Who Rules the World? (30 page)

Much the same was true of the Vietnam War, also considered a failure and a defeat. Vietnam itself was of no particular concern, but as the documentary record reveals, Washington was concerned that successful independent development there might spread contagion throughout the region. Vietnam was virtually destroyed; it would be a model for no one. And the region would be protected by installing murderous dictatorships, much as in Latin America in the same years. It is not unnatural that imperial policy should follow similar lines in different parts of the world.

The Vietnam War is described as a failure, an American defeat. In reality it was a partial victory. The United States did not achieve its maximal goal of turning Vietnam into the Philippines, but the major concerns were overcome, much as in the case of Cuba. Such outcomes therefore count as defeat, failure, terrible decisions.

The imperial mentality is wondrous to behold.

19

“Two Ways About It”

In the wake of the terrorist attack on
Charlie Hebdo
, which killed twelve people including the editor and four other cartoonists, and the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket shortly after, French prime minister Manuel Valls declared “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”
1

Millions of people demonstrated in condemnation of the atrocities, amplified by a chorus of horror under the banner “I Am Charlie.” There were eloquent pronouncements of outrage, captured well by the head of Israel’s Labor Party, Isaac Herzog, who declared that “terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it,” and that “all the nations that seek peace and freedom [face] an enormous challenge” from brutal violence.
2

The crimes also elicited a flood of commentary, inquiring into the roots of these shocking assaults in Islamic culture and exploring ways to counter the murderous wave of Islamic terrorism without sacrificing our values. The
New York Times
described the assault as a “clash of civilizations,” but was corrected by
Times
columnist Anand Giridharadas, who tweeted that it was “not & never a war of civilizations or between them. But a war FOR civilization against groups on the other side of that line.”
3

The scene in Paris was described vividly in the
New York Times
by veteran Europe correspondent Steven Erlanger: “a day of sirens, helicopters in the air, frantic news bulletins; of police cordons and anxious crowds; of young children led away from schools to safety. It was a day, like the previous two, of blood and horror in and around Paris.”
4

Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist, who said: “Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare.” Another reported a “huge detonation, and everything went completely dark.” The scene, Erlanger reported, “was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation.”

The quotes in the previous paragraph, however—as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us—are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report Erlanger wrote on April 24, 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that knocked Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) “off the air,” killing sixteen journalists.

“NATO and American officials defended the attack,” Erlanger reported, “as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack.
5

At the time, there were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of “We are RTS,” no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the TV headquarters was lauded. The highly regarded diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then special envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTS as “an enormously important and, I think, positive development.”
6

There are many other events that call for no inquiry into Western culture and history: for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, in July 2011.

Also ignored in the “war against terrorism” is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times, Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us someday and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the fifty civilians killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, barely reported.
7

One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTS: a Serbian court sentenced Dragoljub Milanović, general manager of Radio Television of Serbia, to ten years in prison for failing to evacuate the building. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were “unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate.”
8

The comparison between these cases helps us understand the condemnation of the
New York Times
by civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, famous for his forceful defense of freedom of expression. “There are times for self-restraint,” Abrams wrote, “but in the immediate wake of the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory, [the
Times
editors] would have served the cause of free expression best by engaging in it”—that is, by publishing the
Charlie Hebdo
cartoons ridiculing Mohammed that elicited the assault.
9

Abrams is right in describing the
Charlie Hebdo
attack as “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” The reason has to do with the concept “living memory,” a category carefully constructed to include
their
crimes against us while scrupulously excluding
our
crimes against them—the latter not crimes but a noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

There are many other illustrations of the interesting category “living memory.” One is provided by the Marine assault against Fallujah in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq. The assault opened with the occupation of Fallujah General Hospital, a major war crime quite apart from how it was carried out. The crime was reported prominently on the front page of the
New York Times
, accompanied by a photograph depicting how “patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The occupation of the hospital was considered meritorious, and justified, since it “shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”
10

Evidently, shutting down this “propaganda weapon” was no assault on free expression, and does not qualify for entry into “living memory.”

There are other questions. One would naturally ask how France upholds freedom of expression, for example, by the Gayssot Law, repeatedly implemented, which effectively grants the state the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from its edicts. Or how it upholds the sacred principles of “fraternity, freedom, solidarity” by expelling miserable descendants of Holocaust survivors, the Roma, to bitter persecution in Eastern Europe; or by its deplorable treatment of North African immigrants in the banlieues of Paris, where the
Charlie Hebdo
terrorists became jihadis.

Anyone with eyes open will quickly notice other rather striking omissions from living memory. Ignored, for instance, is the assassination of three journalists in Latin America in December 2014, bringing the number for the year to thirty-one. There have been dozens of journalists murdered in Honduras alone since the military coup of 2009 that was effectively authorized by the United States, probably according postcoup Honduras the per-capita championship when it comes to the murder of journalists. But again, this was not an assault on freedom of the press within living memory.

These few examples illustrate a very general principle observed with impressive dedication and consistency: the more we can blame some crimes on enemies, the greater the outrage; the greater our responsibility for crimes—and hence the more we can do to end them—the less the concern, tending to oblivion.

Contrary to the eloquent pronouncements, it is not the case that “terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There definitely are two ways about it: theirs versus ours. And not just when it comes to terrorism.

20

One Day in the Life of a Reader of the
New York Times

The
New York Times
can plausibly be regarded as the world’s leading newspaper. It is an indispensable source of news and commentary, but there is a lot more that one can learn by reading it carefully and critically. Let us keep to a single day, April 6, 2015—though almost any other day would have provided similar insights into prevailing ideology and intellectual culture.

A front-page article is devoted to a flawed story about a campus rape in
Rolling Stone
magazine, exposed in the
Columbia Journalism Review
. So severe is this departure from journalistic integrity that it is also the subject of the lead story in the business section, with a full inside page devoted to the continuation of the two reports. The shocked reports refer to several past crimes of the press: a few cases of fabrication, quickly exposed, and cases of plagiarism (“too numerous to list”). The specific crime of
Rolling Stone
is “lack of skepticism,” which is “in many ways the most insidious” of the three categories.
1

It is refreshing to see the commitment of the
Times
to the integrity of journalism.

On page seven of the same issue, there is an important story by Thomas Fuller headlined “One Woman’s Mission to Free Laos from Millions of Unexploded Bombs.” It reports on the “single-minded effort” of a Lao-American woman, Channapha Khamvongsa, “to rid her native land of millions of bombs still buried there, the legacy of a nine-year American air campaign that made Laos one of the most heavily bombed places on earth.” The story notes that as a result of Ms. Khamvongsa’s lobbying, the United States increased its annual spending on the removal of unexploded bombs by a munificent $12 million. The most lethal are cluster bombs, which are designed to “cause maximum casualties to troops” by spraying “hundreds of bomblets onto the ground.”
2
About 30 percent remain unexploded, so that they kill and maim children who pick up the pieces, farmers who strike them while working, and other unfortunates. An accompanying map features Xieng Khouang province in northern Laos, better known as the Plain of Jars, the primary target of the intensive bombing, which reached its peak of fury in 1969.

Fuller reports that Ms. Khamvongsa “was spurred into action when she came across a collection of drawings of the bombings made by refugees and collected by Fred Branfman, an antiwar activist who helped expose the Secret War.”
3
The drawings appear in his remarkable book
Voices from the Plain of Jars
, published in 1972 and republished by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2013 with a new introduction. The drawings vividly display the torment of the victims, poor peasants in a remote area that had virtually nothing to do with the Vietnam War, as officially conceded. One typical report by a twenty-six-year-old nurse captures the nature of the air war: “There wasn’t a night when we thought we’d live until morning, never a morning we thought we’d survive until night. Did our children cry? Oh, yes, and we did also. I just stayed in my cave. I didn’t see the sunlight for two years. What did I think about? Oh, I used to repeat, ‘please don’t let the planes come, please don’t let the planes come, please don’t let the planes come.’”
4

Branfman’s valiant efforts did indeed bring some awareness of this hideous atrocity. His assiduous research also unearthed the reasons for the savage destruction of a helpless peasant society. He exposed them once again in the introduction to the new edition of
Voices
:

One of the most shattering revelations about the bombing was discovering why it had so vastly increased in 1969, as described by the refugees. I learned that after President Lyndon Johnson had declared a bombing halt over North Vietnam in November 1968, he had simply diverted the planes into northern Laos. There was no military reason for doing so. It was simply because, as US Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle Stearns testified to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in October 1969, “Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.”
5

Therefore the unused planes were unleashed on poor peasants, devastating the peaceful Plain of Jars, far from the ravages of Washington’s murderous wars of aggression in Indochina.

Let us now see how these revelations are transmuted into
New York Times
Newspeak. Writes Fuller, “The targets were North Vietnamese troops—especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos—as well as North Vietnam’s Laotian Communist allies.”
6
Compare this to the words of the U.S. deputy chief of mission and the heartrending drawings and testimony in Fred Branfman’s book.