Nabil Salih: An Iraqi in the capital of the US Empire / Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War
As a child in Baghdad, I opened my eyes to a world holding its whip and subjugating us Iraqis to collective punishment through sanctions and repeated wars. Death in Iraq was a spectacle on TV screens in the US. War coverage paid scarce attention to civilian casualties. As one Iraqi woman put it after the Gulf War, “Did they [Americans] ask where these tons and tons of explosives thrown fell? On whom? What happened there?”
Now that I am in
Washington DC, I walk around the capital of the ‘Empire’ and feel as if I am an inferior
being who has barely survived repeated attempts at the obliteration of
his species. As I make my way through the crowds, I think of how oblivious they
must be to the bombs that were funded by their taxes and are still going off in
my head.
Sometimes the few who ask where I come from don’t even know where Iraq is on the map, as if nothing happened there. Most of those who bother to engage in a conversation with me don’t even ask about life over there. It is safe to say that to most Americans, Iraqis are not even an afterthought. Thus I came to think that we are now being comfortably placed in a corner of oblivion beyond dehumanisation….
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/an-iraqi-in-the-capital-of-the-us-empire/
Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War
After all, in my
childhood and youth, in the wake of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
this country began building a staggering nuclear arsenal and would soon be
followed on that path by the Soviet Union. We’re talking about weaponry that
could have destroyed this planet many times over and, in those tense Cold War
years, it sometimes felt as if such a fate might indeed be ours. I can still
remember hearing President John F. Kennedy on the radio as the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 began - I was a freshman in college - and thinking
that everyone I knew on the East Coast, myself included, would soon be toast
(and we almost
were!).
To put that potential
fate in perspective, keep in mind that, only two years earlier, the U.S.
military had developed a Single
Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war against the Soviet Union
and China. In it, a first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons would be “delivered”
to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities. If all
went “well,” those would have ceased to exist. Official estimates of casualties
ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured - and, given what wasn’t known
about the effects of radiation then, not to speak of the “nuclear winter” such an attack would have created on this
planet, that was undoubtedly a grotesque underestimate.
When you think about
it now (if you ever do), that plan and - to steal Jonathan Schell’s famed phrase - the fate of the earth
that went with it should still stun you. After all, until August 6, 1945,
Armageddon had been left to the gods. In my youth, however, the possibility of
a human-caused, world-ending calamity was hard to forget - and not just because
of the Cuban Missile Crisis. …
https://www.juancole.com/2022/01/america-nation-coming.html
US quietly publishes once-expunged papers
on 1953 Iran coup. By JON GAMBRELL
Janet
Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Deadly
Fatwa: Iran's 1988 Prison Massacre
James Cavallaro - The CIA has a long
history of torture
Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the coup in Iran that changed
the Middle East, and the cover-up
Victor
Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew
Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
JAMES SPRINGER: Remembering the Fall of
Saigon, 45 years on
Jesus
sermon from the Rev. Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide Machine
Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young
