Reprint of the article “Unknown To The General Public.”
September 11, 2001. That first wound was the deepest.
Now we know how it feels to be doing mundane human things – brushing the teeth, preparing breakfast – and to be interrupted by the sight of innocent people facing their nightmare deaths.
Indelible, those moments.
Other horrific wounds have followed: the endless reputation of terrifying images. The desperate faces of mourning.
And now, still more battering at the heart. Advancing war drums.
Our friend and neighbor, The United States of America, as offered a profoundly dishonest response to September 11, and is driven to emulate the insanity of his uncertain antagonist.
We are being asked, no, it is demanded of us to support a war on terrorism; ask to damn the monsters who have killed thousands of innocent civilians, at the same time promise to go and do likewise.
We are being asked to prepare for a police state; to watch as walls are built to keep the enemy out and forces are hired and trained to invade our privacy and discard our civil liberties.
The nation, was squanders more of its wealth on arms than any other on earth, has been brought down by a handful of men with razor blades, it still cannot see the folly of its defences.
Who has written the lines for George W. Bush? Who has coached him, how to look into the camera and say them as though they were holy?
It is a new kind of evil we’ve never seen before
It is murder in unconscionable perfidy.
We will rid the world of the evil doers.
The voice of Martin Luther King can be heard as it was in April of 1967.
The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.
The truth is that Americans do not have this moral authority to lead a war against terrorism because for the last 50 years, they have supported terrorism, practiced it, taught it to a legion of dictators and exported it to vulnerable countries all over the earth.
Nobody does it better.
.The governments of the world, including Canada’s know this full well. Still, they rushed to the side of the Americans out of fear, out of hopes for reward, and because they do not know what else to do.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States emerged as the richest and most powerful country in the world, and it’s wealthy elite resolved to keep it that way. Obsessed with the threat of communism they’ve established in 1947 the national Security Act, the National Security Council and what would become the Central Intelligence Agency, a powerful shadow government paid for by American taxpayers but not accountable to them.
Successive presidents have surrendered more and more foreign policy and war powers to the shadow government, using the excuse of national security to keep its activities safe from public scrutiny.
Motivated largely by the desire for control of the world’s resources, it has conducted a permanent, covert war against the poor and developing countries. Students of this third World War estimate that the CIA has killed 6 million people, most of them innocent civilians just like the ones we saw in New York, though not as well dressed or well fed.
Unknown to the general public Americans have used their forces to kill 4000 civilians in Panama; assisted Pinochet in the disappearance of 20,000 Chileans; starved half a million Iraqi children to death – an action Madeleine Albright told 60 minutes was worth it if it kept the sanctions against that country in place.
They have bombed, burned, and buried alive as necessary without mercy or remorse. Osama bin Laden is their former employee.
The same media that is now counting American bodies one at a time have not told Americans these stories because they are owned by the interests that influence and direct the shadow government.
So, this casual warfare has meant little, if anything, to the North American public.
Until now, now that the spectacular debris, the broken bodies, the smashed faces and the shattered lives are American. Now it’s unconscionable murder, perfidy, the work of evil doers, and we are ordered to avenge it.
The dead of New York will not be honored if we merely hate and kill the unidentified, demented terrorists who have punctured its heart.
Our task is to find them, try them, and hear their hellish testimony.
At such a trial, all of us, Americans in particular, may be found guilty of the same crime against humanity: acting as though some lives are more valuable than others, as though blood and death are ours to play with.
Then let us decide together how to rid the world of George Bush’s evil doers.
Lesley Hughes is a Winnipeg based freelance writer and broadcaster.