(snip)
BW: So the essay started as a "from-the-gut" response. What were your thoughts going into it?
WC: This was absurd what was being said. No one's calling (the reporters) on it for describing it as senseless. You've got a little contradiction in packaging here going on between the official news sources who are proclaiming it senseless and then the more official officials - the official officials - who are proclaiming it things like, "They did it because they hate our freedom," and other really profound and insightful things of that sort. It can't both be senseless and for a reason at the same time.
I don't think I was the only one with a different response from the mainstream. It just happens to be the way I framed it. Where that begins is borrowing from Malcolm X's thing about the chickens coming home to roost.
The essay "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" was written on Sept. 11 and then posted to the Internet that night. Churchill started with Malcolm X's famous quote, likened the roosting chickens to returning ghosts and asked who those ghosts might be.
Well, I see a
half-million dead Iraqi children for starters, children that Madeline Albright confirmed she was aware of. This was UN data (on the impact of U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq) in 1996 when she went on 60 Minutes and said, "Yeah, we're aware of it, and we've determined that it's
worth the price."
It's worth the price of somebody else's children to compel their government to do what George Bush had issued as the marching orders to the planet in 1991, which is: "The world has to understand that what we say goes."
What we say goes -
that's freedom. Do what you're told. And if you don't, basically the way this works out is we'll starve your children to death. A communiqué from al-Qaeda, in which the relatively unknown group claimed responsibility for the attacks, would later confirm that
the plight of Iraqi children was primary on the terrorists' list of grievances against the United States. (In the essay,) I went from mentioning Iraqi children to Iraqis over all - the children being a half million, there being
another half-million dead adults in a population of about 20 million in a short period of time and not during the war... I mentioned
the Palestinians, particularly the children in the Intifada, as a direct consequence of U.S. priorities and U.S. support to those who are doing it to them. I think I made a little mention of a bunch of
Panamanians who ended up in a trench who were reported as not having died until the trench was opened up and there they were lying under the quick lime. I think I talked about something on the order of
200,000 uplands Mayan Indians in Guatemala. I think I talked about a whole bunch of dead people in
El Salvador and Nicaragua, killed under false premises... I think I talked about people who had been burned alive at
Dresden. The nuclear bombings (of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), since we're on the subject of weapons of mass destruction... Back to the
Filipinos, back to the turn of the century. I think we're talking about at a minimum 500,000 to 600,000 people and maybe well over a million in the name of liberating them from their colonial masters and turning them into a U.S. colony... Which takes us into the
Indian wars and Wounded Knee and that whole series, all the way back to the Wappingers, the guys who supposedly sold the Dutch the island (of Manhattan) for beads and trinkets, which they didn't. They gave them permission to use the tip of the island as a port facility for trade, which was to the advantage of both. The Dutch falsely proclaimed it to be a sale, and when the Indians objected, they sent out a military expedition and resolved the problem by basically butchering all of them...
All of those chickens came home to roost (on 9/11), because there had never really been a response in-kind in all that entire grisly history. It was sort of manifested in the symbol of those twin towers at the foot of something called Wall Street. And Wall Street takes its name from the enclosure of the slave compound for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So now there's a bunch of those ghosts, too. All the symbolism is confluent (at Ground Zero)...
(I) Churchill then discussed
the concept of collective responsibility and the notion that some of those who worked in the World Trade Center were not only aware of, but participants in
actions that caused harm and suffering abroad. Such events
could not occur without broad support from the American public, he said.(/I)
Since Madeline Albright said that on 60 Minutes, (the suffering in Iraq) could hardly be mysterious to the people in the buildings that would be hit. They just flat considered it irrelevant. Or they embraced it. These aren't exactly centers of organizing opposition to U.S. policy.
I don't say they had detailed information. They were not concerned enough to gather it. They simply embraced it. They applauded it. They voted for it. But they're not innocent of it at the same time. How do you end up participating in this process and being proud and triumphalist about this process and making your vocation the participation in and proper functioning of that system and be innocent at the same time? And that takes me to the Eichmann comment.
BW: Your Eichmann comparison seems to be the thing that has upset people the most.
WC: Oh, yes... I said specifically
the comparison to Eichmann devolved upon the technicians of empire. Is there some definition you can give me where a food-service worker or a child or a janitor pushing a broom is a technician of empire? I wasn't talking about that, clearly. That's the only point that's been raised. "How can you say that an 18-month-old baby girl on a plane was comparable to Eichmann?"
Well, the fact of the matter is, I never said that.
To use Pentagon-speak, that would be the collateral damage... I don't know that they had any specific intent to kill everyone that was there. In order to get at the target, the dead bystanders were "worth the price," to quote directly from Madeline Albright. (The terrorists) used the exact same logic used by Pentagon planners and U.S. diplomats - "This is an unavoidable consequence of getting at the target."
If there's somebody to blame, following the logic that's used now, it would be the people who put a CIA office in the World Trade Center or put command and control infrastructure of other sorts in there.
It's always "their" fault. It's always Saddam's fault. He situated an intelligence office in a hospital... That was the justification for bombing the hospital. Well, if you're going to apply that rule, it's going to come back to you. By enunciated Pentagon rules, (the World Trade Center) was a legitimate target. I don't accept the legitimacy. I'm feeding it back to (the American public, and saying), "How does this feel?" I contest the legitimacy straight down the line. But if you're going to do it to other people on these pretexts and pretend it's OK, then you can't complain when it comes back to you in the same form. That's the point.(snip)
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill_interview_pw.htmlWe are little Eichmann technocrats of this empire. If only people were as appalled over what the US has done/is doing to other countries!
I note with great amusement that those who condemned Churchill the loudest for speaking the truth have repeatedly defended the brutal imperialism of our foreign policy by spinning that only under Bush is war dirty and that wars by Democrats were gentle humanitarian interventions. No wonder some people feel we need more and more protection from terror so that our capitalistic little system, reinforced by the MIC, can keep protecting the great "American way of life". Spin it anyway you like, people are dead, children are starving for this great way of life and they're none too happy about it.
Churchill rocks. Truth to power.
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