The forgotten victims of September 11th

Since the atrocities in 2001, the 11th of September has become a national day of mawkish commemoration in the United States, despite the fact that the same kind of extreme Islamist terrorists are still wreaking havoc across Europe and the Middle East, largely thanks to the US invasion of Iraq that followed 9/11 and ended up creating the biggest lawless terrorism breeding ground on earth.

It would take an extremely blinkered view of history to not know that in the 1980s the US actually funded, supplied and trained Al Qaida in Afghanistan, when they were considered "brave freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation by the western media. 

It would take more historical ignorance/revisionism to fail to realise that the US intervened to fight alongside Islamist militias in Kosovo in the late 1990s, support for Islamist fanatics that was provided several years after the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in 1993!

And it would take a severe level of self-deception to deny that the September 11th terrorist attacks are "blowback" from the United States' foreign policy tactics from the mid 20th Century onward.

Over the space of just a few years we've seen Al Qaida morph from US funded and supported allies in places like Afghanistan and Kosovo into supposedly the greatest ever threat to American freedom in history. A threat that has been used to impose all kinds of unconstitutional and totalitarian attacks on the liberties of American citizens (and citizens of the rest of the world) such as the "Patriot" Act and the incredible expansion of NSA spying activities. 

This rapid conversion of Al Qaida from US allies to dangerous terrorists was bad enough, but the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies in 2013 were marred by the fact that the US government were straining at the leash to actually help Islamist terrorists in Syria by bombing the Syrian government and creating yet another Iraq style power vacuum for them to thrive in.

Just 12 years since after the 9/11 attacks and the US administration were assuming the American public to be so gullible and compliant that they would accept the US openly siding with the same kind of Islamist terrorists as those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and inordinately more innocent civilians in Iraq,Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and in terrorist atrocities across Europe too during the last 17 years.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility that would be necessary for the American public to accept the idea that the US political establishment openly siding with Al Qaida and other extreme Wahabi Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, simply because their terrorist activities there coincide with American imperialist interests is also on display in the fact that so many Americans still believe the absurd narrative that "America fights for freedom and democracy across the World".

40 years ago the US backed a violent coup d'etat in Chile and the
imposition of a brutal neoliberal regime led by Augusto Pinochet.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the American determination to actually undermine and destroy freedom and democracy came in Chile after a US-backed military coup that took place on September 11th 1973.

This coup marked the birth of the toxic neoliberal ideology pushed by the Chicago school pseudo-economists. 

In 1973 neoliberalism was a fringe anti-communist economic ideology supported by virtually nobody, today this bankrupt pseudo-economic gibberish is the global economic orthodoxy adhered to by almost all political parties in the West, and enforced across the globe by the machinery of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

To say that neoliberalism had a painful birth in Chile would be an understatement. The man that the neoliberals backed in Chile was a brutal dictator called General Pinochet. 

During his dictatorship over 3,000 people were "disappeared" (captured and tortured to death) whilst another 28,000 were detained without trial, most of them suffering torture and in many cases sexual abuse too. 

Aside from those tortured and killed and the families that survived them, other victims of this brutal US backed dictatorship included protesters that were burned alive in the streets by the police and musicians who had their fingers broken before being machine gunned to death.
 

The Americans weren't the only ones to back
Pinochet's murderous right-wing dictatorship,
The Thatcher government in Britain
supported him too.

  This brutal and oppressive Chilean regime was supported by the US administration because to successive American governments and their corporate backers, right-wing military dictatorship, imprisonment without trial, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings were an insignificant price to pay when it came to securing access to the Chilean economy so that it could be used as a playground for the neoliberal pseudo-economists from the Chicago School, and opened up for exploitation by US corporations.

The Chilean regime was part of the US financed Operation Condor, which was a plan to control the population of the southern cone of South America through the instillation of  brutal right-wing military dictatorships. 

The members of this anti-democratic group were the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, the Banzer military dictatorship in Bolivia, the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the 12 year military dictatorship in Uruguay. 

Undoubtedly the most brutal members of Operation Condor were the US backed Argentine Junta that joined in 1976, after the military coup against Isabel Perón.

Photos of the disappeared in Buenos Aires, 2004.

The US backed military dictatorship in Argentina was yet another playground for the Chicago school neoliberal pseudo-economists. 

Whilst the US backed military dictatorship were busy murdering an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians and torturing countless thousands more, "the Chicago Boys" were imposing their favoured economic ideology (deregulation, mass privatisation, lax tax enforcement, massive tax cuts for the rich, regressive tax hikes for the poor and ordinary, destruction of welfare provision, revocation of rights and liberties, wage repression ... ), resulting in poverty and chaos for millions of Argentines. 

The state terrorism of this savage regime meant that few people dared to speak out against this US-backed economic vandalism.

Some of the favoured tactics of the Argentine junta included torture, extrajudicial killings, throwing people out of aeroplanes without parachutes (death flights) and the kidnapping of pregnant women in order to steal their babies to give to supporters of the regime, after which the mothers were executed without trial.

In the late 1970s the US and the Argentine junta collaborated in "Operation Charly" to export their model of brutal right-wing dictatorship to Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) and in 1980 the Argentine junta, the US administration and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie collaborated to assist the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia which installed Luis García Meza. 

Meza was another brutal dictator and upon his instillation in power he immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, banned trade unions, silenced the press and oversaw the murder of over 1,000 people in just 13 months in power.

The 45th anniversary of the US backed military coup in Chile will pass virtually unnoticed in the United States, and great swathes of the public will continue to believe the comforting lies that the US has a history of promoting democracy and freedom, rather than a demonstrable history of deliberately and callously undermining them.

The millions of victims of the vile US backed Latin American dictatorships are not the only people that should be remembered on September the 11th. 

The countless global victims of the vile "greed is a virtue" neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology devised by the Chicago Boys, supported by the US government and born in Chile on this day in 1973 also just as worthy of remembrance as the victims of the September 2001 atrocities.
                        

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Where is the media outrage?

After spending an entire week banging on about Jeremy Corbyn laying a wreath four years ago in a Tunisian graveyard where none of the Munich terrorists are even actually buried, you would have thought that the mainstream media might have expressed at least a tiny bit of outrage at the Tory Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt meeting up with and fawning all over a bona fide war criminal. But somehow no.

Henry Kissinger was the architect of some of the United States' most disgusting and deadly foriegn policy interventions. Here are a few of his most notorious:

Cambodia and Laos

During the Vietnam War Kissinger was heavily involved in the secret and completely illegal bombing campaigns against the non-combatant states of Laos and Cambodia.

Over two million tons of bombs were dropped during these illegal bombing campaigns. That's more than the total tonnage that the United States dropped on Japan during the Second World War, and yet the US never actually declared war on either Laos or Cambodia!

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during these illegal US bombing raids, and people are still dying and being maimed today as a result of the thousands of tons of unexploded munitions, especially unexploded 'bomblets' from cluster bombs.

Latin America

Henry Kissinger was one of the chief architects of the US foreign policy of toppling stable democracies and replacing them with murderous right-wing military dictatorships.

In Chile the United States carried out a coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende that resulted in his death. Following on from the installation of the murderous Pinochet regime, Kissinger actively intervened to support Chilean political repression by cancelling a letter warning the Pinochet government not to carry out political assassinations.

In a grotesque letter to the Chilean dictator Kissenger actually portrayed the murderous coup-leading tyrant as a victim by saying "my evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist"!

In Argentina the United States turned a blind eye to an even more repressive right-wing dictatorship as they killed some 30,000 people (often by throwing them out of aircraft without parachutes). 

Thousands of others were detained in torture centres, and some 500 pregnant women had their babies stolen before being killed by the military junta. 

Documents declassified in 2016 revealed that Kissinger personally undermined the Carter administration's efforts to stop the killings.

The two most famous examples of US-backed Latin American military juntas were Argentina and Chile, but numerous other Latin American states were subjected to US-backed military take-overs during Kissinger's reign including Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay.

East Timor

In 1975 the brutal Suharto regime in Indonesia expressed their intention to annex the nascent state of East Timor. At a meeting in Jakarta Kissinger and the then US President Gerald Ford agreed to allow the annexation of East Timor with guarantees that US relations with the Suharto dictatorship would remain strong. Their only proviso was that the invasion be carried out after they'd Indonesian territory.

Suharto delayed the invasion by one day to allow time for Kissinger and Ford to leave, then invaded the territory. The death toll of the invasion and occupation was well over 100,000 (around one quarter of the Timorese population.

Bangladesh

When the US Consul in East Pakistan Archer Blood sent telegrams back to the US warning of "genocide" in the Bangladesh War of Liberation, Kissinger sneered at those who "bleed for the dying Bangladeshis". When Blood continued raising concerns he was stripped of his post.

During the period Kissinger also described the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a "bitch" and a "witch" and said "the Indians are bastards".

Russian Jews

During the flight of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel in the 1970s Kissinger said "if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern".

Recent times

It's hardly outlandish to call Kissinger a war criminal given that he's incredibly careful of where he travels to, for fear of being extradited to to face charges for his war crimes, and his support for murderous right-wing dictatorships.

Where is the outrage?

Kissinger's involvement with the grotesque war crimes in Cambodia and Laos are beyond question. His support for tyrannical military dictatorships across the world are a matter of public record. His contempt for the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union and his racist comments about Indians are also a matter of public record.

So how on earth does the Tory Foreign Secretary get away with fawning all over this absolute ghoul, and then actually bragging about it on Twitter?

The answer is twofold. The first reason is that the mainstream media is shockingly biased towards the Tory party, meaning they're loathe to draw attention to anything that might damage them. The second is that Kissinger is an American, and it doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands of people died in his illegal carpet bombing campaigns, or in the torture centres of the dictatorships he supported ... the professional scribes of the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy that Kissinger promoted will never hold him to account for his actions.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The growing danger of anti-intellectualism

The problem of anti-intellectualism in Britain has got so bad that members of the political establishment class now feel comfortable with actively instructing the public to ignore expert analysis and make important political decisions based on ignorance and blind instinct.

Michael Gove's "people in this country have had enough of experts" comment during the EU referendum debate was the most high profile example of an establishment politician actively promoting anti-intellectualism. It's no surprise to see such a sentiment being expressed by this particular politician. Michael Gove was the man who stuffed our schools with unqualified teachers and ideologically vandalised the comprehensive education system; Gove is a a man who has put ideology and ambition above expert opinion and verifiable evidence for his entire political career; and Gove was just the second person in the entire history of the United Kingdom without any legal qualification whatever to serve as Lord Chancellor, the first completely unqualified Lord Chancellor was his immediate Tory predecessor Chris Grayling and the third is his immediate successor Liz Truss.

Michael Gove is such an anti-intellectual that he actually said that deterring youngsters from ordinary backgrounds from attending university with the prospect of vast student loan debts is "all to the good".

Of course Michael Gove hates the idea of decent levels of public education and actively promotes anti-intellectualism. A burning contempt for experts and expertise is woven through his entire political career.

The problem of course is that this kind of vehement right-wing contempt towards education, experts and expertise is staggeringly dangerous because it feeds into the belligerent "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" mentality.

Anti-intellectualism and dangerous ideological puritanism go hand in hand. Ideological fanatics fear education and expertise because educated minds tend to subject things (including political ideologies) to critical scrutiny. The fear of ideological non-conformity is the reason that extremist ideologies tend to censor criticism and debate, ruthlessly punish dissent and promote anti-intellectual mentalities amongst the general public.

History has taught us that anti-intellectualism (book banning, simplistic propaganda, enforced ideological conformity, ideological purges of universities, government, the media and the civil service) is one of the main features of the road to totalitarianism.

Think of Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Fascist Italy, the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the US, Stalinism in Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile. All of these regimes dealt ruthlessly with intellectuals who stepped out of line by contradicting the official ideology of the state. They burned books; they purged the education system of non-conformists; they banned dissent; and they imprisoned, tortured and killed people for holding "wrong opinions". They embraced anti-intellectualism out of an ideological fear of informed political debate.

Ideological extremists demand certainty and enforce conformity, while the fields of science and philosophical investigation tell us that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that many of the greatest advancements in human history have come about when intellectuals have developed new paradigm-shifting ideas instead of conforming to the orthodoxies of their age. Thus, anti-intellectualism isn't just a dangerous mindset that goes hand in hand with political extremism, it impedes the development potential of humanity.

History tells us that it's when politicians begin instructing the public to despise experts and intellectuals, and promoting their fanatical political ideologies as unquestionable political truths, then things begin to get dangerous, and that's exactly what is going on in Britain today.

The French philosopher Albert Camus wrote that "the most incorrigible vice is that of an ignorance which fancies that it knows everything", and by calling for the British public to reject experts and intellectuals in order to embrace this kind of ignorance, right-wing politicians have demonstrated that the vice of ignorance is something that they're deliberately trying to foster and promote in British society.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The forgotten victims of September 11

Since the atrocities in 2001, the date September 11 has become a national day of American mawkishness and self-pity. The remembrance ceremonies in 2013 will be particularly Orwellian, given that Al Qaida, the official perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities, were back in vogue with the US government under their new brandname ISIS.

It would take an extremely blinkered view of history to not know that in the 1980s the US funded, supplied and trained Al Qaida in Afghanistan, when they were considered "brave freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation. It would take more historical ignorance/revisionism to fail to realise that the US intervened to fight alongside Islamist militias in Kosovo in the late 1990s, support for Islamist fanatics that was provided several years after the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Over the space of just a few years Al Qaida morphed from US funded and supported allies into supposedly the greatest ever threat to American freedom in history. A threat that has been used to impose all kinds of unconstitutional and totalitarian attacks on the liberties of American citizens (and citizens of the rest of the world) such as the "Patriot" Act and the incredible expansion of NSA spying activities. This rapid conversion of Al Qaida from US allies to dangerous terrorists was bad enough, but the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies in 2013 were marred by the fact that the US government were straining at the leash to help Islamist terrrorists in Syria by bombing the Syrian government and creating yet another Iraq style power vacuum for them to thrive in.

Just 12 years since after the 9/11 attacks and the US administration imagined that the American public were so gullible and compliant that they would accept the US openly siding with the same kind of Islamist terrorists as those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and have killed countless American soldiers (and inordinately more innocent civilians) in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade too.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility that would be necessary for the American public to accept the idea that the US political establishment openly siding with Al Qaida in Syria, simply because their terrorist activities there coincide with American imperialist interests, is also on display in the fact that so many Americans still believe the absurd narrative that "America fights for freedom and democracy across the World".

40 years ago the US backed a violent coup d'etat in Chile and the
imposition of a brutal neoliberal regime led by Augusto Pinochet.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the American determination to undermine and destroy freedom and democracy came in Chile after a US backed military coup that took place on September 11th 1973.

This coup marked the birth of the toxic neoliberal ideology pushed by the Chicago school pseudo-economists. In 1973 neoliberalism was a fringe anti-communist economic ideology supported by virtually nobody, today this bankrupt pseudo-economic gibberish is the global economic orthodoxy adhered to by almost all political parties in the West and enforced across the globe by the machinery of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

To say that neoliberalism had a painful birth in Chile would be an understatement. The man that the neoliberals backed in Chile was a brutal dictator called General Pinochet. During his dictatorship over 3,000 people were "disappeared" (captured and tortured to death) whilst another 28,000 were detained without trial, most of them suffering torture and in many cases sexual abuse too. Aside from those tortured and killed and the families that survived them, other victims of this brutal US backed dictatorship included protesters that were burned alive in the streets by the police and musicians that had their fingers broken before being machine gunned to death.

This brutal and oppressive Chilean regime was supported by the US administration because to successive American governments and their corporate backers, military dictatorship, imprisonment without trial, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings were an insignificant price to pay when it came to securing access to the Chilean economy so that it could be used as a playground for the neoliberal pseudo-economists from the Chicago School, and opened up for exploitation by US corporations.

The Chilean regime was part of the US financed Operation Condor, which was a plan to control the population of the southern cone of South America through the instillation of numerous brutal military dictatorships. The members of this anti-democratic group were the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, the Banzer military dictatorship in Bolivia, the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the 12 year military dictatorship in Uruguay. 

Undoubtedly the most brutal members of Operation Condor were the US backed Argentine Junta that joined in 1976, after the military coup against Isabel Perón.

Photos of the disappeared in Buenos Aires, 2004.

The US backed military dictatorship in Argentina was yet another playground for the Chicago school neoliberal pseudo-economists. Whilst the US backed military dictatorship were busy murdering an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians and torturing countless thousands more, the Chicago Boys were imposing their favoured economic ideology (deregulation, privatisation, lax tax enforcement, massive tax cuts for the rich, regressive tax hikes for the poor and ordinary, destruction of welfare provision, revocation of rights and liberties, wage repression ... ), resulting in poverty and chaos for millions of Argentines. The state terrorism of this savage regime meant that few people dared to speak out against this economic vandalism.

Some of the favoured tactics of the Argentine junta included torture, extrajudicial killings, throwing people out of aeroplanes without parachutes (death flights) and the kidnapping of pregnant women in order to steal their babies to give to supporters of the regime, after which the mothers were executed without trial.

In the late 1970s the US and the Argentine junta collaborated in "Operation Charly" to export their model of brutal right-wing dictatorship to Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) and in 1980 the Argentine junta, the US administration and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie collaborated to assist the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia which installed Luis García Meza. Meza was another brutal dictator and upon his instillation in power he immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, banned trade unions, silenced the press and oversaw the murder of over 1,000 people in just 13 months in power.

The 40th anniversary of the US backed military coup in Chile passed virtually unnoticed in the United States and great swathes of the public will continue to believe the comforting lies that the US has a history of promoting democracy and freedom, rather than a demonstrable history of deliberately and callously undermining them.

The millions of victims of the vile US backed Latin American dictatorships are not the only people that should be remembered on September the 11th. The countless global victims of the vile "greed is a virtue" neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology devised by the Chicago boys, supported by the US government and born in Chile on this day in 1973 also just as worthy of remembrance as the victims of the September 2001 atrocities.
                        

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR