| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Jez" |
| Date: |
20 Aug 2004 11:56:40 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Pilger...The warlords of America |
The warlords of America
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nscoverstory.htm
Most of the US's recent wars were launched by Democratic presidents. Why
expect better of Kerry? The debate between US liberals and conservatives
is a fake; Bush may be the lesser evil. From John Pilger in Washington
On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution
which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote
was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans
and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert
the responsibilities of American power".
The joining of hands across America's illusory political divide has a
long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines
laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with
"bipartisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular
historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the
heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which advertising and
public relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology,
embracing both conservatism and liberalism.
In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched by liberal
Democratic presidents - Harry Truman in Korea, John F Kennedy and Lyndon
B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan. The fictitious
"missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New Frontiersmen as a
rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a Democrat-dominated
Congress gave President Johnson authority to attack Vietnam, a
defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United States. Like
the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a non- existent
"incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese patrol boats had
attacked an American warship. More than three million deaths and the
ruin of a once bountiful land followed.
During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to limit the
president's "right" to terrorise other countries. This aberration, the
Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti- Vietnam war movement,
was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.
During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal voices
such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times, doyen of the "doves",
seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was a
threat to the United States. These days, terrorism having replaced the
red menace, another fake debate is under way. This is lesser evilism.
Although few liberal-minded voters seem to have illusions about John
Kerry, their need to get rid of the "rogue" Bush administration is
all-consuming. Representing them in Britain, the Guardian says that the
coming presidential election is "exceptional". "Mr Kerry's flaws and
limitations are evident," says the paper, "but they are put in the shade
by the neoconservative agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush.
This is an election in which almost the whole world will breathe a sigh
of relief if the incumbent is defeated."
The whole world may well breathe a sigh of relief: the Bush regime is
both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not the point. We
have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the Atlantic that
it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to examine
critically a system that produces the Bushes and their Democratic
shadows. For those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching mature years
without having been blown to bits by the warlords of Americanism,
Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and for the millions
all over the world who now reject the American contagion in political
life, the true issue is clear.
It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago.
The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher
Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his property to be
disposed according to his will", have been replaced by another piracy
transformed into the divine will of Americanism and sustained by
technological progress, notably that of the media. "The threat to
independence in the late 20th century from the new electronics," wrote
Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, "could be greater than was
colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that decolonisation was
not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending
of a geopolitical web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The
new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving'
culture than any previous manifestation of western technology."
Every modern president has been, in large part, a media creation. Thus,
the murderous Reagan is sanctified still; Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel
and the post-Hutton BBC have differed only in their forms of adulation.
And Bill Clinton is regarded nostalgically by liberals as flawed but
enlightened; yet Clinton's presidential years were far more violent than
Bush's and his goals were the same: "the integration of countries into
the global free- market community", the terms of which, noted the New
York Times, "require the United States to be involved in the plumbing
and wiring of nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before".
The Pentagon's "full-spectrum dominance" was not the product of the
"neo-cons" but of the liberal Clinton, who approved what was then the
greatest war expenditure in history. According to the Guardian,
Clinton's heir, John Kerry, sends us "energising progressive calls". It
is time to stop this nonsense.
Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips.
In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy that
respects human rights". In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in
East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist
organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came
the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who
laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed
Carter's principal foreign policy overlords - Zbigniew Brzezinski, his
national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary.
No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than
Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his
1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic
imperatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of
the Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East.
His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning of a final
conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. "To put it in
a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient
empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial
geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence
among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep
the barbarians from coming together."
It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar
right. But Brzezinski is mainstream. His devoted students include
Madeleine Albright, who, as secretary of state under Clinton, described
the death of half a million infants in Iraq during the US-led embargo as
"a price worth paying", and John Negroponte, the mastermind of American
terror in central America under Reagan who is currently "ambassador" in
Baghdad. James Rubin, who was Albright's enthusiastic apologist at the
State Department, is being considered as John Kerry's national security
adviser. He is also a Zionist; Israel's role as a terror state is beyond
discussion.
Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded the front
pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little attention. Here,
the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990s, Clinton's
African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa.
Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan
and "liberated" Darfur, or intervened in Zimbabwe or the Congo. The
answer is that they have no interest in human distress and human rights,
and are busy securing the same riches that led to the European scramble
in the late 19th century by the traditional means of coercion and
bribery, known as multilateralism.
The Congo and Zambia possess 50 per cent of world cobalt reserves; 98
per cent of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South
Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in Africa from
Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under Clinton, the
African Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in secret. This has
allowed the US to establish "military assistance programmes" in Senegal,
Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run
by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961
Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a special forces officer in
Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan, helped lead the Contra invasion
of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never change.
None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry
strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or "muscular
internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism
is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even
greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster
since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more
likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so
crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the
better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences
of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's
re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train under
President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American
ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang.
Little of this appears even in the American papers worth reading. The
Washington Post's hand-wringing apology to its readers on 14 August for
not "pay[ing] enough attention to voices raising questions about the war
[against Iraq]" has not interrupted its silence on the danger that the
American state presents to the world. Bush's rating has risen in the
polls to more than 50 per cent, a level at this stage in the campaign at
which no incumbent has ever lost. The virtues of his "plain speaking",
which the entire media machine promoted four years ago - Fox and the
Washington Post alike - are again credited. As in the aftermath of the
11 September attacks, Americans are denied a modicum of understanding of
what Norman Mailer has called "a pre-fascist climate". The fears of the
rest of us are of no consequence.
The professional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have played a
major part in this. The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
is indicative. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims;
what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of "respectable"
dissent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks the collusive
codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin to
deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which "a
sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy" and those fighting in
Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always "militants" and "insurgents" or
members of a "private army", never nationalists defending their homeland
and whose resistance has probably forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or
North Korea.
The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they
exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the
American "national security state" in Britain and other countries
claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the
key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway
places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug
they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is
the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity
as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry
people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of
debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect.
John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and
its triumphs, will be published in October by Jonathan Cape.
--
Jez
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious,
of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society
highly values its normal man.It educates children to lose themselves
and to become absurd,and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed
perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."
R.D. Laing
.
|
|
| User: "Douglas Berry" |
|
| Title: Re: OT: Pilger...The warlords of America |
20 Aug 2004 06:06:39 PM |
|
|
In our last thrilling episode, Jez <iced_spear@NOSPAMdsl.pipex.com>
was pushed over the cliffs of alt.atheism on Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:56:40
+0100 by Zoog, minion of Zathar. As he fell, he screamed:
In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched by liberal
Democratic presidents - Harry Truman in Korea, John F Kennedy and Lyndon
B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan.
The Korean War started with a general offensive by DPRK troops. We
didn't start anything.
The first American advisors in Vietnam were sent in by President
Eisenhower.. a Republican.
Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979. America's
response was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. It was President Reagan
who sent CIA and Special Forces aid to the Mujahadeen.
Facts. They can be fun.
--
Douglas E. Berry Do the OBVIOUS thing to send e-mail
Atheist #2147, Atheist Vet #5
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pense'es, #894.
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
