27.04.1995

USA terrorist state

THE TERRIBLE bomb in Oklahoma last week and the diabolical slaughter wreaked by it should be seen against next week’s anniversary of the USA’s defeat in Vietnam. ‘The bomb hasn’t reduced the USA to terrorism,’ we are told by the media. Are they crazy?

This state was founded on the mass murder and genocide of millions of native Americans. It was built on the blood of generation upon generation of brutalised, raped and murdered black Africans.

It has, particularly since the end of World War II, unleashed naked terrorism across the globe, blitzing men, women and children - not incidentally, but deliberately targeting them as hostages to American global power. Massacring them - not simply with high explosives, as the Oklahoma bombers have done, but up close as in Vietnam.

By the end of the Vietnam war the US state had given up all pretence that such massacres were accidental overflows of military operations, and built a single strategy based on wiping out villages.

Blanket bombing of cities in Indochina and the Middle East, regardless of the obvious murder of thousands of millions of ordinary unarmed, non-combative people, has become established policy of the US military machine since Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the targets were chosen because they were civilian.

Indiscriminate mass murder also happens at home, as in Waco, and against the earlier ‘Move’ organisation.

So let’s be clear: what has shocked America is that someone else should deign to do it to them. The US state is no stranger to terrorism.

It is likely that behind the rightwing fanatics there is another element to the story - perhaps the hand of the CIA and the FBI which have been facing cutbacks now that the Cold War is over. A new enemy has to be found .... or developed.

Now the American public is being spoon-fed a new McCarthyism - the internal threat from groups political, religious and military. Don’t let anyone think that the current purge will end with the rifle clubs and the survivalists. Thought and lifestyle differences and traditional anti-government champions of liberty and individualism are set for a night of long knives.

It should go without saying that this bomb should be utterly condemned.

But we should take no hypocritical bullshit from the US state.

Dave Douglass