Ian Douglas11 maart 2008 – 14:47

We must break out

This occupation — not even a word that conveys what it is — has hijacked and attacked humanity. Some know and feel it. Millions upon millions! Some feared it was coming, and were struggling against its birth. But we shouldn’t use the term birth, for it is nothing but destruction and death. America’s criminal and obscene leaders likely imagine they have given lifeblood to Americans on the back of so much death in Iraq: they aimed to seize the oil, to keep the machine of privilege and mass diversion upon which they depend, and which is their only horizon, running.

But it’s not life that these bigots, these killers and these hypocrites and failures have given America and its people. They feed death into their system, and so their system becomes death. To some it may sound extreme, but I think the world is insane to continue doing what it does — working, sleeping, cooking — while this atrocity is going on. It constitutes GENOCIDE under international law, that false ceiling of our struggle; that venerated labyrinth of nothingness. Where is the law? When law is absent, agency passes into the hands of the people.

How can any of us on earth tolerate for another second the wholesale slaughter in Iraq, the wholesale slaughter in Gaza, the wholesale slaughter in Afghanistan, the wholesale slaughter that is but moments away in Lebanon, and who knows where next? These Western leaders and their media puppets have not even the imagination to conceive of the ocean, or democracy, or life with the people. They whip up fear about Islam and everything. They put the West against everyone. What they should say is that the system they represent is against everyone, and certainly their own people. They kill in our name, and by doing so make our very lives complicit with killing. They make beggars in direct proportion to their profit, and they poison everything. They reduce the entire horizon of life to production and consumption, and make death on the news omnipresent.

It is a massive undertaking, I well know, but we must turn all of this around. All the machines that the modern era gave birth to in the West — the economic machines of expropriation, exploitation, theft and starvation; the State machines of discipline, propaganda, impunity and repression; the military machines that suck up one trillion dollars yearly along with numberless lives — must be stopped in their tracks, by the people, by us, finding unity and ourselves in struggle. We are alive at this time. Start from that awareness, and move forward.

Long Live the Iraqi Resistance for its fight is historic and gives breath to us all. Long Live Arab Resistance that in its justice teaches the West about peace. Long Live the struggle in every single person to reject the culture of genocide that the West represents and to liberate a level of humanity imprisoned by what is going on.

Ian Douglas
Editor and correspondent for the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly and visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine
Initiator of the International Initiative to Prosecute US Genocide in Iraq

Bericht aan de Bevolking is een initiatief van Het beschrijf, in samenwerking met het B/Russell/s Tribunal. Een aantal auteurs van deze teksten treedt ook aan op de Literaire Wake n.a.v. 5 jaar oorlog in Irak, op woensdag 19 maart van 20 u. tot 24 u. in Literatuurhuis Passa Porta, A. Dansaertstraat 46, 1000 Brussel. Zie www.passaporta.be

Link naar het overzicht