I am sure that we were all appalled
at the loss of life caused by the 11 September attacks on US citizens in Washington
and New York, many of whom would have been ordinary working people. Even the
Pentagon needs cleaners.
This has given rise to a reactionary response both in the US and by her allies
including the UK. Blair has adopted a rhetoric of a 'New Evil' which serves
to camouflage decades of US and Western imperialism. Since 1945 the US and its
allies have intervened militarily in Greece, Korea, Lebanon, Laos, Cuba, Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, Ghana, Zaire, Mali, Iraq, the former
Yugoslavia and Granada, either directly or through destabilisation. I have probably
missed some interventions, but surely this paints a picture.
This does not include the actions of its client states and the damage it does
through economic manipulation. Arguably the crisis in the East Asian markets
was a direct consequence of US imposed liberalisation of East Asian capital
markets.
The effects of the attack designed, to provoke such reaction, will also make
it more difficult to expose this naked violence and economic bullying. Indeed
Blair's rhetoric is likely increase xenophobia in the UK, as Bush's rhetoric
certainly is in the US.
The voices of sanity will be few and difficult to hear in the coming weeks and
months but I hope all CfS members make an effort to get people to understand
the history and the context of the current situation and argue that if we want
a peaceful world we must have a world that is just, free from poverty, despair
and oppression. Monstrous behaviour on the part of Western imperialism creates
monsters.
As Mary Shelley's monster puts it in the original Frankenstein:
'Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded...Make me
happy and I shall again be virtuous.'
Vince Mills
Secetary CfS