Prime Minister Harper’s motives for supporting our troops and our
mission in Afghanistan are well intentioned. But does he not thereby
embrace a far greater threat: United States Empire?
Mr. Harper and (now) Public Safety Minster Stockwell Day once wrote in The Wall Street Journal
(March 28, 2003) that, “Prime Minister Jean Chretien has left Canada
outside this multilateral coalition of nations… For the first time in
history, the Canadian government has not stood beside its key British
and American allies in their time of need.” Can they mean “multilateral
coalition”? What about the War of 1812? These are minor quibbles,
however.
Mr. Harper’s political opponent—though ideological twin—Michael
Ignatieff designates the US “Empire Lite,” which, like ads for “Lager
Lite,” conceals massive addiction to the “Myth of Redemptive Violence”
(Walter Wink).
Ever since articulation of The Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and its embrace
of “Manifest Destiny” in the 1840s, the United States has opposed all
nations and peoples (the Americas and American Indians initially)
noncompliant with its agenda of economic and political hegemony. The
current War on Terror is assertion that American dominance now
encircles the globe in an ultimate marriage of both.
No empire known to history has held power without savagery contrary to
articulated values of “civilization”. Why does Mr. Harper think U.S.
Empire with unprecedented global reach and military power is any
different, is “lite” in its ubiquitous (jackboot) footprint? Have not
U.S. Empire values already supplanted previously accepted norms of
civilization?
In 1938, the U.S. Department of State announced that aerial bombardment
of civilians was “in violation of the most elementary principles of
those standards of humane conduct which have been developed as an
essential part of modern civilization.” President Roosevelt September
1, 1939 declared such by the Nazis to be “inhuman barbarism” that “has
profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity”. That was the standard
for “civilization” upheld by the U.S. before World War II. What
happened subsequently?
A poll on December 10 1941 (three days after Pearl Harbor) found 67% of
the U.S. population favouring unqualified and indiscriminate bombing of
Japanese cities. In 1945, General Curtis LeMay, the most decorated
military figure in American history, was in charge of a firebombing
offensive in Japan that resulted in the deaths of nearly 1 million
Japanese citizens, including 100,000 in Tokyo during a single night.
LeMay’s B-29 bombers raked 67 Japanese cities, sometimes killing more
than 50% of the population. LeMay openly bragged: “We scorched and
boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March
9-10 [1945] than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
He also admitted, as did former Secretary of State Robert McNamara in
The Fog of War, that had they lost the war, they would have been tried
as war criminals—on a par with Nazis. Then came the Bomb—not once, but
twice, visited on two cities with teeming populations, neither until
then attacked: “pure targets.” The night before the first mass murder,
amongst those in the know, “few were able to sleep. They were as
excited as little boys on Christmas Eve.” (Thomas Merton)
“Inhuman barbarism”? “Violation of the most elementary principles of…
modern civilization”? Then and since, only visions of sugarplums danced
in their heads.
Yet Mr. Harper seems to have accepted this Orwellian bastardization of
“civilization” and continued U.S. atrocities against civilians
committed the world over since, for which the evidential literature is
voluminous and burgeoning. Do he and Mr. Day still stand by what they
declared in that same Wall Street Journal article: “Modern Canada was
forged in large part by war—not because it was easy but because it was
right. In the great wars of the last century—against authoritarianism,
fascism, and communism — Canada did not merely stand with the
Americans; more often than not we led the way. [The Manhattan Project
that birthed the Bomb, as later development of modern psychological
torture techniques practiced today by American Empire, had indeed
significant Canadian contributions.] We
did so for freedom, for democracy, for civilization itself. These
values continue to be embodied in our allies and their leaders, and
scorned by the forces of evil, including Saddam Hussein and the
perpetrators of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (emphasis added).”
Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee argues that the only
consistent signature of our species is genocide. Is this where US
Empire values are headed in continued revisioning of standards of war,
of standards of torture, of standards of civilization itself?
What is next for Mr. Harper to embrace: full spectrum planet dominance
(The Bush Doctrine) in an ultimate “clash of barbarisms” (Gilbert
Achcar) that perhaps becomes coterminous with global genocide?