Gagging the sceptics
The US, founded to protect
basic freedoms, is now insisting that its critics are its enemies
George
Monbiot
Tuesday October 16, 2001
The Guardian
If satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, then
last week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of the United Nations
peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda or
the massacre in Srebrenica. Now, as secretary general, he appears to have
interpreted the UN charter as generously as possible to allow the attack on
Afghanistan to go ahead.
Article
51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It says nothing about
subsequent retaliation. It offers no licence to attack people who might be
harbouring a nation's enemies. The bombing of Afghanistan, which began before
the UN security council gave its approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man
and the organisation who overlooked this obstacle to facilitate war are honoured
for their contribution to peace.
Endowments
like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to reward self-sacrifice. Nelson
Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de Klerk gave up his power, and both were worthy
recipients of the prize. But Kofi Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up
nothing. He has been rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly submitting to
a gigantic salary and bottomless expense account.
Among
the other nominees for the prize was a group whose qualifications were rather
more robust. Members of Women in Black have routinely risked their lives in the
hope of preventing war. They have stayed in the homes of Palestinians being
shelled by Israeli tanks and have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. They
have stood silently while being abused and spat at during vigils all over the
world. But now, in this looking-glass world in which war is peace and peace is
war, instead of winning the peace prize the Women in Black have been labelled
potential terrorists by the FBI and threatened with a grand jury investigation.
They
are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI named the chaotic
but harmless organisations Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism
in the statement on terrorism he presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a
result of his representations, the Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's
Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace
are in danger of being treated like members of al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine - if
you're not with us, you're against us - is already being applied.
This
government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have
challenged the US government; ergo anyone who challenges the government is a
potential terrorist. That Bin Laden is, according to US officials, a
"fascist", while the other groups are progressives is irrelevant:
every public hand raised in objection will from now on be treated as a public
hand raised in attack. Given that Bin Laden is not a progressive but is a
millionaire, it would surely make more sense to round up and interrogate all
millionaires.
Lumping
Women in Black together with al-Qaida requires just a minor addition to the
vocabulary: they have been jointly classified as "anti-American". This
term, as used by everyone from the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and
the Daily Mail to Tony Blair and several writers on these pages, applies not
only to those who hate Americans, but also to those who have challenged US
foreign and defence objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a demand for
uncritical support, for a love of government more consonant with the codes of
tsarist Russia than with the ideals upon which the United States was founded.
The
charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-American. If
the US does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and
dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project.
Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles
enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as
"anti-American" and investigated as potential terrorists.
Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is
an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational
discourse.
Under
the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks to promulgate a
version of events other than that sanctioned by the US government. On September
20, President Bush told us that "this is the fight of all who believe in
progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom". Two weeks later, his
secretary of state, Colin Powell, met the Emir of Qatar to request that
progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom be suppressed. Al-Jazeera is one of
the few independent television stations in the Middle East, whose popularity is
the result of its uncommon regard for freedom of speech. It is also the only
station permitted to operate freely in Kabul. Powell's request that it be
squashed was a pre-emptive strike against freedom, which, he hoped, would
prevent the world from seeing what was really happening once the bombing began.
Since
then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to prevent al-Jazeera from
airing video statements by Bin Laden, on the grounds of the preposterous
schoolboy intrigue that they "might contain coded messages". Over the
weekend the government sought to persuade British broadcasters to restrict their
coverage of the war. Blair's spin doctors warned: "You can't trust them
[the Taliban] in any way, shape, or form." While true, this applies with
equal force to the techniques employed by Downing Street. When Alastair Campbell
starts briefing journalists about "Spin Laden", it's a case of the
tarantula spinning against the money spider.
If
we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which
President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see
and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem
to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current
one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators
in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared
to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and terrorism in the
US.
There
are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists'
luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The
dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt
consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped
on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to create the false
impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks
suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public
argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving
envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled "a gift
from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their
own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless
operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.
Links:
Conspiracy theories: Who was really behind the WTC attack?