WARD CHURCHILL on the War in Iraq, Uranium, 9/11 and the New World Order being the Old World Order. By Claudette Vaughan
Darling of the Left, Ward Churchill speaks again to the Abolitionist-Online.
 Abolitionist: 9/11. What was the main order of business that day and who was behind the external events that transpired there and thereafter?
Ward Churchill: The truth of the matter is I don’t know. It seems reasonable to me that when you are in the business of slaughtering other people, destroying their lives on a mass scale particularly their children, then eventually if you persist in that behaviour, someone’s going to hand you back an unkind contribution on the premise of how would you like it? and if you don’t like it, then you might just stop doing it to other people.
9/11 may be as advertised literally. People of Arabic abstraction finally responded to the Palestinian children and the US support to Israel which seems to be open ended and without which Israel could not be doing what it is doing, that they responded to the fact of the half million dead and rotting children who had died as a result of US opposed sanctions. Madeleine Albright considered it to be worth the price of imposing “freedom” which is to say, “do exactly as you are told” on another Head of State.
I myself did not consider the presence of US troops in Mecca but that’s 2 of the 3 reasons stated. It also occurred to me that there is an extraordinary long history – antecedent really to present conditions – that’s traced all the way to that particular location where the World Trade Center was situationed through the slave trade from whence Wall Street takes it name.
The United States and the citizens have anointed themselves with some sort of entitlement to act as they do act in the world, with impunity.
I have no reason to believe that it was not al Qaeda although it could have been a number of other actors. It could have been an inside job. It could have been. I don’t disavow it. It’s not like there is an absence of precedent for that sort of conduct albeit not on this scale but you find out a number of operations carried out to create the pretext for certain lines of repression, domestically in the United States or to create a pretext for going to war with another country. I really don’t know who did 9/11. It’s plausible that the United States has created so many enemies and has enough internal ranks here operating in the consolidation of essentially a fascist police state here for any number of actors to have carried it out.
Do Americans, in your view, think that they war is still a good idea? What is the atmosphere like in the States at the moment?
The militarisation of the police continues often with general applause in a number of cases. In fact I would say it’s across the board although different actors or different sets of actors have different reasons that they think it’s justifiable under at least certain circumstances that these guys had it coming.
Most sets of actors, usually poor communities of colour, find some pretext for finding their preferred portion of the militarisation of the police, in fact the proliferation of the police in penal institutions in the United States to be justifiably acceptable, probably excessive but excessive means too-much-of-a-good-thing.
On that basis there’s a certain mentality that’s willing to accept the war that has evaded it so far, although the reasons for wanting out are entirely self-serving in the main. There are exceptions to that. They are not predicated on a fundamental understanding about what was wrong in going into the war in the first place and just at a rhetorical level, if you are seriously concerned about then you get concerned with bringing your own Government onto a leash because this is the most proliferate power on the planet, or it has been in terms of the only power that has used nuclear weapons against others.
What they are saying is they are real comfortable with having a veritable monopoly on that and what they want to make sure is other people don’t have that same firepower. So we can “Do Unto Others” with impunity. The US is somehow magically self-exempting from the consequences of the action and policy here and that includes the bulk of the anti-war movement as well as those that are proponents of the war.
George Galloway, the English politician has called for a global alliance between Muslims and progressives. He said, “Not only do I think it’s possible, I think it’s vitally necessary for what’s happening in the world today. It’s possible because the progressives and the Muslims have the same common enemy. The enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries, mainly Muslim countries”. Would you go that far yourself?
Actually I think it’s a bit narrowly cast in terms of the common enemy. I don’t know if the alliance would be natural in terms of common enemy simply between Muslims and progressives either and I’m a little skeptical of progressives. There’s a wrong notion being that there is some sort of progression towards “improvement” that’s almost a parody of a materialist interpretation of history, for example, the inevitability about it – like there’s a beginning – a creation and there’s some sort of a Armageddon and that strikes me as rather Christianique although there’s a common basis interpretatively speaking in terms of conceiving history between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. They come from the same book source, text source and their presuppositions or assumptions would be more similar than not yet there’s a whole of the planet that doesn’t fit any of the three although they take themselves as a Holy Trinity that’s thinks beyond them, there’s not much of consequence in terms of spiritual understanding or philosophical understanding or a way of relating to the world or ambitions or things that would be quite right. Progressivism in a main means more-of-the-same done better and I’m fundamentally opposed to what it is that constitutes what we would have more of done better. I think things got derailed a long time back in more of the same even if done perfectly would represent a net loss not a gain.
Still talking about the New World Order, after watching the Jonestown massacre in Ghana of mostly Black people in the 70’s being forced to commit mass suicide by a white man, then later with AIDS in Africa and the US and more recently Katrina, it occurred to me, they’re still having trouble killing off large numbers of people of colour to this day.
That ambition really dates back to at least as far as 1450. At that point the Portuguese went down the west coast of Africa trying to find a way to circumvent the continent in order to circumvent the Islamic world. The mechanism for that was to contemplate corporate charters together which legitimated elementary capacities for profit. Those are the ingredients of the so-called globalisation initiative now and the nature of the State now. This is a trajectory that took a while to get off the ground and the notion to get firmly implanted in the minds of the elites, whether preexisting or self-made as a result and it’s been carried forward in ever move refined forms or more ambition or ever more destructive ever since. So the New World Order is pretty much the same as the Old World Order but in a technologically organisationally up-dated form.
Is there a Muslim holocaust going on in the world that parallels how the Native American people were crushed by a technologically advanced elite? And what about Africa and how it’s people are being starved off their land for the land and its minerals? The whole world is being divided up into rich and poor literally.
The world “holocaust” is somewhat problematic given the baggage it carries but genocide which is the fundamental concept that is clearly occurring. That’s the intent which is to bring about a dissolution of Islamic culture but with emphasis in certain sectors because it’s more of a mouthful that one can chew at any given time so you have this process of erosion and it’s a process by which Islam can become a caricature of itself homogenised into the greater whole in order to get a station assigned for a particular set of actors within it to fit in to the global whole. They say there’s a place for everything and everybody as well, in the script that’s being designed here. For people to fit into this externally designed script, the people have to be rendered subordinate rather than autonomous. Cultural assimilation is a component of genocide and it is imposed upon at least militarily weaker people by militarily stronger peoples. There’s ways of doing it aside from militarisation but the military is always a component. Economically you can do and there’s various other ways to compel these sort of assimilations to a homogeneous model that is designed by those who are in charge of the military apparatus that makes this possible.
The US TODAY has said the Muslims stop the Freemasons from capping the pyramid with gold. Apart from Bush’s messianic obsession with bringing forward the Apocalypse, are we seeing the beginning of this now with the pre-emption of Iraq? What do you make of it remembering that all of this was very well known and spoken about in leftist underground culture in the 70’s as well as a prediction that a nuclear holocaust will precede the anti-Christ? The anti-war protesters of today look like a stroll in the park compared to the days of the 70’s.
Yeah! Defined free speech zones are approved and designated by the people that supposedly the protestors are protesting against.
So does We the People have any meaning anymore?
We the People hasn’t had any meaning for a long time in this country and in Australia too for that matter. I’m not sure that it ever had meaning because the people would encompass everybody who’s residing on the land, never included the Aborigines, never included the Kooris, never included the Tasmanians so We the People was excluding some of the people from the get-go. That’s been rationalized and implemented on the basis of a virulent form of supremacism. White supremacism has been the predominating view, if you will, of the perpetrators from Day One. So who would We the People be? When we talk about our security meaning you giving up certain rights, whose the “we” that constitutes the “our” in that proposition? If we are talking in terms of the United States that clearly does not include Arabs within Arabs as citizens for generations – they are automatically suspect and they are to be guarded against. They are to be surveilled. They are to be dealt with through arbitrary detentions. They are a number of things. It certainly doesn’t include Black people – it never did. Racial profiling goes in that precise direction justified by the courts. It certainly wouldn’t include Latinos who happened to be citizens of the United States – they are arbitrarily stopped and detained and so forth. It wouldn’t include Asians and it certainly doesn’t include American Indians. In fact it doesn’t include poor whites so who’s left? We whose security is so damned important that everybody needs to forfeit chunks of their rights are those who are residing in gated communities of Los Angelo’s and elsewhere around the country and they only marginally because there’s only 1-2% of society in this country that constitutes the elite and are making the decisions regarding its deposition. So 98% of the population, at the minimum, are marginally or are completely outside the definition of whom The People actually are.
Is Iran a done deal?
No. I couldn’t say that it is and the reason I couldn’t say that is because I am doubtful that military capacity to do what they want to do in Iran, actually exists in the United States. There have been some pretty fundamental calculations. Could they do a considerable amount of damage to Iran? Can they introduce troops? That’s a lot more tenuous. Can they even spare the troops from the bog they have ended up in by virtue of having miscalculated the intensity of the opposition in Iraq and they introduced troops in Afghanistan to try and stabilize that situation. That’s without going into Northern Pakistan, which would stretch them beyond breaking point, so you’re really looking at a situation here where either they implement a draft which for political reasons is very problematic or they restrain military ambitions to get a balance. This is not because they think it’s wrong to go into Iran, it’s because they simply don’t have the capacity for the available boots-on-the-ground.
What they have discovered is while you can use the technological capacity of the United States to inflict horrendous damage you cannot stabilize an area that requires sufficient manpower to actually occupy.
Yeah there’s 9/11 and there is that capacity to do that kind of thing but that’s just a poor man’s version of what the United States does around the world as a matter of course. The matter of course doesn’t really change the geopolitical calculus of the goal, it actually hardens sentiment against the United States and in order to do what they want to do, which is to have, essentially dominion over the entire span of territory between Syria through to Pakistan. That’s really what the issue is here. You have to have a whole lot of actual manpower available here. Either you’ve got to use surrogates to enable to accomplish or you’ve got to have a whole lot more availability in terms of US personnel and in order for this techno war they are trying to wage that manpower can’t be the transcript variety that was used in South-East Asia 40 years ago. They have to be relatively well trained. None of that works out in practice. There’s a fairly intractable technical problem here that the United States policy makers, particularly the neo-cons, are not in a position to solve.
Why Syria through to Pakistan? Is it because of the oil there?
Oil is a considerable part of it. Both oil in terms of consumptive capacity. I mean the United States is the largest consumer per capita on the planet, far and away, to control assess to the oil but also to control though who might otherwise have assess to it and on what terms and here I’m talking about China. It’s meant to control and deny the free flow of oil to China for the purposes of instability for economic and military capacity. Control is the key and it’s been like that way for a long time.
I remember shortly after arriving in Boulder in the late 1970’s, Sir Robert Thompson came and gave a talk at the University of Colorado which I attended. I was interested in Thompson as a imminent counter insurgency theorist. He asked a question to the audience: He said what is the most strategic single point in the world? I recently asked this at the US Army War College and I got a stoned silence. People tend to make wild guesses. They were talking about South Africa, the Philippines and this and that. Finally I got exasperated and shouted at them “Strait of Hormez.” It’s a strait that’s about 70 miles wide. It’s a jump point whereabouts approximately 70% of the world’s oil supply has to pass to be utilized in the economy of developed nations.
Will you speak about your most recent controversy over fragging. Did you actually say you should frag your commanding officer to put an end to the war? I thought you had said that friendly fire stopped the war in Vietnam far quicker than any protest ever did because of the number of casualties – over 10,000. What did you actually say?
Categorically I did not say that about fragging but I did say that about friendly fire casualties stopped the war quicker than protested even did. What I did was frame the question to a group of anti-war activists in Portland, Oregon as I recall. They are committed to ending the war and they were hoo haaing about soldiers who were making a statement of refusing to go to Iraq and how they supported them and I said, “Well if your object is to impair the war effort aside from these gestures make from individual soldiers, of course which are worthy of support, you also then support the phenomena of soldiers fragging their officers in the combat zone. That impairs the war effort”.
Friendly fire is a different phenomena than what fragging is. Fragging is when US personnel intentionally took out people who were considered to be a little gung-ho, particularly officers. There were some 350 of those reported in a single year – it was a burgeoning phenomena so you can imagine what that was doing to the morale and the confidence of officers late into the war who still thought it was worth fighting and so on were trying to galvanize the troops to engage in combat with troops that had had enough of it. This is well documented in several locations which would include the book “Flower of the Dragon” by Richard Boyles. He tracks the disintegration of the US Army in Vietnam. Then there’s Tony Hubert, the US Army super soldier. He’s the guy who was assigned to the Inspector General to the 173ed Airborne where there was just wholesale war crimes occurring and was being blocked from bringing charges on those by superior officers in the 173ed Airborne. He began to talk about it publicly and was removed from his position, sent to a empty office and a desk and nothing to do until the Pentagon could muster him out of the Army so he was basically sacked. This was their super soldier who actually believed the function of infantry units was to clothe and kill the infantry not to kill everything in sight and their were rules and engagement that would be observed otherwise you’d have war crimes and it ended up being exactly that. He treated them as such and therefore he was eliminated from the Army. He talked about fragging being one of the consequences in the breakdown of the observance in any of the rules binding on the military. There was a trickle down effect. The troops were not necessarily, under those circumstances, inclined to obey the rules when they didn’t want to go by killing the people who were telling them to go. The Army collapsed basically and that was the outcome of that process in Vietnam. If you ask me how to bring this war to a stop I never got an answer to that question.
The numbers dead in Iraq now from the internet 2873 US soldiers have died in Iraq and 21572 have been wounded. Some people reading this were born in the 80’s and 90’s and haven’t even heard of Henry Kissinger
That speaks volumes…Not having heard of Henry Kissinger is like not being aware that there was a life before MacDonalds.
His rant about the ordinary troops as “dump stupid animals…mere pawns to achieve Americans oligarchic ambitions abroad for the US foreign policy”. I know you have strong thoughts on troops being used as cannon fodder and I wanted to ask if you would reiterate some of that here today?
That’s basically the long and the short of it. Here you have highly trained, highly motivated volunteer troops but they were basically worth no more than what was then conscripts and within the context I was talking about was the conscription of an army with some people going in at 19 or even earlier so they can get some preferred treatment. You can’t buy a cigarette in this country lawfully prior to 18 although you can be prosecuted as an adult and you can be sent to a combat zone to have both legs blown off or traumatic brain injuries or be contaminated with all manner of chemicals from dioxins through to depleted uranium to end up with these syndromes that don’t even have names yet. All that’s possible but there’s nothing to look after you on the other side. We like to do our ra-ra-ra’s to motivate people to send them out and wrap them in glory but when they come back with half their brain shot away or your arm and your shoulder missing so you are pondering how you are going to hold your child, should you have one. There’s a stony silence. So they send them off to slaughter, and they get slaughtered although they send them to a veterans hospitals which are horror shows and recently it was shown that the non-celebrity personnel were being treated in an abysmal manner in even one of the better facilities.
Policy makers quibble over whether their injuries were really incapacitate them to a degree which would allow them have a living income and the aftermath or whether the contamination and so forth was really exposed to it in the military or some other fashion. Post-traumatic stress disorder, which in capacitates them – asking whether that’s really the source of the trauma then you see how this goes in order to save nickels and dimes at the expense of the veterans who gave everything there was to a war effort America should have never been involved in the first place.
That’s a human tragedy on a mass scale but those who want to talk about it as such ought to be talking about it on the much larger human suffering that is caused by what they did while they were engaged in a combat zone. So you’ve got a couple of hundred thousand seriously disabled veterans in the United States as a result of Vietnam, probably more if you take into account the psychological consequences and Agent Orange poisonings from things that weren’t acknowledged and from the estimation of Robert McNamara there’s well over 3 million dead Indo-Chinese in the aftermath of herbicide usage, saturation bombings, endemic cancers, mutated children and all the rest of it, that are not much discussed here.
Going nuclear in conventional warfare has seen the death, deformities and cancers of hundreds of thousands of people, both Iraqis and US Troops in active service. Radiation dispersion including land mines, bullets, shells, missiles and bombs are in Dr Rosalie Bertell’s words, (she’s a respected scientist who serves on a variety of Pentagon committees), that troops are handling radiation ordnance and munitions without being told the health risks by their military superiors. Doug Rokke has said that military personnel are refused health assessments to be tested for radiation and uranium exposure. ..
There’s a variety of other toxic substances that are utilized in military munitions as well as uranium and some of the equipment. Each has its own line of effects – none in which are good - a lot of which is hideous. If they are taken in certain combinations the results aren’t even known. It probably is difficult to diagnosis with certain people because they are not contaminated with a given substance, they are contaminated with several and the symptomatologies are so what different. The effects are reasonably uniform though. Organic degeneration - that is the systems of your body begin to fail because your immune system outward. You have weird cancers that are not prevalent to any other population and then there’s various mutagenic effects. Over all there is not much known on how to treat these people. That’s one reason why they continue to die willy-nilly. There’s no known medicine and if there was it probably would be inordinately expensive and therefore they want to talk about personal habits like smoking and so forth as being the source of this dilemma – and they actually do that. If you are a smoker, they say, then you probably brought the problem on yourself. They spent 30 years unable to confirm the effects of dioxin on US troops in Vietnam but they can tell you at the point of a decimal point how many people will die of cancer next year caused from smoking. If you believe one, you’ve got to believe another that is they are absolutely stupid about the effects of plutonium or dioxin or several other potent herbicides and heavy metals. They say they really don’t know a thing about it but they have an absolute steel trap grip that says when you get comfortable generated by those substances, then it must have been smoking. I have never met anybody die of lung cancer from plutonium inhalation in this country. You’d think that environmental tobacco has the toxicity of nerve gas the way they are treating it. It’s the same game played in a more intensive manner with veterans that are directly exposed to massive amounts of these substances. It’s a societal problem but you’ve got this sector who are clearly exposed more intensively than people in general society but they try and play the same sorts of games as in the causative factors.
The troops – whether we are talking about the domestic population or the so-called enemy population – gets valued at about the same level as toilet paper by the people who are ordering these things to happen. You don’t count. You can be the medal of honour winner but what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?
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