[ April 23, 2003]
THE EMPIRE OF TERROR
I.K. ShuklaEmpires have always believed in their necessity and immortality. Divine right, arrogated by them, clerics in tow, convinces them of their universal mission, and the will and means to power persuade them that totalitarian imperialism is what the world around should have been eagerly waiting for. It is this conceit, obsessively delusional and self-servingly induced, that prods them to war and violence in the service of robbery and rapine in an unending spiral of barbaric and brutal orgies. These orgies at the altar of predatory greed, red in tooth and claw, are called, in popular parlance, colonialism and conquest, but by the mercenary flaks of the empire, Ñwhite manÇs burdenâ, or more engagingly, Ñliberationâ. This semantic somersault presents a putsch as no more than just Ñregime changeâ. The empire concocts its own Ñliberationâ theology, with misanthropy as its core sentiment, mass murder as its rosary, and loot as its canonical reveille.
The empireÇs verbal chicanery effaces all the grim debris and gory consequences of savage violence, employed in the massive slaughter of innocents, in the destruction and despoliation of their material assets, in the evisceration of their history, and in the extinction of their cultures far older and superior to that of the invader. Empire debases humanity, it plunges civilization into a deadly darkness, and squashes imagination. Even as the empire expands, the human subjects shrink in every way. Terror and genocide are integral to empire, as essential to it as lies, deceit, illegality, betrayal, and tyranny. It buys and breeds traitors in the conquered land.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------By Pentagon figures, more Iraqis were killed in Baghdad on Saturday April 5 à the day of the Third Armored DivisionÇs drive-by killing rampage through the city à than died at the WTC on Sep. 11, 2001. The total number of Iraqis killed in three weeks of war likely exceeds the 50,000 Americans killed over a 12-year period in Vietnam. This death toll is in a country whose population is less than one tenth of the United StatesS
Far more Iraqis have lost a loved one to American bombs, missiles, tanks, and guns or to the US-led economic blockade, than have embraced American soldiers or shouted praise for Bush. à Patrick Martin: Image-making, Lies and the Liberation of Iraq, Countercurrents.org, 12 Apr. 03.
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Bamiyan to Baghdad: Memories of Fire
Lest the Taliban, the jihadi iconoclasts, creatures of the US, should steal its thunder and upstage it by their demolition of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan (Afghanistan), the Anglo-Saxon axis of biblioclasts plumped for and earned greater distinction in the vandalization of museums and bonfire of libraries in Iraq. That ensures for it the end of history via erasure of memory and its referential appurtenances like artifacts and manuscripts, books, documents, records, statistics, treaties, tracts, and testaments. Christianity, through the centuries past, has religiously burnt books, åhereticsÇ, åwitchesÇ, and åenemiesÇ (dissenters, non-conformist thinkers, and rationalists).
The axis of extreme and absolute evil now has handy its age-old plea of conquering a land without any history, by bereaving it of one. As for people, were they to be even in hundreds of millions, they can be purged out of the land, as was done in the Americas and in Palestine in an unending series of mega and mini holocausts and forcible Ñtransfersâ. American antique dealers will make a killing selling IraqÇs history as curio pieces of a commercial commodity, thanks to an advance understanding with the Pentagon. Business, militarism, totalitarian hegemony, and grand theft are all in sync.
The sense of cultural inferiority and historical infamy that an upstart always suffers from, despite his material opulence, can never be quenched except by recurrent exercise of violence for the explicit purpose of aggrandizement. The pirate is accountable to none while he enriches himself by laying waste to othersÇ lands and stealing othersÇ properties. In the Christian west there is the hoary tradition of stamping the robbers and pirates as Ñroyalâ. Thus Columbus, from a criminal, is scandalously invested in the Western-Christian iconography as a discoverer (he brought silver, plundered from the New World, for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain), and Drake, the pirate, anointed as a chivalrous knight (1581).
Violence, venality, and villainy have been, in the moral code of the White conquerors and colonials, always raised to the degree of virtues, and not just in the Project for the New American Century. They became entrenched when time began as abiding attributes and higher values of a parasitic and terroristic culture. This culture of pillage, through the praxis of repetitive iteration and Ñvictoryâ, unctuously certifies itself as righteous and sets the standards of national and international behavior ignobly skewed in the interests of a few bandit barons, now called (trans-national) corporations.
The invasion of Iraq which was mooted in 1992 and prepared for over a decade-long
period of time neither needs nor cares for excuses. But it trots them anyway. The world watched in abject petrifaction, with the UN comatose and NATO complicit, the aggressive build up for war in the ambience of Iraq over nearly a year à warships, helicopters, bombers, tanks, missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, and weapons of mass destruction descending in monstrous clusters in deadly proximity to a people pulverized by thirteen years of genocidal sanctions the like of which the world had never seen before. Nor did the world shed a drop of its insouciance as Iraq was being bombed daily by two rogue states for thirteen years. All this was to soften IraqÇs defenses, like the punitive sanctions. Willy-nilly the world assented to or acquiesced in the crime.
The imperialist militarism has historically found colored people very useful as guinea pigs for its omnicidal experiments. Iraq has predecessors and kin among the marauding Anglo-SaxonsÇ victims in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It is not mere coincidence that the axis of invaders includes USA, Britain, and Australia, past and present imperial powers (the first two kicked out of Iraq decades back, hence the vendetta), adept at and advocates of exterminating millions of indigenous peoples wholesale. Practice made them perfect perverts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Governor Pataki (of New York) says we should take the statues of Saddam Hussein, melt them down, and put them in a new World Trade Center à to serve as permanent reminder that America is a country that cannot tell Arabs apart. àBill Maher, quoted in Newsday, Apr.17.
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In Belgium, colonial chauvinism now began to bubble up in verse:
On the beaches where a wise SovereignÇs voice draws them,
Our soldiers, hearts serene, brave the brazen climate
To break the AfricanÇs chain, and subdue the cruel Arab.
- A Secret Society of Murderers: Chap. 11, p.175, in King LeopoldÇs Ghost by Adam Hochschild, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1999.
The Pentagon has its auxiliaries of sumptuously paid spin-doctors, in the media, in the academia, in the publishing houses, and in the entire state apparatus topped by the Blanc House. It was to push through their agenda of infinite invasions and serial conquests that the triune of neo-conservatives, protestant fundamentalists, and Zionists had formulated and propagated via their Ñthink tanksâ (a peculiar institution invented to weave justifications and conceptualize projections for American supremacy through war and violence), not very secretly, that the US Supreme Court virtually hijacked the presidency and gifted it to a person whom people had massively rejected and who would always be a ÑPresidentâ only within quotation marks. It was a bloodless coup, but coup it was nonetheless. The US has since become a putschist Ñdemocracyâ, spawning a political freak that daringly mingles irreconcilable opposites. Some invention indeed!
A government that is on the auctioneersÇ block, a society that is held hostage by crime-ridden and corruption-infested corporations and plutocrats, a political system that is in hock to the insatiable greed of a few and allows only one political party with two names to compete for power, an economic and financial system that thrives on captive markets, enslaved trade, and protectionist iniquity; a mendacious media that is pledged to inculcate infantilism among the masses, is devoted to sleazy profits, and committed to the perpetual dumbing down of people; an Ñintelligentsiaâ that is incapable and afraid of asking questions and scrutinizing its government, a populace which is doped with Ñpatriotismâ of the most vulgar and vicious kind, - are no ingredients of a full-fledged democracy. And yet, this negation of democracy is what Washington wants emulated all across the globe.
And, from day one, at breakneck speed, the new occupant of the Blanched House, raced to execute his plan of plunder and domination abroad, and pauperization and repression at home. The UN, as ever, was expected and tasked to help the process of imperialist perfidy and pillage proceed smoothly, any dissenting murmur verboten, bullied into silence or bought out. This vigorously showcased the voodoo democracy that obtains both in the USA and the UNO. This is the model to be superimposed on the rest of the world. But the world is aghast at this verbal pollution and calls the model plutocracy, slavery, colonialism, and briefly, imperialism.
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Europe's destruction of the "inferior races" of four continents prepared the ground for HitlerÇs destruction of six million Jews in Europe. à Preface in Exterminate All the Brutes: Sven Lindquist, The New Press, New York, 1996.
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Designs and Tools
When the US invaded Panama in 1983 and killed, by several accounts, between 4,000 and 5,000 people, neither did it receive any UN reprimand, nor did it apologize, nor did it pay Panama any reparations. Why? Because the USA had never done so, and had gone on invading country after country with impunity, always getting away with it. Never reprimanded, never charged, never tried, never punished, never quarantined, never sanctioned, it felt endorsed and encouraged to persist in its aggressions around the world since it had a shield in a self-proclaimed and self-justificatory fig leaf of Exceptionalism.
What is this fictional flake? Simply and laughably, it is the assertion of right to commit crimes and never having to pay for it. It is the political equivalent of the principle of Ñchosen peopleâ, who are, supposedly, divinely ordained to be prone to criminality and immune from punishment. It is not for nothing that Washington believes in its fire and brimstone variety of Southern Baptist Christian crusade. It helps imperialism righteously stomp the world and send the colored heathen more to hell than to Jesus. That is why, for this evangelism, the Christian God loves Christian USA.
America is the only country in history that grandiosely persists in calling its rebellion (all it had begged of England was representation in its parliament!) against George the Third a revolution, and has had it so shrilly intoned by its army of bugler Ñhistoriansâ, that the myth has become a nationally venerated Ñhistoricalâ fact, incontrovertible and immutable. This is a stunning success in the realm of political idiom and historiographical usage.
There was no keening in the world for the slaughtered Panamanians, nor any cry of horror when Washington flouted international norms by invading the Vatican embassy there in pursuit of Gen. Manuel Noriega, PanamaÇs President. Nor was there any universal lamentation or any cosmic compassion in evidence for the 600 plus students murdered in Mexico in the sixties. But Tiananmen Square in Beijing became globally notorious for the students killed there. Morals in the Christian West have always been sporadically evocative, expediently useful, censoriously selective, and recklessly random. Its writings, actions, preachments and performances are so well calibrated in pursuit of venality and violence as to mount on a pedestal immorality itself as an icon of noble vocation and virtuous obsession. Where else in the world is liberty, an abstract noun, turned into stone?
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The United States [a mercantile state à a gigantic mercantile society] thenceforth was to be a Phoenician enterprise, a Carthaginian republic. Washington and Lincoln must have wept in shame in their graves. - The Shark and the Sardines by Juan Jose Arevalo, Lyle Stuart, New York, 1961.p.10.
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The invasion of Iraq is the eerie intimation of the apocalypse, nay, the doomsday. Not only West Asia but also the whole of South Asia will be impacted adversely. Many maps will change, many mortuaries will be filled. With military bases and/or US troops in over 150 countries in the world Washington is well set to destroy all freedom and every democracy in the Third World as per its wont since inception. The occupation of Iraq and control of its oil (Operation Iraqi Liberation spells OIL) scream disaster for the security and sovereignty of scores of countries far and near.
IsraelÇs military arsenal, with 500 nuclear bombs, poses a permanent threat to the security of all nations in West Asia and beyond. (ÑGerms, Gas and A-Bombs of Israel: Fingers at All Buttonsâ by Neil Sammonds, indexonline.org, Apr.22). As for South-East Asia, the undisclosed nuke arsenal of the US and its 40,000 troops in South Korea threaten and imperil several nations all around much more than any potential nuclear capability of Pyongyang sought defensively to counter foreign aggression.
This blueprint of absolutist terrorism targets nations and their resources as well as their independence. Iran, India, and China are in the gun-sight. India playing lackey to the superpower will become the scourge of Asia. Its dream of regional hegemony, a la Israel,
as a fiduciary of USA, will only exacerbate the privation in the region and alienate the surrounding powers big and small. If the rift between China and Russia has any lesson for the Third World it is that such divisions would multiply the gains of the lone superpower fuelling still more fiercely its unbridled and illegitimate ambitions. Russia, even without Central Asia (which can be coerced with bribe and terror by the US to turn hostile), remains still quite sizably an Asian power. The eastward expansion of NATO is the other inimical flank of Russia that can easily be placed under siege. These geopolitical realities call for very sensitive understandings and pragmatic alignments if the whole arc from Central to South to West Asia is to be saved from being gobbled up.
The US frowning on any regional economic or political bloc is not new. Any such formation appears to it as whittling and challenging its imperialist terrorism. It can suffer only those that yield to its yoke. The cases in point are, to name just two, the Organization of African Unity and the Organization of American States (supposedly of South America, but headquartered in Washington!). Its animus against the Non-Aligned Movement was abusive and public. When it talks of fabricating another United Nations and discarding the present one, it would be salutary to recall that Sukarno, frustrated with the UN, had first mooted the idea of an Asian UN, and had earned the implacable animosity of Washington. The US loathes the idea of a UN not serving its interests and it has disregarded and battered it umpteen times contemptuously. Similarly, it has always bought, bred, and installed Quislings and thugs in the conquered nations, a few of them being Castillo Armas and, later, Rios Montt (Guatemala), Pinochet (Chile), Syngman Rhee (Korea), Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam), Marcos (Philippines), Mobutu (Zaire), Somoza (Nicaragua), Shah (Iran), Suharto (Indonesia). All of them were great killers and big time thieves.
The Third World War that began as a wrongly termed Cold War did never cease. It is ironic that the wars limited mostly to Europe, or at most some of its colonies, are called World Wars. This is another example of Euro-centric conditioning and misappropriation of language. The post-1945 imperialist wars engulfing Africa, Asia, and Latin America did not qualify as World Wars because of two reasons. They were invasions, not wars. And, the dead were non-whites. Millions in the Third World have paid with their lives, and many more millions will continue being killed for the profits and power that an inhuman dispensation seeks as its toll from the Ñinferior racesâ. An irresponsibly prodigal way of life and an inherently violent and invidious system that rob and waste resources of the planet earth, as they destroy human lives, threaten the Homo sapiens with enslavement and extinction as nothing before had done so. Militarization of space is the ultimate in hubris and horror that demeans life and vows to decapitate the world.
Iraq, having been conquered by the Anglo-Saxon hordes in its summer of sacrilege and sorrow, yet attests the collapse of a world order which the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had fostered however deficiently, and witnesses the neo-colonial depredation as imperialist cannibalism. Even in its bloodied sunset Iraq has performed a duty to its neighbors and the world at large by sounding the tocsin against Western-White-Christian terrorism and ensuing tyranny. We will ignore it at our peril. If Westphalia had ended a Thirty YearsÇ War, its repudiation heralds another war, this one of indefinite duration.
References:
WW3Report.com, Fsrn.org, Indymedia.org, Informationtimes.com, Counterspin.org, Counterpunch.com, Pentagonlies.com, Commondreams.com, Dream-tools.com, Americanstateterrorism.com, Mediawhoresonline.com, Wsws.org, Stratfor.com, Informationclearinghome.com, Znet.com.
The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer (UK), Le Monde Diplomatique (Paris).
Rogue State by William Blum, Common Courage Press, Maine, 2000.
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, Plume/Penguin, 2003.
Hidden Agendas by John Pilger, The New Press, New York, 1998.
Imperial Alibis by Stephen R. Shalom, South End Press, Boston, 1993.
Empire of Knowledge by Vinay Lal, Pluto Press, London/USA, 2002.
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