America: Beyond the Propaganda

A buddy of mine from Finland sent this to me. Read this with an open mind and it may enlighten you to the cruelty that America has inflicted on the world. WARNING this will be a long read.

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The Algebra of Infinite Justice
by Arundhati Roy

The Algebra of Infinite Justice In the aftermath of the unconscionable 11th September suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and Evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don t know, massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." {1} Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know (because they don't appear much on TV). Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US Government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "International Coalition Against Terror", mobilized its army, its airforce, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country, reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, its cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On the 20th of September, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said he knew exactly who the terrorists were and which governments were supporting them. {2} It sounds as though the President knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his 20th September address to the U.S. Congress, President George Bush called the enemies of America "Enemies of Freedom". "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said. "They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other". {3} People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade the American public that America's commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance -- the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon -- were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things -- to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)?

It must be hard for ordinary Americans so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around, eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies that are so hated. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by America's firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office goers in the days that followed the attacks. American people can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try and understand why September 11th happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages, no organization has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said, must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's War Against Terror in America or against Terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7000 lives, the gutting of 15 million square feet of office space in Manhattan {4} the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds hundreds of thousands of jobs, the potential bankruptcy of some airline companies and the crash of the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that?

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US Ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice," but that all things considered, "we think the price is worth it." {5} Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilization and savagery, between the massacre of innocent people or, if you like, a clash of civilizations and collateral damage. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of Infinite Justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead children for every dead man? How many dead mujahideen for each dead investment banker?

As we watch mesmerized, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama Bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11th attacks. The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans. There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) {6} Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional co-ordinates or sign-posts to plot on a map -- no military bases, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryyside is littered with land mines -- ten million is the most recent estimate. {7} The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in. Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are 8 million Afghan citizens who will need emergency aid. {8} As supplies run out -- Food and Aid agencies have been evacuated -- the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. {9} Witness the Infinite Justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death, while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan back to the stone-age". Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. {10} And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US Government and Afghanistan are old friends. {11} In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the CIA's largest covert operation since the Vietnam war. {12} Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jehad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the Communist regime and eventually de-stabilize it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited tens of thousands of radical mujahideen from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. {13} The rank and file of the mujahideen were unaware that their jehad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself).

In 1989, after being bloodied by ten years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilization reduced to rubble. Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jehad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mujahideen ordered farmers to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. {14} Under the proection of the ISI hundreds of heroin processing laboratories were set up across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of Heroin in the world, and the single biggest source on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between 100 and 200 billion dollars, were ploughed back into training and arming militants. {15}

In 1996, the Taliban -- then a marginal sect of dangerous, hard-line fundamentalists -- fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by thhe ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. {16} The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls-schools, dismissed women from government jobs, enforced Sharia laws under which women deemed to be immoral are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. {17} Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead. The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet Communism and the springboard of a uni-polar world dominated by America. It made the space for neo-capitalism and corporate globalization, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from next to nothing to a massive number. {18} Even before September 11 there were millions of Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalization's Structural Adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. {19} Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrassas, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan Government has supported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties. {20} Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garrot the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war onhis hands. {21}

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. {22} Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any Third World country with a fragile economy and a complex social base, should know by now that to invite a Superpower such as America in, (whether it says it's staying or just passing through), would be like inviting a brick to drop through your winsdscreen.

In the media blitz that followed the September 11th, mainstream TV stations largely ignored the story of America's involvement with Afghanistan. So, to those unfamiliar with the story, the coverage of the attacks could have been moving, disturbing and perhaps to cynics, self-indulgent. However, to those of us who are familiar with Afghanistan's recent history, American television coverage and the rhetoric of the "International Coalition Against Terror" is just plain insulting. America's free press like its free market' has a lot to account for.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare -- small pox, bubonic plague, anthrax -- the deadly payload of innocuous crop duster aircraft. {23} Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defense industry. To what purpose? President George Bush can no more "rid the world of evildoers" than he can stock it with saints. {24} It's absurd for the US Government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their factories from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings, who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's New War, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory. {25}

The 11th September attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel -- backed by the U.S. -- invaded Lebanon in 1982, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousaands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. {26} And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists who the American government supported trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama Bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. {27} But in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jehadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from Suspect, to Prime Suspect, and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".

From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11th attacks. {28} So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them. From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions from which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks -- that he is the inspirational figure, the CEO of the Holding Company. {29} The Taliban's response to US demands for the extrradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: Produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable". {30}

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs -- can India put in a side-request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the USA? He was the Chairman of Union Carbide, reesponsible for the 1984 Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?) {31}

But who is Osama Bin Laden really?

Let me rephrase that. What is Osama Bin Laden?

He's America's family secret. He is the American President's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, ist vulgarly stated policy of "full spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. {32} Its marauding multi-nationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.

Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug-addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43 million subsidy for a "war on drugs"...) {33} Now they've even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as the head of the snake. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of Good and Evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world -- "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" -- is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. {34}

It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

Arundhati Roy
New Delhi 24
September 2001

 

Dane didn't read it so I don't think his opinion really matters. He's convinced it is one of those anti American things which is BS but it isn't unusual for the blind to lead the blind.

 

You know fuck it. Just delete the damn post all together. I only posted it to explain how someone could come at America but I'm tired of being treated like shit over this. So just delete it I don't enjoy having some ignorant ass call me names.

 

Hamma I'm sitting here being bashed into the ground. Please remove the thread before I start returning fire. Because when I go off nothing will be sacred.

points of attack will consist of the following:

*Ignorant bastards believe anything they are told

*The word Fuck will be repetivly used

*Returning of the personal attacks will be.. ugly

 

I lived in Cape Town for a while. Maybe we can chat about the KFC and how expensive a Snickers bar is and how hard they are to find there. I also lived in johanisburg.. I don't know how it is spelled because I was only ten and didn't care at the time. I went to a Naval school there and I was in the 2nd standard at the time. In Johanisburg I remember i could go to the side of the hill I lived on and litterly dig out crystals.

But back to the flames. My opinion is simple... people don't come all the way to America to blow us up without a reason. It's not that I believe everything an outsider tells me. It's that I take their point of view into consideration before I make a decision. I was military and the rest of my family is military. So I get to hear about things you probably don't and influences my prespective on the matter.

 

It's all good. We are in December and Everyones stress levels are reaching critical as we hunt for X-mas gifts and worry about life. I'll take more caution in the feature


Moo?

 

Alright I'm not going to push for flames or anything so I'll leave it alone.

Lets chat about South Africa some more. It has been a while since I talked about South Africa with someone from the country.

I took a snap shot of my childhood passport to verify that I'm not making this up.



FYI The transformer is the MTX stamp