Another way of describing impunity is that ‘might is right’ but a ‘right’ reinforced and delivered by the corporate media’s complicity in the process of granting immunity (invisibility) to those who practice mass murder and genocide on a scale that almost defies description.
The book is divided into three sections: Part I: From Hiroshima
to Guantanamo; Part II: Humanitarian Law: Legal and Moral Values to
Defend and Part III: In Pursuit of an End to Impunity.
Other descriptions listed by the Thesaurus are perhaps even more apt:
Owe
no responsibility, be free from, have no liability, spare oneself the
necessity, exempt oneself, excuse oneself, the list goes on…
- “The
American ambassador to the United Nations in the middle of the 1970s,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has thus congratulated himself in his memoirs,
for having rendered “totally ineffective, on the instructions of the
State Department, all measures taken by the United Nations [with regard
to the 40-plus UN resolutions on Palestine]”. — ‘Rudolph El-Kareh, The
American Politic in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness.’
(p.64)
The
collection of essays gathered together in ‘International Justice and
Impunity’ encompasses the views of many people and organizations united
by one thing, namely the examination and condemnation of the ‘right’
enjoyed by the United States and its principal allies the UK, the EU
and Japan, to be extremely selective about international law and human
rights, applying such laws as and when it suits them to and simply
ignoring the self-same international laws when it doesn’t.
Of
course such behaviour by the imperialist states is nothing new but
given the power of a hegemonic global media to blank out the crimes of
the US and its allies, impunity takes on an ominous significance given
the awesome power the US employs as it seeks to extend its control of
the world and its resources.
Again (and again), I have to
return to the simple fact that without the corporate (and state)
media’s collusion in this massive sleight-of-hand such deceptions would
be well nigh impossible to carry out. And, if I have a criticism of the
book it is the omission of a section that directly addresses the role
of the mass media in delivering the imperialist message, without which
it would be difficult to persuade us to go along with the slaughter and
the barbarity practiced by those who impudently like to call themselves
civilized.
The process is plain to see for anyone who cares to
look; it’s the media equivalent of saturation bombing. The names
Zimbabwe, Darfur, Tibet, Islamist, Hamas, Hizbollah, Chavez, Cuba,
immediately come to mind but over the years the list is an extremely
long one.
The recipe is extremely simple: take one event where
there are obvious human rights violations eg in Sudan and go hell for
leather in swamping the ‘news’ outlets with cries of rage and
indignation about the Sudanese government’s treatment of its population
and keep on doing it until the word DARFUR is burned into everyone’s
brain. Follow this up with demands for intervention, and, in the
supreme irony, demand that a special (and illegal) criminal tribunal be
convened, using the cover of the ‘United’ Nations to bring the
miscreants to justice before the eyes of the world.
Ironic
because the US fought tooth and nail to stop the formation of the
International Criminal Court and failing to do that, watered it down at
every step along the way and then, to add insult to injury, refused to
recognize its jurisdiction, when over 100 countries signed up to it
(Bush even removed the US signature from it when it realized that even
with its awesome power, it couldn’t prevent its formation).
Worse
still, the US was instrumental in the creation of ad hoc ‘criminal
tribunals’ by arm-twisting the United Nations whose Charter has no
powers to convene such creatures.
The degree to which the US
perverts every international law (including those that it has
reluctantly signed) is perhaps best exemplified by the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for contrary to the mass media
misconception, the NPT is not just about stopping the spread of nuclear
weapons (beyond the original six signatories) but is specifically aimed
at reducing and eventually eliminating existing nuclear weapons
entirely.
So all the while that the US and its allies engineer
an hysterical campaign against Iran and its alleged development of
nuclear weapons, the US is actively developing new nuclear weapons not
as deterrents but to use in combat. The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review[1]
spells it out in horrendous detail as Tadatoshi Akiba relates in his
contribution to the book ‘Toward the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons’.
“…instead
of simply utilizing nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence, they [the
US] will start manufacturing bombs and other devices of mass
destruction for the purpose of actually using them … and the most
important point I believe, is that they clearly stated their intention
to use those weapons in combat.” (p.26)
At first reading the
selection of essays chosen for this book seemed to have no immediate
connection one to the other but on closer inspection they reveal that
Impunity is the thread across the decades which, as Samir Amin’s
contribution ‘The Geostrategy of Contemporary Imperialism’ shows is an
intrinsic component of the US ruling class’s project to “extend their
military control over the whole planet”, a project that Amin describes
as
“…overwheening, even crazy, and criminal by what it implies,
[and one that] did not come out of President Bush Junior’s head, to be
implemented by an extreme right junta, seizing power through dubious
elections.
“It is the project which the ruling class of the United
States has unceasingly nurtured since 1945, even though its
implementation evidently passed through ups and downs, encountered a
few vicissitudes, and was here and there checked, and could be not be
pursued with the consistency and violence that this implied in certain
conjunctural moments like that following the disintegration of the
Soviet Union.” (p.34)
It is, as Amin states, the Monroe
Doctrine extended to to the entire planet and one that he describes in
his conclusion as “The Empire of Chaos and Permanent War”. (p.54)
As
an aside, the reality described by Amin and other contributors bears
absolutely no resemblence to what we are all fed by the corporate
media, indeed it’s as if we live on two different planets, so
integrated is the media into the ‘Empire of Chaos’s’ view of the world
and how it works and currently best exemplified by the incessant
hammering of the ‘War on Terror’ motif that insinuates itself into our
daily lives. But again, the ‘War on Terror’ is merely the War on
Communism by another name, which in turn was the war on any country
that dared defy the imperialist ‘right to rule’ which in turn is, as
Michael Parenti’s excellent summation of imperialism’s ‘divine right’
to own the planet, ‘Rulers of the Planet - The Real Reasons for the US
Invasion of the Planet’ puts it,
“The objective of US global policy is not just power for its own sake but the
power to control the world’s natural resources and markets,
power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world,
power to prevent alternative self-defining, self-developing economic models from arising,
and
power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere—including Europe
and North America—the blessings of an untrammeled global “free market”
(pps. 123-1)
The integration of the media into the imperialist
project is total and virtually seamless, made possible by a veritable
army of a complicit intelligentsia created by an education system
designed literally to “mold” a view of the world that complies with the
imperialist project.[2]
Two essays reveal the two realities
most tellingly, the first is Rudolph El-Kareh’s, ‘The American Politic
in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness,’ and Monique
Chemiller-Gendreau’s contribution, ‘Impunity and Massive Breaches of
Humanitarian Law in Vietnam’, the war that slaughtered perhaps three
million Vietnamese and whose consequences haunt the Vietnamese people
to this day through the US use of Agent Orange which was dropped on
around 8.5% of Vietnamese territory or 2.5 million hectares.
“It
is notably in the Middle East, and surrounding the question of
Palestine, that the United States has systematically instituted
impunity in the face of violations of international law…. The violation
of international law and the work of sapping the United Nations were
not only infractions of its Charter, of which the United States was one
of the principal authors, but also contravened Article 6 of the
American Constitution considering this as an integral part of the
“supreme law” of the country.” (p.64)
Hey, but this is what impunity
is all about, ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say!’ As Bill Blum’s
contribution ‘Freeing the World to Death - How the United States Gets
Away with It’ says,
“When I speak before American university
students I say this to them: If I were to write a book called The
American Empire for Dummies, page one would say: Don’t ever look for
the moral factor. US foreign policy has no moral factor built into its
DNA. Clear your mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of
seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes they feed us.” (p.102)
If
it weren’t all so tragic, it would be laughable. The gulf between the
words and the actions of the United States is demonstrated by the
contribution of Daniel Iagolnitzer, ‘International Law Relative to War
and the United States’, an overview of the progress made over the past
century and a half in the development of international law as it
applies to war and how the US has demolished every last one of them!
Ironically,
one of the first laws governing the conduct of the state when engaged
in war was president Lincoln’s Lieber Code, introduced in 1863 which
included the prohibition of the use of torture,
“Military
necessity does not admit of the inflicting of suffering for the sake of
suffering or revenge, nor of wounding except in fight, nor of torture
to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any
way or of the wanton devastation of a district… (Art. 16).”
Perhaps
the most devastating exposé of not only the United States actions but
also of other Western states and especially the UK, is revealed in Jan
Myrdal’s contribution ‘The Necessity of Defending the Rule of Law!’.
Myrdal quotes sections of the testimony of Reich Marshal, Defendant
Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. The parallels
between his defence of the concentration camps and ‘preventive
detention’ and that of the US in creating Guantanamo (and in the UK of
‘preventive detention’ under its ‘anti-terror’ laws) are most
illuminating and chilling. Referring to what Goering called “protective
custody”:
Mr. Justice Jackson: … You did prohibit all court review
and considered it necessary to prohibit court review of the causes for
taking people into what you called protective custody?
/…/
Goering:
In connection with your question that these cases could not be reviewed
by the court, I want to say that a decree was issued by me and jointly
to the effect that those who were turned over to concentration camps
were to be informed after 24 hours of the reason for their being turned
over, and that after 48 hours, or some short period of time, they
should have the right to an attorney. But this by no means rescinded my
order that a review was not permitted by the courts of a politically
necessary measure of protective custody. These people were simply to be
given an opportunity of making a protest.
Mr. Justice Jackson:
Protective custody meant that you were taking people into custody who
had not committed any crimes but who, you thought, might possibly
commit a crime?
Goering: Yes. People were arrested and taken
into protective custody who had not yet committed any crime, but who
could be expected to do so if they remained free, just as protective
measures are being taken in Germany today on a tremendous scale.
Sound familar? You bet it does as it describes exactly the situation today as the result, allegedly of the ‘war on terror’.
Finally,
the sub-text of impunity must also be described as a crime of
‘omission’, omission that is, on the part of us, the citizens of
empire.
The section by Amy Bartholomew “Strategies of the
Weak”? Contesting Empire Through Litigation Under International
Humanitarian Law’ addresses the issue of ‘omission’ directly (and not
merely of the media), when she says,
“Such a felt sense of
political responsibility for Empire’s actions by its citizens is
dependent on viewing oneself not as an innocent or impotent bystander
but rather as an implicated agent.
…as a relationship of
perpetrators of atrocities liable for legal prosecution for having
committed crimes of commission, their innocent and violated victimes,
and bystanders who may be viewed, at most, as culpable of sins of
omission, morally guilty, of the “excusable and forgiveable misdeed of
“bystanding’”. This approach … misses the fact that there is a
necessary relationship—a “grey area”—between perpetrayors and
‘bystanders’. But by constituting them as distinct categories we miss
the fact that there may be “common ground to both”, an “affinity
between ‘evil doing’ and ‘non-resistance to evil”’ and this needs not
just be recognized but also to be the object of our political efforts
to bring these these two categories under the lens of moral political
concern.” (p.221)
As Bartholomew says, citizens of empire,
“do
have a responsibility to act to resist empire. This is based on an
analysis of the impunity of empire for it is the idea that there is a
nonreciprocal right of Empire to run roughshod over everyone else in
the name of spreading its own values and its own conception of security
globally—one of the essential hallmarks of ‘empire’s law’— that must be
contested.” (pps.222-223)
It is only by directly addressing the
issue of our complicity, by our failure to act that the Empire does
indeed run roughshod over all opposition. Moreover, Bartholomew
suggests that,
“while capitalism is unleashed and “economic forces
are free to act globally”, there are at best only germs and
premonitions of a globally binding legal and juridicial system, global
democracy or globally binding, enforceable and obeyed ethical code.”
This
is because, “Ethically motivated and informed global action has no
adequately global instruments.” (p.225) But Bartholomew does suggest an
approach that I believe is extremely important, based upon our raising
the issue of legally challenging the right to wage war,
“What the
American Empire fears, and I think rightly, is that such strategies may
contribute to our capacities to become the ‘strong’…my claim is that
such politically inspired attempts litigating against American Empire
under international humanitarian law may contribute to the goals of
cultivating a sense of poitical responsibility, while both depending on
political action for their broad effectivity and contributing to
further political action.” (p.228)
But warning us that “the
development of cosmopolitan law, of global law” will not, by itself
lead to “perpetual peace and universal freedom”, only a coherent,
progressive and anti-capitalist (socialist) agenda has even a chance of
achieving the defeat of Empire of Chaos.
Notes
1. See for
example, ‘Secret Plan Outlines the Unthinkable’ A secret policy review
of the nation’s nuclear policy puts forth chilling new contingencies
for nuclear war. by William M. Arkin
2. The national education
system implemented by the Tory government in the closing days of WWII
described the advantages of such a system using the term “molding” an
entire generation. Molding our views to support the idea of our ‘divine
right’ to rule, a strategy that up until now anyway, appears to have
been very successful.
This essay is archived at: http://www.creative-i.info/?p=305
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