17
OCT 2001, UWS BANKSTOWN CAMPUS
This
talk was given to a public forum at the University of Western Sydney, Bankstown
Campus, organised by Students United Against War and Racism and the Partnerships
in Cultural Change Project.
The opening paragraph refers
to that fact that the talk took place during the longest-running student
occupation at UWS, and possibly any Australian University, being held by
indigenous students from the Goolangullia Aboriginal Education Centre,
over issues of management centralisation, rationalisation and lack of consultation.
---
Let
me begin by offering my respects and my sorrow for the victims of biological
and chemical war. I mean those people mass murdered in this land – such
as with smallpox scabs deliberately imported for the purpose, with strychnine
poisoning their waterholes, with the whole arsenal of diseases and drugs
as well as with the more conventional weapons, and the hunger and humiliation
and the hopelessness which followed, along with our own form of concentration
camps.
If
I'm here to talk about war and racism, the only way to begin is by recognising
the war of invasion and accompanying racism against the indigenous people
of his land. Bringing European 'civilisation' to the supposed benighted
savages. And if that's a 'black armband view of history', then black is
a pretty good colour for one. The racism continues to this day, and the
colonialist mission-manager approach of the white administrators is still
sadly with us. So I salute the students from Goolangullia who continue
occupying that little bit of their land and demanding the right
to have a say over their education and the allocation of its resources.
That's part of the hard yards towards real, grassroots reconciliation that
not all the sorry-books and grand gestures in the world can achieve.
But
I've been asked – at the last minute – to talk about the bombing war, as
well as about racism in Western Sydney. The war of the 'smart bombs'. One
blew up a clearly marked Red Cross warehouse in Kabul his morning, and
destroyed food and clothing for starving and exposed civilians. That's
pretty smart, isn't it? Yesterday one landed in a residential area and
killed dozens of civilians. Somebody, punched in the wrong code, they said.
A similar clean surgical strike blew up a tall building in Iraq, a decade
ago, I recall. It was full of non-combatants - residents or office-workers
- and at first they tried to say it was a ccommunications tower but then
it was just a mistake. Like the Chinese embassy in Belgrade a couple of
years ago, hit with a US smart missile, slaughtering innocent civilians.
Another mistake.
But
this is the 'War against Terrorism'. Just after the attack on the World
Trade Centre and the Pentagon, leading US politicians, military leaders
and conservative commentators called for this war and I read their unusually
frank announcement that some indiscriminate killing of civilians would
be necessary and unavoidable. And I thought to myself, isn't indiscriminate
killing of civilians what terrorism is?
And
I thought about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two different designs of atom bomb,
dropped deliberately at different heights, in the two cities with different
geographic conditions, to gauge the levels of devastation for future reference.
On civilians. A hundred thousand killed - the lucky ones died straight
away. Burnt to death, crushed in obliterated buildings. Others perished
slowly and painfully from the radiation poisoning. More than a grand experiment,
though, this was an exercise in global terror. The war was already won.
This was about the Cold War to come; it was to show that just one side
had these terrible weapons of mass destruction, and could exercise its
power unchecked around the globe. We know now that they did not keep their
monopoly on nuclear weapons, and there were two global superpowers for
half a century. Until one of them won the Cold War: they now exercise that
power quite unhindered.
How
can you say – as so many punditsgravely
have – that September 11 is the Date the World Changed? Perhaps
because one life wrapped in pinkish skin in North America is seen to be
so much more valuable than many more lives wrapped in yellowish or brownish
skin in Asia? Whose world changed on that day?
The
unfettered superpower's blockade of Iraq has meant that hundreds of thousands
of people have died of starvation and disease. Life did not change there
on September 11 for the thousands of innocent Iraqi children perishing
of hunger and infection. Isn't theirs a violent, suffering and terrible
death? But we must have oil for the wheels of civilisation. So the innocent
victims are represented as an evil, barbaric and utterly foreign people.
Arabs. Muslims. Terrorists. The enemy.
As
a result of this representation, during the Gulf War, women in western
Sydney supermarkets had their veils torn off. People were spat on in the
streets. Places of worship were vandalised. People were assaulted. Some
were even driven from their homes. There was at least one death. Most victims
were Australian citizens, of course. Yet oliticians and tabloids proclaim
we are civilised here, and know how to behave decently, and presume to
lecture immigrants and asylum seekers. Can we learn the lessons of history?
My
Chilean friends tell me that their world did change on September
11th – in 1973 when Pinochet's forces, with the instigation
and backing of the CIA, seized control of their country in a coup d'etat.
The democratically elected president was murdered, his official residence
bombed, and a junta was put in place that assassinated, disappeared and
tortured tens of thousands in its reign of terror. But the old general
still has friends in that one remaining superpower, and doubtless remembers
with gratitude the assistance that would embarrass those still in high
places there. So he goes free: he will not face trial for crimes
against humanity.
Who
are the terrorists? Who bombed President Ghaddafi's house and murdered
his wife? Who have made countless attempts on President Castro's life?
Who support the regime in Israel, which is daily carrying out political
assassinations in the territories it occupies and boasting about it to
the world. A cruel irony: the murdered are always declared to be terrorists,
and the dead can't defend themselves against the accusation.
What
are crimes against humanity? What about the chemical defoliation of an
entire country? We only hear of agent orange for the effects it had on
US and Australian soldiers in Vietnam; what about the people that lived
there? How about napalm bombing of civilians, so that their bodies are
agonisingly burned: many to death, others to years of brutal pain and lives
of disfiguration? Is not carpet-bombing, obliterating with cluster bombs
all in its path – civilians, women, children – a crime against humanity?
The valiant spokesmen for the land of the brave and the home of the free
– our ally – bragged of how they would bomb that poor people back to the
Stone Age. And so marched the forces of freedom and democracy across the
globe for decades. The freedom of the market and the democracy of the dollar.
Against 'evil and godless' communism.
But
now the Cold War is lost and won: a decade ago. Now our great and powerful
friend faces evil and Islamic terrorism, they say. And the generals lament
that Afghanistan is already blasted back to the stone age and they don't
have anything much to bomb. The new personification of evil is the United
States' old ally in the fight with the Soviet Union. The US trained and
funded Osama Bin Laden for that purpose, and promoted and aided the movement
that produced the Taliban. But then they also earlier paid and backed their
other incarnation of evil, Saddam Hussein, when it suited their interests
to confront Iran in the region. The fundamentalist forces they confronted
in Iran, headed by their previous epitome of evil, Ayatollah Khomeini,
were formed with the overthrow of the corrupt and despotic Shah – another
torturer and murderer – whom they installed and supported, far too long
for their own interests, as a bulwark against communism and to secure sources
of oil and profit. Now what is their plan for Afghanistan, the country
next door? They're talking about bringing back the aged former king, another
Shah, as a figurehead in a puppet government! Don't these leaders learn?
Or do the followers forget too soon?
Now
all of these US propaganda enemy-figures I've mentioned, some of them conveniently
forgotten former friends, have been represented typically in racist ways
in the media, as part of the campaign to rally the domestic population
– and the troops – to the cause. There is nothing new about this; the same
thing was done with Japanese during World War 2. It has some very ugly
consequences. After Pearl Harbour, for example, Japanese Americans, some
of them in the US for generations, were persecuted, attacked driven from
their homes, and so on, identified with the enemy on the basis of their
physical appearance. Some of the Americans who suffered this have felt
scarred for life by it, and have spoken out recently, saying they know
how it must feel for people of Middle Eastern appearance in the US today.
This
sort of racism, fuelled by the grossest of ignorance, is not very discerning.
In Australia, after World War 2, for instance, German-speaking Jews, for
example, refugees from Nazism, were often taunted and reviled by association
with the very fascism they had fled. So in our country today, government
ministers and media demagogues are branding Afghani and Iraqi asylum-seekers
as possible terrorist agents for the very regimes of the Taliban or Saddam
Hussein from which they have escaped. This is irresponsible and opportunistic
cynicism, and very damaging to communities in Australia. As well as being
ignorant, racism is irrational and fundamentally confused. A sort of jumbled
equation bounces around in many people's minds, like: Middle Eastern=Arab=Muslim=fundamentalist=mysogynist
+violent+terrorist. If it's a man, you can add 'rapist'. This ignorance
is a deep disgrace to our education system, and its wilful provocation
is a shame on our political system.
One
women assaulted in Sydney during the Gulf War, having her hijab ripped
off, was an Indonesian: Muslim=Arab=Iraqi enemy. After 11 September, a
Christian church in Western Sydney gets smeared with excrement and defaced
with graffiti because it has Arabic writing: Arab=Muslim=terrorist. A Sikh
man is bashed in Sydney: turban+brown skin=Middle Eastern=terrorist. A
Sikh man and a Pakistani man – innocent citizens going about their lives
– have been murdered in the United States in the last weeks in racist attacks.
Two mosques have been burned in Australia. We must not allow this sort
of race-hate. We know, since the Nazi Holocaust – that other crime against
humanity that did change our world – where it can lead. Please,
no more pogroms, no more Crystal Nights, no more smashing of synagogues,
mosques, churches, religious icons and other sacred sites and objects.
No more burning of books: we need to learn.
All
human beings have the same needs for food, for clean water and air, for
shelter from the elements. We do not have the right to deprive others of
these. We all have the same, human thirst for knowledge, the same gift
of human language, the same wonder of human culture and its making. We
are all capable of laughter, pain and love. People of all cultures love
their children. What fatuous, racist arrogance to say, as have some media
and politicians, 'Look how these people on the Manoora behave, what sort
of people can throw their child in the sea? We do not want such people
among us and we will not allow them shelter.' We should rather ask, how
great must be the desperation that would drive our fellow humans, who love
their children as we do, to do so? Have we not seen recently before the
photos of desperate, frantic, people throwing their children over razor
wire in the hope of rescue?
I
grieve for the people in those planes and those buildings on 11 September.
I feel sorrow for their families and friends. But let us not diminish the
humanity of others. Let us have, therefore, as some emails I've received
from Latin America suggest, one minute's silence for these ten thousand
odd victims of terrorism.. And let us have, proportionately:
·"Thirteen
minutes in remembrance of the 130,000 Iraqi civilian dead in 1991 through
the orders of George Bush Senior;
·Twenty
minutes in memory of the 200,000 Iranians killed by the Iraqis with weapons
and money provided to Saddam Hussein by the same America which later turned
all its artillery on them;
·Another
fifteen minutes for the Russians and 150,000 Afghans killed at the hands
of the Taliban, also with arms and orders from the USA who raised their
organisation and trained them with the CIA;
·And
a further ten minutes for the 100,000 Japanese civilians killed directly
and indirectly by the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
If
we observed all that, we'd have an hour of silence: one respectful minute
for the American victims of terrorism,and
fifty-nine minutes for the victims of American terrorism.
And
to this dreadful calculus we can add the victims of mass destruction in
Vietnam and the terror and torture in Chile, which I mentioned, along with
untold others that I haven't. I haven't even referred, for example, to
the decades US-admitted biological warfare against the people of Cuba,
the hijacking of Cuban planes, the bombing of a Cuban airliner.
And
now, for every child that is killed in this dreadful war in Afghanistan,
a thousand will die of indirect causes, an aid worker from a respected
agency said yesterday in an ABC interview.
So
let's say, 'Stop the war! No more racism! No more weapons of mass destruction!'
And
finally, in view of today being October 17, which they used to say was
a date that changed the world, let us recognise, whatever else has changed,
that peace, land and bread are still honourable and decent objectives.
–
Scott Poynting