Authors: Noam Chomsky
In fact, the triumvirate was quite isolated in its attacks—undertaken to eliminate the mercurial tyrant whom they had supported when it was advantageous. The hope was for a regime likelier to be amenable to Western demands for control over Libya’s rich resources and, perhaps, to offer an African base for the U.S. Africa command (AFRICOM), so far confined to Stuttgart.
No one can know whether the relatively peaceful efforts called for in U.N. Resolution 1973, and backed by most of the world, might have succeeded in averting the terrible loss of life and the destruction that followed in Libya.
On June 15, the African Union informed the Security
Council that “ignoring the A.U. for three months and going on with the bombings of the sacred land of Africa has been high-handed, arrogant and provocative.” The African Union went on to present a plan for negotiations and policing within Libya by A.U. forces, along with other measures of reconciliation—to no avail.
The African Union call to the Security Council also laid out the background for their concerns: “Sovereignty has been a tool of emancipation of the peoples of Africa who are beginning to chart transformational paths for most of the African countries after centuries of predation by the slave trade, colonialism and neocolonialism. Careless assaults on the sovereignty of African countries are, therefore, tantamount to inflicting fresh wounds on the destiny of the African peoples.”
The African appeal can be found in the Indian journal
F
RONTLINE
, but was mostly unheard in the West. That comes as no surprise: Africans are “unpeople,” to adapt George Orwell’s term for those unfit to enter history.
On March 12, the Arab League gained the status of people by supporting U.N. Resolution 1973. But approval soon faded when the League withheld support for the subsequent Western bombardment of Libya.
And on April 10, the Arab League reverted to unpeople by calling on the U.N. also to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza and to lift the Israeli siege, virtually ignored.
That too makes good sense. Palestinians are prototypical unpeople, as we see regularly. Consider the November/December issue of
F
OREIGN
A
FFAIRS
, which opened with two articles on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
One, written by Israeli officials Yosef Kuperwasser and Shalom Lipner, blamed the continuing conflict on the Palestinians
for refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state (keeping to the diplomatic norm: States are recognized, but not privileged sectors within them).
The second, by American scholar Ronald R. Krebs, attributes the problem to the Israeli occupation; the article is subtitled: “How the Occupation Is Destroying the Nation.” Which nation? Israel, of course, harmed by having its boot on the necks of unpeople.
Another illustration: In October, headlines trumpeted the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who had been captured by Hamas. The article in the
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
M
AGAZINE
was devoted to his family’s suffering. Shalit was freed in exchange for hundreds of unpeople, about whom we learned little, apart from sober debate as to whether their release might harm Israel.
We also learned nothing about the hundreds of other detainees held in Israeli prisons for long periods without charge.
Among the unmentioned prisoners are the brothers Osama and Mustafa Abu Muamar, civilians kidnapped by Israeli forces that raided Gaza City on June 24, 2006—the day before Shalit was captured. The brothers were then “disappeared” into Israel’s prison system.
Whatever one thinks of capturing a soldier from an attacking army, kidnapping civilians is plainly a far more serious crime—unless, of course, they are mere unpeople.
To be sure, these crimes do not compare with many others, among them the mounting attacks on Israel’s Bedouin citizens, who live in southern Israel’s Negev.
They are again being expelled under a new program designed to destroy dozens of Bedouin villages to which they had been driven earlier. For benign reasons, of course. The Israeli cabinet explained that ten Jewish settlements would be
founded there “to attract a new population to the Negev”—that is, to replace unpeople with legitimate people. Who could object to that?
The strange breed of unpeople can be found everywhere, including the United States: in the prisons that are an international scandal, the food kitchens, the decaying slums.
But examples are misleading. The world’s population as a whole teeters on the edge of a black hole.
We have daily reminders, even from very small incidents—for instance, last month, when Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives barred a virtually costless reorganization to investigate the causes of the weather extremes of 2011 and to provide better forecasts.
Republicans feared that it might be an opening wedge for “propaganda” on global warming, a nonproblem according to the catechism recited by the candidates for the nomination of what years ago used to be an authentic political party.
Poor sad species.
ANNIVERSARIES FROM “UNHISTORY”
February 4, 2012
George Orwell coined the useful term “unperson” for creatures denied personhood because they don’t abide by state doctrine. We may add the term “unhistory” to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.
The unhistory of unpersons is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries. Important ones are usually commemorated, with due solemnity when appropriate: Pearl Harbor, for example. Some are not, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by extricating them from unhistory.
Right now we are failing to commemorate an event of great human significance: the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s decision to launch the direct invasion of South Vietnam, soon to become the most extreme crime of aggression since World War II.
Kennedy ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam (by February 1962, hundreds of missions had flown); authorized chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve the rebellious population into submission; and set in motion the programs that ultimately drove millions of villagers into urban slums and virtual concentration camps, or “Strategic Hamlets.” There the villagers would be “protected” from the indigenous guerrillas whom, as the administration knew, they were willingly supporting.
Official efforts at justifying the attacks were slim, and mostly fantasy.
Typical was the president’s impassioned address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, where he warned that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.”
At the United Nations on September 25, 1961, Kennedy said that if this conspiracy achieved its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”
The short-term effects were reported by the highly respected Indochina specialist and military historian Bernard Fall—no dove, but one of those who cared about the people of the tormented countries.
In early 1965 he estimated that about 66,000 South Vietnamese had been killed between 1957 and 1961, and another 89,000 between 1961 and April 1965, mostly victims of the U.S. client regime or “the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases.”
The decisions were kept in the shadows, as are the shocking consequences that persist. To mention just one illustration:
S
CORCHED
E
ARTH
, by Fred Wilcox, the first serious study of the horrifying and continuing impact of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese, appeared a few months ago—and is likely to join other works of unhistory. The core of history is what happened. The core of unhistory is to “disappear” what happened.
By 1967, opposition to the crimes in South Vietnam had reached a substantial scale. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were rampaging through South Vietnam, and heavily populated areas were subjected to intense bombing. The invasion had spread to the rest of Indochina.
The consequences had become so horrendous that Bernard Fall forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity . . . is threatened with extinction . . . [as] . . . the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”
When the war ended eight devastating years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who called it a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication;
and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly.
Still to come was the bombing of the remote peasant society of northern Laos, executed with such magnitude that victims lived in caves for years to try to survive; and shortly afterward the bombing of rural Cambodia, which surpassed the level of all Allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World War II.
In 1970 U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had ordered “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves”—a call for genocide of a kind rarely found in the archival record.
Laos and Cambodia were “secret wars,” in that reporting was scanty and the facts are still little-known to either the general public or even educated elites, who nonetheless can recite by heart every real or alleged crime of official enemies.
Another chapter in the overflowing annals of unhistory.
In three years we may—or may not—commemorate another event of great contemporary relevance: the 900th anniversary of the Magna Carta.
This document is the foundation for what historian Margaret E. McGuiness, referring to the Nuremberg Trials, hailed as a “particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections.”
The Great Charter declares that “no free man” shall be deprived of rights “except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” The principles were later broadened to apply to men generally. They crossed the Atlantic and entered into the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which declared that no “person” can be deprived of rights without due process and a speedy trial.
The founders of course did not intend the term “person”
to actually apply to
all
persons. Native Americans were not persons. Neither were those who were enslaved. Women were scarcely persons. However, let us keep to the core notion of presumption of innocence, which has been cast into the oblivion of unhistory.
A further step in undermining the principles of the Magna Carta was taken when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which codifies Bush-Obama practice of indefinite detention without trial under military custody.
Such treatment is now mandatory in the case of those accused of aiding enemy forces during the “war on terror,” or optional if those accused are American citizens.
The scope is illustrated by the first Guantánamo case to come to trial under President Obama: that of Omar Khadr, a former child soldier accused of the heinous crime of trying to defend his Afghan village when it was attacked by U.S. forces. Captured at age 15, Khadr was imprisoned for eight years in Bagram and Guantánamo, then brought to a military court in October 2010, where he was given the choice of pleading not guilty and staying in Guantánamo forever, or pleading guilty and serving only eight more years. Khadr chose the latter.
Many other examples illuminate the concept of “terrorist.” One is Nelson Mandela, only removed from the terrorist list in 2008. Another was Saddam Hussein. In 1982 Iraq was removed from the list of terrorist-supporting states so that the Reagan administration could provide Hussein with aid after he invaded Iran.
Accusation is capricious, without review or recourse, and commonly reflecting policy goals—in Mandela’s case, to justify President Reagan’s support for the apartheid state’s crimes in defending itself against one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups”: Mandela’s African National Congress.
All better consigned to unhistory.
WHAT ARE IRAN’S INTENTIONS?
March 1, 2012
The January/February issue of
F
OREIGN
A
FFAIRS
featured the article “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option,” by Matthew Kroenig, along with commentary about other ways to contain the Iranian threat.
The media resound with warnings about a likely Israeli attack on Iran while the U.S. hesitates, keeping open the option of aggression—thus again routinely violating the U.N. Charter, the foundation of international law.
As tensions escalate, eerie echoes of the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are in the air. Feverish U.S. primary campaign rhetoric adds to the drumbeat.
Concerns about “the imminent threat” of Iran are often attributed to the “international community”—code language for U.S. allies. The people of the world, however, tend to see matters rather differently.
The Non-Aligned Movement, with 120 member nations, has vigorously supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium—an opinion shared by the majority of Americans (as surveyed by WorldPublicOpinion.org) before the massive propaganda onslaught of the past two years.
China and Russia oppose U.S. policy on Iran, as does India, which announced that it would disregard U.S. sanctions and increase trade with Iran. Turkey has followed a similar course.
Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. In the Arab world, Iran is disliked but seen as a threat only by a very small minority. Rather, Israel and the United States are regarded as the pre-eminent threat. A majority think that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons: In Egypt on the eve of the Arab Spring,
90 percent held this opinion, according to Brookings Institution/Zogby International polls.