To be sure, there have arisen cadres of extremist Islamic zealots, of whom the Taliban in Afghanistan are a prime example. The Taliban are dedicated to waging holy war in the hope of imposing their theocratic rule upon their country. In their maniacal intolerance, they pursue indiscriminate bloodletting, ghastly mistreatment of women, and a readiness to sacrifice themselves to their own acutely warped version of Islam. It might do well to remember that the Taliban were a product of the CIA-created, post-Soviet era in Afghanistan.
In various other parts of the world there are extremist Islamic sects and grouplets that teach their members to loathe all non-Muslims and detest even those Muslims who belong to the wrong sect and who indulge in such evil pursuits as shaving, listening to music, or allowing their women to leave their faces uncovered.92 (This fanatical intolerance has its parallel among certain fundamentalist Christian sects that delightedly dwell on how all nonbelievers—as well as incorrect believers in competing sects—will writhe in eternal hellfire and are deserving of every ill-fated mishap here on Earth.) These kind of aberrant religious groups have long existed in various countries. The question is: what are the socio-political conditions that feed their accretion, thrusting them onto center stage in force and numbers?
In Iraq, as of 2007, fanatical sectarian elements have come to the fore but only after the U.S. invasion and occupation. This would suggest that the desperate conditions created by Western imperialism and globalization serve as fertile breeding grounds for such groups. The invasion of Iraq has created far more terrorists than ever previously existed in that country.
Meanwhile our rulers indulge in their own form of terrorism. They would have us believe that the terror bombings and invasions inflicted upon the peoples of other nations are for their own good. Why the targeted populations cannot see this remains a mystery to the chief sponsors of Washington’s “humanitarian wars.” When asked why he thought some populations have a “vitriolic hatred for America,” George W. Bush offered his superpatriotic mystification: “I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”93
Even the Pentagon allowed that what U.S. leaders do abroad might have something to do with inciting terrorism. A 1997 Defense Department study concludes: “Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”94 Such “U.S. involvement,” it should be noted, often consists of a state-sponsored terrorism that attacks popular movements throughout the world, exterminating whole villages and killing large numbers of labor leaders and workers, peasants, students, journalists, clergy, teachers, and anyone else who supports a more egalitarian social order for their own country.
People throughout the world are also discomforted by a U.S. superpower that possesses an unanswerable destructive capacity never before seen in human history, that can with impunity visit aerial death and destruction upon any nation that lacks a nuclear retaliatory strike force. With only five percent of the Earth’s population, the United States expends more military funds than all the other major powers combined.95 U.S.-sponsored terrorism—in the form of death squads, paramilitaries, invasions, and occupations—has taken millions of lives in scores of countries.
Whole societies have been undermined and shattered, not only by U.S. military assaults, but by U.S. sanctions and monetary policies that have imposed a debt peonage and poverty upon struggling nations. Maybe all this has something to do with why the terrorists oppose this nation. But to consider such things in any detail is to get too close to exposing the hypocrisies that sustain the U.S. global empire. Washington policymakers find it more convenient to pose as misunderstood paladins in shining armor puzzled by the ingratitude of those whom they purportedly rush to rescue.
NOTES
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (various editions).
2. The reference to China is prior to the 1979 modernization and rapid growth and prior to the one-child family program: see Food First Development Report no. 4, 1988.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (selected writings) (International Publishers, 1972), 319.
4. Italics added. When the text of Clinton’s speech was printed the next day in the New York Times, the sentence quoted above was omitted.
5. Washington Post, 11 June 1990.
6. New York Times, 1 and 3 November 2006.
7. New York Times, 15 October 1995.
8. New York Times, 16 June 1996.
9. New York Times, 27 February 1990.
10. Vladimir Bilenkin, “Russian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime: Notes on a Class in Defeat,” Monthly Review, November 1996, 1–12; and Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997), chapters 6 and 7.
11. See Eleanor Randolph, Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
12. CNN news report, 2 February 1992.
13. Toronto Star, 5 November 1995.
14. New York Times, 6 April 1994.
15. NPR news, 21 July 1996.
16. K.L. Abeywickrama, “The Marketization of Mongolia,” Monthly Review, March 1996, 25–33, and reports cited therein.
17. Nation, 7 December 1992.
18. Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1996.
19. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1990.
20. Wall Street Journal, 19 May 1994.
21. New York Times, 8 April 1996.
22. AP report, 28 October 1996.
23. Bilenkin, “Russian Workers Under the Yeltsin Regime”; italics added.
24. Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1996.
25. Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1990.
26. Washington Post, 1 January 1996.
27. Modern Maturity, September/October 1994.
28. Richard Pipes, “Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want,” Foreign Affairs (May/June, 2004).
29. Information and quotations in the above paragraph are from Laura Petricola, “Czech Gov’t Bans Youth Group, Torpedoes Democracy,” People’s Weekly World, 28 October 2006.
30. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 145.
31. New York Times, 8 July 1998.
32. Sean Gervasi, “Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis,” CovertAction Quarterly, winter 1992–93.
33. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1996; and Chossudovsky’s “Banking on the Balkans,” THIS, July-August 1999; see also see the collection of reports by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Nadja Tesich, Michel Choussudovsky, and others in NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition (International Action Center, 1998).
34. Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo (the “Rambouillet Agreement”), February 23, 1999, reproduced in full in The Kosovo Dossier, 2ND ed.(Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1999).
35. New York Times, 10 October 1997; for more details of this incident, see selection 3, “Methods of Media Manipulation.”
36. Joan Phillips, “Breaking the Selective Silence,” Living Marxism April 1993, 10.
37. Financial Times (London), 15 April 1993.
38. See for instance, Yigal Chazan’s report in the Guardian (London/Manchester), 17 August 1992.
39. Michael Kelly, “The Clinton Doctrine is a Fraud, and Kosovo Proves It,” Boston Globe 1 July 1999.
40. Foreign Affairs, September/October 1994.
41. San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 1999 and Washington Times, 3 May 1999.
42. New York Times, 1 November 1987.
43. For example, Mira Markoviç, Night and Day, A Diary (Dragiša Nikoliç, 1995).
44. For instance, Raymond Bonner, “War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops ‘Cleansed’ the Serbs,” New York Times, 21 March 1999, a revealing report by a reputable corresponden
t that was largely ignored.
45. John Ranz, paid advertisement, New York Times, 29 April 1993.
46. “Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia, “ New York Times, October 23, 1993.
47. San Francisco Examiner, 26 April 1999.
48. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt, 1997), 262.
49. New York Times, 7 August 1993.
50. Brooke Shelby Biggs, “Failure to Inform,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 5, 1999.
51. Audrey Gillan, “What’s the Story?” London Review of Books, 27 May 1999.
52. Washington Post, 10 July 1999.
53. Carlotta Gall, “Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs,” New York Times, 27 August 1999.
54. Both the 500,000 and 100,000 were reported in the New York Times, 11 November 1999.
55. Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, “Where Are Kosovo’s Killing Fields?” weekly analysis, 18 October 1999.
56. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, “Playing the Numbers Game” (www.aim.org/mm/1999/08/03.htm).
57. Perez Puhola quoted in London Sunday Times, 31 October 1999; see also Stratfor.com, Global Intelligence Update, “Where Are Kosovo’s Killing Fields?” weekly analysis, 18 October 1999.
58. For a fuller discussion of the atrocity lies and related issues, see Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso, 2000).
59. Richard Gwyn’s report in the Toronto Star, 3 November 1999.
60. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, 12 January 1999 and 29 October 1998 to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, 20 April 1999.
61. For further discussion of this point, see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights Books, 1995).
62. New York Times, March 28, 1999.
63. San Francisco Chronicle, 20 September 2002.
64. New York Times, 24 January 2003.
65. Kevin Tillman, “The Day After Pat’s Birthday: A Plea to Speak Up for Democracy,” CommonDreams.org, 19 October 2006, www.commondreams.org/views06/1020-23.htm.
66. See the report Rebuilding America’s Defenses promulgated by Project for a New American Century, the right-wing think tank that provided the top policymakers of the Bush Jr. administration.
67. Max Fuller, “Ghosts of Jadiriyah,” 14 November 2006, www.brusselstribunal.org/FullerJadiriyah.htm.
68. W. Clark, “The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq,” Independent Media Center www.indymedia.org, 6 March 2003; and Coilin Nunan, “Currency and the War on Iraq,” www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil, 27 March 2003.
69. London Financial Times, 24 February 1998.
70. San Francisco Chronicle, 22 February 1998.
71. On paper, Iraq’s oil industry was still state owned as of 2006.
72. James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006), 61–62 and passim.
73. Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States, 21 and passim.
74. See Yahya Sadowski, “No War for Whose Oil?” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2003; Patrick Seale, “A Costly Friendship,” Nation, 21 July 2003, and Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States.
75. New York Times, 12 June 2005.
76. New York Times editorial, 28 September 2006.
77. San Francisco Chronicle, 30 November 2001.
78. Financial Times, 12 January 2002.
79. ABC’s “Nightline” 16 September 2005.
80. New York Times, 19 October 2006.
81. Associated Press report, 22 September 2006.
82. Nation, 6 May 2002.
83. San Francisco Chronicle report, 16 April 2002; and response by Donald Scott, 18 April 2002.
84. New York Times article, 4 April 2006; and response by Robert Daiman, 5 April 2006.
85. See Gregory Wilpert, ed., Coup Against Chávez in Venezuela: The Best International Reports of What Really Happened (Fundación por Un Mondo Multipolar, 2003).
86. “Venezuelan Court Rules Against Dissident,” New York Times, 16 April 2005.
87. New York Times, 9 January 1998.
88. Los Angeles Times, 13 November 2002.
89. New York Times, 26 March 1989.
90. San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January 2004.
91. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God (Ecco, 2003).
92. For example, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam (Tarcher, 2007).
93. Boston Globe, 12 October 2001.
94. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DOD Responses to Transnational Threats, October 1997, Final Report, Vol.1. www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans.pdf, cited.
95. On the U.S. military empire, see the collection of articles in Carl Boggs (ed.) Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (Routledge, 2003).
VIII.
THE REST IS HISTORY
35 DOMINANT HISTORY
History has many enemies, including some who profess to serve its cause. The struggle to define the past is part of the struggle to control society itself. Too often history is used not to enlighten but to indoctrinate. The study of history is too important to be left exclusively in the hands of historians. In fact, all sorts of people, including political leaders, publicists, press pundits, clergy, textbook publishers, moneyed investors, semiliterate editors, professors, and school teachers are involved in the manufacturing and marketing of mainstream history.
Many historians who claim to be disciples of impartial scholarship have little sense of how they are wedded to ideological respectability and how inhospitable they are to counter-hegemonic views. This synchronicity between their individual beliefs and the dominant belief system is treated as “objectivity.” It follows that a departure from this ideological orthodoxy is itself dismissed as ideological.
The term “history” refers both to the actual course of past events and the study of those events, that is, making history and writing it. But the distinction between these two meanings is not absolute, for those who write history have an impact upon events in that they help control history’s course by defining its dominant themes, thereby influencing our understanding of what has happened. Conversely, those who make history, especially those who occupy elite policy positions, often manipulate the materials needed for recording it. They sometimes destroy or repress information, introducing distortions at the point of origin well before the history is written or even played out. In an unguarded moment Winston Churchill told William Deakin, who had helped him write The Second World War, “This is not history, this is my case.”1 With that same intent to make their case, numerous political leaders have produced self-justifying memoirs and official histories whose contribution to the truth has been parsimonious.
The process of controlling history at the point of origin is not left to chance but is pursued systematically by policymakers and official agencies. This point was brought home to Carroll Quigley, who for twenty years studied the Cecil Rhodes–Alfred Milner Round Table. The Milner Group, as they were known, was a coterie of elite decision makers who had a definitive influence on British policy from 1891 through World War II. Quigley himself was close to establishment figures in the United States and Great Britain. After teaching at Princeton and Harvard he spent the rest of his career at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, was a consultant for the Brookings Institution, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and taught western civilization and history. Not surprisingly, he was in agreement with most of the policies of the Round Table elites but he was bothered by some of their methods and thought their inherited wealth and power held “terrifying” implications for democratic governance. If anything, Quigley was bothered not so much by their influence over events but by their control over the recording of these events. To quote him:
No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished in Britain—that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such po
wer in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and teaching of the history of their own period.2
The examples of how history is changed, distorted, suppressed and fabricated at the point of origin are too numerous to record.3 Any researcher who has spent much time in government archives soon discovers that many documents are missing; others are not available or have never been catalogued; many remain classified for fifty years or more. The War Department Records on President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination were kept secret for sixty years, finally placed in the public domain in the mid-1930s.When researching the conspiracy behind Lincoln’s murder, Theodore Roscoe discovered that some Civil War records of the “U.S. Army secret intelligence” were still classified almost one hundred years after the assassination.4 What question of national security could be involved here? How many Confederate spies were prowling behind Union lines in 1960?
There are the dramatic vignettes such as during the Iran-Contra affair when Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North shredded documents while FBI agents lackadaisically thumbed through files at the other end of the office. There are the thousands of documents related to the assassination of President John Kennedy still under lock and key, the physical evidence that disappeared or showed signs of being tampered with, and the limousine in which he was shot, whose insides—the scene of the crime—were immediately stripped and destroyed. There are the classified documents and disappeared materials and many unanswered questions relating to the mind boggling events of 9/11. One could go on.
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