- "Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer.
The operation and its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt
I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless
ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.
-
- However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare
was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare
of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence;
the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war
against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us you are against
us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We will not allow
the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders".
Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.
-
- The US is at this moment developing advanced systems
of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them
where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together.
It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical
weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy
behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.
-
- The United States believes that the three thousand deaths
in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter.
They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.
-
- The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred
to.
-
- The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through
US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines
are never referred to.
-
- The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the
Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly
high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do
have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.
-
- The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975
brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by
the United States are never referred to.
-
- The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised
by the United States are never referred to.
-
- The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
are no longer referred to.
-
- The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central
factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.
-
- But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading
of history this is.
-
- People do not forget. They do not forget the death of
their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget
injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism
of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.
-
- The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable.
It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations
of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in
all parts of the world.
-
- In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant"
in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself
preposterous.
-
- How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing
a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks
are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible
and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently, a terrorist
poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented.
But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel
on the London Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from
which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders
of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel
on the underground himself.
-
- The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated
murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from
their dictator.
-
- The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which
can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally
to catastrophe.
-
- It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting
at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just
to take control of Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now
a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans,
we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be
helpless.
-
- Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage
and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander
Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently)
"We are not the doctors. We are the disease".
-
- Harold Pinter
-
- The Assassinated Press
-
-
- They hang the man and flog the woman
- That steal the goose from off the common,
- But let the greater villain loose
- That steals the common from the goose.
-
- Constant apprehension of war has the same tendency to
render the head too large for the body. A standing military force with
an overgrown executive will not long be safe. companions to liberty. --
Thomas Jefferson
-
- "America is a quarter of a billion people totally
misinformed and disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our
media is -- I wouldn't even say corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us
anything that the government doesn't want us to know." Gore Vidal
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