Whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad — Euripides
In 2007 we pleaded
… tell me that America isn’t completely barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, crazy, demented, deranged, dippy, flipped out, fruity, haywire, insane, loony, lunatic, mad, maniacal, manic, mental, nuts, nutty, out of their minds, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwy, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped and whacko.
It is truer today than it was then.
As Glenn Greenwald says this week at Salon,
“ There’s little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era — and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible — both in politics and the establishment media — not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one’s culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?
He’s talking about the amazing revelations this week by Tom Ridge, the first head of the US Department of Homeland Security, that he had been pressured for political reasons to raise the terror threat level just before the 2004 elections.
“ [Ridge] wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in ‘The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again’, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
What is extraordinary but not surprising is that those on the US right, now told categorically that they were wrong when they said the government wouldn’t do something like that and that the left were loony conspiracy theorists, take a position something like, “Yes but we were right to be wrong and the left were wrong to be right because, you know, we respected Our President but the left were just Bush Haters.”
Greenwald addressed this craziness in his Salon column this week
“ Ambinder’s belief that there is nothing other than blind “Bush hatred” that could have justified such a belief — and his accompanying self-defense that journalists like him had no way of knowing any of this — is patently false. [A] 2006 Time column by Josh Marshall … details the ample empirical evidence suggesting that “that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”
And [t]here is an exhaustive and lengthy (17 minutes) segment from Keith Olbermann early last year that “weaves from each revelation of an intelligence failure or a Democratic political victory to an almost immediate orange alert or ‘new threat’ from al Qaeda.”
Olbermann’s conclusion after examining all the evidence: “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons” (Olbermann had been raising the same suspicion for many years).
The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn’t because it didn’t exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It’s because they didn’t want to see it, because — as Ambinder said — they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest.
It’s because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they’re much more serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.
Putting Greenwald’s piece together with the insanity and ignorance of the US health insurance debate it is quite clear that the US is in mental, moral and political free fall. It is thrashing and flailing about for something to hold onto, not knowing where it is going. And it is going into a very dark pit.
“ They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them…
Between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes…
And they became forever invisible and they entered into the realm of shadows.
The Nazgûl were they, the Ringwraiths, the Ulairi, the Enemy’s most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death…
The Nazgûl came again like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men’s flesh. Out of sight and shot they flew, and yet were ever present, and their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry.
At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war, but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death.
Is there a more obnoxious, more simply awful creature than this Nazgûl, Philip Ruddock, whose entire career has been to suck the life out of all around him? In a recent outing he supported the Rudd government’s changes to terrorism legislation like this:
“ … the man who drafted the existing suite of laws, former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, indicated in-principle support for the Rudd government’s changes: “I always saw counter-terrorist laws as an unfinished canvas.”
It is one thing to be a cold and heartless bastard in whose presence blood congeals, water freezes, the sun dims and flowers wither and die; to be a wraith who sucks the breath out of the mouths of babies and who, when he speaks, makes the sound of sand being breathed into his lungs, or of your brain being sucked out of your skull through your ears.
It is another thing to be what many might consider a traitor, if a traitor is someone who is advocates selling or giving away his country’s sovereignty to another.
Everyone can recall, with a shudder, his tenure as the “cold, callous and outrageous” Minister for Immigration, and his equally inhumane, life-sucking time as Attorney General. You may not have heard of “Mr T”, a Vietnamese Australian suffering from mental illness, who was detained three times by Immigration and whom the Nagûl blamed for the horrors that Ruddock and the dark forces of his department visited upon him.
“ In order to excuse himself of any accountability, Mr Ruddock referred to ‘contributory negligence’ and said problems of identification lie when people did not properly identify themselves.
“Mr T was well known to the Department of Immigration having been asked to verify his identity on a number of occasions,” said Mr Burke.
“When Mr T was detained for the first time in 1999 despite ‘appearing confused’ and displaying signs of mental health problems, he managed to tell the Department of Immigration his full name – with the first two names transposed -, his correct date of birth, his correct address and his sister’s correct phone number. He was identified and released after five days in detention.
“Mr Ruddock was the Minister responsible when Mr T was wrongfully placed, yet again, in Villawood for 242 consecutive days in 2003. He was also the Minister responsible when on 22 January, five days into this period of detention, Mr T identified himself as an Australian citizen. Mr T also provided his correct date of birth.” ‘
Ruddock has acted consistently against the rights and interests of Australian citizens. It was Ruddock who was Attorney General when the Howard Government agreed to allow Indonesia to determine Australia’s policy on West Papuan refugees.
It was Ruddock who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for allowing the – at that time – corrupt United States Justice Department, and the Pentagon, and the State Department, and the White House, to determine Australia’s policy on the detention of David Hicks.
It was Ruddock who, as the highest legal officer in the nation, through his terrorism legislation willingly buried the essential concept – and one of Australia’s hardcore values – of innocence until guilt is tested and proven, not to mention habeas corpus, for reasons that can only be guessed but probably include vanity, ambition, pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, cringing Uriah Heepish sycophancy, and just basic total bastardry. Ever so ‘umble.
Stripping away these foundational values of our nation was in our view nothing short of treachery, stupidity, ignorance and a dried and shrivelled morality.
Now Ruddock has formed the grisly view that amounts to this: Australia should allow China to determine Australia’s foreign policy.
If we give away who we are and what we stand for, if we give away the very values that make us Australian, the values that make it worth being an Australian and make being Australian so exceptional, for fear that China might take its money and go home, then Australia is a whore, owned by anyone with enough money and pimped by a politician. A politician, of course, knows exactly what this is all about. The heart of a politician’s art is to say what people want to hear, especially what their masters want to hear. Doing whatever China wants would install China as our master and we would no longer be a free people.
We would no longer be a sovereign people and to agitate for such a condition is to be a traitor to the country and its people.
Well, as a whore, why don’t we go the whole way? China’s politburo seems to define anyone – especially downtrodden minorities – who disagrees with its brutal, inhumane, anti-democratic, racist, butchering regime, Orwell’s ‘boot stamping on a human face – forever’, as a “Terrorist”. So why don’t we do as the Nazgûl advises and just tell the Chinese that we agree with them, that we’re not really all that fussed about “democracy” (until they’re ready to let us have it). Why don’t we take their lists of “terrorist organisations” and make them our own, round up Chinese and Chinese-born Australian citizens (same thing to the Chinese) who fit China’s “Terrorist” profile, bulldoze their homes and businesses as the Chinese do and send them back to China for a bullet in the back of the head?
But Ruddock’s not a whore. Whores have feelings.
…and now he was come again, bringing ruin, turning hope to despair, and victory to death.
Goldman Sachs is furious at what Matt Taibbi has written in Rolling Stone. This is apparently not absolutely fresh news but we heard the magic phrase for the first time this morning.
It’s from Taibbi’s article, “The Great American Bubble Machine”, in Rolling Stone about the place of Goldman Sachs in the modern world.
The memorable line is this description of Goldman Sachs:
“ The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
But then there is this, too:
“ Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
[ … ]
The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.
Taibbi also claims that Goldman is at the root of the astronomical oil price rises over the last year or so because oil has been commodified in the Goldman Sachs way so that every barrel of oil was bought and sold 27 times before it ever reached its end user. That’s 27 times a profit has to be made – sort of like compound interest, and your economics teacher told you how good that is at increasing your bank balance.
You might think, as Goldman Sachs has suggested, that his article is “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories” and so it might be — unless it is true. Taibbi certainly has filled his piece with checkable facts and figures, such as the astonishing reach of the company and its alumni, including: bailout czar, Paulson; Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and then chairman of Citigroup; John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch; Robert Steel, head of Wachovia, who “scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing”; Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout; Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff; and Ed Liddy, whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG. Etcetera etcetera etcetera…
Not to forget, as it seems Taibbi does, that Malcolm Turnbull is also an alumnus of Goldman Sachs: chair and managing director of Goldman Sachs Australia (1997-2001) and a partner with Goldman Sachs and Co (1998-2001). All we need is another ex-Goldman Sachs partner to become PM of Australia …
Stark reading, and enough material to keep him writing for 7 (online) pages, including this potentially even more worrying note:
“ They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
According to this, if you want to rule the world, join Goldman Sachs!
Definitions of terrorism in western countries are remarkably similar. According to Chomsky, writing in 2006, official definitions include that terrorism is
“ the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature…through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear,” typically targeting civilians. The British government’s definition is about the same: “Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.”
In Australia’s Crimes Act
“ terrorist act means an action or threat of action where: … the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; and … the action is done or the threat is made with the intention of … (i) coercing, or influencing by intimidation, the government of the Commonwealth or a State, Territory or foreign country, or of part of a State, Territory or foreign country; or (ii) intimidating the public or a section of the public.”
As Chomsky continues,
“ These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.
But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to take the most uncontroversial case, Reagan’s state-directed terrorist war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list beyond them.”
This is all very well. But, Chomsky points out, there is an act which is perceived by international courts, beginning at least as early as Nuremberg, as being even worse than terrorism and that is the much higher crime of Aggression.
“ The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An “aggressor”, Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State,” or “Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.” The first provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and unprecedented scale.
It may also be recalled that aggression was defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” – all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily dismissed on grounds of wrong agency – right to the present.
So this definition of aggression takes in the US, the UK and Australia in the invasion of Iraq. The government of the day, in Australia’s case the Howard government, is therefore guilty of the highest war crime of Aggression. No, I don’t think Howard and his mates are about to be sent a summons to this effect. Note, however, that the high-minded definition of Aggression, under which he would be found guilty if tried, was formulated by a US judge, Justice Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, who, sentencing Germans to death at Nuremberg, said,
“ If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us….We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”
Under this definition Israel would be guilty of Aggression for its recent invasion of Gaza. So could Hamas be guilty of “refusal … to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands [of rocket-launching militants] of all assistance or protection” and so would Iran for “provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State”.
An enormous loss to literature, the stage, the arts, to humanity and to breaking all the rules.
We think the best way we can toexpress our gratitude and to honour his life is to share his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech; the video and the transcript:
Art, Truth & Politics
“ In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here. Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case ‘innocent people’ were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’
Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’ The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.
But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days — conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally — a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading — as a last resort — all other justifications having failed to justify themselves — as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda:
‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’
And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children’s blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate. Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull’s eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!*
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity — the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons — is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.
‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’ A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.
Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.
* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
That’s what we were! Imagine our surprise when we read this from Bill Kristol, the Ultimate Republican Death Beast:
“ Fire the Campaign!
It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign. He has nothing to lose. … What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.”
The reason for our astonishment? (No, it’s not because he looks like an Alan Jones clone)
Days earlier we had written,
“ Voters are not attracted to this desperate man at a time when they need someone strong, balanced and dependable. He may be firing up committed supporters but he is alienating the rest … What he really needs is to look presidential.”
McCain’s only hope now, we said, was to say to the American people,
“ I apologise for the way this campaign has been run. I am unwilling to sacrifice America to my ambition, because I know that if I continue this way, whether I win or lose, I will have caused terrible harm to the nation … Therefore I have sacked my campaign advisers … Mr Obama and I differ on serious questions of ideals and of processes and I will argue those differences as forcefully as I am able in the remaining days of this campaign … From now on I will debate the issues and that is all.
So cheers, Bill. You could at least have given us a link or something!
And on another note, (remembering that George Bush presided over
the unprofitable Arbusto,
the collapsed Spectrum 7 Energy Corp.
and Harken Energy, with it’s Saudi links
and Bush’s claimed multiple violations of federal securities law,
(and noting that he is screwing America with the same level of incompetence)
one of our favourite comments on US politics in the last few years, from an American interviewee on tonight’s Foreign Correspondent:
“ Right now, George Bush is about as popular as Anthrax.”
We think that makes Anthrax look like a wonder cure.
