Al-Arab Blog - مدونة العرب

GOD BLESS AMERICA !!!
By CHRIS WHITE
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/antiwarcom/message/14148

The author here is a former Marine Sergeant who is currently working on his
PhD in history at the University of Kansas. He served in the infantry from
1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan, and Doha,
Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace. The following is an
excerpt of a speech he delivered on September 11, 2003 at Bethel College, a
Mennonite institution of higher learning in rural Kansas.

And reading this should make any true American proud of their country,
because when it comes to butchery, we are the best !

Bob
********************

A Marine Veteran's Perspective
By CHRIS WHITE

Two years ago today, everyone in this room felt a sense of dread and fear
perhaps unlike anything they could have imagined. My heart still aches
whenever I think about the horrors that must have been felt by the victims
of that day. Something virtually unknown in this country is that Chileans
were also mourning on that day, but for a different reason. It was
twenty-eight years before to the day the U.S. government assisted the
military coup led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew the democratically
elected president, Salvador Allende, and led to the systematic murder of
3,000 Chileans and the torture of many thousands more, as well as a
seventeen year dictatorship that we whole-heartedly supported. We observe
9/11 as a date to reflect on the wrongful deaths of 3,000 Americans, but why
do we not mourn those who died at the hands of Americans?

Places such as Iran, where the CIA engineered a coup in 1953 that overthrew
the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed
the Shah and supported his secret police force, SAVAK, who tortured and
murdered thousands of Iranians, do not warrant American tears. Nor do the
countless number of Filipinos, who suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed
dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. The tens of thousands of Guatemalans who were
tortured, disappeared, and died at the hands of many U.S.-supported
dictators and puppet presidents in the four decades that followed the 1954
CIA coup that overthrew the democratically-elected
presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, do not receive official American sorrow.

Nor do the 500,000 Indonesians or the 200,000 East Timorese who were
slaughtered by the U.S.-backed dictator, General Suharto, after yet another
CIA coup in 1965. The 2 million Vietnamese, the 300,000 Laotians, and the
600,000 Cambodians whom the U.S. military murdered in the 1960s and 1970s
hold little place in our collective consciousness outside of Hollywood, and
there exists no national day of remembrance for them like we have for our
3,000 victims of 9/11. The silenced voices of tens of thousands of Haitians
killed by Marines in the early 1900s and at the hands of the U.S.-backed
Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier during the Cold War, deserve no day of mourning
in the country that applauded their sorrow and held contempt for their
pursuits of happiness.

When the people of Zaire tried their hand at democracy in 1961, the CIA
called for its death when it supported Patrice Lumumba's assassination and
then supported the dictator Mobutu's reign of terror for the next three and
half decades. Yet, Mobutu's tens of thousands of victims are virtually
unknown in the U.S., nor are the many Zairians who died at the hands of
U.S.-hired South African mercenaries during the 1960s, some of whom lynched
their victims, because they were opposing a dictatorship.

The thousands of Peruvians who were murdered by their U.S.-backed military
in the 1980s receive no official moments of silence on a sacred date, as
does our 9/11.

The Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, killed and tortured tens of
thousands of Haitians and Dominicans during his three-decades of U.S.
support, and yet we still have no day of mourning for his victims because we
encouraged their suffering.

The tens of thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Uruguayans, Bolivians,
Mexicans, and Paraguayans who were murdered under U.S.-backed dictators and
de facto dictators during the Cold War only add to the list of millions of
direct victims of U.S. intervention who go unnoticed, and in effect drop out
of history.

The hundreds of thousands more who were murdered in Iran, Angola, Grenada,
Cuba, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, and Iraq receive no
official memorials or official moments of silence in the U.S., because we
caused those deaths, and by definition of U.S. foreign policy, our victims
ALWAYS deserve what comes to them.

As an American citizen whose tax dollars have contributed toward some of the
above atrocities carried out in my name, I can not help but feel remorse. I
am saddened by the victims of 9/11/2001, but I am more saddened by the fact
that our nation as a whole has learned very little as a result of the
attacks. Instead of looking at the reasons why we were attacked, we have
declared war on everyone who hates us, hoping to stamp out this hate with
even more hate. It is a war of indeterminate length that will cause an
indeterminate amount of deaths, all in the name of creating the illusion
that we will somehow be safer as a result. Funny how the atrocities we have
carried out in the past have never correlated with an enhanced amount of
actual safety for Americans, even though the flag of national security has
always been waved to promote such policies.

This summer, I actually got to visit several of the above mentioned places
where U.S. intervention was supposed to lead to a safer America, the
hundreds of thousands of deaths we helped cause were somehow supposed to
have made us safer, but I didn't see it. In Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, and Nicaragua (the places I visited), School of the
Americas-trained officers, versed in the techniques of "low intensity
warfare" were given carte blanche in their efforts to enforce obedience to
dictatorships supported by our "democratic" governments.

Although all of Central America intrigues me greatly, El Salvador keeps
calling me back for some reason. You can feel a greater sense of sorrow in
the air once you cross the border into that country. One of San Salvador's
streets became darker as we walked past one of the infamous police stations,
once used to torture and disappear victims of our beloved dictators. But the
main reason I went to El Salvador was to visit the massacre site at El
Mozote, for it was there that in December of 1981, U.S.-trained officers
from the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military murdered between 800
and 1000 mostly women, children, and aged people, as part of a
scorched-earth policy carried out in Morazan province.

I visited this place to see first hand the greatness of US foreign policy.
The iron silhouette of a family in front of hundreds of the victims names on
boards hanging from a brick wall would have given George W. Bush a sense of
pride of the sacrifice we were then willing to make for US national
security. The blown up homes, the bomb craters, the monument over the
remains of 132 of the victims, 121 of which were children, the remaining
bone chips and blood-caked clothing in the fields, and the well in which 75
children were thrown to their deaths by the American-trained Salvadoran
officers, would have made Don Rumsfeld realize more than ever that whatever
price others need to pay for our freedom, is worth it.

As I walked away from the well I noticed a small film crew setting up in
front of the silhouette and realized that Rufina Amaya, the sole adult
survivor of those days of horror in El Mozote, was there. I got up the
courage to introduce myself, but what the hell could I say? My government
trained the men that ordered the deaths of her children and the rest of her
village, and she witnessed it all. On top of that, I am a former Marine. On
top of that, our government effectively rewarded the Salvadoran military for
the massacre of her village by increasing military aid after the incident. I
told her how sorry I was that my government caused so much harm to her
village and to her country.

So now we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American soldiers are baffled by
the fact that a lot of people there don't like them and they can't figure
out why the rest of the world opposed this last war (save a few dozen
weak-spined leaders who needed the dough). They, just like I used to be,
think that we would never do wrong on purpose, that our government may have
been wrong with the evidence and such to go to war, but that in the end, we
always had the best of intentions. I don't believe the Bush administration
has the intention of fighting terror, for we are the ones killing thousands
of innocent people, just as we have been doing for many decades all over the
world.

But let me make one thing clear: although I have been accused of it many
times, I do not hate America. I fear for it. And although I feel sorrow for
the victims of 9/11/2001, I feel that the lives of each of the victims of
U.S. aggression deserves as much attention, but their deaths are not mourned
by America, and until they are mourned by us and until we start caring about
the people we kill, we have reason to fear for the future.