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United
States and global terrorism
V
Sundaram
The
greatest acts of terrorism in the last hundred years have been
committed not by furtive gangs of masked desperadoes in different
foreign lands. The most horrific acts of terrorism have been
committed by governments and their militaries. Here is the official
FBI definition of terrorism: 'Terrorism is the unlawful use of force
or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a
government, a civilian population, or any segment, in furtherance of
political or economic or social objectives'. Even by its own
definition, the hypocrite US government is guilty of terrorism-- on
a massive and international scale for nearly 60 years.
In
Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and now in Iraq, the US
government has broken international law under the Geneva Convention
many times with brutal use of force and horrific violence against
persons and property, to intimidate and coerce governments, civilian
populations, and many segments thereof, in furtherance of political,
social and especially economic objectives.
If
'terrorism' means intimidation by violence or the threat of
violence, and if we allow the definition to include violence by
States and agents of States, then it is these States, not isolated
individuals or small groups, that are the most important terrorists
in the world. Viewed in this light, the US government is the
greatest terrorist in the world today.
If
terrorist violence is measured by the extent of politically
motivated torture and murder, it is in the US-sponsored and
protected authoritian States -- the real terror network-- that these
forms of violence have reached a crescendo in recent decades. After
the fall of Germany in May 1945, Hitler's Ministers and Generals
were arraigned before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal established
by the Allies for various war crimes.
By
letting loose unprovoked and unwarranted violence and aggression
against a small country like Iraq, Bush and Blair are guilty of the
same war crimes as were committed by Hitler and his criminal gang in
Nazi Germany. Robert Jackson, American Prosecutor, Nuremberg War
Crimes Trial, cryptically stated in 1946 in open court: 'If certain
acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether
the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are
not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others
which we would not be willing to have invoked against us'.
Tragically for mankind as a whole, the times today have
changed.
The
US government is guilty of double standards and hypocritical conduct
in its foreign relations with different countries. Republican
Conservatives in USA demand that the United States should be exempt
from the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, a
permanent tribunal established at The Hague , Netherlands. For the
2001 World Conference Against Terrorism, the US government
authorised the allocation of a paltry $ 250,000 compared to over $10
million provided to conference organisers by the Ford Foundation.
For three decades, the US government refused to ratify the 1965
United Nations Convention on Elimination of Terrorism. Is it any
wonder that most of the Third World countries question the US
motives?
The
carpet bombing of Iraq seems to Third World observers to have less
to do with the suppression of terrorism, weapons of mass
destruction, chemical and biological warfare, an d more with
securing future petroleum production rights in Central Asia. The US
media and opinion-makers repeatedly have gone out of their way to
twist facts to distort the political realities of the Middle East. A
likely consequence of the current US war against Iraq will be an
enormous intensification of inter-imperialist conflicts--principally
between the United States and its major economic and geopolitical
competitors. Thus, a very definite stage is being set.
Apart
from the global geo-strategic and economic motivations, there is yet
another critical factor in the political equation that induces the U
S government today to go on the path of Hitler and Mussolini.
Throughout the past decade, US policy experts have expressed concern
over growing signs of a decay of social cohesion in USA. Samuel
Huntington, who is best known for his book 'The Clash of
Civilisations', warned several years ago that the end of the Cold
War in the late 1980s had deprived the US government of a cause that
could foster mass support for the State. There did not seem to
exist, he wrote, any genuine sense of national interests that
commanded widespread support.
The
problem noted by Huntington, however , is not primarily ideological.
It is rooted in increasingly irreconcilable social conflicts within
American Society. It is becoming even more difficult to mask the
massive social inequality that presently characterises American
society. The concentration of extraordinary levels of personal
wealth among a very small percentage of the population has far
reaching social implications, no matter how vigorously the mass
media glorifies the rich and their lifestyles.
The
erosion of democratic norms and the ever-more apparent dysfunctional
state of American politics are objective consequences of social
polarisation. In the year 2000, for the first time since the
aftermath of the Civil War in 19th century, it was not possible to
arrive a t a democratic resolution of the election. In the end, the
plutocracy handpicked the President. The existing two-party system,
whose personnel are utterly dependent on the financial support of
the plutocracy, is thoroughly unrepresentative of the general
population. How else can one explain the fact that the deep unease
and ambivalence felt by millions of Americans towards the drive
toward war in Iraq find virtually no articulation in the political
establishment. Rather, the political establishment, whose
constituencies are different fractions of the richest 2 per cent of
the population in USA, is absolutely incapable of giving voice to
the concern and interests of the broad masses.
Let
me now document the sad story of American war crimes in Asia,
Middle-East, and the rest of world during the last 50 years. The
current regimes of Bush the Bully and Blair the Blinking are
indistinguishable from the worst features of Hitler's Nazism,
Stalin's communalism and Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution in
China. The current Anglo-American attack on Iraq excels all forms of
wickedness in the technological efficiency of its cruelty and
ferocious aggression. As William Shrier observed in 1973: 'Until we
go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of
New York, Washington, Chicago, Boston, Los Angles and elsewhere
while buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and bodies
hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge
in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes
gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished--only after that
gruesome experience will we realise what we are inflicting on the
people of Indo-China.'
The
Korean people were victims of atrocious cirmes in the US-launched
Korean war from 1950 to 1953. In the three-year war, about 6 million
Korean people were sacrificed and 4 million of the total war dead
were civilians, not combatants. But the world knows only distorted
facts about this act of American international terrorism, because
mass media and major powers of the world have schemed to cover up
the truth on a large-scale for fear of the disclosure of facts about
US troops atrocities.
Mori
Masataka, chief of investigation team of historical fact of US germ
warfare during Korean War, states emphatically that US committed
germ warfare in Korea by using Japanese Imperial Army's Unit No.731
The weapons of mass destruction used by the US troops during the
Korean War included more than 15 million napalm bombs. The
biological and chemical warfare committed by the US forces during
the Korean War was a deliberate and premeditated criminal act to
exterminate the Korean nation and severely destroy the land of
Korea. In my considered view the greatest crime since World War -II
has been US foreign policy.
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