News & Views No.9: Chile Coup – Twin Towers – the Legacy Bill
Diarmuid Breatnach (Reading time: 5 mins.)
September 11th is the anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on the new World Trade Center in the USA known as “the Twin Towers” and also of the Pinochet Coup in Chile. The former caused the deaths of 2,996 people and the latter of over 40,000.
These are not happy anniversaries and US Imperialism bears a major portion of the blame for both events.
How so, one might ask? The coup in Chile, probably with CIA help, sure. But the Twin Towers? That was a Muslim jihadist attack AGAINST the USA! Surely we’re not expected to believe that stupid conspiracy theory that the USA ruling class actually staged the attack?
That is truly a crazy conspiracy theory but the historical truth does indeed involve a conspiracy. In 1997 the government of Afghanistan was socialist which was worrying for the USA, so in partnership with Saudi elements, they funded and even founded Muslim jihadist groups there.
These groups were to be encouraged to overthrow the socialist regime and when the USSR sent troops to support the government, to defeat the Russians too. Which they did.
But forget about fantasy stories of traditional tribesmen with ancient muskets fighting a world power’s army – these were jihadists, fundamentalists, armed with modern automatic weapons and mobile missile launchers including SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles).
Forget too about Rambo-led simple hill people – since the US achieved the overthrow of the socialist regime and invaded Afghanistan alongside their British allies, those jihadist groups have been squabbling over their share of the spoils, often murderously.
In fact, US imperialism is largely responsible for the world pestilence of not only jihadism of the Al Qaeda type, but the even more virulent Islamic State variety (which indicates Mary Wollstonecraft’s story of Frankenstein’s monster to be more prediction than fiction).
Although US Imperialism had created Al Qaeda and although Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was totally opposed to the jihadist group (and vice versa), US politicians used the attack on the Twin Towers to ‘justify’ the US military invasion of Iraq.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity” indeed when manipulated by US Imperialism for domestic consumption and for world public opinion, also when assisted by British Imperialism’s Labour Government, in particular by lying-through-his-teeth Tony Blair.
The US-led campaign against Iraq resulted in about 1.5 million deaths through economic sanctions alone followed by over 300,000 civilians in the Western military campaign. These figures do not include deaths and injuries of Iraqi military and of the invading allies under the USA and UK.
Nor do those figures include the many deaths, military and civilian, in internal conflicts since the invasion of Iraq which continue to mount.
The deaths resulting from the coup in Chile were overwhelmingly of civilians as the coup was carried out by the Army with little opposition within the military and the civilian population were mostly unarmed.
Most of the deaths occurred in succeeding days and years as the regime rounded up communists, trade union militants and others suspected of having supported Allende’s party, to torture and execute them, including most famously the renowned musician and singer-songwriter Victor Jara.
The anniversaries of both the Pinochet coup and the Twin Towers have been commemorated in various parts of the world with, it appears, the coup being remembered in most of them, not only in Latin America but also in many countries in Europe where Chilean political exiles found refuge.
In the USA, of course, the attack on the Twin Towers was officially commemorated and probably communally too much more so than the coup in Chile.
Another imperialist-generated disaster, the anniversary of which falls only a couple of days after those two, is that of the Oslo Accords, signed on 13th September 1993 and often also known as a stage in “the Palestinian Peace Process”.
At the White House, supervised by Bill Clinton, elected chief of US Imperialism at the time, Yitzak Rabin for the Israeli Zionist state and Yasser Arafat, for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, signed an agreement, as a result of which the PLO would be permitted to run their own statelet.
Hailed as a great breakthrough by most media at the time, the PLO, dominated by Arafat’s Al Fatah, got to have limited self-government within the Zionist State, with the borders of any future Palestinian state undefined and no mention of the millions of Palestinian exiles around the world.
Although the increasing encroachment on Palestinian lands by Zionist settlers was temporarily halted, the land already taken and built upon remained in Zionist hands, that issue and others ‘to be discussed later’ but the Palestinians were to give up the armed resistance immediately.
The South African pacification process had begun earlier and, though enfranchisement of non-white South Africans was not to come until 1994, it was clearly on the way. The ANC promoted pacification processes to Al Fatah and both parties promoted them to Provisional Sinn Féin.1
The Palestinian ‘Process’ was controversial among their people from the start and grew more so as it became clear how little the Palestinian cause had gained and how much had been set aside, along with the growing official corruption and nepotism growing among the Al Fatah organisation.
Though the pacification process was widely rejected in Palestine and failed to install a widely-recognised ‘official’ collusive leadership, it did achieve the fragmentation of the Palestinian leadership and helped to ‘justify’ the demonisation of Hamas, winner of the 2006 elections.
ALTERNATIVES
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (sic) is quoted in the media as saying that there is no alternative to the UK’s legacy legislation, which proposes to prevent recourse in law for any crimes committed by its soldiers, colonial police, proxies or Government Ministers.
The legislation in question is titled The Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill.
All political parties in Ireland on both sides of the British Border have vigorously opposed this legislation and THERE CLEARLY IS AN ALTERNATIVE, which is to abandon it. What the UK’s ‘colonial governor’ of the Six Counties means is: no alternative acceptable to the ruling class.
While we’re on alternatives, all liberation movements had and have the alternatives to embracing pacification processes, which is to maintain the path of resistance upon which they embarked until the day they win that for which their people and fighters have sacrificed their liberty and lives.
Allende and the communists in Chile had the alternative of arming the people and purging the Army but instead chose to put their faith in the ‘loyalty’ of Pinochet, ‘democracy’ and the opinion of the
Western powers.
“The people armed cannot be harmed”, perhaps, rather than “The people united can never be defeated”.2 Allende’s error cost him his life but also the lives of hundreds of thousands of others.
Imperialists have the alternative of respecting the right to self-determination of the peoples of the world and to cease from exploiting, oppressing and repressing them.
But if they did that, they wouldn’t be imperialists, would they? And since they cannot change their nature, they have to be overthrown.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1Provisional Sinn Féin signed up to the Irish Pacification Process in 1998 and they and the ANC then moved on to promote a pacification process to the leadership of the Basque movement for independence, which also finally signed up to it without even obtaining release of the political prisoners. By that time the Palestinian Process had shown its empty promise and the Second Intifada (2000-2005) demonstrated its rejection by most Palestinian youth and the elections to the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council were won convincingly by Hamas.
2An alternative slogan to “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” was even then being promoted by a smaller communist group: “El pueblo armado jamás será aplastado!”, i.e ‘The armed people will never be crushed’.
SOURCES
rebelbreeze 