The American Terrorby
Jack D. Douglas
~ Associated Press, January 14, 2006
~ William Pitt, House of Commons, January 14, 1766
~ William Pitt, 1783 Yesterday was another day like all others recently around the globe. The American people sent their greetings of death from the skies to the poor women and children of a remote Pakistani village, the second American Happy New Year to the poor children of Pakistan in one week. America was once the hope of mankind for a freer world. Today America is the scourge of mankind who rains death down upon their children in the middle of the night. A nation that routinely murders innocent children in the poor villages of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and supplies and supports the murderous secret police of scores of nations around the world sending out their Death Squads trained by the Americans is seen by the world as the Enemy of Mankind. A few days ago the Financial Times of London quoted a British business leader who said that Britain is the only friend the U.S. now has in the world. He exaggerated. Tony Blair may, if he is a very stupid man, still be the friend of Bush II, but the British people are at best completely mixed in their feelings about their erstwhile partners in Anglo Saxon Constitutional constraints on tyrannical government. The intelligent and educated British people, like those around the world, now loathe the U.S. government, are still mixed in their feelings about the American people who are docilely accepting this reign of American Terror around the world, but are coming more and more to stigmatize Americans in general as The Terrorists because their silence allows the Bush reign of American Terror to grow relentlessly. The Big Media of America are fiercely cooperating in keeping these awful truths about the global loathing of America from the ignorant people of America who have little contact with the world outside. Once in a while an American or someone around the world briefly breaks through the cocoon of the Big American Media to express astonishment at this great transformation of America from the Hope of the world to the Terrorist Enemy of Mankind that now threatens us all. But then they are fiercely attacked by the Media tyrants to prevent any serious presentation of the facts. There have been many polls around the world showing the obvious, soaring loathing of the U.S. for The American Terror. These have been so effective initially getting the message across to educated Americans that the U.S. government psyops and agitprop forces went to work buying up polls as well as journalists and whole media to provide the usual Big Lies to hide reality from the ignorant Americans, Bush's only constituency (other than the Oligarchy Club). But it does not take an army of pollsters or interviewers to see the obvious and no amount of U.S. corruption and Big Lies will hide the simple truth from people around the world or intelligent Americans at home. It takes only common sense. Any intelligent people who merely think a few minutes about how they would feel if their nation was being attacked in the night by American Hellfire missiles or 500 pound bombs as happens in Pakistan and other nations, or, far war, was being strangled to death as the U.S. strangled Iraq for fifteen years and is beginning to strangle Iran today, or, even worse, was being annihilated from the air and invaded as Afghanistan and Iraq have been will see immediately how they feel now about Americans. In 1777 the British leader William Pitt declared in a speech, without consulting a single pollster or interviewer, "You cannot conquer America...If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms – never! never! never!" That was how the American revolutionaries felt and reacted. He understood them by using his common sense understanding of human beings and his fellow Englishmen and Scotsmen living across the Atlantic. Any American who knows our history knows that he was right. And any American who thinks seriously for a few minutes knows common-sensically that the American Terror that is raining death down on people around the world is producing an awful loathing of Americans and a fierce will to resist these mass murders. The annihilation and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq again have obviously convinced the vast majority of the Muslim nation of one and a third billion people that America is the Great Satan which intends to destroy or tyrannize their vast nation. They will never, never, never surrender to this tyranny over Islam. The guerilla wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other Muslim nations has barely begun, but it has already become very costly in all ways for Americans. Now Bush and his Media are once again beating the American war drums against Iran, a vast Muslim nation of somewhere near a hundred million people who have already fought one vast war against America and their allies, Saddam Hussein and the Europeans and Russia. The Americans helped Hussein invade Iran. The Iranians suffered horrific losses but prevailed against the Great Satan and their totalitarian protégé, Saddam Hussein. If the U.S. or its protege Israel attacks them, the Iranians will unite and fight fiercely against the Americans with the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Pakistanis and their Muslim brothers worldwide. The vast majority of Europeans, our erstwhile allies in the long war against the Soviet Empire and The Soviet Terror, are now against the U.S. because of its rain of terror from the skies, its invasions and annihilations of nations, the vast American war crimes of kidnapping and torture and murder, some of it carried out secretly in their own nations. George Bush asserts hysterically that "necessity" forces the U.S. to commit all of these war crimes and atrocities and impose a reign of terror upon the world. That is utterly absurd and a total Big Lie. He and his vast war machine have committed all of these atrocities because they wanted to do so and in the short run could get away with it, especially because most Americans openly or tacitly supported them. The world after 9/11 was on our side and would have remained so if Bush et al. had shown common human decency, lived by the laws of the American Constitution and our international agreements, and reached out to Muslims and the rest of the world to get their help, as his father had done in the first invasion of Iraq. As the specialists at the CIA, most notably Michael Scheur, told the White House, al-Queda attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and earlier because the U.S. was supporting the tyrannical police states in the Muslim World, had stationed American troops in the heartland of Islam, and was imposing a terrible tyranny on the Muslim world in all ways. The U.S. could have avoided any such attacks by NOT imposing tyranny and terror upon the Muslim world or any other part of the world. Instead of correcting these catastrophic mistakes made over many decades (beginning with the overthrow of the Iranian democracy and the imposition of the Shah's Terror), Bush rushed to the extreme in the other direction by invading and annihilating Afghanistan and Iraq, transferring the U.S. Central Command from Florida to Qutar next door to Saudi Arabia, building huge and permanent bases obviously intended to colonize the Middle East and Central Asian Muslim oil nations permanently. The Americans saw the British sending troops to Canada for use against the U.S. and started arming against the tyranny that promised. When the British peacefully occupied Boston, transferring their Centcom to American shores, the Revolutionaries began mobilizing for the coming war. The Muslims see the U.S. building immense, permanent bases in many of their lands for the same purposes, annihilating and occupying two of them, and they are mobilizing on an immense scale for the Permanent World War Bush declared and began carrying out against them. Tiny and impoverished Palestine living under the boot of the American-Israeli tyranny, has been fighting Israel for eighty years now and Israel is a financial catastrophe totally dependent on U.S. money to survive, largely because of the guerilla war against their vast war machine provided by the U.S. Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the Muslim Terror Against The American Terror have vowed they will resist these New Crusaders as the Arabs in Palestine resisted and eventually annihilated the earlier Crusaders, for centuries if necessary. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the cultural heartland of the Arabs and much of the Muslim World, is vastly more important to them than Palestine. The Persian Gulf holy lands, especially Saudi Arabia, are far more important then that. They see this Holy War (Jihad) Against The Great Satan of America as a calling of God, fight to the death for their religion, culture and homelands. They are vastly more committed to this War than the Americans were to their war of liberation from the "Absolute Despotism" of the British King, which was by Bush standards a very tame, non-terrorist form of "Despotism." The U.S. annihilations of Afghanistan and Iraq (in both U.S. Wars Against Iraq) have probably killed a few hundred thousand civilians directly and indirectly through disease, malnutrition, crime and civil war and mutilated a million others. The U.S. Economic War against Iraq probably killed a half million children, women and old people from the diseases of polluted water and malnutrition, as estimated by European medical sources. The U.S. is continuing to bomb, strafe, and in all other ways murder and mutilate untold thousands of civilians in these huge countries, in Pakistan, and intermittently in secret murders in Yemen and other nations. This is not "necessary" collateral damage. This is planned, known murder and mutilation of civilians by a vast war machine with immense technological superiority. Yes, they may be trying to murder al-Queda leaders, the military leaders of the Resistance Guerilla Armies of the Muslim World (Jihadists), just as al-Queda's few dozen guerilla warriors were trying to destroy the leaders of the American military in the Pentagon (and probably the White House) and the economic leaders and government officials in the WTC towers, with disregard for civilian casualties. When America launches its rain of death from the sky they know exactly what they are doing. In Pakistan yesterday the reports are that the Predator missiles destroyed the houses first, then the huge jet fighter-bombers swooped in with big bombs to make sure no one survived the first killing. This was a carefully planned and executed murder of innocents by a vast, immensely superior technological War Machine. The sleeping babies had no chance against the vast War Machine the White House and Pentagon unleashed against them last night in the mountains of Pakistan. And they made sure of that. The U.S. government asserts that it had good "intelligence" indicating that the second in command of al-Queda was in one of the many houses annihilated in the night. But everyone, including the most ignorant American rulers, are now perfectly clear that even the most certain "slam dunk" American "intelligence" is really nothing but carefully selected big lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just as the army of U.N. inspectors reported before Bush annihilated Iraq, and there were no al-Queda baby sitters in those Pakistani houses. Even if there had been, no decent human being would murder these innocents to try to kill a has-been guerilla leader. Only a Terrorist murders innocents in that way, as Bush proclaimed to the world after 9/11 in circumstances in which everyone knew there were U.S. government officials in all the buildings attacked. Ask yourself, would you murder mothers and babies in the wild hope of killing one has-been enemy leader who has no weapons with which to threaten you or your children? By Bush's own definition, what America is doing now around the world, but most especially in the Muslim world, is terrorism on an immense scale vastly surpassing anything the Muslim Armies of Guerillas have done – and The American Terror is a more carefully planned and executed form of terrorism against civilians with the vastly superior technology of a vast War Machine. Certainly the murders of some real innocents, like journalists and aid workers, in Iraq by unknown forces suspected of being guerilla armies of many sides are the same kind of Terrorism against innocents. They torture each other at times, but so far have not tortured, as far as we know, the innocents they murder on tape, as the U.S. has tortured and murdered POW's in Abu Ghraib and the many other torture chambers of the CIA and U.S. military stretching across the Muslim World and into Europe and Guantanamo. By any objective standard, and using Bush's own definition of Terrorism, The American Terror is vastly worse than anything they have done. I do not intend, however, to try to seriously involve the Bushwhackers of America in an argument about morality. I have known this kind of people in America all my life and I know some of them now, especially since some of them viciously attack me for things I have never imagined saying. They have totally closed minds and are self-righteous about whatever crimes and atrocities they commit, as we have seen over and over again in the Super Patriots like Duke Cunningham and Tom Delay. Such fanatical bigots and hate mongers exist in all nations, most obviously in fascist and neo-fascist and communist nations where totalitarian Party thugs have absolute power, are absolutely corrupted in their thinking and in every other way, and use the Big Lies of "Foreign Threats" like "The Jew Threat" and "The Muslim Terrorist Threat" to terrorize their own ignorant people into slavish submission to them. I mention the obvious moral disparity between the immense American Terror and the Jihadist Terror because that is how the rest of the world sees it. (I myself do not even accept Bush's absurd definition of Terrorism. I am using his definition to show that his "justifications" for his Terrorism are, by his own definitions, absurd Lies.) The U.S. has convinced the vast majority of the people of the world, especially the intelligent and educated, that the U.S. is imposing an American terror upon the world. The U.S. has done this by its horrifying actions, by invading and annihilating vast nations and by systematically carrying out planned murders from the sky of innocents in many nations. No moral argument will work with these people. No objective, rational argument will work. The intelligent, educated people of the world have tried desperately to argue with them. Even masses of the best and brightest people from within the Republican Party have tried to argue with them and been totally disappeared in the Party Media and denounced in general along with everyone else who argues objectively and morally with them. They will push on to utter disaster. They are doing so now. They did so yesterday in Pakistan. but their reaping of the whirlwind of global loathing, quiet containment, and secret attacks for their American Terror will affect most Americans very seriously for a long time to come. America lost the hearts and minds of the world the day Bush annihilated Iraq in his "Shock and Awe" (Terror) invasion. That was the loss of the Permanent World War he had declared. The longer he fights this war of American Terror and the more innocents he murders, the more awful the world retribution against Americans in general will be. Most Americans are trying to pretend The American Terror is not happening. They are refusing to read the world's newspapers and the Media conspire with them by not showing the mangled bodies of the babies their vast War Machine murdered yesterday and today. But any intelligent person can see that there will be a terrible price to pay for this American Terror. The Nazi regime was destroyed roughly 56 years ago, but Germans are still loathed by much of Europe for what their ancestors did, not the real people of today. Germans are still seen as untrustworthy and potentially dangerous and they live in a state of permanent, quiet containment. Living down bloodguilt on this immense scale is exceedingly painful. But it could turn out to be the least of America's pains as the vast Muslim Jihad Against America gains strength in the decades and possibly centuries ahead. Intelligent young Americans know that Bush is destroying their long-run financial future, unless they are part of the Corporate Oligarchy he is building within the Party. But it is even more important for them to realize that he may be destroying their future in a worse way with The American Terror. All it takes is a few Russian or Pakistani or other nuclear military workers who loathe America because of its Terror to turn a nuclear weapon over to guerilla forces. Iranian rulers today may well be taking awful risks to develop nuclear weapons because they have seen The American Terror on their doorstep and Bush threatens to make them next on his list if they do not submit to his tyranny. Bush is once again proclaiming to the world that he has "slam dunk" intelligence showing that technologically backward Iran is about to build nuclear weapons in five to ten years, and is, therefore, an imminent threat to the existence of the U.S. Hitler was never more brazen in his Big Lies. We and the Iranians have seen this Bush Siren Call to War over and over again. They know, as fifteen hundred American physicists are warning today (led by physicists from UCSD), that Bush has abrogated the clauses of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that require the U.S. to destroy its nuclear weapons and, instead, is rapidly developing a new generation of low-killiton nuclear weapons to use against nations like Iran that do not submit to his demands, and that Bush and many U.S. politicians repeatedly warn them the U.S. may attack them at any time if they do not submit immediately. I certainly do not know what is going on in the heads of the Iranian Mullahs, but my guess is that they are desperately trying to escape submission to the American tyranny by developing at least a minimal deterrent nuclear force. And, like many other nations, they see the soaring Bush nuclear weapon threats against them as an incentive to move faster, not to submit more quickly. Pakistan, India and other nations have already followed this path because the U.S. quietly abrogated its treaty obligations to end the U.S. nuclear threat against the world. The U.S. Nuclear Terror is making the world immensely more dangerous because of this proliferation, not safer. These are only a few of the ways in which Bush's American Terror could be catastrophic for Americans. There will be no polls of any value on this. Use your common sense and think rationally about it and you will see that it is a total fool's game to transform your nation into the enemy of mankind, as Bush has done to America and is continuing to do with every murderous attack against innocents every day. Americans may not be seeing the mangled bodies of those Pakistani babies on their TV-news, presumably because the AP reporter who went there could not get his video tapes played on American TV, but you can bet hundreds of millions of Muslims and others are seeing them from on-the-scene reporting by al-Jeezera. Bush cannot hide his terrorist murders the way Nixon and Kissinger were doing in Cambodia. And today the world does not need the U.S. to protect them from the Soviet's Evil Empire. Now it is The American Evil Empire from which they need protection desperately and they feel it with a sense of terrible betrayal and loathing against the nation they once supported against the Soviet Evil Empire. But the American terror is also a more immediate, irreversible and awful threat to any decent American who has not lost all sense of morality and become one of the Bush Thugs. We Americans, especially we older Americans, still feel in our innermost sense of selves that we are "American" and that to be American means to be above all else committed to the Spirit of Freedom and to bringing peace and brotherly love to the world as best we can. Any American who joins with Bush and his Evil Empire in this American Terror is destroying the Spirit of Freedom in America and around the world and is inflicting war and mass murder upon whole nations of innocents. It is not bin-Laden who is destroying Freedom in America today or ever could. It is Bush and his vast armies of secret police and Death Squads roaming the world and raining death down upon innocents who are destroying American freedom and building a worldwide American Terror. It is not bin-Laden who is spying on all Americans and building torture and death camps around the world. It is Bush who is doing so with the support of a majority of Americans who think they are Christians but are actually carrying out Satan's work. This is how they will see it some day when they awake from their self-imposed sleepwalking into disaster. They will some day know that by supporting this American Terror they have lost their own souls and destroyed the very Spirit of America, the Spirit of Freedom and of brotherly love. There can be no greater loss than losing one's self, destroying what should have been the Hope of Mankind for peace and brotherly love, and creating The American Terror to tyrannize the world and bring death to millions of innocents. Americans will have bequeathed to mankind an undying legacy of hatred, torture and death. There could not possibly be a greater betrayal of all that America has stood for over four centuries than what Bush and his Party are now inflicting upon all of mankind.
January 17, 2006 Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |