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Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School (Pennsylvania, US), reflects on the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the
inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long
been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt,
apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has
committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World
Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to
those crimes, is close to inadmissible. Editorializing on the
recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York
Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and
consequent "resurgence of ethnic hatreds," but that the United
States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by
their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and
pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and
Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and
without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is
completely unrecognized.
The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious
fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by globalization,"
and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values"
among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in
such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate
globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest
allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank
and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the
Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans
and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are
quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is
the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.
Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting
rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating
"nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the
masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand
for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the
masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council
report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print."
In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence
a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s
and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35
countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late
1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of
those torture victims and their families, and the families of the
thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through
the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United
States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous
military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority
government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on
the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country
killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina)
devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that
perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth
defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here
again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile
feelings toward the United States.
The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United
States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of
"constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried
out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline
states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S.
support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home
and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine
dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of
hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah
as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in
"methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of
torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported
Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with
them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against
the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in
1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in
helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may
know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit
award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New
York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned
this high level commendation).
The Iraqis then had their turn. Saddam moved from valued ally in
the 1980s, whose use of "weapons of mass destruction" against Iran
and the Iraqi Kurds caused no problem at all with his U.S. and
British friends, to "another Hitler" upon his invasion of Kuwait in
1990. Suddenly his possession of "weapons of mass destruction"
became an extremely urgent matter as the man had demonstrated an
inability to follow orders. The war and "sanctions of mass
destruction" that followed have killed more than a million Iraqis,
and in the well-know words of Madeleine Albright, questioned on
whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified by the
U.S. policy ends, saying "it is worth it." No doubt this is so
within Albright's system of "cultural values," but understandably
many Iraqis will feel differently and may view the United States as
the true "evil empire."
The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has
carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in
a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas--
uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But
these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no
constructive consequences because the United States gives the
ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as
regards policy.
All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western
civilization and cultural values," but that is because they
recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a
neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate
interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to
achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using
economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence,
but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy
victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do
not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism
that is riding high and whose principals are not prepared to change
its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great
importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism
inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent
need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging
empire.
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DIGITAL ECOLOGY