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”.
We are opposed to the actions of some individuals in particular.
We are not opposed to their religion in particular.
We are opposed to all religious belief (except, of course, the Flying Spaghetti Monster) in general, all religious practice and especially all religious coercion.
We are not opposed to the State of Israel.
We are opposed to some Israeli politicians, apparatchiks and apologists, their actions and their dishonesty.
We are not pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian
…except in the sense that we are pro-humanity and pro-human beings.
We are opposed to the killing and harming and exploitation of human beings by any person or any group in the pursuit of political agendas.
So that said…
There is an Israeli election coming up. Tzipi Livni is up against Netanyahu.
Also, George Bush, well-known for being the easy pushover for American Zionists, is about to be stop being President.
Livni has had one last window of opportunity. And, coincidentally enough, she is now claiming that the “Gaza job” is almost complete. Just in time to be over for Obama’s inauguration.
So who is Tzipi Livni? [Most of this from Wikipedia]
Tzipi Livni is a child of the Jewish struggle for a homeland, the daughter of Eitan Livni (born in Poland) and Sara Rosenberg, both prominent former Irgun members.
Irgun was a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was established as a militant offshoot of the earlier and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah.
The Irgun was the armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. He expressed this ideology as
“every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state”.
Some of the better-known attacks by Irgun were the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 [killing 92 people] and the Deir Yassin massacre (accomplished together with the Stern Gang) on 9 April 1948.
In the West, Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by The New York Times newspaper, The Times of London, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, and prominent world and Jewish figures, such as Winston Churchill, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and many others.
Irgun attacks prompted a formal declaration from the World Zionist Congress in 1946, which strongly condemned “the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare”.
Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel’s right-wing Herut (or “Freedom”) party, which led to today’s Likud party. [And Kadima, Livni’s party, is a splinter from Likud.]
“ The symbol of the Irgun, with the motto “Only Thus” alongside a hand holding a rifle in the foreground of all of mandatory Palestine (both sides of the Jordan River), symbolized the striving for Hebrew independence over the entire land of Israel, to be achieved only by the power of Hebrew weapons.
In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent American Jews signed a Godwin’s-Law-compliant letter that began:
“ Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
Soon after World War II, Winston Churchill said “we should never have stopped immigration before the war”, but that the Irgun were “the vilest gangsters” and that he would “never forgive the Irgun terrorists.”
Are we drawing too long a bow, or is the spirit of Irgun alive in Israel today?
The Times:
“ British anger at terror celebration
July 20, 2006
The commemoration of Israeli bombings that killed 92 people has caused offence.
The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.
In 2006, Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv at the time, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem at the time, wrote in response to a pro-Irgun commemoration of the King David Hotel bombing:
“ We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated.”
They also called for the removal of plaques at the site which blame the deaths on “ignored warning calls.” The plaques read:
“ For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated,”
but McDonald and Jenkins asserted that no such warning calls were made, adding that even if they had,
“ this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths.”
It is hard to think that Livni’s politics are not deeply influenced by her family’s past and by the history, politics and culture of Irgun. There are scarily striking echoes here. To Livni and the Israelis, Palestinians who act militarily for what they believe are their rights are “terrorists” who, along with their children and families, need to be shot, bombed and killed. Israelis, in stark contrast, are “freedom fighters” whose deeds deserve commemoration.
Livni this week blamed the Palestinians for their own deaths, for the very same reason that her political forbears blamed the Brtitish for their deaths at the King David Hotel 62 years ago: the Palestinians had been phoned to warn them that their homes were about to be bombed. It was up to them to evacuate. Ah, yes. The good old game of “blame the victim”.
How would Israelis react if people said of the Holocaust, “Well, you know, you have only yourselves to blame. If you weren’t jewish….” Of course they’d be outraged, and rightly.
“ A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said Monday that the army had “no intention of harming civilians.”
The height of the disingenuousness of the Israelis comes in saying they don’t “intend” to kill civilians, while knowing that they certainly will, and proposing that, since they didn’t ‘intend’ the inevitable casualties they will certainly cause, they are not therefore accountable for them. In fact they go further and sheet the responsibility home to Hamas. Or accident. In this way, of course, they kill and maim any number of innocents without, supposedly, troubling their conscience at all. The Israelis seem to be proposing that ‘lack of intention’ is exculpatory. It is not.
Whether they ‘intend’ the deaths of innocent civilians or not, the Israelis areresponsible for them and accountable for them. Their squirming avoidance of responsibility and their refusal to admit blindingly obvious agency is the real awfulness in the matter and the true indication of the national character flaw. Not to mention their retreat behind the magic mirror of the past — you know, the one that makes everyone who looks into it turn into an anti-semite at the slightest suggestion of criticism of their ruthless, immoral, bloodthirsty 21st century politicians.
The awfulness doesn’t stop there. Israeli spokesperson, sleazy — and unfortunately and shamefully Australian — Mark Regev, said wtteo “we are sorry a UN truckdriver was killed. We don’t know if Hamas was operating in that area on that day and the UN trucks got accidentally caught in the crossfire, but it is terrible that they were”, sliding from barely plausible scenario to probable fact in the course of a single sentence.
All the people who have acted to shed blood, or failed to act to stop it – Israelis, Hamas, Bush, Tony The Fixer Blair, the UN – must be called to account for the consequences of their actions and inaction, particularly given their sleazy attempts to avoid accountability.
The greatest lie may have been that told by Condolleeza Rice, that a ceasefire was desirable but that it must be sustainable and must include disarming Hamas.
No! That is not what was required.
What was required was for Israel to stop killing people.
That’s all.
Stop killing innocent people, children, babies, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. The rest can be worked out later. It’s like someone saying, “The Indians are attacking, they’re firing arrows at us. Quick, find some wood and nail it across the windows,” and you say, “No, no, if you’re going to alter the appearance of the windows first we need to discuss colour, and call in the interior decorator to make sure it’s done nice. And I want frilly curtains.”
Just stop killing each other. That is not difficult. At all.
The stupidity of the Israeli action in Gaza is that it is blindingly obvious that it ensures that hostility towards Israel and Israeli citizens is perpetuated and increased and not just amongst Palestinians.
Anti-Israeli feeling is growing globally. People are impatient with Israel’s politicians. They are over its immature tantrums, its childish emotions and bullying excesses.
The Israelis have lost much of the grassroots international support they had and it is going to be increasingly difficult in the future for liberal-democratic regimes around the world, – or even America – to carry their populations with a pro-Israeli stance.
But surely that is not what Israelis want – permanently to play the role of self-inflicted victimhood.
If the Israelis should listen to anyone, I plead with them, listen to the great souls amongst you, past and present.
Listen to Daniel Barenboim. Watch what he does; see how he reconciles Israeli and Palestinian. Hear what he says and listen to the music he makes with his Israeli/Palestinian, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
UPDATE:
Oops! Wonder what Regev (née Freiberg) will say about the Israeli shelling of the UN compound in Gaza. How will he blame Hamas for this one? Will it be another case of crossfire or did the gunner swallow a muslim-sympathising fly just as he was pressing the button?
Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said it was a “grave mistake” and he took it “very seriously”. He assured Ban Ki-Moon that “extra attention” will be paid to U.N. facilities and staff and this will not be repeated.”
Unfortunately the Israeli track record is not good on the “never again” scale. They killed the UN truckdriver just the other day, and during their glorious fight against Lebanon recently, remember they shelled a UN observation post killing at least two UN officials.
“Oops, sorry, I’ll try not to do it again,” isn’t really good enough, is it.
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.
Really. We just want to acknowledge ourselves privately but publicly (it makes sense to us, anyway). It’s not meant to be onanistically self-congratulatory, except in the sense that we have achieved some things and we want to record them. So this is a stocktake for posterity, if you like, that marks a moment, a milestone.
Yes, ValuesAustralia is two years old. This is our 712th post. Singlehanded, eh, Clubtroppo, Larvatus Prodeo, RoadtoSurfdom etc. etc.? That’s almost one a day. (There used to be a billboard for One A Day vitamin pills at the corner of Victoria Rd and Rowntree Street at Blackwattle Bay in Sydney. There was a picture of a man and a woman. The woman was saying, “I’m Jenny and I give John One A Day.” Soon a graffiti artist had added, “I’m John and I’m fucked!”)
And, yes, we’re just about fucked, ourselves. We’ve got a rotator cuff from all the typing and mouse clicking, especially during October and November last year.
(We went to the radiologist. “What seems to be the problem?” “I’ve got a sore shoulder.” “Hmm…we’ll do an ultrasound and an x-ray…… Hmm…. Hmmmmmm, our expert analysis of the ultrasound and x-ray indicates you have a sore shoulder. You’ll have to stop using it for a while.” “Thanks….What?)
We’ve never paid for any advertising. We’ve never submitted ValuesAustralia to any search engine. Nevertheless, we got ourselves listed on Google within 24 hours of launching the site. We tried to register the site with dmoz.org (The Open Source Directory) – as you do – but it wasn’t taking orders, and by the time it came back on line months later, ValuesAustralia was already magically listed!
We’ve been #1 for “Australian Values” on Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask most of the time for more than a year and a half. We’re #12 for “values” on Google worldwide, out of 314,000,000 results and on google.com.au we’re #2 for “values” out of 307,000,000. We’re #1 on google worldwide and Australia for “Australian political values” out of about 400,000 results.
Our Google Page Rank is 4 (used to be 5 but they changed the algorithm) which is respectable but we’d prefer a 5 or a 6.
We’ve had over 300,000 aggregate visitors and more than 75,000 spam messages (thank you, Akismet).
Earlier this year we were consistently getting more than 1000 visitors a day – over 30,000 a month, which is okay, although nothing like the big guys.
We’ve made friends all over the world and especially in Australia. We are in the top 1% of websites worldwide. We are popular in Saudi Arabia – amongst the top 42,000 favourite sites for Saudis. (That worries us just a bit…Say hullo to Al for us…) We appreciate our readers and those who choose to comment from time to time. We thought a scarcity of comments was a Bad Thing, a Failure, but we noticed that one of the most popular, most entertaining bloggers we know of, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, doesn’t get heaps, either – a few, but not tens like Possum or hundreds and thousands like William the PollBludger.
In May 2007 ValuesAustralia was picked up by the “Stay In Touch” column at the Sydney Morning Herald, accusing us of “rhetoric”.
One of Sir Roger’s posts was selected by ClubTroppo and On Line Opinion in January 2008 as one of the top 40 posts in Australia for 2007. We’re very proud of that.
But it’s a post we made early in 2007 that we are still most proud of. Ken Parish at ClubTroppo called it
“quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence… ”
Yes, Troppo has been good to us and we mourn the passing of Missing Link and Ken’s prolonged work-induced(?) absence. We were also congratulated by Richard Neville (HomePageDaily) and Steven Poole whose Unspeak blog is our benchmark for economy, clarity, style and wit.
We have enjoyed the journey so far and we have no intention at this stage of stopping, although we have slowed down (work, you know).
Bobbo the Clown
Our favourite person in the world, of course, is the clown, Bob Correll (above), Deputy Secretary of DIC, OPM, because he wrote us the letter which inspired our outburst. As we discovered he was (and appears still to be) the person who had taken over departmental responsibility for “Borders, Compliance, Detention and Technology”, or in other words, perhaps, for keeping innocent kiddies locked up in the desert, deporting Australian citizens, supporting the failed state of Nauru, making the lives of genuine refugees a misery, doing it to please the Minister, and all at the touch of a computer key. Previously he had been the driving force behind developing and implementing Job Network, or “how to design exquisite, personalised punishment for people who are already struggling with the stress of being unemployed”. Godluvvya, Bob! How’s the Volvo? How’s the kids? How do you sleep at night?
One of the most satisfying things is how we always beat the Immigration Department on Google.
Our second favourite person is Mick Keelty, just for being such a hopeless buffoon and continually making appalling stuff-ups for us to make fun of. G’bye, Mick.
I’m just a soul whose intentions are good Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood
“ President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”
As we picked our chin off the floor we thought, “What an utterly lame and sleazy attempt this really is to rewrite history in the name of clawing back some sort of presidential legacy from the catastrophic horrors he has inflicted on the world and even on his own people through his proud ignorance and astonishing immaturity.”
Actually, we didn’t think that. We don’t talk to ourself like that. I mean, you don’t, do you. It was more like “What the fucking fuck?!” But it’s what we meant.
As SFGate‘s Edward M. Gomez, a former U.S. diplomat and staff reporter at TIME, put it, “Now he tells us.”
“ Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”
Well, Mr Bush, (pardon us) FUCK YOU!
It wasn’t your rhetoric that showed you were a “guy really anxious for war”.
It was how you were, ah, really anxious for war.
It was how you rushed in.
It was how you deliberately ignored, manufactured and distorted intelligence.
It was how you had quite a few people killed. Over a million on the high but credible side and, certainly, considerably over 100,000 on the very most conservative realistic estimates. All innocent. Largely mothers and children.
People don’t think you are not a man of peace because of something you said, Mr Bush. People know you are not a man of peace because you started a war and killed a lot of people.
People know you are not a man of peace because you started a war on your very own, on the flimsiest and most transparent of excuses and against international laws and conventions, against a country that had not attacked yours and could not. As you and all those around you knew.
You will not get away with this slimy, slippery, dishonest, hollow, inauthentic, typically infantile attempt to avoid responsibility for the global horrors you have created with your own hands; horrors which include the devastated lives of the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles of the more than 4,000 soldiers whose lives were wiped out because you were anxious for war; horrors that include the destroyed futures and minds of the tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraq veterans who are physical and mental casualties of your headlong and bloodthirsty rush into a synthetic conflict, and that include the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died, and the more than two million Iraqis who have been forced to flee Iraq or who are internally displaced.
And the release and explosion of sectarian violence in Iraq which was caused by your stupidity and your lust for war.
So please don’t ask for forgiveness.
Don’t claim to have been misunderstood.
The rest of the world will not let you get away with it. Surely your own countrymen will not, either.
You claim to be troubled about how your country has been misunderstood.
Mr Bush, your country is not misunderstood. Not really. The world knows that many Americans are confused about how all this happened, how the country attracts so much hatred.
But we can tell them that it’s not them, it’s you.
The world knows that your country includes warmongers like yourself, anti-democratic ideologues whom you support, ignorant stupid people like yourself, religious nuts who think god talks to them and tells them what they ought to do – and some even worse than yourself.
And yet the world also knows that your country still nurtures a people who are extraordinarily generous.
The world knows that, despite your efforts to silence and sideline them, your country still is home to more than its fair share of the most humane souls, the greatest, wisest minds, the most creative thinkers and talented doers, and some of the most energetic, enterprising, adventurous, life-loving and courageous people on the planet.
Watched The Einstein Factor this evening and the second contestant’s subject was the life and poetry of Wilfred Owen (more or less).
One of the poems mentioned — which of course it had to be — was Dulce et Decorum Est. Everyone – most of them very well-educated and perhaps even erudite – pronounced it “DOOLL-chay et d’-CORum est”.
Which is fair enough, but I think it is wrong, at least in the context of the poem itself.
Way back in the….well, more than a couple of minutes ago….I was sitting in an English tute at UNE. Wilfred Owen’s poetry – and this poem in particular – was the topic.
The tutor asked if anyone knew how the title was properly pronounced. I remember because this smarmy new chap, who was the only person I ever knew who had done Latin for the Leaving Certificate, showed the rest of us up by casually giving the correct answer. It wasn’t that he knew, exactly; it was his attitude of “well, of course, I thought everyone knew that, don’t they? (And by the way amn’t I clever?).”
Anyway, his pronunciation was something like: “DOOLchet DECKerest”.
Our tutor nodded sagely, with an approving smile at the cleverboy, so I have no doubt it is correct. But why would it be different from the “normal” pronunciation? Is it for the scansion of the lines? Is it because accepted Latin pronunciation began changing sometime around the early 1900s? cf. Mr Chips’s joke about vicissim:
Headmaster to Chips: “This question of Latin pronunciation, for instance–I think I told you years ago that I wanted the new style used throughout the School. The other masters obeyed me; you prefer to stick to your old methods, and the result is simply chaos and inefficiency.”
At last Chips had something tangible that he could tackle. “Oh, that!” he answered, scornfully. “Well, I–umph–I admit that I don’t agree with the new pronunciation. I never did. Umph–a lot of nonsense, in my opinion. Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when–umph–for the rest of their lives they’ll say ‘Cicero’–if they ever–umph–say it at all. And instead of ‘vicissim’–God bless my soul–you’d make them say, ‘We kiss ‘im’! Umph–umph!” And he chuckled momentarily, forgetting that he was in Ralston’s study and not in his own friendly form room.
So this has been bugging me for hours. I haven’t found anything about it, any guidance on it, on the intertubes.
That is why I throw myself at your mercy, dearest and most appreciated blog-lurker. Please, if you know, tell me if I have come anywhere close to this special pronunciation. Tell me, if I am wrong, why I would have this memory? Or tell me that I am really stupid and old and losing it. I can take it [just don’t all rush in at once…].
Just by the way, Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori means, more or less, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”. Owen did not, you can imagine, subscribe to this view. Yet the same idea is still trotted out by such as George Bush (who are fairly confident that they are not about to be called upon to die for their country, either sweetly or fittingly) with terms like “sacrifice” and “honor” as some sort of justification for deaths in pointless, cynical wars.
My favorite Owen poem is Mental Cases. It’s about what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There’s so much of it about these days¹…..
[….]
These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
[….]
etc…….
¹UPDATE: Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.
