In every country, the rush to military action in Iraq and Syria has been accompanied by unrestrained war propaganda on the part of both governments and the servile media, which take advantage of the lack of information and confusion to try and stampede the people into war. Nowhere is this expressed more shamelessly than in the editorial published by the New York Times Friday entitled “The Fundamental Horror of ISIS.” “The mind rebels at the reports of cruelty by the Islamic State,” the editorial begins. Citing reports of beheadings, torture, rapes and massacres, the Times declares that ISIS “stands alone in its deliberate, systematic and public savagery.” The editorial concludes that “it must be degraded and ultimately destroyed, to use President Obama’s apt terms.” Who are they to lecture anyone about “cruelty” and “savagery?” This same editorial board fully supported the Bush administration in launching an invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. This war of aggression remains the premier crime of the 21st century, its catastrophic social destruction giving rise to the present crisis throughout the region. Even excluding the mass murders carried out directly by US imperialism, when it comes to “cruelty” and “savagery,” ISIS is a bunch of amateurs compared to the client regimes and mercenary forces supported by Washington. With US support, military juntas in Chile and Argentina murdered tens of thousands in detention camps and torture centers, throwing workers and youth from helicopters to die in the sea, while the CIA helped found a dictatorship in Indonesia over the corpses of half a million victims. The Nicaraguan contras, organized and financed by the US government, killed tens of thousands and committed every crime for which the Times indicts ISIS—massacres of civilians, rapes, executions of children—all the while hailed as “freedom fighters” by the president of the United States. Within little more than the last year, Egypt’s military-dominated regime, supported by Obama, massacred thousands while imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands more, and Washington’s closest ally in the region, Israel, carried out a savage war on the defenseless population of Gaza, killing nearly 2,200 Palestinians and wounding 11,000 more. The call by the Times for a military crusade against “savagery,” “zealots” and “raw evil” is an echo of the rhetoric employed by the yellow press over a century ago, when the US, then a newly rising global power, joined a similar imperialist gang-up against an anti-Western insurgency—China’s Boxer Rebellion of 1898 to 1900. The Boxers, a proto-nationalist secret society, developed into a mass movement based on popular resentment of China’s subjugation and humiliation by the Western powers, which carved the country up into various “spheres of influence.” The Boxers beheaded foreign missionaries and massacred Christian converts in a wave of violence directed against the foreigners who dominated the country’s political and economic life. Then too, the various imperialist powers seemed to act as one, with the British, Germans, Russians, Americans, Italians, French, Austro-Hungarians and Japanese forming a common expeditionary force of nearly 50,000 to drown the rebellion in blood and tighten their grip on China’s markets and resources. The present united crusade against ISIS will prove to have as great a historical significance in the affairs of world imperialism as the war waged against the Boxer Rebellion 114 years ago. In the name of a struggle against “terrorism” and the defense of “civilization” against “savagery,” all of the imperialist powers are again going to war and, as in the case of Germany, rearming and re-embracing militarism with a speed that appears aimed at making up for lost time. This turn to war is driven by the crisis of world capitalism and its fundamental contradictions, in the first instance, between the development of a globally integrated economy and the continued division of the planet into antagonistic nation states. wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/04/pers-o04.html
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 08:04:20 +0000
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