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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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In the Name of God and Freedom™
By John
Maxwell
The
principle is known to every boy who has ever attended one of the
thousands of ersatz English public schools scattered about the
former Empire. It was only later that you may have come to
realise that someone had codified it: ”Beware of those in whom
the urge to punish is powerful.”
It was
this principle that provoked my initial distaste for George W.
Bush – watching his career as the executioner Governor of
Texas and his campaign for the presidency of the United States.
The campaign failed, but he became President anyway. As one of
his admirers, Lt. Gen. William Boykin explained, “The
majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? [in
the White House] … I tell you this morning that he's in the
White House because God put him there for a time such as this"
(New York Times, October 17, 2003)
The
Super-Americans
General
Boykin is now a very important official in the Pentagon, one of
those with serious authority over the course of the war in Iraq,
an aide and adviser to Generalissimo von Rumsfeld.
The
people round Bush with the exception of Rumsfeld and Powell,
know nothing of war. They have probably never seen a dead body
except on television. And, if Rush Limbaugh is right, the dark
deeds in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad are to them, nothing more
than sophomoric japes, the stuff of fraternity initiations. Some
people die in those juvenile romps, as do some in the US
marine training camp at Parris Island, in military camps like
Deepcut, in England and in prisons all over the world.
But
none of this is new. I am indebted to the editor of the Information
Clearing House (ICH) for the following - hundred year
old – quote:
“Our
men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children,
prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people
from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into
men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners
people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and
an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one
by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples
to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses."
That
was written in the Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in
1901, by its Manila correspondent during the
Spanish-American War.
A
century later, the Abu Ghraib scapegoats are being prepared for
sacrifice: the enlisted men, some officers above them, even
Donald Rumsfeld, the Generalissimo, himself.
But,
as I said last week, the reason for the problem is a culture which
assigns to itself the right to decide what is right for the
world and concedes no limit on its power to enforce its will. It
is a culture based on the same religious intolerance which armed
the Conquistadors and allowed them to exterminate entire
civilisations in the sixteenth century. It is a culture which
gave Rumsfeld licence to allow the pillage of 8,000 years of
cultural history after the fall of Baghdad.
Another
quotation supplied by the ICH makes my point a little clearer:
"I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for
light and guidance … and one night late it came to me this
way.… We could not leave (the Philippines) to
themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they
would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than
Spain's … There was nothing left for us to do but take
them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize
them" (President William McKinley in 1901).
It is
the same impulse which has transformed Cuba into a private
torture chamber for the delectation of ten American presidents
and which allows George Bush to announce, three days ago, a new,
more aggressive policy towards Cuba which he hopes will achieve
the overthrow of the Cuban government.
Nowhere
in the anti-Cuba document is it acknowledged that most of the
latest proposals are, like the 45-year embargo and the Helms
Burton Act, illegal, acts of war and brutal transgressions
of international norms
Which
is not to be wondered at. Having suckered Saddam Hussein, their
erstwhile ally, into providing them a casus belli by
invading Kuwait, the United States then launched a
brutal war to reduce Iraq to what the US and Israel considered
its proper station. And, not satisfied with that, the US
launched with the help of its major allies in the Security
Council, Britain and France, a ten year campaign of sanctions
and bombing which almost completed the destruction of the
Iraqi infrastructure and left more than a million people dead,
among them, half a million children. Then came Mr Bush’s
anti-terrorism war.
Accomplices
of the Press
In
most of this, the American people have lived in blissful
ignorance, an ignorance promoted and managed by the organs of
the Western Press, which have largely concealed from public
view, the continuing atrocities in Iraq and in other
‘dark corners of the world’ to use Mr Bush’s felicitous
phrase.
It is
this silence and this conspiracy which made it impossible for
Americans to understand why President Bill Clinton apologised
in 1999 to the people of Guatemala for American complicity
in the Guatemalan military’s campaign of genocide.
Andrew
Reding of Djinn magazine describes what happened:
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Guatemala
was an American Rwanda. The army and its paramilitary
allies carried out at least 626 massacres, many of
entire villages. Security forces slaughtered civilians
without regard for age or sex. They impaled and shot
children. They raped women, and slashed open the wombs
of pregnant women. They skinned, amputated, and burned
victims alive. They forced townsfolk to watch as they
disemboweled still-living relatives and neighbors. At
gunpoint, they forced Mayans to kill fellow-villagers or
even their own kin.
All
told, the government and its allies killed about 200,000
men, women and children, more than four-fifths of them
Mayan. One fourth of the victims were women. Depopulated
villages were completely destroyed, their buildings torn
or burned down, their wells poisoned. In the larger
cities, death squads killed teachers, university
professors, trade union leaders, politicians, and anyone
else who questioned the killings or military rule. Most
of the slayings, including the bulk of the massacres,
occurred between 1981 and 1983. |
The
Reagan administration reversed President Carter’s human
rights-based foreign policy under UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s
rubric that authoritarian [i.e. fascist] states are preferable
to totalitarian [i.e. Communist] states. That doctrine led
to all sorts of atrocities across Central America, directed by
people like the recently resigned US Special Ambassador to Latin
America, Otto Reich. Reich is a notorious fraudster, identified
by the US General Accounting Office as having unlawfully used US
taxpayer dollars to propagandize Americans.
In the
1980s Reich used taxpayer dollars, as head of the Reagan Office
of Public Diplomacy, to scare Americans into believing that
Soviet MIG fighters based in Nicaragua were being prepared to
attack California! He was also implicated in the Iran-Contra
scandal and missed prison by the skin of his teeth. Since then
he has been implicated in the abortive coup against President
Chavez of Venezuela and the coup against Aristide in Haiti. One
of the people he has protected is the man who blew up a
plane-load of people over Barbados in 1976 – Luis Posada
Carriles.
In
Port au Prince, Haiti, at midnight on Mothers' Day last week, US
troops blew in the front door of a house, decapitated the family
dog, arrested and handcuffed Sister Anne
Auguste, Haiti's
equivalent of Louise Bennett – a 69 year old folklorist,
grandmother and her four young grandchildren and other relatives
and friends and dragged them all off to jail.
Deeply
Embedded Hypocrites
The
American people are almost entirely unaware that it is rascals
like Reich who are representing them to the world. When
Americans ask, plaintively, “Why do they Hate us so?” they
need to check out people like Reich and Noriega and they need to
demand explanations from their Press.
In the
Washington Post yesterday, Jefferson Morley reports that
around the world, the Press which had supported the pro-war
initiatives of Bush and Rumsfeld is now drawing away, trying to
maintain a respectable distance from their former allies
and surrogates. The taint of the torture in Iraq is too much for
them. But the Press itself was deeply implicated in recommending
torture as a means of combating the terrorists, or as it
were, fighting fire with fire.
In Newsweek
magazine, (Nov. 5, 2001) I was dumbfounded to read "It's
a new world, and survival may well require old techniques that
seemed out of the question," liberal columnist Jonathan
Alter wrote. "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can
find his thoughts turning to . . . torture. . . . Couldn't we at
least subject [al-Qaida suspects] to psychological torture? . .
. How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or
deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings?"
If I
was dumbfounded by Alter I was bowled over by Alan
Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor and an icon of the
liberal Human Rights establishment, who, in an Op Ed piece in
the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 8, 2001) asked:
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Is
it justified to resort to unconventional techniques such
as truth serum, moderate physical pressure and outright
torture? |
Dershowitz
came to the conclusion that torture was not outlawed by the US
Constitution and the only problem was that evidence so obtained
could not be used in court.
The
important thing, for both Alter and Dershowitz, was to get
information, an objective shared by the inquisitors at Abu
Ghraib. If one could discover by torture, details of an
impending terrorist outrage, would not that justify
torture?
In
Vietnam in the 1960s the CIA used crude as well as sophisticated
torture. Alexander Cockburn, in the Nation in
November 2001, wrote about one bizarre episode:
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.
. . the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to
break suspected leaders of Vietnam's National Liberation
Front . . . So the agency began more advanced
experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three
prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in
their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given
knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the
electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one
another. They didn't. The electrodes were removed, the
prisoners shot and the bodies burned. [You] can read
about it in Gordon Thomas's book Journey into
Madness. |
Cockburn
reminded his audience about Dan Mitrione, an American kidnapped
and murdered by the Tupamaru guerillas at about the same
time.
|
.
. . Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching
Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to
prisoners without killing them. In Uruguay, according to
the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione helped
"professionalize" torture as a routine measure
and advised on psychological techniques such as playing
tapes of women and children screaming that the
prisoner's family was being tortured. |
And, of
course, no one involved in Latin American politics can forget
the School of the Americas, operated by the US Army at Fort
Benning, Georgia, at which more than 60,000 soldiers and
policemen from Latin America (including Jamaica) were trained
from the 60s onward.
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U.S.
Army intelligence manuals advocating torture techniques
and how to circumvent laws on due process, arrest and
detention were used for at least a decade to train Latin
American soldiers at the U.S. Army’s School of the
Americas, (SOA) renamed in 2001 the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC.
– SOAWatch.org |
Most
of this information will be news to 99% of Americans. Many of
them will simply not believe it. Between their authoritarian
Administration and their compliant, cowardly press, they have
been protected from the truth and inoculated against reality.
Getting
rid of Rumsfeld will solve nothing and make no difference to a
culture of fundamentalist intolerance and racist impunity.
Copyright©2004 John Maxwell
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update 16 June
2008 |
