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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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01 October 2010 By Paul Craig Roberts
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform
me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless
things have gotten worse.
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point,
permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear
bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that
Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a
number of other German cities, expending more
destructive force, according to some historians,
against the civilian German population than against
the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil
War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan,
committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that
the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies
against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli
official has compared to 19th century US genocidal
policies against the American Indians, that the US in
the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on
contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of
civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair
lent the British army to his American masters, as did
other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves
committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in
lands in which they have no national interests, but
for which they receive an American pay check.
I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I
know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long
list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new
lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite
its strict illegality under US and international law,
and a recent poll shows that the percentage of
Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it
is quite high, though still just below a majority.
And we have what appears to be a
new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war
to murder civilians. Recently American troops were
arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and
collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.
This revelation came on the heels
of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army
video of US soldiers in helicopters and their
controllers thousands of miles away having fun with
joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan
civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience
that has been discarded by his government and his
military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying
the law and reporting a war crime to the American
people.
US Rep. Mike Rogers, a
Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the
House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for
Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is
an act of treason to report an American war crime.
In other words, to obey the law
constitutes “treason to America.”
US Rep. Rogers said that
America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of
disclosure” and that this “serious and growing
problem” could only be stopped by the execution of
Manning.
If Rep. Rogers is representative
of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t
need.
The US government, a font of
imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it
commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war
crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and
four million displaced Iraqis are all justified,
because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect
itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction
that the US government knew for a fact were not in
Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if
they were in Iraq.
When other countries attempt to
enforce the international laws that the Americans
established in order to execute Germans defeated in
World War II, the US government goes to work and
blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the
Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited
Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to
sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against
George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon
Brown.
The West includes Israel, and
there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover,
if you mention any of them you are declared to be an
anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove
that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and
anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was
the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who
produced the UN report indicating that Israel
committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian
population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For
his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to
be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on
instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard
the Goldstone Report to the UN.
As the Israeli official said, we
are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans
did to the American Indians.
The Israeli army uses female
soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by
remote control machine guns from towers to murder
Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500
meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There
is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered
by gunning down young children and old people who come
to tend to their fields.
If the crimes were limited to war
and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a
case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality,
otherwise still in effect.
Alas, the collapse of morality is
too widespread. Some sports teams now have a
win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure
the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all
these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing
where 200 mph speeds are routine.
Prior to 1988, 22 years ago,
track deaths were due to driver error, car failure,
and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety
hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to
improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and
spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver
Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost
toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek
(August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen
before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that
day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing
began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss
called “dirty driving” became the norm.
Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports
that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that
Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for
fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.”
Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.”
Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from
being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill]
and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because
you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against
the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could
win.
When asked about the ethics of
modern Formula One racing, American World Champion
Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day
was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed
certain tactics were unacceptable.”
In today’s Western moral climate,
driving another talented driver into the wall at 200
mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born
in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an
unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand
Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive
his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into
the wall at 200 mph speeds.
Confronted with his attempted act
of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One.
Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”
Neither does the US government,
nor state and local governments, nor the UK
government, nor the EU.
The deformation of the police,
which many Americans, in their untutored existence as
naive believers in “law and order,” still think are
“on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the
police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic
extremists.”
The police have been off the
leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by
the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have
been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school
infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have
moms with a car full of children (see, for example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AaSLERx0VM ).
Anyone who googles videos of US
police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of
thousands of examples, and this is after laws that
make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two
ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands
of videos.
In one of the most recent of the
numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of
citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken
because he objected to a night time towing of his car.
The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke
his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says
that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much
younger police goon, because the old man clenched his
fist.
Americans will be the first
people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they
are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even
devised a title for themselves to rival that of the
Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.”
The Americans call themselves “the indispensable
people.”
Paul Craig Roberts
was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an
Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest
book,
HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been
published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached
at:
PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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