The Terror That Goes Around Comes Around
An examination of why the United States chooses to give material support to jihadists, plus the terror we breed at home.
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
In December of 2011, a Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi was out selling produce from his food cart on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. Unemployment in Tunisia, particularly for the young, was, and still is, staggering, affecting more than a quarter of the population. Bouazizi, 26-years old at the time, had been selling goods on the street for much of his life to make ends meet. He was consistently harassed by corrupt police officials and forced to pay them bribes. On the morning of December 17th, the cops got on Bouazizi for not having the proper permits to be a street vendor, a mere pretext for extracting yet another bribe from the impoverished young man. Without money to give, the cops beat him, turned over his food cart, and confiscated other items of his. Immediately after the stealing of his livelihood, Bouazizi went to the local governor’s office and demanded to be seen and have his items returned. He was refused. This was the end of his rope. Bouazizi got some gasoline, stood in the middle of traffic outside the office, cried out "How do you expect me to make a living?” and set himself on fire.
News of Bouazizi’s immolation quickly spread throughout Tunisia. Mass street protests erupted in response. Bouazizi’s plight was representative of the widespread poverty of the Tunisian people and the corruption of their government. Bouazizi, in a coma since his burning, died in the hospital 18 days later, stirring up further protests. Tunisian president Ben Ali fled the country amid intensifying unrest.
The Tunisian protests inspired similar unrest throughout the Arab world. These uprisings came to be known as the Arab Spring. In every country where people took to the streets the popular demonstrations faced violent crackdowns. The most intense uprisings were concentrated in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed after a NATO bombing campaign against him, plunging the country into chaos. Syria has been suffering a civil war ever since the uprisings (with the U.S. and NATO backing anti-Government jihadists while Russia backs the Assad regime), causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yemen has been bombed into oblivion by U.S.-backed Saudi forces as the Saudi royal family fears an uprising of the Houthi rebels. Though some limited success for the Arab Spring came in Egypt with the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and the democratic election of Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the new leader was quickly overthrown in a military coup.
Out of the violent quashing of the Arab Spring and the calamitous U.S. invasion of Iraq, the grotesque beast known as ISIS came roaring out of Iraq and began riding roughshod throughout the region. Seeking to institute a new caliphate, harkening back to the years of the Ottoman Empire, ISIS carved out a bloody path of destruction and desecrated many historical sites in their wake. The Iranian journalist and novelist Salar Abdoh writes in his book Out of Mesopotamia about being imbedded with the coalition of Iranian, Afghan, Syrian, and Kurdish forces who fought back against ISIS:
In this war, nothing – nothing at all – made sense. People appeared and disappeared, ancient animosities suddenly boiled over, heads were cut off with such fierce regularity that it made you doubt the proper digits of your century, and there were so many sides and fronts and realignments that when you managed to grab a sliver of reliable Internet long enough to read a foreign paper, where they referred to the simple men you marched alongside as men who committed atrocities, you began to doubt everything, especially yourself: Am I a part of some beastliness?
When ISIS was at its height, it was paying its fighters good monthly wages and distributing its plunder throughout the rank and file. Young men, not unlike Mohamed Bouazizi, faced with dwindling prospects, living under constant warfare, subjected to the deathly vicissitudes of their corrupt governments, having witnessed the failures of the Arab Spring, and having vanishingly few ways left to affirm themselves, found purpose and a kind of security within the extremist ideology of ISIS.
Years after Bouazizi’s death, in 2015, the situation in Tunisia, post-“revolution,” remained largely unchanged if not worse, with youth unemployment at around 40 percent. “The youth of Kasserine are waiting for jobs. They are unemployed,” said a Tunisian woman, a mother to another man who set himself aflame shortly after Bouazizi. “Why do they go to Chaambi Mountain [a jihadist refuge]? Why do they join ISIS? This is all because of poverty and misery, and the government doesn’t care about them,” she said to The Guardian. Another young Tunisian man, himself unemployed and now turning towards making art, said, “You have one man who is unemployed. He doesn’t even have money to buy a coffee. Another man joins jihad and earns a lot of money. Should we stay unemployed without money, or join jihad and earn money?”
One cannot fully understand the enduring power and attraction of Islamic extremism in the Middle East today without apprehending how and why the Western powers deliberately cultivated this ideology for their own short-term interests.
The world that each and every one of us lives in today was forged in the fires of the Cold War. But what was a “cold” war for the United States was, in fact, an unbearably hot war for the Third World. One can examine multiple categories of horrors that were bequeathed to millions of people by America’s ideological adherence to capitalism and its own exceptionalism throughout the post-WWII era. One horror that is perhaps the least understood by those in the West, precisely because it has hit us so close to home, is America’s bolstering of jihadism.
In the mid-20th century, fanatical anti-Communists in the U.S., within the CIA in particular, saw the religions of the Third World, particularly Islam, as an effective bulwark against the materialist ideology of Marxism that was ascendant in places such as Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala – all of which experienced U.S. invasions or CIA-backed coup d’états in response to their attempts at national sovereignty and freedom from Western control.
U.S. officials were so worried about other countries standing up to America by, for example, not allowing U.S. oil companies to extract their natural resources to make Western oil executives rich while immiserating the locals in the process (which the CIA overthrew Iran’s Mossadegh for), that nothing was off the table when dealing with such countries that would not obey U.S. dictates. The West, overestimating both the military and diplomatic influence of the Soviet Union, assumed that any vaguely leftist nation must be in the pocket of the dreaded Kremlin and therefore an existential threat.
The Domino Theory, that if one country “fell” to Communism then others would follow suit, was the guiding gospel for U.S. officials during the Cold War. One whiff of anti-Western sentiment coming from a Third World leader, whether that sentiment was explicitly communist or not, was seen as a very real challenge to U.S. power and therefore intolerable. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made this rationale explicit when he urged President Nixon to covertly overthrow Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. Kissinger wrote: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, …the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it."
The U.S. used different means to handle each country that made the mistake of putting a socialist in charge. CIA-backed death squads and military coups were the most frequent choice, used heavily in Latin America. In the Middle East, the U.S. found Islam to be the ideal unifying anti-communist force.
In the 1950s and 60s, the ascendant political movement in the Arab world was pan-Arabism, a solidarity movement whereby people’s of the Arab nations could band together as one to assert their collective interests regionally and in opposition to Western control. The Middle East, suffering from sectarianism caused largely by the Sykes-Picot Treaty (which was a Western invention that drew the borders of Arab nations after WWI not based on any existing ethnic divisions or cultural history but instead seemingly at random by two White guys), found the hope of pan-Arabism to be electrifying. For the West, this would simply not do. As journalist Abdel Bari Atwan explains:
The United States, UK, and European powers were also deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge, left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to support Islamist tendencies within each country…
The U.S. saw Saudi Arabia as key to its efforts in stoking Islamic identity as a way to undermine a broader Arab identity. Saudi Arabia, controlled by its royal family, exports its own form of radical Islam, known as Wahabism, by giving material and ideological support to extremist groups. The Saudi royals are concerned chiefly with their own perpetuation, power, and wealth, and are happy to quash any form of secular pan-Arabism, communism, or Islamism that threatens their royal status. The country is well known for its rampant public beheadings and suppression of dissidents. Despite their many human rights violations, the U.S. remains boson buddies with the House of Saud through thick and thin because, other than the hold that their massive oil reserves have over the West, the regressive royal family serves as a factionalizing force against left-wing movements in the Middle East. When Egypt’s Nasser cracked down on the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the CIA assisted Brotherhood members in moving to Saudi Arabia and continued funding the group.
“The CIA nudged Saudi Arabia to create the Muslim World League in 1962 as a way to organize people in the Third World on the basis of religion,” writes Vijay Prashad in Washington Bullets, “and to suggest the dangerous foreignness of communism, left-wing nationalism, trade unionism and even anti-clericalism.” (Painting left-wing reform as something stirred by outside agitators is an old tactic of right-wing reactionaries. In the U.S., Southern slaveholders often blamed slave insurrections on white and freemen abolitionists giving the “contented” slaves undue ideas.)
To further demonstrate the cynicism of the Western powers, the U.S. has given billions of dollars of weapons to jihadists in their efforts to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad - those jihadists going on to slaughter entire villages - while at the same time, a leftist group such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have long fought against the brutal authoritarian regime in Turkey, were at the forefront in battling ISIS, and who fight for a democratic, socialist society with women’s equality being central to their aims, are labeled as a terrorist organization by the U.S. so as to appease Turkey, a NATO ally. Joe Biden even went so far as to say “there is no substantive difference” between the PKK and Daesh (ISIS).
Some Western leaders were quite naked about their tactics in the Middle East. The Ice Queen herself, Margaret Thatcher, once said, “It is in our own interest that [Arab Nations] build on their own deep religious traditions. We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.” Prashad spoke to one U.S. official who said, “Pan-Islam was not, to us, seen as a strategic threat. There were bad guys doing bad things to people on the Left, to Nasser. They were fighting the pinkos. So, we didn’t see pan-Islam as a threat.”
Better to have a radical Islamist than a radical communist, so the Western capitalist line of thought went. Then, once the predictable terror starts against ongoing Western meddling and oppression, you can blame it on a backwards religion, rather than a forward-thinking socialist revolution. “Backwardness was better than communism, and backwardness could be sold ideologically as authentic to the cultural world of Asia,” Prashad writes. “It was communism that was foreign; backwardness was indigenous.”
Our funding of Islamic extremists in opposition to communists was seen perhaps most troublingly in Afghanistan in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Seeing an opportunity to draw the Soviet Union into a costly, drawn out conflict, the U.S., through the CIA, began arming, training, and funding the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen to the tune of billions of dollars (remind anyone of anything?). As the journalist John Pilger summarizes:
For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth - with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on condition that he was made prime minister - which he was.
As is well understood today, elements of the Mujahedeen morphed into Al Qaeda. Their members benefited from some of the best U.S. training. “More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6,” Pilger writes, “with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.”
After 9/11, once the U.S. saw fit to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan in retaliation for the threat it had created, the impoverished country devolved into a 20 year nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of lives were violently taken and trillions of dollars were wasted. For what? With the taste for the American Forever Wars beginning to sour back home, in 2021 the U.S. finally retreated with its tale between its legs. Afghanistan swiftly fell back again to the Taliban, surprising only those who knew nothing of the corruption and mendacity of the U.S. efforts to “rebuild” the country, or of the litany of U.S. war crimes committed against innocents in Afghanistan which drove many civilians into the arms of the Taliban.
The Taliban, despite, or perhaps because of, their strict enforcement of religious pieties, were able to maintain, before the U.S. invasion, a minimal level of order and safety compared to the ravages of tribal warlords who were bought and paid for by the CIA and dominated the countryside during the U.S. occupation, kidnapping and raping children and ransoming them from their families.
Pilger interviewed one Afghan woman who described these horrors:
Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11, 2001.
Seeing a short-term advantage for their Cold War tinkerings, the Western powers used Islam as a way to divide and conquer the Middle East. The rise of nationalists and socialists in figures such as Nasser and Mossadegh scared Washington spooks half to death. Later, having effectively quashed pan-Arabism and the Soviet Union through mass subterfuge and violence, the United States found that not only had it menaced millions of people who knew very well the depths of Western interference in their lives, but that many of these people had now been radicalized along religious lines.
As journalist Murtaza Hussain explains:
Islamists…long ago took note of how successful the United States had been at crushing secular nationalist and leftist movements in their countries. As a result they’ve girded themselves for much more suffering and a much longer fight. “We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the C.I.A. can snuff out,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once said about the clerical-led Islamic Republic he leads. After four decades, there’s reason to consider that he might be right.
The Islamic terror that could have been predicted decades before began arriving at our gates. Embassies, warships, and even New York’s World Trade Center were all targets that preceded the 9/11 attacks. America, looking for the next good war after the horrors of Vietnam, was ready for a new total evil to combat. Radical Islam was only too ready to provide.
The current fanatical anti-Islamic attitude in the West – resulting from the terroristic blowback to the West’s own bolstering of both Islamic extremists and tyrannical puppet governments in the Middle East as a way of quashing leftist, nationalist, and anti-imperialist movements – feeds the ideology of radical Islam. Western violence perpetrated against Muslims confirms the central tenants of jihadism, namely that the West desires the absolute obliteration of Muslim culture and the eradication of Islamists. And this vicious cycle is exactly what the neoliberal imperialists in the West want to maintain. Our Orwellian Forever Wars are extremely beneficial to powerful interests, ensuring not only a permanent war economy, but a permanent wartime state of mind. As James Baldwin wrote, the “myth and menace of global war are nothing more and nothing less than a coward’s means of distracting attention from the real crimes and concerns of this Republic.” And on we march into a maelstrom of death, as weapons manufacturers receive billions of our dollars every year, our intelligence agencies are turned inward to study, influence, and corral the domestic populace, and increasing use of military force only begets increasing threats to our security.
For precisely how long a society can keep up this state of affairs, where Western citizens, or rather, those who think they are citizens, are forced, in the name of anti-terror, to sacrifice not only their own dear civil liberties, those things which they are taught make their country better than all the rest, but are even forced to give up their very human faculties of trust, community, cooperation, and regard for their fellow men, thus bringing them to the level of jackals, all in service of an imperialist project which they have no say over and, indeed, which they materially benefit from very little if at all (did my minimum wage get raised because of the Afghans vaporized in an instant?), will be just as long as the Western conscience fails to recognize that its fate is inextricably bound with the fates of the least of these, our brethren. So long as we manufacture everlasting enemies, in other words, so long as we permanently menace an entire people, the whole of our society will be under threat from both within and without by that same menace we think to be our salvation.
How much easier it is to demonize the other, to externalize evil, to thereby rationalize the evil within yourself, than to recognize your state’s enforcement of imperial violence – a natural course for capitalism – in the form of coups, resource extraction, political meddling, outright war making, the funding of death squads, and, finally, genocide. Once an absolute evil is identified, in this case radical Islam, all our means are justified. Nothing is off the table. Though we may lose any semblance of humanity, we’ll make damn sure that they shuffle off before we do. The absolute evil is the imperialist’s wet dream.
And how convenient for the boot-licking rationalists who would rather identify radical Islam as the greatest cultural enemy of the West instead of identifying the West as the greatest global exporter of violence and totalitarianism. Figures who answered the call of duty to defend the odious machinations of their state in the name of antiterrorism by extolling the virtues of Western rationalism and “civilization” – figures such as Christopher Hitchens (who defended the criminal invasion of Iraq), Sam Harris (who, among other questionable views, defends the use of torture in certain cases and religious profiling of people at security checkpoints), and all the other New Atheists who, lacking a historical appreciation of the motives of empires, became cheerleaders for imperialist projects in delusional attempts to make themselves feel better about their genocidal “enlightened” cultures – can go suck a big, black Muslim dick. It’s exactly what their countries were asking for. A Marxist dick was just too much for them to handle.
Christopher Hitchens often characterized practitioners of Islam as those “who have declared themselves enemies of civilization.” For someone who considered himself a humanist, this statement is breathtaking in its reductionism and dangerous in the kind of Manichaean worldview it creates. Tell me, oh dead man, what kind of “civilization” murders 6 million people in the name of avenging a single terror attack? How are we to appraise the morality of a civilization that uses threats, torture, and industrialized slaughter as its main modes of communication with the rest of the world? Why should people respect a civilization that imprisons a greater proportion of its own population than any other country? I could go on. There is no shortage of examples to draw from to demonstrate the galling hypocrisy of a Westerner proclaiming the superiority of their civilization in the face of a terrorist threat which it itself gives both figurative and literal ammunition to on a daily basis. It would seem to me that Hitchens, despite how much he rightfully honors the great English radical Thomas Paine – a man who never gave up his revolutionary ideals even in the face of death, something which decidedly cannot be said of Hitchens – is nevertheless unable to banish the endemic chauvinism, elitism, and stubborn imperialism that runs deep in his English blood. One may sadly not be surprised, if Buckingham Palace was the target of a terrorist attack and Hitchens was still around today to comment on it, to hear him abandon all his previous criticisms towards the hereditary monarchy and instead cry out in all earnestness “God save the King!”
Sam Harris, in a lengthy piece dedicated to defending himself against the many questionable and even reprehensible things he has said, made very clear what he thinks about the notion that those in the Middle East actually have some proper grievances against the West:
At moments like this, we inevitably hear—from people who don’t know what it’s like to believe in paradise—that religion is just a way of channeling popular unrest. The true source of the problem can be found in the history of Western aggression in the region. It is our policies, rather than our freedoms, that they hate. I believe that the future of liberalism—and much else—depends on our overcoming this ruinous self-deception. Religion only works as a pretext for political violence because many millions of people actually believe what they say they believe: that imaginary crimes like blasphemy and apostasy are killing offenses.
Firstly, liberalism’s greatest enemy has always been the enduring tendency for liberals themselves to kowtow to the regressive and morally corrupting forces of authoritarian capitalism in the interest of order instead of standing up for true justice. As George Orwell explained:
It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy.” Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism. To fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment.1
Liberals stand for nothing and die for nothing save their own parochial interests, despite their kind words and sympathetic brows. While the nature of Sharia Law, a consistent bogeyman for those such as Harris, is indeed anathema to much of liberalism’s ideal of a free and open society, it comes nowhere near the immediate threat of U.S. liberals and conservatives joining arm-in-arm to support the gutting of our civil liberties, the militarization of our police, and the repressive surveillance exerted by the marriage of our intelligence agencies and multinational corporations all in service of “anti-terror.”
Secondly, Harris emphasizes that Islam “only works as a pretext for political violence” because people actually believe in it. It would seem that Harris thinks if you get rid of the hold that Islam has on much of the Middle East, then all this pesky anti-Western violence will cease, as if a bombed and beleaguered people require religion to act on their understandable bloodlust. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by the Bosnian Black Hand anarchists because they really believed that he needed to die. No religion was required. Timothy McVeigh blew up hundreds of innocent people in Oklahoma City as a reaction against our creeping police state because he really believed that our militarized law enforcement was at war with the American people.
Whatever ideological or religious finery a person chooses to dress up their aggrievement with, it does not change the fact that a people menaced by injustice will be more likely to menace others in return. A terrorist’s reactionary violence can be justified with religious belief, nationalism, racial identity, class background, or any various political ideology. The shortest solution to such violence is not to focus on eradicating any one of these justifications for it - a new justification will be found - but to remove the forces and structures of the original injustice. In other words, fine, Harris, let’s magically get rid of religion. You’re still going to have lots of people in the Middle East who want to blow us up in the same way that their wife and kids were blown up by U.S. bombs. When a person is faced with such world-ending darkness, revenge is often all they have left. They don’t need religion to justify their actions that follow. The radical and highly influential Jordanian cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a man who has spurred many an Islamist to pick up a gun, once explained the attraction of jihadism:
This movement will not end because people are still looking for solutions to the problems of the dictatorial regimes and the conflict with Israel. Leftist, socialist, and Muslim Brotherhood groups have all tried and failed to address these problems. But the youth are still looking for new models to create change.
So long as Western crimes are inflicted upon the people of the Middle East, religion or no, the West will remain a target of reactionary violence.
In a recent podcast, Sam Harris said that he was “appropriately humbled” by America’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Happy as this newfound humility is, Harris’ supposed change of heart comes at an unimaginable price. Need we be reminded of the countries destroyed, the regions destabilized, the millions of lives decimated, whole families obliterated, children starved, hundreds tortured in secret prisons, trillions of our dollars wasted, and, let us not forget, the many Westerners who flung themselves to the level of barbaric beasts all in the name of country and civilization? Harris needs reminding of these things daily.
Our complicity in these immense crimes mortifies our souls in the same way we mortify the flesh of those we torture in nightmare dungeons such as Abu Ghraib and, to this day, Guantanamo Bay. Harris makes no mention of any contrition for his role in cheerleading the American Crusade against Islam, despite the fact that he was confronted early and often by those who warned us against the true nature of America’s War On Terror, a terror it itself birthed into existence and raised up to the global force it is today.
Harris, lacking a deep understanding of the complex political and cultural history of the Middle East, made the galling claim that the West – bruised as it was from the 9/11 attacks, a comparatively tame event to the horrors unleashed by the U.S. throughout the world since WWII – was ordained, by virtue of its “values,” to control the fates of millions of Muslims, millions who had tried again and again, whether through the explicitly leftwing nationalism of Mohammed Mossadegh or through the nonviolent uprisings of the Arab Spring, to secure their own liberation but had been routed at every turn by Western imperialists and their puppet regimes. That some of these disillusioned people, apprehending the astounding moral hypocrisy, cultural vapidity, obscene decadence, and spiritual wasteland of the Western “democratic” powers, instead found meaning and purpose in the dangerous utopian illusions of radical Islam, abetted for decades by the West, is as understandable as it is frightening.
We don’t need a feeling of humility from those such as Harris. They must be brought to feel ignominious for their imperialist apologetics and must remain silent on matters of grave importance which they know nothing about.
The New Atheists and the jihadists deserve each other.
Besides dressing down religious leaders with a mixture of erudition and acid, Christopher Hitchens reserved a goodly amount of verbal abuse for those he labeled as apologists for “civilization’s” enemies. He lamented, or perhaps more accurately saw an opportunity in, his former role model Gore Vidal succumbing to, as Hitchens put it, his “crackpot strain” in the wake of 9/11. Vidal, a longtime critic of America’s imperial projects, did not put it past the Bush administration to have known about the 9/11 plot beforehand (We do know now that the CIA was aware of the al-Qaeda hijackers being on U.S. soil for over a year and told no other agencies. We also know that the White House and members of Congress have known about a material connection between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers, but classified documents relating to this connection have yet to be released even in the face of 9/11 victims suing the Saudi government for damages.). Hitchens does not suffer such a conspiratorial insinuation by Vidal lightly, and finds Vidal’s critiques on American exceptionalism, from his questioning the nobility of our involvement in WWII to regarding our opposition of the Soviet Union as overzealous, to be little more than “crank-revisionist and denialist history.” Hitchens even took some offense at Vidal’s comments on England when he said: ‘This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.”
To ask another rhetorical question of the dead: What role, then, does England play in global affairs other than as a second-rate lackey to America’s imperial projects? The U.K. marched in lock step behind the U.S. to invade Iraq. It is now serving its proper role as a henchman for the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, ratcheting up tensions, spiking peace talks, flooding Ukraine with weapons, all while the people of the island kingdom suffer under astronomical energy bills. Not to put too much strain on a pop culture reference, but America has transformed from the Padawan learner and assumed the role of Sith Lord from England as the world’s foremost imperial power, though what America has done with the mantle is quite worse than anything Darth Vader ever dreamed of, and England was never quite so noble as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Hitchens also took exception with Vidal calling Timothy McVeigh a “noble boy” in an interview. Vidal wrote a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair in 2001 where he reminds us that the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst attack by an American against Americans since the massacre by federal agents at Waco (this definition of “Americans” of course leaves out the barbaric natives. How does one answer the question of whether or not both sides were American in the so-called Indian Wars, more accurately called the American genocide?). Vidal emphasizes the fact that the commercial media rarely examines the fundamental question of why people who the state labels as terrorists choose to do what they do. “Since McVeigh had been revealed as evil itself, no one was interested in why he had done what he had done,” Vidal writes, “But then ‘why’ is a question the Media are trained to shy away from. Too dangerous. One might actually learn why something had happened and become thoughtful.” This shying away from the motives of terrorists serves to perpetuate the unquestioned righteousness of the West while ensuring that no legitimate grievances of terrorists are ever properly addressed, whether they come from radical environmentalists or Islamists.
Some argue that McVeigh’s white supremacist beliefs were central to his aggrievement and thus write him off completely as an abject, hateful lunatic. Others see those racist beliefs as merely tangential to his understandable grievances against the federal government’s overreach. A psychiatrist who spoke with McVeigh said that he carried out the bombing “not because he was deranged, but because he was serious.”
Vidal, while using his Vanity Fair article to suggest a deeper conspiracy behind the Oklahoma City bombing - perhaps even involving the encouragement of the U.S. government with its motive being to get stringent, reactionary anti-terror laws passed - makes curious insinuations towards McVeigh being a John Brown-like figure in search of his Harper’s Ferry. Admirers of the famously pious abolitionist bristle in unison at this unlikely comparison, though Brown was also undoubtedly “serious.” Vidal explicitly erases any notions that McVeigh was motivated by racial animus, writing that he had “no hang-ups about blacks, Jews, and all the other enemies” of the Aryans and the Patriots.
Whatever the extent to which white supremacy played a role in McVeigh’s act of terror, it is indisputable that the later reaction to the 9/11 attacks, carried out as they were by those evil brown foreigners, was far less subtle and understanding than the reaction to Oklahoma City. McVeigh received due process, was allowed to speak to reporters, was not tortured, and was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. One of his conspirators was sentenced to prison for life. No Islamic terrorist, not even a merely accused Islamic terrorist, as most are, and not even an accused American Islamic terrorist, has ever been afforded these same rights as McVeigh. For them, the empire reserves hellfire missiles, cattle prods, and top secret dungeons.
Primed as Americans already were in the early 1990s to look for jihadists hiding in their toilet bowls, before the true culprit of the Oklahoma City bombing was known, a rash of anti-Muslim acts occurred in response throughout the nation. The Christian Science Monitor reported that law enforcement received 227 reports of harassment against Muslims ranging from “verbal threats to assaults.”2
While McVeigh, like bin Laden, murdered many innocents in his attack on a physical symbol of U.S. power and oppression, 168 people to be exact, including 19 children, he was nevertheless, also like bin Laden, reacting to a very real problem. Namely that U.S. law enforcement, increasingly militarized, all too often acts as judge, jury, and executioner. The police drove a tank through a building with innocent children inside it at Waco, something which McVeigh himself witnessed, killing 25 of the kids and 51 others, including two pregnant women. In 1985, police dropped bombs from helicopters onto a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 11 people, five of them innocent children, and leaving 250 people homeless as the city let the fires burn. The cops beat Rodney King half to death on the streets of L.A. These are just some of the shocking instances we remember. The roll call of the dead and destroyed at the hands of our state, just amongst our own citizenry, is too vast, deep, and unimaginably horrifying for a true accounting. Who, for example, knows the name of Carnell Russ?
To sum up: In Arkansas in 1971, Russ, a 24-year old black man, was pulled over for speeding. His wife Clementine, six of their children, and Clementine’s cousin were in the car. All of them were escorted to the nearest courthouse jail to pay a bond of twenty-three dollars. Before he left, Russ asked for a receipt. The local cop, Charles Lee Ratliff, refused, and saw fit to shoot Russ between the eyes for making such an uppity request. The state trooper who originally pulled Carnell over came out of the courthouse and told Clementine that her husband had “said a smart word.” Clementine later received a forty-five dollar bill for the ambulance that transported her young dead husband to the hospital. What happened next is an all too familiar tale. An all-white jury acquitted Ratliff on manslaughter charges. Later, another all-white jury acquitted Ratliff in a wrongful death lawsuit. It wasn’t until eight years later, in a civil suit, that a jury awarded Clementine Russ $288,000 in damages from Ratliff. Mrs. Russ never received a single cent of that money. Ratliff skipped Arkansas and later died before paying out.
The terror we’ve unleashed against the underclasses, marking many of our brothers and sisters from birth – their parents, gazing into their children’s eyes, worrying what, I can’t imagine, awaits their precious issue – is a terror that, as James Baldwin wrote, “has little to do with one’s specific fears for oneself: it relates to Dante’s I would not have believed that death had undone so many.”
While McVeigh can certainly be accused, and found guilty of, among many other racist behaviors, only giving a shit about the state using its endless, violent police powers against people when those people were white (where was McVeigh when L.A. was burning in ’92?), his heinous bombing of the Federal Building, an act of escalation which he called a “retaliatory strike” and a “counter-attack,” should serve as a stark reminder of what can happen when the state decides to bring a tank to a gun fight. In the same way that the violence we teach to the rest of the world comes back to haunt us, the language of violence we use against our own citizenry is the language our children will talk back to us with. To hide from this fact is to deny history, and to therefore have history be ever chasing you, hounding you, demanding the bill to be paid, as any hope of peace is lost, for memory is long indeed.
At his sentencing, McVeigh quoted a liberal hero Supreme Court judge. He said: “I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’”
No matter what the state believes, no matter what technology it develops, what weapons it amasses, what stratagems of thought-control it employs, a people can be effectively menaced and deprived of their sovereignty for only so long. It may indeed be a very long time. As Howard Zinn reminds us:
Society’s tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, than we have examples of revolt. Measure the number of peasant insurrections against centuries of serfdom in Europe – the millennia of landlordism in the East; match the number of slave revolts in America with the record of those millions who went through their lifetimes of toil without outward protest. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency towards violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people, faced with an overwhelming environment, to submit to it.
But history also teaches us that when the tinder is there something always goes up in flames. Those holding the reigns, and the whip, as it were, better pray that they’ve made a few good friends in the lower classes once the opiate of our consumer goods have run out.
May we see our children and ourselves in the faces of persecuted Muslims, those people the West has seen fit to demonize unto our mutual destruction, and, understanding that a fanatical atheism is just as much of a moral wasteland as a fanatical religion, may we cry out against those cowards who refuse to grapple with the very human evil that resides in their own hearts. And that is the key. Evil is human. Evil is common. Evil is a downright birthright. To deny this fact is to open yourself up to an even more pernicious and destructive form of evil, an evil which says: I am righteous and good, may every man see as I do, he who stands in my way is my enemy, he who denies my goodness is himself evil, and, therefore, worthy only of destruction.
The United States cannot be said to be a moral nation because it so clearly has disregarded the well-being of its own children - to say nothing of the world’s children, our very future. We have bequeathed unto them a hell-scorched earth. To confront this fact would mean confronting death itself, a concept which America is quite uncomfortable with, for the nation wishes to keep going and going and going, staying one step ahead of the ghosts at its heels. Is it any wonder that, as we continue to ravage the Holy Lands, watering the sand with blood, and as we consign our own citizens to pauperism, that these children - representing at once our shameful history, our living issue, and our legacy - are running up behind us with a knife aimed squarely at our back?
A little addendum from a wonderful Irish lady who said everything I just said but did it in 60 seconds:
Homage to Catalonia, 202.
Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror, 6.