General Richard Myers, chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, claims, "It is not systematic. And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch, maybe, the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen, and Marines."
US President George Bush, commenting on the pictures of Iraqis being tortured, stated, "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. I didn't like it one bit." British PM Tony Blair went on record as saying the behaviour shown was in "direct contravention of all policy under which the coalition operates". He said nothing, however, about the US Army's tactics during the siege of Fallujah, which is estimated to have left 800 civilians dead.
The US and British historical record doesn't support the "good guy" image. In an article in this issue, John Pilger quotes historian V.G. Kiernan, writing about British prisons in Kenya in the 1950s, "The special prisons were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments". The British were responding to the "Mau-Mau terror", a struggle of national liberation that was responsible for the deaths of less than 50 white settlers.
According to the BBC, Professor Caroline Elkins of Harvard University has been investigating the claims of Mau-Mau veterans' groups. Elkins states that in excess of 50,000 people could have been killed by British security forces. That includes tortures and murders committed by white officials and local soldiers under their command; castrations and blinding for defying captors; fatal whippings; and rapes by British soldiers.
The US record in Vietnam is well known. The shooting of women and children in the village of My Lai is but one incident in a long list of atrocities.
So much for the "good guys". The propaganda mill has been quite effective in maintaining that image despite hard evidence to the contrary. But why is it happening? Pilger bluntly labels it racism, "the essence of imperialism, a word only now being restored to our dictionaries" and cites the terms US soldiers used for the Vietnamese: "gooks", "dinks" and "slopes".
If you rent or buy a DVD copy of Three Kings, the 1999 satire about the Gulf War, and listen to director David O. Russell's commentary, he says that members of the film crew objected to the terms "towel-heads" and "sand niggers" being used by actors depicting US soldiers. Russell said he left them in because he had it on good authority that they were commonly used at the time. Viewing Three Kings today, knowing that soldiers from the same country are now occupying Iraq, is a chilling experience.
Are there other possible reasons for explaining the horrors we are witnessing? Two hundred and fifty years ago, Voltaire wrote, "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities". The US claim of "liberating" Iraq is as equally absurd as its search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
The torture atrocity stories in Iraq can also be viewed as "business as usual", in the same category as raping and pillaging, traditionally carried out by conquering armies, committed against the weak and defenceless — racism coupled with power.
Would socialism prevent these kinds of crimes? Whilst there is no foolproof inoculation against the corruption caused by power, socialists believe that the best preventative is genuine, direct democracy, the holding of power by the people as opposed to governing elites.
Socialists recognise racism and the absurdities spouted by governing elites to promote war for what they are. In the film Matewan, about unionism in the 1920s in a US coal-mining town, the union organiser, when asked by a young boy in the town if he killed anyone in the war or whether he went to prison instead, replied that as he saw it, the two years he spent in jail was time better spent. Wars were just one worker killing another worker.
Opposing imperialist wars and fighting against racism in all of its manifestations are hallmarks of the Socialist Alliance. We believe there is no reason why we cannot build a society free from imperialism, racism and war. We are an active part of the opposition to the occupation of Iraq and to the racism that it represents. We continuously work, through our publications, notably our new magazine Seeing Red and through our contributions in Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, to identify and highlight the absurdities that lead ordinary working people to commit horrific atrocities against other ordinary working people.
Austin Whitten
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 19, 2004.
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