Children,
many of whose deformities are believed to be the results of the
chemical dioxin that the US used in the Vietnam war, play outside a
hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)On
my wall is the Daily Express front page of September 5 1945 and the
words: "I write this as a warning to the world." So began
Wilfred Burchett's report from Hiroshima.
It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that
defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least
by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass
murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.
Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of
the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the
subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria
psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again we are held hostage by the
prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal
critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity's most
dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.
John Kerry's farce and Barack Obama's pirouettes are temporary.
Russia's peace deal over chemical weapons
will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists
reserve for diplomacy. With al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed
coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last
independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. "This
operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland
Dumas in June, "goes way back.
It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."
When the public is "psychologically scarred", as the Channel 4
reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people's overwhelming
hostility to an attack on Syria, suppressing the truth is made urgent.
Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the "rebels"
used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US, not Syria, that is the world's most prolific user of these terrible weapons.
In 1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity
of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of
population." This was
Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand
– the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal
catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar,
monstrous
deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked
war record,
will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used
depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No
Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.
The sterile repetitive debate about whether "we" should "take action"
against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet
another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk,
professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on
Palestine, describes it as "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral
screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed
as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence". This "is so widely accepted as to be virtually
unchallengeable".
It is the biggest lie: the product of "liberal realists" in
Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain themselves as
the world's crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis.
Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it with
jargon that serves western power designs, they mark "failed", "rogue" or
"evil" states for "humanitarian intervention".
An attack on Syria or Iran or any other US "demon" would draw on a fashionable variant,
"Responsibility to Protect", or R2P – whose lectern-trotting zealot is the former Australian foreign minister
Gareth Evans, co-chair of a "
global centre"
based in New York. Evans and his generously funded lobbyists play a
vital propaganda role in urging the "international community" to attack
countries where "the security council rejects a proposal or fails to
deal with it in a reasonable time".
Evans has form. He appeared in my 1994 film
Death of a Nation,
which revealed the scale of genocide in East Timor. Canberra's smiling
man is raising his champagne glass in a toast to his Indonesian
equivalent as they fly over East Timor in an Australian aircraft, having
signed a treaty to pirate the oil and gas of the stricken country where
the tyrant Suharto killed or starved a third of the population.
Under the "weak" Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before.
With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has
taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried
their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor,
George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by
an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe,
piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian
nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their
beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than
are dying on battlefields. Last year
6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.
The historian Norman Pollack calls this "liberal fascism": "For
goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of
the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer
manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling
all the while." Every Tuesday the "humanitarian" Obama personally
oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that "bugsplat" people,
their rescuers and mourners. In the west's comfort zones, the first
black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very
existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood.
This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war
movement – Obama's singular achievement.
In Britain, the distractions of the fakery of image and identity
politics have not quite succeeded. A stirring has begun, though people
of conscience should hurry. The judges at Nuremberg were succinct:
"Individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent
crimes against peace and humanity." The ordinary people of Syria, and
countless others, and our own self-respect, deserve nothing less now.
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