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The Globalization of Terror — Peddlers of the Old, New Democracy
Part 1
by keith harmon snow
New Delhi, December, 2001: On November 26, a surveillance helicopter dispatched from the destroyer U.S.S. John Gray, which was docked for R & R in Chennai harbor, invaded Indian airspace without clearance. Days later, the Indian government newly subordinated its land and people to the whims of the U.S. Navy and Air Force. The new military agreement, U.S. Admiral Dennis Blair assured, buys America’s newest ally in war a plethora of hope and promise. This is the fiction sold by the United States government. In reality, the pact signals a new darkness for India, and another portentous knell in the wake-up call for the world.
There is turmoil in the House of India. India, for example, has a reputation for free market prostitution. Hundreds of thousands and possibly over a million females are employed in Indian brothels. Thousands of Nepalese, Tibetan, Bhutanese and Burmese children—girls as young as nine—have been lured or abducted into sexual slavery in India. The trade is booming. Nepalese and Indian officials sanction trafficking in females; police are amongst the brothels’ leading patrons.
Respected for its "non-aligned" status throughout the Gulf War, the government of India has again underscored its propensity to barter people, water and land—its very soul—for money. There are the deals with nuclear weapons and nuclear wastes; the trysts with the multinational corporations—the Coca-Colas and Nestlés and Shell Oil companies; the duplicitous bargains with the shady peddlers of "free-trade"—the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. But money cannot be eaten.
Through the social and environmental debts and debits of mega-dams, mega-loans and militarization—progress as prescribed by western predatory capitalism—India has further mortgaged its way into deplorable poverty, class and race discrimination, sexual slavery, natural resource exhaustion, agricultural decline and domestic war.
Now India prostitutes itself to the globalization of terror and the peddlers of the old, new "democracy." India sides with terrorists—legitimizes state terrorism peddled by the West—and prepares to manufacture its own: Terror is yet another sweatshop commodity peddled in the global marketplace. Dotting the streets of Delhi, however, the black and red adverts for ABB—the secretive, Swiss-based multinational Asea Brown Baveri—are obvious signs that India has for some time been sleeping with the enemy. Indeed, some of us know this.
We know that U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a sordid history as an ABB director, that he is peddling our rights and freedoms for personal profits. We know that Condoleeza Rice is as tight with Chevron as Ronald is with McDonald’s. We know that Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham—U.S. secretaries of Commerce and Energy—are greasing the skids for oil and gas and nuclear fallout. We understand the implications of the Bechtels and the Carlysles and the GEs having revolving doors into the U.S. government and back. And we are supposed to believe that these people and companies are serving the greater American interests?
For her pact with the new U.S. "Coalition of Terror," India is promised combined "humanitarian airlifts," combined "special operations training," "small unit ground and sea exercises," and—the most laughable reward of all—the promise of "increased security in the region."
Well, some of us, at least, know what that means.
Afghanistan has been unconventionally nuked: It is just a matter of time before we learn, as happened in Iraq, that uranium-cased ammunitions, or other "smart" radioactive toys, were used; that civilian water systems were intentionally contaminated. Pakistan’s economy is reeling. Pakistan’s people are divided. The U.S. is goading Israel to finish the job once and for all; the terrorists in the Israeli government are appropriately excited. American patriots are dispensing anthrax at home, feeding the frenzy of American vengeance. At least half the world is at war and the tentacles of the newly prosecuted western terror stretch from the Philippines to Nepal, from Columbia to the Congo, from Maine to San Francisco.
The Pentagon’s program for India was recently revealed in its master plan for the region: missiles, and planes to carry them; heavy artillery; commands, communications, and controls (C3I)—a plethora of war toys imagined at the University of Massachusetts, MIT, Dartmouth and Stanford. Technogadgets and retrofits and miss-fits and spare parts and replacement parts and everything needed to separate innocent people from their body parts. And with the indiscriminate precision of an American cluster bomb, the Pentagon’s new deal in India triggered an immediate attack on the Indian parliament: eleven people dead, and new cause for India to prosecute war on its own.
To understand the menace of "increased security in the region," one needs only examine Washington’s "Plan Columbia": millions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars used to defoliate and sterilize the land and the animals and the people of Columbia; U.S.-sponsored paramilitary death squads; assassinations, tortures and massacres—and U.S. government agents, addicted to violence, dealing cocaine, and shooting up the Gulf of Mexico.
One needs only examine the clandestine gunrunning and state-organized crime on the killing fields of Africa. War as cover for private profit is U.S. foreign policy; meanwhile, private mercenary firms—staffed by former U.S. generals—are dealing diamonds out of Africa. What—besides total, brutal war—do Angola, Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan have in common? Diamonds from each accrue to the dons of the Bush-Clinton-Bush gangs.
"Increased security in the region" brought us Srebrenica, where 5,000 to 8,000 Moslems were systematically slaughtered after they gave up their guns to the United Nations—who pulled out and abandoned them. The new brokers of the U.S. Coalition of Terror are selling the "security" of a red-light district, an internment camp, or a minefield. The threat is real, but unseen, and it is deadly: one is never safe. From these criminal enterprises we can get some inkling of the hope and promise in store for the world and its discontents. The Emperor is as naked as a snake, and thrice as lethal.
Elements in the United States government, and the corporate shadow warriors behind it, are the leading purveyors of global terror. Not that this is anything new. The hydra has certainly molted, however, shed its old skin, and boldly emerged from its hole. September 11 has ushered in a new era. Indeed, the Emperor need no longer so carefully mask his gruesome intent, for a majority of the people—the angry, horrified, wounded American people and their sympathetic brethren—now openly clamor for the annihilation of the enemy: an elusive, scurrilous foe defined by classified documents and the credos of globalization.
But not all Americans support our "government" and its corporate allies and their new Coalition of Terror. Language is a tool we are stuck with, and we know not what else but "government" to call it. But it was stolen from us. George Bush was never freely elected (as suppressed election evidence reveals). These people have hijacked the state, wrecked the environment, and even the village idiot can see—if he is not already blind from the toxic discharge of multinational corporate sludge and lethal gases. Those in "government" now openly practice policies previously pursued only in the corridors of darkness, in their corporate boardrooms, in their elite men’s clubs, in the tombs of their mindless thoughts.
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