Editor,
Andrew Beale begins his column for the Daily Lobo “Hypocritical US takes part in terrorism constantly” with the following statement: “The United States government is the largest terrorist organization operating today.” In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” he comes to a similar conclusion when he says: “(My own government is) the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Not much has changed since then. U.S. history continues to be littered with wars, occupation, massacres, torture, assassinations and secret detention. Founded on the Native American genocide, this nation is haunted by the African-American holocaust as it seeks nationalistic distraction in imperial wars. When Dr. King said as much, he was a marked man. His violent death a year later proved his point. This is just one of the many ironies in the tragedy of American history.
The video recently released by the news organization WikiLeaks provides factual evidence of the judgment, a rarity in our times of corporate media control. It depicts a U.S. massacre in Baghdad from July 12, 2007, one of countless unreported. The video speaks for, or rather, against itself. The fact that it had to be leaked suggests the government’s mistrust of its own people. That the Pentagon can no longer find its own copy suggests a sense of guilt. Common sense condemns the massacre. The military, however, exonerated the culprits, effectively condoning the atrocities. If all criminals could preside over the trials of their own crimes, all would go free.
As it stands, it’s the privilege of a hegemonic government and its military. We call it the Pax Americana.
Those who defend the atrocities do so by rationalizing the forbidden into the permissible. They are effectively saying, “We are better Nazis than the Germans 70 years ago. They killed 6 million European Jews, we ‘just’ killed one million Iraqi Arabs.”
In his 1967 speech, Dr. King recognized the fatal kinship between the Nazi death camps in Europe then and the deadly American weaponry today. He condemned both.
Today we must recognize: the continued American occupation of Iraq has as much justification as Nazi Germany’s invasion and occupation of Poland. In both cases the aggressor falsely claimed homeland defense with the murderous assault. It is a natural consequence that to the illegal occupier every movement of the occupied looks suspicious. Countless war crimes have resulted from the suppressed sense of guilt.
When Leo Tolstoy recognized this deceit in human rationality, he converted to Christianity and became an uncompromising Christian pacifist who challenged state and church for their false faith of nationalism. Americans today who undergo a similar conversion too refuse to chant the imperial battle cry. Instead they humbly pray, “May God forgive America and bless the whole world.”
Joachim L. Oberst
UNM instructor
