[Peace-discuss] Paul Street on worthy and unworthy victimes.

[Brussel Morton K.]

Paul Street points up what should be obvious, that the bloodshed in  
Iran in repressing the demonstrations there is being used by the U.S.  
(and its clients) as a propaganda tool to hide the ugly acts of its  
own policies.

As for the issues in Iran, two things also ought to be clear. 1) There  
has been no convincing evidence that the Iran election results were  
fraudulent, and hence it seems that the demonstrations there are  
political acts that do not have justifiable reasons aside from a  
venting of frustration at a regime they deplore. 2) On the other hand,  
the brutal repression of the demonstrators can be condemned.

As unfortunate as it may be, all governments, perceiving danger to  
their power, possibly from outside their borders (which Iran has good  
reasons to suspect) will do what the Iranian Iranian power structure  
has done, quell the demonstrations before they cause an unraveling of  
the regime.  It is in the nature of governments to protect their  
power  and privileges.

Paul Street puts into rightful perspective our power structure's wrath  
and indignation at the killing of Neda Sotan and its complacency at  
the deaths caused by our own actions, military and economic.

--mkb

Imperial Culture and Moral Absurdity in the Age of Obama: From Teheran  
and Bala Boluk to New York, Bagua, and Tegucigalpa

July 02, 2009

By Paul Street
Source: The Empire and Inequality Report

Paul Street's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace


During a concert at Chicago's United Center last May 12th, Bruce  
Springsteen observed that "sometimes it seems like the more things  
change the more they stay the same."  He was talking about the  
persistence and indeed the deepening of poverty and inequality in the  
United States, where financial parasites and perpetrators receive  
untold billions of taxpayer dollars while millions are pushed further  
into destitution, their fate worsened by a regressive welfare  
"reform" (elimination) that "progressive" President Barack Obama has  
repeatedly praised as a great bipartisan policy triumph.

  WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS

Among numerous other examples of "things stay[ing] the same," the Boss  
(Springsteen, that is) might also have mentioned the deeply ingrained  
tendency of top U.S. politicians and dominant U.S. media to make  
unstated but easily discernible distinctions between "worthy" and  
"unworthy victims" in world affairs.

"Worthy victims" are killed by officially designated enemies of the  
inherently virtuous United States. Their deaths are reported in ways  
meant to elicit sympathy and to encourage outrage against their  
murderers. Some of them can become martyrs.

"Unworthy victims" perish at the hands of the intrinsically honorable  
United States and/or its officially designated allies and clients.   
They die anonymously and without fanfare, passing down the memory hole  
devoid of sympathy in dominant U.S. media and political culture, where  
their deaths often register little more than those of ants crushed  
beneath the wheels of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle or (to mention  
another great weapon of empire) a CNN camera truck.

Pop quiz question #1, fellow American: who is Neda Soltan? Who killed  
her?

Yes, that's right. She's the beautiful 26 year-old woman who was  
murdered on June 20th by (the story goes) a government sniper engaged  
in the repression of protests against a rigged election in Iran.

You knew that right away. Of course you did. Neda was all over U.S.  
television as a global democracy symbol for days - a ubiquitous and  
potent media image until she was knocked off center stage by the  
ongoing death drama of the mysterious American pop icon Michael  
Jackson (the coverage of which most Americans find "excessive").  Neda  
was murdered by an officially designated U.S. enemy state.

No less an American than President Obama said he had watched the  
graphic Internet video of Neda's death. "While this loss is raw and  
extraordinarily painful, we also know this: those who stand up for  
justice are always on the right side of history," Obama said. The  
president called the video "heartbreaking."

"I think that anybody who sees it knows that there's something  
fundamentally unjust about that," he claimed.

"No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing  
witness," Obama added.

Pop quiz question # 2: name a single person among the more than ten  
dozen who died in the western Afghanistan village of Grani in Bala  
Boluk district in the province of Farah in the first week of last May.  
Ninety-three of the people killed were children, many blown literally  
to bits.  Angry and grieving villagers put some of the victims' body  
parts in pickup trucks and wagons and hauled them for public viewing  
to provincial headquarters. On May 4th, Dr Atiqullah, a Grani  
resident, told Pajhwok Afghan News that "bombardment destroyed the  
whole village and some of the mutilated bodies were beyond  
recognition. He said they had so far retrieved 123 dead bodies from  
beneath the debris of the destroyed homes by using tractors."

Can't come up with a name? Of course you can't. The civilians in  
question were slaughtered from the sky by the world's only Superpower  
- the United States.  They did not merit meaningful identification and  
personalization by U.S. communication authorities.


TOO "GOOD" TO APOLOGIZE

They and the many thousands of Afghans (and Iraqis and Pakistanis)  
that "we") have butchered in recent years are unworthy victims. They  
died tragically - "regrettably" but inescapably - as "collateral  
damage" in the military campaigns of a morally splendid nation that  
seeks to do noble things - to spread freedom, peace, prosperity, and  
democracy - in the world. As President Barack Obama told CNN's Candy  
Crowley last July, the U.S. should never apologize for any its actions  
- even for its sporadic "mistakes" (Obama has always refused to apply  
the word "crime" to any of Uncle Sam's many past transgressions) - on  
the global stage.  This, he explained, is because America is "force  
for good" in the world.

As Barack Obama's "loved" philosopher, the establishment theologian  
Reinhold Niebhur, told the U.S. imperial class after World War Two:  
"the paradox of grace" means that U.S. policymakers cannot their  
sacred purpose of advancing goodness on Earth if they shirk from their  
intimately related duty to commit sin. You can't make an omelet  
without breaking eggs.

If America's overflowing uprightness leads its benevolent tanks,  
helicopters, bombers, unmanned aerial vehicles to "occasionally"  
squash civilian insects abroad, that's a shame. But "collateral  
damage" is unavoidable when you are a Superpower working for peace,  
freedom, and the material and spiritual betterment of humanity. As War  
Democrat Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright explained  
in the fall of 1999, seven months after the U.S. initiated deadly  
bombing runs over Belgrade, "The United States is good.  We try to do  
our best everywhere." When asked about the death of more than half a  
million Iraqi children due to U.S.-led "economic sanctions," Albright  
told CBS television that "we think the price is worth paying" to  
advance the United States' fundamentally honorable policy goals.

Consistent with his repeatedly stated "American exceptionalist" faith  
in the unmatched moral purity of U.S. foreign policy and national  
character, Barack Obama has consistently (as candidate and as  
president) proclaimed the United States' criminal assault on  
Afghanistan (October 2001 to ????) to be a "good," "just" and "proper"  
war.The dominant U.S. corporate war and entertainment media has not  
seen fit to question this judgment even as hundreds of innocent  
civilian Afghans and Pakistanis perish in the face of Obama's expanded  
and re-branded "global war on terror," replete with a stepping up of  
"targeted assassinations," the appointment of a notorious death squad  
("special ops") leader (Stanley A. McChrystal) to the head of the  
newly merged "Af-Pak" war theater, and the escalation of provocative  
drone attacks (executed by distant technicians in air-conditioned  
command centers in California) in South Asia

Neither Obama nor his "mainstream" media allies were about to "bear  
witness" to the "unfortunate" massacre of civilian creatures in remote  
Afghan villages.

"Shit" like the aerial dismemberment of dozens of Pashtun children  
"Happens" when you are on a global mission from God and/or History.

Such is the "paradox of grace."

Meanwhile, Obama's Pentagon tried to pin the unspeakable carnage from  
the heavens in Bala Boluk on..."Taliban grenades."


SCARING NEW YORKERS V. KILLING AFGHANS

Around the same time that Grani's villagers collected the remains of  
their U.S.-pulverized children, Obama and his Republican Secretary of  
Defense Robert Gates apologized to the American people and fired a  
White House official.  They did this because a late-April presidential  
photo shoot above Manhattan went terribly bad.  The president's plane,  
"Air Force One," had flown far too low over the island with a fighter  
jet in tow, terrifying New York City residents and office-workers by  
reminding them of 9/11.

Scaring New Yorkers and stirring up the ghosts of 9/11 elicited an  
executive branch apology and the discharge of a staffer. Actually  
killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require public  
contrition or a single firing. The imperial gendarmes even got to make  
up childish tales about how so many civilians died in Grani ("the  
Taliban did it") - stories that were taken seriously by "mainstream"  
media.

Such are the ironies and burdens of imperial culture!

Of course, 9/11's U.S. dead are the ultimate worthy victims in  
reigning U.S. political/media culture.  The New York Times ran a  
touching series of photos and biographies of every 9/11 victim they  
could over many months in 2002. No such personalization and respect  
has ever been or ever will be granted by U.S. media to any of the much  
larger number of Arabs and Pashtuns and others who have died  
prematurely because of U.S. actions, including more than 1 million  
Iraqis (killed by another illegal invasion Obama and his many fellow  
War Democrats are sustaining in the name of peace and "withdrawal")  
who have perished since March of 2003.

The unworthy victims of Superpower's rogue behavior die in mass  
anonymity, unlike Neda, whose name Obama knows. Apparently some kind  
of iron fist and/or velvet glove is powerful enough to "shut off" most  
U.S. citizensand the U.S. president from "bearing witness" to the huge  
number of Southwest and South Asians that "good" America has seen fit  
to liberate from existence since and before 9/11. There's "something  
fundamentally unjust about that" (to use Obama's words on the murder  
of Neda).

Such nationally narcissistic absence of concern is no small part of  
the richly bipartisan imperial-cultural matrix that did so much to  
cause the jetliner attacks of 2001.  Until the perverse dichotomy  
between "worthy" and "unworthy victims" - along with much else in the  
imperial mindset and structure - is overcome, we can expect more and  
perhaps bigger attacks on the "homeland."

INVISIBLE VICTIMS IN PERU

Let us turn now to some recent events in Superpower's hemispheric  
"backyard."  Pop Quiz # 3: Name any among the dozens of indigenous  
citizens and activists massacred by police while protesting oil and  
mining projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua  
in the first week of June 2009. Find a Neda among the forty people,  
including three children, who died at the hands of police on June 6  
and June 7.  The indigenous Peruvians were trying to protect Amazonian  
ecology and their social and physical health from multinational  
corporations seeking to "move forward" under a series of Peruvian  
government decrees passed to implement a "Free Trade Agreement" with  
the U.S.  The incident was only weakly covered in dominant U.S. media,  
which failed to report the predominantly state-inflicted nature of the  
violence and left out the underlying corporate-globalizationist and  
eco-cidal context behind the conflict. Also left out: presidential  
candidate Barack Obama's support for the anti-labor/anti-environment/ 
anti-indigenous US-Peru Free Trade Agreement - the extension of the  
global investors' rights bill, the North American Free Trade Agreement  
to Peru - in the fall and winter of 2007. Candidate Obama falsely  
claimed that the bill contained important labor and environmental  
protections - a deception for which he was strongly criticized by the  
tragic John Edwards.

You'll have to do some research to get any names of the Bagua dead,  
fellow American. They died in the usual scornful anonymity conferred  
upon the unworthy victims who are liquidated by U.S. clients and on  
the wrong side of U.S. global policy.


A RECENT OPPORTUNITY TO BE GOOD IN SUPERPOWER'S OWN BACKYARD

Last week Obama got another chance to reject the childish notion that  
righteous Uncle Sam might express some contrition for the murder and  
mayhem he causes across the world.  During a White House visit by  
Chile's president Michele Bachelet, a Chilean reporter asked Obama if  
he might tender a U.S. state apology for the American Empire's  
critical role in the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew that  
country's elected government and installed the murderous right-wing  
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.  Obama refused, explaining that "I'm  
interested in going forward, not looking backward" (sound familiar?).   
The president added that "the United States has been an enormous force  
for good in the world" even if "there have been times where we've made  
mistakes." The reporter did not follow up to press the president on  
the "enormous [U.S.] good[ness]" involved in (to mention a few key  
past and ongoing "mistakes" like murdering 3 million Indochinese  
during the 1960s and 1970s, killing a million Iraqis with "economic  
sanctions" during the 1990s, making a grossly outsized contribution to  
global warming and other forms of planetary pollution,  incarcerating  
more then 2 million of its own citizens, sustaining dictatorships in  
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, accounting for nearly half the world's  
military spending, and sustaining an empire that includes more than  
760 bases located across more than 130 countries in a planet where  
more than 2 billion people live and die on less than a dollar a day,  
thanks to a world capitalist system that the U.S. government has long  
sought to protect and expand with, well, an iron fist when "necessary."

Just this last week, events in Honduras have offered Obama a shining  
opportunity to "go forward" as  "an enormous force for good in the  
world" by acting decisively against the military officials who  
executed a coup against Honduras' democratically elected, left-leaning  
president Manuel Zelaya. The coup was (quite naturally) carried out by  
U.S.-trained and U.S.-funded military forces and conducted with U.S.- 
supplied military equipment. Obama possesses the power to restore  
Zelaya to his rightful office in Honduras, a nation whose government  
and economy has long been exceedingly dependent on the U.S. More than  
that, there are disturbing questions about Washington's role leading  
up to the coup. As the incisive left journalist and author Jeremy  
Scahill noted Monday morning:

"It is impossible to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup  
was in the works. In fact, this was basically confirmed by The New  
York Times in Monday's paper...While the US has issued heavily- 
qualified statements critical of the coup—in the aftermath of the  
events in Honduras—the US could have flexed its tremendous economic  
muscle before the coup and told the military coup plotters to stand  
down. The US ties to the Honduran military and political establishment  
run far too deep for all of this to have gone down without at least  
tacit support or the turning of a blind eye by some US political or  
military official(s)."

"Here are some facts to consider: the US is the top trading partner  
for Honduras. The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress  
are supporters of the ‘free trade agreements' Washington has imposed  
on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a  
rejection of Hugo Chavez's influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and  
an embrace of the United States and Washington's ‘vision' for the  
region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup  
with a simple series of phone calls."


According to the noted Latin American historian Greg Gandin one day  
after the coup, "The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of  
the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin  
American country is fully owned by the United States, it's Honduras.  
Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances. So  
if the US is opposed to this coup going forward, it won't go forward.  
Zelaya will return, if the United States—if Obama and Hillary Clinton  
are sincere in their statements about returning Zelaya to power."

On Sunday, Obama expressed "deep concern" regarding "the detention and  
expulsion of President Mel Zelaya" and called on "all political and  
social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms" and the "the  
rule of law" so as to resolve "existing tensions and disputes...  
through dialogue free from any outside interference."

Still, the White House, which keeps more than 500 troops and a number  
of planes and helicopters at a Honduran base, has refused to  
officially/legally declare the removal of Zelaya "a coup."  Making  
such a declaration would trigger (under the Foreign Assistance Act) a  
cutoff of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. aid to the Central  
American nation. According to Reuters, "The [U.S.] State Department  
has requested $68.2 million in aid for fiscal year 2010 [for  
Honduras], which begins on October 1, up from $43.2 million in the  
current fiscal year and $40.5 million a year earlier."

John Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras and a leading,  
blood-soaked figure in U.S. coordination of mass-murderous right-wing  
state terror across Central America under Ronald Reagan, told the  
Washington Post that the Obama administration's disinclination to  
fully acknowledge the reality of recent events "appeared to reflect  
reluctance to see Zelaya returned unconditionally to power."

Will the U.S. work seriously for Zelaya's return? Obama's Secretary of  
State Hillary Clinton said, "We haven't laid out any demands that  
we're insisting on, because we're working with others on behalf of our  
ultimate objectives."  In a Monday briefing with reporters, U.S.  
Statement spokesman Ian Kelly had an interesting exchange with the  
press:

MR. KELLY:  I believe that [the coup] is illegal, yes. I mean, I don't  
think that there was - look.....As I say, I am not an international  
lawyer. But this was not a democratic solution to some of the  
conflicts that we saw leading up to yesterday's events. And I think  
that's - that's our real issue with this, and I think that's the issue  
with all of our colleagues in the Organization of American States

QUESTION: Is it fair to say that the Secretary said, look, as a  
practical matter, this is a coup, but we're not yet making that formal  
legal determination, which would, of course, then trigger the cutoff  
of most aid.

MR. KELLY: Yeah.

QUESTION: That you were essentially trying to create some space to try  
to reach a negotiated outcome?

MR. KELLY: I think that we - right now, we're calling on all parties  
to come to a negotiated solution


Superpower could have prevented the coup in advance with some phone  
calls and well-placed threats. With just a tiny portion of the  
military and political force it pours into sustaining illegal  
invasions and occupations (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine) and  
dictatorships in oil-rich Southwest Asia, it could (in line with  
majority Latin American and global opinion)quickly restore the  
democratically elected president to power in Honduras.

AGAINST INDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT

Expect some sort of "negotiated solution." Confronting a changed, left- 
leaning balance of forces and opinion in Latin America, the White  
House will probably bring Zelaya back on a conditional basis (think  
Bill Clinton and Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1994), re- 
installing him on more disciplined, U.S.-friendly terms. The  
intermediate resolution the White House is seeking certainly falls  
short of what would be expected from an actual "enormous force for  
good in the world" and fits nicely with the imperial mindset  
articulated in Obama's aforementioned (and deeply conservative)  
Audacity of Hope:

"Of course there are those who would argue with my starting premise -  
that any global system built in America's image can alleviate misery  
in poorer countries...Rather than conform to America's rules, the  
argument goes, other countries should resist America's efforts to  
expand its hegemony; instead, they should follow their own path to  
development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like  
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, or turning to more traditional principles of  
social organization, like Islamic law...I believe [Chavez and other]  
critics [of the U.S. and neoliberalism]  are wrong...The system of [so- 
called - P.S.] free markets and [so-called -P.S. ] liberal  
democracy... offer[s] people around the world their best chance at a  
better life" (Obama, Audacity of Hope, p. 315).

Global capitalism does no such thing, of course. Candidate Obama's  
reflections ended on a profoundly false judgment, properly rejected by  
Mel Zelaya, who came into office in early 2006 as a center-right  
politician but who subsequently moved left and shifted his desperately  
impoverished and U.S.-controlled nation into Hugo Chavez's socialist  
"Bolivarian Alternative for the America's" (ALBA).

Truth be told, the not-so "free market" and "liberal-democratic"  
system of state capitalism and corporate-managed democracy is ever- 
more obviously opposed to ordinary peoples' "chance at better life"  
inside the United States itself.  But that's another if intimately  
related topic in the saga of American Empire and InequalityIncorporated.



Paul Street (paulsrtreet99 at yahoo.com) is the author of many essays,  
reviews, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and  
Inequality: American and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004),  
RacialOppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield,  
2007), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics: www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090702/3829b205/attachment-0001.html