“When two gunmen in camouflage appeared in the village, it immediately attracted people’s attention and caused a spontaneous riot,” said the acting chairman of the local state administration, Sergey Barinov. “About 200 residents of Limansky village surrounded the representative of the military and the armed police officers and threatened to punish them.“
The quote above is from a January 4, 2015 article by Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Imagine what the families of at least half million Iraqis killed as a result of the USA’s illegal invasion would say of that statement. Such crimes, when acknowledged at all, are downgraded to “faults” or “mistakes” by liberal elites like Ken Roth.
The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
Like the rest of the media, the Guardian protests passionately when ‘bad guys’ commit an atrocity against ‘us’, but emotive defences of free speech are in short supply when ‘good guys’ bomb Serb and Libyan TV, or threaten the life of progressive US filmmakers. Far fewer tears are shed for Serb, Libyan or Palestinian journalists in US-UK corporate media offices.
ISIS was itself birthed in the chaos that accompanied our invasion and conquest of Iraq, and McCain and the War Party are intent on duplicating that Orc factory in the territory of Syria.
It was not pencils and pens – let alone ideas – that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands of human beings dead. Not twelve. Hundreds of thousands. All with stories, with lives, with families. Tens of millions who have lost friends, family, homes and watched their country be torn apart.
The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendour and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.
Waheed Mozhdah, a well-known political analyst and author based in Kabul, echoed Muhammad’s account. “Bagram is worse than Guantanamo,” Mozdah told me, “and all the crimes, even the most cruel ones like the dog story, are well known here but most people prefer to not talk about it.”
But it’s not just Turkey. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait have all been heavily implicated in the past – according to the CIA’s own classified assessments – in financing the most virulent extremist elements of the Islamist rebel groups in Syria. Yet they did this under a covert operations programme to destabilise the Assad regime that was coordinated primarily by the US and UK.
So, comrades, instead of debating the minutiae of the latest torture report, instead of choosing to be surprised, instead of turning this into yet another pathetic two-party debate [sic], instead of creating Cheney memes, let’s instead do the work to see past the corporate propaganda
much of the media coverage of this issue is missing the crucial bigger picture: the deliberate rehabilitation of torture under the Obama administration, and its systematic use to manufacture false intelligence to justify endless war.
Whether she knows it or not, by pointing to Prince Harry fighting and killing the Taliban—most of whom are poor, local men from farming families—Majida crossed a red line that most career-minded journalists steer well clear of.
