Time to Recognize State Terror

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Time to Recognize State Terror

Post by Iris » 09-18-2004 09:35 PM

Time to Recognize State Terror
by John Pilger

The world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and "us." That is the unerring message from Western governments, press, radio and television. For Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the cold war, when the world was divided between "Reds" and us, and even a strategy of annihilation was permissible in our defense. We now know, or we ought to know, that so much of that was a charade; released official files make clear the Soviet threat was for public consumption only.

Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is held up to us as a true reflection of events. The new threat is given impetus with every terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way mirror, our leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are not in question. Tony Blair's "idealism" and "decency" are promoted by his accredited mainstream detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his political demise opens on the media stage. Having taken part in the killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi civilians, Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news: from his arcane rivalry with treasurer Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his damascene conversion to the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is allowed to say, without irony or challenge, that "this international terrorism will not prevail." These are the same words spoken by Mussolini soon after he had bombed civilians in Abyssinia.

Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter dishonesty of all this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as war criminals in the literal and legal sense and present evidence of his cynicism and immorality, are few; but they have wide support among the public, whose awareness has never been higher, in my experience. It is the British public's passionate indifference, if not contempt for the political games of Blair/Brown and their courts and its accelerating interest in the way the world really is, that unnerves those with power.

Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way it really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering, incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the occupation is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a corrupt American officer class, given license by its superiors in Washington. Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than the total number of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during the past year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing of three American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier, the SS Das Reich division killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane as revenge for the kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is there a difference?

These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other dense urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any modern application, it is this industrial state terrorism. The British have a different style. There are more than 40 known cases of Iraqis having died at the hands of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the current issue of the magazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance reporter, wrote, "Working as a Brit in Iraq is hazardous, particularly in the south where our troops have a reputation (unreported at home) for brutality." Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home. This is so worrying the Ministry of Defense that it has moved to placate the family of 17-year-old soldier David McBride by taking him off the AWOL list after he refused to fight in Iraq. Almost all the families of soldiers killed in Iraq have denounced the occupation and Blair, all of which is unprecedented.

Only by recognizing the terrorism of states is it possible to understand, and deal with, acts of terrorism by groups and individuals which, however horrific, are tiny by comparison. Moreover, their source is inevitably the official terrorism for which there is no media language. Thus, the State of Israel has been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers. For all of Israel's perverse rage against the BBC – a successful form of intimidation – BBC reporters never report Israelis as terrorists: that term belongs exclusively to Palestinians imprisoned in their own land. It is not surprising, as the recent Glasgow University study concluded, that many television viewers in Britain believe that the Palestinians are the invaders and occupiers.

On September 7, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis in the town of Beersheba. Every television news report allowed the Israeli government spokesman to use this tragedy to justify the building of an apartheid wall – when the wall is pivotal to the causes of Palestinian violence. Almost every news report marked the end of a five-month period of "relative peace and calm" and "a lull in the violence." During those five months of relative peace and calm, almost 400 Palestinians were killed, 71 of them in assassinations. During the lull in the violence, more than 73 Palestinian children were killed. A 13-year-old was murdered with a bullet through the heart, a 5-year-old was shot in her face as she walked arm in arm with her 2-year-old sister. The body of Mazen Majid, aged 14, was riddled with 18 Israeli bullets as he and his family fled their bulldozed home.

None of this was reported in Britain as terrorism. Most of it was not reported at all. After all, this was a period of peace and calm, a lull in the violence. On May 19, Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on peaceful demonstrators, killing eight of them. This atrocity had a certain significance; the demonstration was part of a growing nonviolent Palestinian movement, which has seen peaceful protest gatherings, often with prayers, along the apartheid wall. The rise of this Gandhian movement is barely noted in the outside world.

The truth about Chechnya is similarly suppressed. On February 4, 2000, Russian aircraft attacked the Chechen village of Katyr Yurt. They used "vacuum bombs," which release petrol vapor and suck people's lungs out, and are banned under the Geneva Convention. The Russians bombed a convoy of survivors under a white flag. They murdered 363 men, women and children. It was one of countless, little-known acts of terrorism in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian state, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, has the "complete solidarity" of Tony Blair.

"Few of us", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

It is time we stopped denying it.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=3592
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. B. Franklin

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Post by Dude111 » 12-11-2012 05:16 AM

Alot of us DO NOT DENY IT and we know the "War on terror" IS BOGUS AND MEANT TO KEEP THE MASSES IN THIER CONTROL!!!!!

A good article indeed my friend,ITS WELL PAST TIME FOR PEOPLE TO RECOGNISE IT!!

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Post by HB3 » 12-11-2012 11:24 AM

Sorry, Dude -- this article is total garbage. Now here's a poster I'm glad is gone.

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Post by HB3 » 12-11-2012 11:31 AM

I feel coated in an oily layer of stupidity and lies just reading it. "Apartheid wall." Yeah, sure. These guys always have that weird thing about the Jews...

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Post by SquidInk » 12-11-2012 02:55 PM

What if the term/concept 'terror' was replaced with 'brutality'? Does that change the nature of the criticism? Asking seriously.

What about the Chechnya/Russia thing at the end? Do we know if that account is even remotely true?
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Post by HB3 » 12-11-2012 03:47 PM

"Terror" in itself is a euphemism, but, of course, articles like the above don't want to remove the euphemism, but move even further away from the reality.

Who knows about the Putin thing. Maybe he took a day off hunting whales to engage in genocide. And those guys who took hostages at the elementary school and committed such horrific slaughter were obviously Zionist agents.

The point is that these guys have a strange habit of seeing these issues in terms of "either/or" propositions. "IF" the US or one of its proxies engages in dirty warfare, that automatically means no one else is. Huh? So, it's self-serving logic with something else to prove entirely different than what it's claiming. Calling Dr. Freud...as usual these guys are terribly lacking in any introspection, which always struck me as odd. But I guess that too makes sense if you think of the Soviet application of psychology, as a method of stifling political dissent. They never cast the mirror of Freudian insight on themselves. That's not what it's there for.

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Post by HB3 » 12-11-2012 06:23 PM

I'd be really interested in figured out where this suicidal, anti-civilizational impulse comes from. Ironically, the explanation from the anti-Semitic paleo-conservative wing is that it's Jewish tribalism poisoning the host culture for its own benefit. I tend to think, whatever it is, it was happening in western culture way before any significant Jewish influence.

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Post by HB3 » 12-12-2012 12:50 AM

A 25-year-old Somali woman living in San Diego was sentenced Tuesday to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to sending money to a suspected terrorist group in her native country.

Nima Yusuf admitted in San Diego federal court that she sent
A 25-year-old Somali woman living in San Diego was sentenced Tuesday to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to sending money to a suspected terrorist group in her native country.

Nima Yusuf admitted in San Diego federal court that she sent $1,450 to men in Somalia who were fighting on behalf of al-Shabaab, considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government. She also admitted trying to recruit a local man to go to Somalia to fight for al-Shabaab.

According to FBI wiretaps, Yusuf was pleased when told in a phone call by another Somali that al-Shabaab had killed Burundian peacekeeping troops. She allegedly responded: "Oh my God! God is great! Wonderful! I swear to God, you told me something to be happy about."

In another conversation, Yusuf laughingly said she hoped another terrorist strike like the Sept. 11 attack occurs in America: "Oh! It will be happening again. Trust me, more this time it will be double, triple their deaths."
,450 to men in Somalia who were fighting on behalf of al-Shabaab, considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government. She also admitted trying to recruit a local man to go to Somalia to fight for al-Shabaab.

According to FBI wiretaps, Yusuf was pleased when told in a phone call by another Somali that al-Shabaab had killed Burundian peacekeeping troops. She allegedly responded: "Oh my God! God is great! Wonderful! I swear to God, you told me something to be happy about."

In another conversation, Yusuf laughingly said she hoped another terrorist strike like the Sept. 11 attack occurs in America: "Oh! It will be happening again. Trust me, more this time it will be double, triple their deaths."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... group.html

Meanwhile, the Jews are doing things like hosting annoying late-night television programs. I'll take the Jews.
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Post by SquidInk » 12-12-2012 10:22 AM

Well, that's not all 'the Jews' are doing. Israel is essentially engaged in an ongoing war with Arab factions, and they are doing the things necessary to win a war. So are the Arabs. It sometimes gets brutal.

Keep in mind as you read this, in the context of guns and bombs and murder and invasions, I couldn't care less what the Old Testament says,

Wars and killing are domains of the un-exceptional. The concept that Israel, England, Canada and the US are somehow more noble when they kill than 'the terrorists' are when they kill, is somewhere between wishful thinking and full-blown insanity. Wait - who said anything about England and Canada?

The OP compares the US in Iraq to the Nazis in France (of course). That's ridiculous. But so is the idea that the US invaded Iraq to free them from evil. It's just simply not true.

As for the Somali woman you cited - she's a lowlife. I would actually entertain the concept of a baited scenario designed to capture these types, followed by deportation. She's completely different than a Mexican worker sneaking around trying to find work. Yes, both are destructive to this society, but one is direct and intentional, while the other is a much more indirect side effect (in most cases).

When two states are at war, it requires 'terrorist' tactics on all sides - that's war, that's why we used to try and avoid war. As an example, nobody outside of DHS believes the Costa Ricans are terrorists.
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Post by HB3 » 12-12-2012 10:57 AM

Well, that's not all 'the Jews' are doing. Israel is essentially engaged in an ongoing war with Arab factions, and they are doing the things necessary to win a war. So are the Arabs. It sometimes gets brutal.
Yeah, without even getting into it, what I see going on here is reasoning that somehow only one "side" can be "brutal," and whichever side that is automatically means the other side is purely innocent.

I was exaggerating about the late night TV thing, of course. But let's note there is no command for military conquest in the Old Testament. It's not Judaic doctrine, so people have to come up with more complicated theories about intrinsic ethnic tribalism -- a la Kevin McDonald -- to justify theories of supposed Jewish aggression.
But so is the idea that the US invaded Iraq to free them from evil. It's just simply not true.
Again all I'm pointing out is the one-sidedness of the argument. Just because America didn't belong in Iraq doesn't automatically mean the Jews built an "apartheid wall" in a kind of reverse Holocaust, which is basically the argument going on here.
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Post by Fan » 12-12-2012 11:09 AM

Countering brutality with brutality does not equal peace or innocence.

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Post by SquidInk » 12-12-2012 11:10 AM

HB3 wrote: Yeah, without even getting into it, what I see going on here is reasoning that somehow only one "side" can be "brutal," and whichever side that is automatically means the other side is innocent.

I was exaggerating about the late night TV thing, of course. But let's note there is no command for military conquest in the Old Testament. It's not Judaic doctrine, so people have to come up with more complicated theories about intrinsic ethnic tribalism -- a la Kevin McDonald -- to justify theories of supposed Jewish aggression.



Again all I'm pointing out is the one-sidedness of the argument. Just because America didn't belong in Iraq doesn't automatically mean the Jews built an "apartheid wall" in a kind of reverse Holocaust, which is basically the argument here.
I agree with alot of what you are saying. The apartheid comment was a bit much.

My reference to the Old Testament was in regards to the formation & placement of Israel after WW2. I realize a Hebrew nation has historical 'claims' in the area, but certain realities exist.

If the Apaches, with the full backing of Russia, suddenly re-took and fortified Albuquerque, and the locals there fought the idea - well, that's a huge mess. Nobody is going to act with civility in those kinds of situations.
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Post by SquidInk » 12-12-2012 11:23 AM

HB3 wrote: Again all I'm pointing out is the one-sidedness of the argument. Just because America didn't belong in Iraq doesn't automatically mean the Jews built an "apartheid wall" in a kind of reverse Holocaust, which is basically the argument going on here.
Ok, I think I understand you here & agree.

Many people have vested spiritual interest in the concept of 'Israel' and because of that are only able to see brutality on one side of the equation. In a war, it's always a trade - brutality for brutality. Even when the causes are very clear, like the Americans versus the Japanese in WW2 - it boiled down to necessary brutality.

I am unaware of a 'Rape of Nanking' type of excessive full blown inexcusable evil brutality on the part of any side in the Middle East conflicts. Did such an event occur? I think that would change the conversation.

The criticism & shunning should not revolve around 'terrorism' but instead should be directed at any participants in on-going wars.
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Post by HB3 » 12-12-2012 11:24 AM

Right, well, there was a lot more back and forth with a "territory" like Jerusalem. I've heard that argument from paleo-conservatives, that they were just asking for trouble for insisting Israel be in that particular location, rather than, say, New Jersey or Hamburg or something. But the situation isn't quite analogous to your Russian hypothetical -- it wasn't just "Russia," but the League of Nations, Britain, and the UN that shaped and authorized the modern State of Israel.

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Post by HB3 » 12-12-2012 11:30 AM

I am unaware of a 'Rape of Nanking' type of excessive full blown inexcusable evil brutality on the part of any side in the Middle East conflicts. Did such an event occur?
Oh, I'm sure there's many claims for just that. But when it comes to hatin' Jews, that well predates modern Israel.

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