freedom costs money

October/2003

How many times have we heard something along the lines of: Well after 9/11 everything changed…….. DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE! The external enemy has long proved a valuable means towards exercising internal control and achieving the limited agendas of corporate-political elites..............

As 80’s retro seems to be unnervingly trendy at the moment why don't we examine the rhetoric once employed by the Reagan Administration? A prime objective of the Reaganites was to wage a “war on terror. Sound familiar?! As Chomsky shows; the Reagan Administration claimed it was their aim to eradicate ‘state-supported international terrorism, the most virulent form of the plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself in a “return to barbarism in the modern age, as 'Administration moderate George Shultz’ put it.¹

In 1985, Reagan and Israeli Prime Minister Peres focused attention on the “evil scourge of terrorism during a Washington news conference. A few days earlier Peres had “sent his bombers to Tunis where they killed 75 people on no credible pretext, a mission expedited by Washington and praised by Secretary of State Shultz, though he chose silence after the Security Council condemned the attack¹. The history of the West is littered with examples of seemingly indiscriminate killing and when one places this into the current good vs evil framework Bush and Co seem to like employing it is easy to see why Muslims (or indeed anyone) growing up in the developing world might well perceive our governments as the ones who are really the “depraved opponents of civilization itself. Unconvinced? Again in 1985, a car-bomb in Beirut killed 80 people and injured 250 others. This terrorist atrocity that killed mostly women and girls has been traced back to the CIA and British Intelligence. Not only was this bomb placed outside a mosque but it was timed to explode as people were leaving. In the same year Peres waged his forces against “terrorist villagers in Southern Lebanon, “reaching new depths of calculated brutality and arbitrary murder according to a Western diplomat familiar with the area, a judgement amply supported by direct coverage.¹

1985 is generally regarded as a peak year in terrorist action but Chomsky highlights how modern scholarship avoids citing the horrific examples already described in this article. Instead the emphasis is placed on “two terrorist atrocities in which a single person was murdered, in each case an American.¹ Nearly twenty years on and I dread to think what’s in store for us by the time a further twenty years passes. It is surely time we properly understood it is the vested interests which prevail in our societies that continually push us towards violence and bloodshed and also that, up to this point in time, the terrorist tragedies the US and Britain have suffered are a drop in the ocean compared to the wide-ranging terror we have inflicted on the many countries Western nations have always actively sought to subjugate.

WILLIAM GRAY

(Anyone interested in the subject matter discussed in this piece will, in my humble opinion, find they can arrive at a better understanding of the international political system if they read work by Chomsky Pilger and Monbiot, or simply log onto ZNet)

1 Wars of Terror/New Political Science/Vol 25/No.1/2003 Noam Chomsky