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SelfDefense: To Kill An Empire

Terror stalks world sculpted from spare rib of a world wasted by America: its gunboat diplomacy, nuclear arsenal, vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its barbarous military interventions, its despots & dictators, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.
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Love Life? OR US Zombie Killers (english)
Ahrundati Roy isreview.com Kerala, India ahrundati_roy-AT-hotmail.com


Bush to Attack Mesopotamia on March 15 (The Ides of March)

"Beware the ides of March. [says the UN] " Caesar [Sadam] replies, "He is a dreamer, let us leave him. Pass." Caesar and his train approach the Senate. He sees the soothsayer in the crowd and confidently declares, "The ides of March are come". "Ay, Caesar; but not gone", replies the soothsayer. (Act 3, SceneI)

With his dying breath Caesar addresses Brutus [France], "Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!". Caesar falls lifeless upon the pedestal of Pompey's statue. Cinna [Condolezza Rice] rejoices, crying, "Liberty, Freedom! Tyranny is dead!"
Antony [Bin Laden] arrives and volunteers to die with his noble ruler, but Brutus replies,
“O Antony, beg not your death of us.
Though now we must appear bloody and cruel,
As, by our hands and this our present act,
You see we do, yet see you but our hands
And this the bleeding business they have done:
Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful;
And pity to the general wrong of Rome—“

Brutus also tells Antony that he loves Caesar and assures Antony he will reveal the reason why he killed Caesar as soon as they have appeased the people of Rome
Act 3, Scene II
Brutus agrees to Antony's requests and the assassins depart, leaving Antony alone with the body of Caesar. Antony vows to seek revenge on Brutus and his cohorts by launching a civil war:
“Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.”

Antony turns the crowd against Brutus
Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?

People run through the streets, screaming "Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay! Let not a traitor live!" They rush to burn the homes of Brutus and his conspirators and Antony rejoices:
Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt!

Act 4, Scene I
Antony meets with Octavius [Bush Sr.] and their henchman Lepidus [GW Bush Jr.] to decide who must be murdered to ensure they regain power. After Lepidus leaves on an errand, Antony and Octavius belittle him, comparing him to a horse that "must be taught and train'd and bid go forth"


March 8, 2003
Dear distinguished readers and editors,
Nothing can stop Mr. Bush of the US from committing the world to suicide and tragedy.
I have written innumerable essays on the fallacy of security through war and I ask you to review these documents and sentiments along with my final essay on DEAF Zombies.

Thank you for the years and your ears,
In memory of what might have been,

A. ROY
Kerala, India

Oh Love, Where art Thou?

ARE YOU LISTENING YET US ZOMBIE FASCISTS?
The addicted zombies known as the US citizenry need a few more 911 wakeup disasters.

They don’t listen to the world that keeps telling them to stop killing in Palestine, Colombia, Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t listen as the world tells them to stop consuming 7 to 10 times their share of the world’s resources and to stop polluting 8 to 12 times their share of toxic pollutions.

In the orgy of decadence known as the USA Empire almost 500 billion dollars of drugs are force-fed to make the year pass by. An equal cost is paid defending the right of the US citizenry to this madness. Enraptured in this un-Holy stupor, the citizenry cruise elegantly in their fancy cars and imagine they are the pinnacle of human development.

They are not. The US restricts civil liberties and spends trillions of dollars on its security. They will lose. They will suffer terribly. They will not listen. They cannot care. They are deranged beasts. If USA leaders listened they would ask for forgiveness for all the murders, the destructive economic policies and for all the weapons they have lent to evil governments like Israel, Colombia and Indonesia.

The USA is simply another word for the violence of the evil lies. It is not a war for oil or a war of the Euro currency versus the US Dollar, this is a war that engulfs the whole of the world at this time. It infects our hearts and no transplant can heal the damage. The Bush war is the endgame for domination and enslavement. As a USA Zombie you receive its lifestyle of addictions and death worship.

The world works through symbolic stories. These stories and our faith in them creates existence and identity. For many centuries these stories were from the Bible and the improved version: the Quoran. For a hundred years the story has been of progress, technology and the western values. Now there is no story and existence is threatened.

The self-defense 911 bombings of New York and Washington DC were the greatest artistic performance in modern history. Like the sacking of Rome, the Fall of Saigon and Custer’s Last Stand, these performances echo on to inspire artists and warriors everywhere. Time stands still.

911 combined the white magic of the cinemascape with the black magic of righteous terrorism. 911 combined the white light of creative expression with the black light of a destructive martyrdom. 911 erased all of the stories of the world. The thousand points of light and George Bush Sr.’s City on a Hill are obliterated and forever dead. Never again will people anywhere fall for such vile beguilements, the wicked entrancement of a sucker’s story.

The smoke and confusion of the 911 battlefield is the vacuum we now inhabit. Only one story leads away from the madness of the USA, the Yankee gringos and the Gods of the Corporations. The new story and the symbolic existence that can power good people forward is the story of a permanent war, the never ending story of resistance in solidarity and victory. AND so we shall see who is the stronger and the faithful.

From Guantanamo Bay, Kundoz, Shatilla, the Bay of Pigs, the prisons of Pinochet and the Shah, Colombia’s mass-gravesites, the US-John McCain-bombed hospitals of Hanoi, the killing-fields of Central America and a narrow strip of Palestinian existence and death in Gaza, … spirits soar. We man the cockpit of your guilt. We are coming. YOU are without hope.

This is our story…

A strange story on Kundoz found at: www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4306995,00.html

WAGING PEACE
www.wagingpeace.org/articles/01.11/011118royarundhati.htm

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with-and bombed-since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys-many of them orphans-who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women...

There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they'll all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony-every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

It wouldn't make any sense at all to make cheaper missiles, for example, to the Carlyle Group-described by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper-the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel-says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential government-clients.

Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.

Then there's that other branch of traditional family business-oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.)

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the 'Clash of Civilisations' and the 'Good vs Evil' discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been-a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders-have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear-without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?

This article initially appeared on OutlookIndia.com on 18 Oct. 2001 via Znet.com

Perspectives on Terrorist Attacks

www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

It's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.


The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

The terror that stalks the world was sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink



csf.colorado.edu/envtecsoc/2002/msg00603.html

Since it is September 11th that we're talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance. This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the
citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: Welcome to the World.

Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. ``Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible," said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate, then the U.S. Secretary of State.

After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential palace. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we'll never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply `disappeared'. Firing squads conducted public executions. Concentration camps and torture chambers were opened across the country.

The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. For seventeen years, the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock, of routine `disappearances', of sudden arrest and torture. Chileans tell the story of how the musician Victor Jara had his hands cut off in front of a crowd in the Santiago stadium. Before they shot him, Pinochet's soldiers threw his guitar at him and mockingly ordered him to play.

Some people think that international law gives the U.S. the right to bomb Afghanistan. It does not. In fact the U.S. has a long history of disregarding international law.

The United Nations Charter, under Article 51, gives a state the right to repel an attack that is ongoing or imminent as a temporary measure until the UN Security Council can take steps necessary for international peace and security. This does not include the right to retaliate after an attack. And it certainly doesn't give the U.S. the right to attack Afghanistan in retaliation for a crime it believes (but has yet to prove) was committed by someone living there.

The United States remains the only western democracy opposed to the creation of a permanent and independent International Criminal Court (ICC). "The American Servicemembers' Protection Act"(approved by the House on May 10th, 282 to 137) threatens to cut off military aid to countries that ratify the ICC treaty (except for NATO, Israel and Egypt), and forbids the US military from supporting any UN peacekeeping missions unless they were exempted from ICC prosecution. It would prohibit U.S. co-operation with ICC inspectors even in a case of international terrorism and give the U.S. President "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release from captivity of U.S. or allied personnel detained or imprisoned against their will by or on behalf of the Court, including military force." In other words, if U.S. servicemen were found to be terrorists, the U.S. would not turn allow them to be tried.

The U.S. does not even recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court. It withdrew from it in 1986 when the Court condemned the U.S. for attacking Nicaragua, mining its harbors and funding the contras. In that case, the court rejected U.S. claims that it was acting under Article 51 "in defense of Nicaragua's neighbors" and found the U.S. guilty of terrorism.

The Bush administration has refused to support the biological weapons treaty being drafted at the United Nations which 143 nations have already ratified. George Bush has announced that the U.S. plans to withdraw from the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and violate a ban on weapons in space with his national missile defence system.

The Bush administration has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to cut emissions of six greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride), an important first step toward reversing global warming and climate change. The Protocol only required the U.S. to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by seven percent. With four percent of the world's population, the U.S. accounts for about 25 percent of the Earth's greenhouse gas emissions.

Last September, the Bush administration refused to join 163 other nations at the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

The United States is the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons during war.

Since World War II, the United States has bombed the following nations:
China (1945-46, 1950-53);
Korea (1950-53);
Guatemala (1954, 1967-69);
Indonesia (1958);
Cuba (1959-60);
Congo (1964);
Peru (1965);
Laos (1964-73);
Vietnam (1961-73);
Cambodia (1969-70);
Grenada (1983);
Libya (1986);
El Salvador (1980s);
Nicaragua (1980s);
Panama (1989);
Iraq (1991-99);
Bosnia (1995);
Sudan (1998);
Yugoslavia (1999).

And now Afghanistan.
And now Iraq
And soon Iran, N. Korea, Colombia, Lybia, Syria, Russia
During the last 20 years the United States has committed the following acts of terrorism: The shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981; the bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984; the bombing of Libya in 1986; the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987; the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988; the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989; the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, the latter destroying a pharmaceutical plant which provided for half the impoverished nation's medicine.

The government of the United States is the major obstacle to international law and to peace and justice on our planet today.

Join us in opposing the U.S. war on EVERYTHING…

Join us in struggling for a world of peace and justice.
(The above list of nations bombed by the United States since World War II was included in an excellent article by Arhundati Roy entitled "War is Peace". The full text may be found on the outlookindia website: www.outlookindia.com )

(According to a report written in October of 1993, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798 - 1993 there have been 234 instances in which the US has used its armed forces abroad, including five declared wars: the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1846, the Spanish American War of 1898, World War I declared in 1917, and World War II declared in 1941. Adding Iraq, Bosnia, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan from Arundhati Roy's list brings the total to 239, -if you count the war on the people of Iraq from 1991 to present as one instance.)

(Zoltan Grossman recently revised a report entitled, "From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan: a century of U.S. military interventions". It is available on the web: www.zmag.org/list2.htm. This list illustrates what indigenous leaders have long called the "longest undeclared war in history": the U.S. war on First Nations.)

www.isreview.org


Roy Shoots From Wide Hips
by Steven Ames 2:43pm Sat Mar 8 '03
info-AT-circleoflifefoundation.org


Roy is the only author who puts it together. Wish we had more like her, wish I lived in India. The backup documents show her consistency in shaming the US record of atrocities.

I agree with great sadness that the US has not, cannot learn its lesson. Fire with fire - sometimes force only listens to force, even Gandhi recognized this.

History should judge the European leaders more harshly than the derranged Bush and his US zombies.

Why don't people talk much more now about how to punish the US - how to extend the conflict - how to bring the war home???

??? Steve

www.circleoflifefoundation.or
 
 
 

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