Mark S. Blackburn, Veteran USA
The below letter come from Arun Gandhi, Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi.
-Mark
US
Fundamentalism is the Root Cause of the Horror inflicted on Washington and
New York
by
John Pilger
Zmag
22 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 one 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 Mujahedin, which gave birth to the
fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the Central Intelligence
Agency. 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 last week
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 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 Garcia 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 1965/1966, a million people were killed with the
complicity of the US and British governments, the Americans supplying Gen
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 Britain, 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. 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.
This article was published first by Zmag, an online magazine.
Mark Blackburn
Mark S. Blackburn, MBA
1310 E Street Victorian
Sacramento, CA 95814
916.444.6500
Write to Mark: Mark_Blackburn@Yahoo.com