[Reader-list] [Fwd: John Pilger on Imperialism]
Aditya Nigam
aditya at sarai.net
Tue Sep 18 14:55:08 IST 2001
This is an interesting piece on Islam and the US/West.
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>Subject: The Herald, 13 September 2001
>Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 10:01:06 +0530
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> | >Pilger: Inevitable ring to the unimaginable
> | >
> | >JOHN PILGER
> | >
> | >The Herald, 13 September 2001
> | >
> | > IF the attacks on America have their source in
> | > the Islamic world, who can really be surprised?
> | >
> | > Two days earlier, eight people were killed in
> | > southern Iraq when British and American planes
> | > bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a
> | > word appeared in the mainstream media in
> | > Britain.
> | >
> | > An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the
> | > Health Education Trust in London, died during
> | > and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter
> | > known as the Gulf War.
> | >
> | > This was never news that touched public
> | > consciousness in the west.
> | >
> | > At least a million civilians, half of them
>children,
> | > have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval
> | > embargo imposed by the United States and
> | > Britain.
> | >
> | > In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen,
> | > which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was
> | > largely the creation of the CIA.
> | >
> | > The terrorist training camps where Osama bin
> | > Laden, now "America's most wanted man",
> | > allegedly planned his attacks, were built with
> | > American money and backing.
> | >
> | > In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by
> | > Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not
> | > for US backing.
> | >
> | > Far from being the terrorists of the world, the
> | > Islamic peoples have been its victims -
> | > principally the victims of US fundamentalism,
> | > whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic
> | > and economic, is the greatest source of
> | > terrorism on earth.
> | >
> | > This fact is censored from the Western media,
> | > whose "coverage" at best minimises the
> | > culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk,
> | > professor of international relations at Princeton,
> | > put it this way: "Western foreign policy is
> | > presented almost exclusively through a
> | > self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with)
> | > positive images of Western values and
> | > innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
> | > campaign of unrestricted political violence."
> | >
> | > That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal
> | > weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and
> | > Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted
> | > uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to
> | > the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken
> | > seriously when he now speaks about the
> | > "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism"
> | > says much about the censorship of our collective
> | > sense of how the world is managed.
> | >
> | > One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" -
> | > comes to mind. Alas, it is no comfort to the
> | > families of thousands of ordinary Americans
> | > who have died so terribly that the perpetrators of
> | > their suffering may be the product of Western
> | > policies. Did the American establishment
> | > believe that it could bankroll and manipulate
> | > events in the Middle East without cost to itself,
> | > or rather its own innocent people?
> | >
> | > The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a
> | > long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab
> | > peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
> | > the foundation of the state of Israel, four
> | > Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal
> | > occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems,
> | > obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of
> | > awesome cruelty by those who say they
> | > represent the victims of the West's intervention
> | > in their homelands.
> | >
> | > "America, which has never known modern war,
> | > now has her own terrible league table: perhaps
> | > as many as 20,000 victims."
> | >
> | > As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East,
> | > people will grieve the loss of innocent life, but
> | > they will ask if the newspapers and television
> | > networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of
> | > the present coverage to the half-a-million dead
> | > children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed
>in
> | > Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer
> | > is no. There are deeper roots to the atrocities in
> | > the US, which made them almost inevitable.
> | >
> | > It is not only the rage and grievance in the
> | > Middle East and south Asia. Since the end of
> | > the cold war, the US and its sidekicks,
> | > principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and
> | > abused their wealth and power while the
> | > divisions imposed on human beings by them
> | > and their agents have grown as never before.
> | >
> | > An elite group of less than a billion people now
> | > take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.
> | >
> | > In defence of this power and privilege, known by
> | > the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade",
> | > the injustices are legion: from the illegal
> | > blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade,
> | > dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic
> | > environmental decencies, to the assault on
> | > fragile economies by institutions such as the
> | > World Trade Organisation that are little more
> | > than agents of the US Treasury and the
> | > European central banks, and the demands of
> | > the World Bank and the International Monetary
> | > Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay
> | > unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in
> | > Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks
> | > between North and South Korea (in order to
> | > shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).
> | >
> | > Western terror is part of the recent history of
> | > imperialism, a word that journalists dare not
> | > speak or write.
> | >
> | > The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia
> | > in the 1960s by the Wilson government received
> | > almost no press coverage.
> | >
> | > Their homeland is now an American nuclear
> | > arms dump and base from which US bombers
> | > patrol the Middle East.
> | >
> | > In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were
> | > killed with the complicity of the US and British
> | > governments: the Americans supplying General
> | > Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off
> | > names as people were killed.
> | >
> | > "Getting British companies and the World Bank
> | > back in there was part of the deal", says Roland
> | > Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia
> | > correspondent.
> | >
> | > British behaviour in Malaya was no different
> | > from the American record in Vietnam, for which
> | > it proved inspirational: the withholding of food,
> | > villages turned into concentration camps and
> | > more than half a million people forcibly
> | > dispossessed.
> | >
> | > In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and
> | > poisoning of an entire nation was apocalyptic,
> | > yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood
> | > movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls
> | > cultural imperialism.
> | >
> | > In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA
> | > arranged the homicide of around 50,000
> | > people. As official documents now reveal, this
> | > was the model for the terror in Chile that
> | > climaxed with the murder of the democratically
> | > elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10
> | > years, the crushing of Nicaragua.
> | >
> | > All of it was lawless. The list is too long for
>this
> | > piece.
> | >
> | > Now imperialism is being rehabilitated.
> | > American forces currently operate with impunity
> | > from bases in 50 countries.
> | >
> | > "Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's
> | > clearly stated aim.
> | >
> | > Read the documents of the US Space
> | > Command, which leaves us in no doubt.
> | >
> | > In this country, the eager Blair government has
> | > embarked on four violent adventures, in pursuit
> | > of "British interests" (dressed up as
> | > "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no
> | > basis in international law: a record matched by
> | > no other British government for half a century.
> | >
> | > What has this to do with this week's atrocities in
> | > America? If you travel among the impoverished
> | > majority of humanity, you understand that it has
> | > everything to do with it.
> | >
> | > People are neither still, nor stupid. They see
> | > their independence compromised, their
> | > resources and land and the lives of their children
> | > taken away, and their accusing fingers
> | > increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of
> | > plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds
> | > terror and more fanaticism.
> | >
> | > But how patient the oppressed have been.
> | >
> | > It is only a few years ago that the Islamic
> | > fundamentalist groups, willing to blow
> | > themselves up in Israel and New York, were
> | > formed, and only after Israel and the US had
> | > rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state,
> | > and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
> | >
> | > Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the
> | > daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have
> | > at last come home.
> | >
> | > * John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning
> | > journalist.
> | >
> | >Full article at:
>| >http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/13-9-19101-0-24-43.html
>
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