I would admit to despair were it not for my shock and awe at the mess that has been made of a great democracy in a country I still bemusedly love from a distance. Oh you Americans, you crazy helicopter-parented delinquent kids!
I write as a shamed Canadian whose parliamentary system has been traduced, but we too have sent our citizens for foreign torture — as we did to Maher Arar. I’m not aware that we kill them ourselves.
We live in an age of government and corporate secrecy amid the destruction of personal privacy. What do any of us know of what governments do?
I started my fall into this moral sinkhole with Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a new study of the Vietnam War, part of the American Empire Project which aims, despairingly, to analyze U.S. imperial aspirations.
It offers a new view from classified documents that show that the My Lai massacre was not the aberration that the U.S. wanted it to appear to be, but a run-of-the-mill event. It was a war built on crimes — widespread civilian slaughter, rape (including child rape), torture (including sexual torture), deliberate indiscriminate frenzied destruction — that have never come to light.
The U.S. viewed the Vietnamese as subhuman, that convenient means of evaporating human decency. It invaded Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, hoping to win hearts and minds. It invaded Iraq on trumped-up charges, as with Vietnam, without even knowing the difference between Sunni and Shiite, as though Muslims were all the same. Again, it expected to be welcomed.
American wars since World War II have almost always been waged against non-whites — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name but a few campaigns conducted in the classic American style, which is to bomb.
Is it chance, since the world is mostly non-white? Is it a reaction to a noble war against racism at home, so that war becomes a displacement of racial hatred? If Americans don’t dissect their failures, they don’t learn.
The first bomb ever dropped from a plane fell on Tripoli, in 1911. In 102 years, humans have bombed with delight, with abandon, with the greatest cruelty that could be devised, dropping fire bombs (on 67 Japanese cities), atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, clinging fire (napalm), fuel-air explosives (sucking oxygen from lungs), bombs of bombs (cluster bombs) and worse.
Senators are not testing Brennan himself, they are testing the national tolerance for drones — which are merely another bomb delivery system. Will Americans allow their government to assassinate them from the air?
The hearings, whatever their selectiveness and hypocrisy, are admirable. American-born Anwar al-Awlaki had dark skin and a funny name. Yet politicians are objecting to President Barack Obama’s decision to kill him.
I am reading the journalist Thomas Mallon’s novelization of the Watergate scandal, and the fears of that era are now reborn. Magruder, LaRue, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, the names flood back.
Again, Americans are being asked: Are there limits to government power? Do you object to your government killing people it dislikes without permission?
The U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did on Europe. Churchill bombed German civilians. Bombing does not destroy the human will. Bombing doesn’t work. And yet Americans bomb, now with drones.
Drones excite us, but they’re nothing new. They’re just airplanes. They have always been used to spy, to terrify, to devastate, to discipline.
The U.S. panic since 9/11, the war on terror and this new fascination with fancy unmanned warplanes, it’s Watergate-style tyranny all over again with a more softened and fearful citizenry. We are reporting on it as though it’s new. But I’m reading about the history of bombing, about Americans refighting the same wars, about conspiracy and distant death.
Spare yourself the posturing, Americans, and read your history. Been there, done that.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Heather Mallick
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