Theos-Talk Archives (September 2001 Message tt00124)

Here's some more food for thought while we ponder how theosophists might deal 
with the present world situation. 
LHM
(P.S. When I tried earlier to forward it directly, the text below was 
censored by Yahoo. I wonder why?)

_______________________________________

In a message dated 09/14/01 9:50:36 AM, dyanne@perryhill.co.za writes:

Hi all,


I think it is imperative, in the essence of world harmony and the state of 
oneness to which we hope to progress as a people, that we consider these two 
seperate texts which I received today. This is a mere portion of the 
'such-ness' of the things that have gone before...

Love, Dy


Apparently, John Pilger is renowned for exposing the 'other side' of the

story, stepping out where other journalists are not prepared to go.


The Herald, 13/09/01


Inevitable ring to the unimaginable

JOHN PILGER


IF the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can 
really be surprised?

Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and 
American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared 
in the mainstream media in Britain. An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to 
the Health Education Trust in London, died during and in the immediate 
aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War.

This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west. At least a 
million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result 
of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain. In Pakistan 
and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was 
largely the creation of the CIA.

The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most 
wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money 
and backing.

In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed 
long ago were it not for US backing. Far from being the terrorists of the 
world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally the victims of 
US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and 
economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.

This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best 
minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of 
international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign 
policy is presented almost exclusively through 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." 

That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has 
sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was 
the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken 
seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass 
terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the 
world is managed.

One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no 
comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so 
terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of 
Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could 
bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or 
rather its own innocent people?


The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the

Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation

of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's

brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours

by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the

victims of the West's intervention in their homelands. 

"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league

table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."

As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss

of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television

networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the

half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in

Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no. There are deeper roots

to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable.

It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia.

Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally

Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while

the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown

as never before.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent

of the world's wealth.

In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free

market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal

blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its

trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile

economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are

little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks,

and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in

forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US

"Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and

South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).

Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that

journalists dare not speak or write.

The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson

government received almost no press coverage.

Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US

bombers patrol the Middle East.

In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity

of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto

with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed.

"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the

deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia correspondent.

British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in

Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food,

villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million

people forcibly dispossessed.

In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation

was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what 
Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism. In Operation Phoenix, in 
Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000 people. As official 
documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in Chile that 
climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador 
Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua. All of it was 
lawless. The list is too long for this piece. Now imperialism is being 
rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with impunity from bases in 
50 countries. 

"Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.

Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.

In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent

adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as "peacekeeping"), 
and which have little or no basis in international law: a record matched by 
no other British government for half a century. What has this to do with this 
week's atrocities in America? If you travel among the impoverished majority 
of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do with it.

People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence 
compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken 
away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great 
enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more 
fanaticism.

But how patient the oppressed have been. It is only a few years ago that the 
Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and 
New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had rejected outright 
the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by 
imperialism.

Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway

brutalised places have at last come home............. Bryan Porter


And then one is presented with this truth :



This, from a Canadian newspaper......


America: 


Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable

editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television

commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as 
printed in the Congressional Record:

This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most

generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.


Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of

the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and 
forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even 
the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who

propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the 
streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in

to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. 
Nobody helped.

The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into

discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about 
the decadent, warmongering Americans.

I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion 
of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in 
the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, 
or the Douglas DC10?

If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except

Russia fly American Planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider 
putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and 
you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. 
You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon - not once, 
but

several times - and safely home again. You talk about scandals, and the

Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. 
Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded.

They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking

Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend 
here. When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down 
through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody

loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name you 5000 times 
when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in

trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco 
earthquake. Our neighbours have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian

who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of

this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to 
thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

I hope Canada is not one of those." 



Stand proud, America!




FOOD FOR THOUGHT, isn't it? Are we not too quick to either defend or blame, 
instead of taking a step backwards and examining the factors which have 
actually been in play? 

I believe that we need to consider what it is that sets us free from our 
shackles in the wake of such an event... 

Freedom can be found in compassion and striving to truly understand and 
assimilate the yin and the yang of our innateness as human beings, the light 
and the dark, the 'good' and the 'bad'.... and following the road that it 
leads down.

May Peace and Love be our heritage.