The Anti-Empire
Report
Some things you need to know before the world ends
March 22, 2006
by William
Blum
"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens." Friedrich
Schiller
"With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain."
I'm often told by readers of their encounters with Americans
who support the outrages of US foreign policy no matter what facts are presented
to them, no matter what arguments are made, no matter how much the government's
statements are shown to be false. Included amongst their number are those
who still believe that Iraq had a direct involvement in the events of September
11, that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al Qaeda, and/or that weapons of
mass destruction were indeed found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
My advice is to forget such people. They would support
the outrages even if the government came to their homes, seized their first
born, and hauled them away screaming, as long as the government assured them
it was essential to fighting terrorism (or communism). My (very) rough guess
is that they constitute no more than 15 percent of the population. I suggest
that we concentrate on the rest, who are reachable.
Inasmuch as I can not see violent revolution succeeding
in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite
match the government's firepower, not to mention their viciousness), I can
offer no solution to stopping the imperial monster other than increasing
the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass; at
which point ... I can't predict the form the explosion will take.
So I'm speaking here of education, and in my writing
and in my public talks I like to emphasize certain points which try to deal
with the underlying intellectual misconceptions and emotional "hangups" I
think Americans have which stand in the way of their seeing through the bullshit;
this education can also take the form of demonstrations or acts of civil
disobedience, whatever might produce a thaw in a frozen mind. Briefly, here
are the main points:
(1) US foreign policy does not "mean well". It's not
that American leaders have miscalculated, or blundered, causing great suffering,
as in Iraq, while having noble intentions. Rather, while pursuing their imperial
goals they simply do not care about the welfare of the foreign peoples who
are on the receiving end of the bombing and the torture, and we should not
let them get away with claiming such intentions.
(2) The United States is not concerned with this thing
called "democracy", no matter how many times George W. uses the word each
time he opens his mouth. In the past 60 years, the US has attempted to overthrow
literally dozens of democratically-elected governments, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not, and grossly interfered in as many democratic elections in
every corner of the world. The question is: What do the Busheviks mean by
"democracy"? The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy,
the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too
much is not enough. The first thing they have in mind is making sure the
target country has the political, financial and legal mechanisms in place
to make it hospitable to corporate globalization.
(3) Anti-American terrorists are not motivated by hatred
or envy of freedom or democracy, or by American wealth, secular government,
or culture. They are motivated by decades of awful things done to their homelands
by US foreign policy. It works the same all over the world. In the period
of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string
of Washington's dreadful policies, there were countless acts of terrorism
against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US
corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and
Afghanistan have created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We'll
be hearing from them for a terribly long time.
(4) The United States is not actually against terrorism
per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is
a lengthy and infamous history of support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists,
even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this
moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though
he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people
and his extradition has been requested by Venezuela. He's but one of hundreds
of anti-Castro terrorists who've been given haven in the United States over
the years. The United States has also provided close support of terrorists
in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran and elsewhere, including those with known connections
to al Qaeda, to further imperial goals more important than fighting terrorism.
(5) Iraq was not any kind of a threat to the United
States. Of the never-ending lies concerning Iraq, this is the most insidious,
the necessary foundation for all the other lies. This is the supposed
justification for the preemptive invasion, for what the Nuremberg Tribunal
called a war of aggression. Absent such a threat, it didn't matter if Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction, it didn't matter if the intelligence was
right or wrong about this or that, or whether the Democrats also believed
the lies. All that mattered was the Bush administration's claim that Iraq
was an imminent threat to wreak some kind of great havoc upon America. But
think about that. What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for
attacking the United States other than an irresistible desire for mass national
suicide?
(6) There was never any such animal as the International
Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery,
rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government,
a government usually supported by the United States.
(7) Conservatives, particularly of the neo- kind (far
to the right on the political spectrum), and liberals (ever so slightly to
the left of center) are not ideological polar opposites. Thus, watching a
TV talk show on foreign policy with a conservative and a liberal is not
necessarily getting a "balanced" viewpoint; a more appropriate balance to
a conservative would be a left-wing radical or progressive. American liberals
are typically closer to conservatives on foreign policy than they are to
these groupings on the left, and the educational value of such "balanced"
media can be more harmful than beneficial as far as seeing through the empire's
motives and actions.
How to be (duh) happy
Renowned conservative writer George Will penned a column last month celebrating
the fact that a survey showed that conservatives were happier than liberals
or moderates. While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves "very happy",
only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative
Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of conservative Republicans. Will
asserted that the explanation for these poll results lies in the fact that
conservatives are more pessimistic and less angry than liberals. If that
seems counter-intuitive concerning pessimism, I could suggest you read his
column{1}, except that it wouldn't be particularly enlightening; the piece
is little more than a vehicle for attacking the welfare state and government
interference in the god-given, wondrous workings of free enterprise. "Pessimistic
conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept
that happiness is a function of fending for oneself," writes Will.
I would propose that one important reason
conservatives may be happier is that their social conscience extends no farther
than themselves and their immediate circle of friends and family. George
Will gives not the slightest hint that the sad state of the world affects,
or should affect, conservatives' happiness. In my own case, if my happiness
were based solely on the objective conditions of my particular life -- work,
social relations, health, adventure, material comfort, etc. -- I could, without
hesitation, say that I'm very happy. But I'm blessed/cursed with a social
conscience that assails my tranquility. Reading the hundred varieties of
daily horrors in my morning newspaper -- the cruelty of man, the cruelty
of nature, the cruelty of chance -- I'm frozen in despair and anger. Often,
what makes it hardest to take is that my own government, at home and abroad,
directly and indirectly, is responsible for more of the misery than any other
human agent. I would have been incredulous, during the first half of my life,
to think that one day my own government would scare me so. But if I were
a conservative, I could take great comfort, even happiness, in convincing
myself that it's largely "the bad guys" who are being hurt and that the US-caused
horrors are for the purpose of extending democracy, freedom, and other joys
to the dark corners of the world. And at a profit.
The Cuban punching bag
The Committee to Protect Journalists{2}, located in New York, calls itself
"An Independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending press freedom
worldwide". In December it issued a report that said that "China, Cuba, Eritrea,
and Ethiopia are the world's leading jailers of journalists in 2005".
On January 7 I sent them the following email{3}:
"Dear People,
"I have a question concerning your report on imprisoned
journalists. You write that you consider journalists imprisoned when governments
deprive them of their liberty because of their work. This implies that they've
been imprisoned because of WHAT THEY'VE WRITTEN PER SE. You show Cuba with
24. And I would question whether your criterion applies to the Cuban cases.
The arrests of these persons in Cuba had nothing to do with them being
journalists, or even being dissidents, per se, but had everything to do with
their very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to
American government officials.
"The United States is to the Cuban government like al
Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. During the
period of the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles
in the US have inflicted upon Cuba damage greater than what happened in New
York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against
the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for victims of (at that
time) forty years of aggression. The suit accused Washington policies of
being responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and wounding or disabling
2,099 others.
"Would the US ignore a group of Americans receiving
funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders
of that organization inside the United States? Would it matter if these American
dissidents claimed to be journalists? In the past few years, the American
government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad on the basis
of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba
had with its dissidents' ties to the United States.
"Moreover, most of the arrested Cubans can hardly be
called journalists. Their only published works have appeared on websites
maintained by agencies of the United States."
On February 10, having received no reply, I sent another email referring
them to my January 7 letter. As of March 21 I still have not received a reply.
In the United States one does not have to defend attacking Cuba for any reason.
You just do it, and if by some oddball chance, some oddball person asks you
to defend what you've said ... Who cares? The sports section of the Washington
Post today brings another mindless knee-reflex attack. Alfonso Soriano, the
Washington National's new player, has refused to play left field, insisting
on his regular second-base position. "Imagine," writes Thomas Boswell, "Soriano
refusing to change positions if he played for the Cuban team in the WBC title
game. Fidel Castro might have disposed of the body before game time."{4}
Incidentally, it might also be noted that amongst America's
prison population of more than two million, there are
probably at least a few hundred who have practiced journalism at one time
or other, in one manner or other.
September 11, 2001
Many readers have asked me why I haven't expressed any opinion about the
events of that infamous day. The reason is that I preferred to not get entangled
in all the complexity and controversy, the arguments and hard feelings, without
any clear answers. But, very briefly, here goes.
Almost all of those who have asked me this believe that
it was all planned and carried out by US government officials. I don't think
so. Not that I would put it past the imperial mafia morally. I just think
the complications would have made it next to impossible to stage with such
"success", and without making it obvious to virtually everyone. I think what's
more likely is that the government knew that some terrorist act involving
aircraft was being planned and they let it happen so as to make use of it
politically, or they watched the progress of the planning to see where it
would lead, and perhaps capture other plotters, and they waited too long,
which is apparently what happened in the first terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center in 1993. There is an impressive body of evidence indicating
that various government officials had knowledge of the broad outline of the
2001 planned deed, if not every detail.
I also think that some of the questions raised by 9-11
researchers are not very impressive. Like no one has given me a good explanation
as to why the government would want to destroy building 7. And the fact that
Bush quietly spent time in a class with young students after hearing about
the first plane -- If it was being staged he would have reacted in a different
way. Or that several of the hijackers turned up "alive" in the Middle East.
Why couldn't their identity have been stolen? And more things like that.
There are numerous questions about the official version
-- which leaves the government completely innocent, albeit incompetent --
that make it very difficult to take the story at face value, but one doesn't
therefore have to jump to the other extreme of a government operation.
And now for something completely
different
Question for discussion, class. Why does a lottery whose jackpot reaches
$200 million or more attract so many more players than one where the jackpot
is only about $20 million? It's as if winning only $20 million wouldn't change
one's life radically and dramatically. What dream do these people have that
could be realized by $200 million but which would be unfulfilled with only
$20 million?
NOTES
{1} Washington Post, February 23, 2006, p.19
{2} http://cpj.org/
{3} To: info@cpj.org
{4} Washington Post, March 21, 2006, p.E1
William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
<www.killinghope.org >
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