The Lies of Empire: Don’t
Believe a Word They Say
By Glen Ford
The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria. The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And, isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed to be listening for on our telephones?
By Glen Ford
The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria. The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And, isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed to be listening for on our telephones?
The rulers
would have you believe that the world is becoming more complex
and dangerous all the time, compelling the United States to
abandon previous (and largely fictional) norms of domestic and
international legality in order to preserve civilization. In
truth, what they are desperately seeking to maintain is the
global dominance of U.S. and European finance capital and the
racist world order from which it sprang.
The
contradictions of centuries have ripened, overwhelming the
capacity of the “West” to contain the new forces abroad in the
world. Therefore, there must be endless, unconstrained war –
endless, in the sense that it is a last ditch battle to fend off
the end of imperialism, and unconstrained, in that the
imperialists recognize no legal or moral boundaries to their use
of military force, their only remaining advantage.
To mask
these simple truths, the U.S. and its corporate propaganda
services invent counter-realities, scenarios of impending
doomsdays filled with super-villains and more armies of darkness
than J.R.R. Tolkien could ever imagine. Indeed, nothing is left
to the imagination, lest the people’s minds wander into the
realm of truth or stumble upon a realization of their own
self-interest, which is quite different than the destinies of
Wall Street or the Project for a New American Century (updated,
Obama “humanitarian” version). It is a war of caricatures.
Saddam
“must go” – and so he went, along with a million other Iraqis.
Gaddafi “must go” – and he soon departed (“We came, we saw, he
died,” quipped Hillary), along with tens of thousands of Black
Libyans marked for extermination. “Assad must go” – but he
hasn’t left yet, requiring the U.S. and its allies to increase
the arms flow to jihadist armies whose mottos translate roughly
as “the western infidels must also go…next.” Afghanistan’s
Soviet-aligned government was the first on the U.S. “must go”
list to be toppled by the jihadist international network created
as a joint venture of the Americans, Saudis and Pakistanis, in
the early Eighties – a network whose very existence now requires
that Constitutional law “must go” in the American homeland.
Naturally,
in order to facilitate all these exits of governments of
sovereign states, international law, as we have known it “must
go.” In its place is substituted the doctrine of “humanitarian”
military intervention or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a
rehash of the “White Man’s Burden” designed to nullify smaller
powers’ rights to national sovereignty at the whim of the
superpower.
The entire
continent of Africa has fallen under the R2P umbrella (without
ever having fully emerged from the colonial sphere – but, that’s
the whole point, isn’t it?). Somalia achieved a brief period of
peace, in 2006, under a broadly based Islamic Courts regime that
had defeated an array of warlords backed by the U.S. Washington
struck back late that year through its client state, Ethiopia.
The Americans invoked both the Islamist enemy and
“Responsibility to Protect” to justify an invasion that plunged
Somalia into what UN observers called “the worst humanitarian
crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur.” Eventually, the U.S.
enlisted the African Union, itself, as the nominal authority in
a CIA-led Somalia mission that has militarized the whole Horn of
Africa.
U.S.
proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a
conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan
invasion of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and
the loss of six million lives – all under the protection,
funding and guidance of a succession of U.S. administrations in
mock atonement for the much smaller “genocide” in Rwanda.
President Obama sent Special Forces on permanent duty to the
region in search of another caricature, Joseph Kony, whose only
central casting defect is his rabid Christianity but whose
convenient presence in the bush justifies stationing Green
Berets in Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and South
Sudan.
Muammar
Gaddafi’s exorcism in Libya energized jihadists all across the
northern tier of Africa, as far as northern Nigeria, giving a
green light to a French colonial renaissance and further
expansion of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Only five years
after its official inception, AFRICOM reigns supreme on the
continent, with ties to the militaries of all but two African
countries: the nemesis states Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (They “must
go,” eventually.)
New age
Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the
International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved
for Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize
the global judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.
Back in
Syria, the reluctant domino, blood samples taken from alleged
victims of chemical weapons are sent to the Americans by
jihadists in their employ to prove that Assad really, really,
must go. Obama announces that he is going to do what he has
actually been doing for a very long time: send weapons to the
“rebels.” The Washington Post, forgetting its duty to follow the
administration’s scripted timelines, reports that the decision
to go public about arms transfers to jihadists was made two
weeks before the “proof” arrived.
The lies
become jumbled and are quickly superseded by new fictions to
justify no-fly, but the targeted caricatures remain front and
center, to be hooted and hollered over, once dead. It is only
the lies that make these situations seem complex: the lies that
cover up multiple U.S. genocides in Africa, to paint a canvas of
humanitarian concern, when the simple truth is that the
Americans and Europeans have established military dominion over
the continent for their own greedy purposes. The lies that have
attempted to camouflage a succession of brazen aggressions
against unoffending secular Arab governments in order to remove
any obstacles to U.S. domination of North Africa and the Near
East. And, the lie that has become central to the U.S. global
offensive since 9/11: that the U.S. is engaged in a global war
against armed jihadists. In fact, the jihadists are
American-contracted foot soldiers in an Arab world in which the
U.S. is hated by the people at-large. Washington was the
Godfather of international jihadism, its sugar daddy since at
least the early Eighties in Afghanistan – and now, once again
quite openly so in Syria as in Libya, at least for the time
being.
The simple
truth is, the U.S. is at war for continued hegemony over the
planet, for the preservation of the imperial system and its
finance capitalist rulers. In such a war, everyone, everywhere
is a potential enemy, including the home population.
That’s why
Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and, now, Edward Snowden are
considered so dangerous; because they undermine popular consent
for the government’s lies-based policies. The administration has
sent its operatives to Capital Hill and all the corporate
pseudo-journalistic outlets to explain how its mega-data mining
of phones and the Internet has prevented “potential terrorist
events over 50 times since 9/11,” including at least 10
“homeland-based threats,” as mouthed by National Security Agency
chief Gen. Keith Alexander. The details are, of course, secret.
However,
what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is enough to
dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic
enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is
clearly relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to
manufacture homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of
homeless Black men in Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare
to Chicago, much less bomb the Sears tower? Why must they entice
and entrap marginal people with no capacity for clandestine
warfare, and no previous inclination, into schemes to bomb
synagogues and shoot down military aircraft, as in Newburgh, New
York? Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if
the real thing is so abundant? If the FBI, with NSA assistance,
is discovering significant numbers of real terrorists, wouldn’t
we be watching a corresponding number of triumphal perp-walks?
Of course we would. The only logical conclusion is that terror
is a near-negligible domestic threat, wholly unsuited to the
NSA’s full-spectrum spying on virtually every American.
So, what
are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and behavior
thatalgorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people
that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for
the State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each
other, but whose patterns of life make them potentially
problematic to the rulers, possibly in some future crisis, or
some future manufactured crisis. A propensity to dissent, for
example. The size of these suspect cohorts, these pattern-based
groups, can be as large or small as the defining criteria
inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would the
programmers be interested in?
Ask Edward
Snowden. He’s the only one talking.
BAR executive editor Glen
Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
This
article was originally published at
BlackAgendaReport
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