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Our Silence is Not for Sale
I have to keep saying to myself: George Bush does not represent the USA; George Bush does not represent the USA. Tony Blair is not the British people; Tony Blair is not the British people.
Yet both were chosen by their parties as leaders and both became leaders of their respective countries through the vagaries of their particular representational systems. I like to think - and I have many American friends who frustratingly make the same argument - that George Bush represents the state of politics rather than the state of the union and that not all North Americans share his war-mongering.
Just look at what the high and mighty have managed to do! Certainly in the USA (and increasingly in Britain) they have made ordinary people apathetic and so disillusioned that the right to vote - what their forbears struggled and often died for - is considered a pointless exercise. In the last Presidential elections only half the people who were registered to vote (which is significantly less than half the people entitled to vote) cast their ballot. In Britain it is estimated that 60% of young people didn’t bother to vote in the last general election which saw the lowest turn-out in eighty years.
For many in the working class and underclass across Europe - with the foremost exception being the nationalist community in the North - the political system is seen as an exclusive, impenetrable club.
US Congress, Senate and Presidential elections are contested by millionaires or wealthy candidates, bankrolled by millionaires, big business interests and multinationals, with one or other, or all candidates, supported by media monopolies out to secure their own interests. Imagine if the voting power of blacks (who make up 12% of the population), ethnic minorities and the thirty three million people in the USA who live in poverty, was realised and impacted on the choice of representatives? Do you think the President could still go to war so easily? Or that he could allow Israel to continue with it slow genocide of the Palestinian people?
The world was supposed to be a dangerous place because of the division between capitalism and communism, epitomised, respectively, by the USA and its allies, and the former USSR and its comrades, and the proliferation on both sides of weapons of mass destruction. Yet the collapse of communism has only fed the arrogance of US imperialists who think they can do what they want across the globe without respect to other opinions.
The angry and dismissive attitude of the Bush administration to those members of the United Nations which advocate caution, giving UN weapon inspectors more time in Iraq and who refuse to roll over for Uncle Sam is a case in point.
No chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been discovered in Iraq yet in a few weeks time US and British forces are going to invade that country and murder its citizens to get control of its oil. Afterwards, we will be told that Saddam Hussein was really overthrown because he was a cruel dictator (which is true) and that it was a war for ‘democracy’.
Overthrowing cruel dictators and replacing them with ‘our’ social democracies sounds very noble if it weren’t for the fact that US administrations have spent more time overthrowing democratic leaders and replacing them with dictators. It’s a hard habit to break. Just last April the US fulsomely welcomed the overthrow by dissident army forces and big business of popularly elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - only to discover that they had been a bit premature. Within days the coup was reversed and he was restored to power after the lower ranks of the army came to his rescue and crowds of supporters took to the streets.
US government spokespersons have also attacked the ‘dangerous’ policies of the most recently democratically elected President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, because he cancelled a large $700 million dollar fighter jet deal so he could plough the mondey into his fight against hunger and help put three meals a day on the table of his people.
Opposition to the forthcoming war against the Iraqi people is building - right across the world, including huge mobilisations in capital cities across the USA. Nelson Mandela has urged the American people to join protests against their president and has accused Tony Blair of being George Bush’s Foreign Minister.
Here in Ireland there has been an ongoing protest at the use of Shannon airport by US forces on their way to the Middle East as part of the military build-up. Typically, one of the more crude and craven arguments given by detractors of the peace movement is that if we don’t support the US war against Iraq we might alienate US investors in Ireland! This is the culture of greed and self-interest which actually creates the climate for war and perpetuates human misery.
But our silence is not for sale.
On Saturday week, February 15th, there will be anti-war protests in every major city around the world. Everyone - those with or without votes - will have the opportunity for their voices to be heard, to speak as one.
Then we shall see that George Bush does not represent the USA. And Tony Blair is not the British people. We shall see that ordinary people do not subscribe to their lies and double standards, and, that the USA, in the words of Nelson Mandela, “has no moral authority to police the world.”
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison