MB Civic

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:28 AM and filed under Articles. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

4 Responses to “Fisk on our denial of history and the monstrous lies our leaders continue to feed us on.”

1. ben stagg said:

   Mr Fisk’s indignation at what we have been led into and the miniscule stature of those who have led us there is well placed, but in the end he sees it the way they do. He says, ” And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan.” There is nothing particularly ‘terrible’ about this guess. Those countries are not there to be won or lost. The aim is strategic withdrawl, without creating a blood bath.
   Mr Fisk then goes on to say, ” There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. ” Oh, and what occupation would that have been at the time of 9/11?
   Your points are good ones, Mr Fisk, but your conclusions are as simplistic and innacurate as those you rightly attribute to our leaders.

   Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 12:00 pm | Permalink
2. Alexander Harper said:

   Far be it from to read Mr Fisk’s mind but I would guess that the pre-9/11 ‘occupation’ he refers to would have something to do with Israel’s long-standing US backed occupation of Palestine and destabilisation of the Lebanon, where Fisk lives and in which he takes an understandably personal interest. The other occupation, to which he might refer but not agree with, would be the one as seen by the Islamic purists, of whom there are millions, who feel that the Islamic states of, inter alia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and now Iraq are western satrapies governed by traitors, who have sold out to the ‘Crusaders’. This view is in my opinion based more on muslims’ sense of underachievement and consequent feelings of humiliation and resentment than hard fact but unfortunately, right or wrong, millions of them feel like that. We should not be in their countries at all and if it were not for the geo-political-economic importance of the region (OIL) we would not be and how splendid that would be for us and them. Without the conveniently ever present western scapegoat they would finally be obliged to take responsibility for their self-inflicted disasters, which could only be healthy.

   As far as Fisk is concerned, much as I enjoy reading him and often though I agree with him there is an element of hysteria sometimes in his writing, which makes my instincts doubt his conclusions, however much my brain, or what is left of it, might agree.

   I will continue to post his articles just the same!

   Posted on 19-Mar-08 at 12:39 pm | Permalink
3. ben stagg said:

   The article is a good read and well worth posting. I felt sure that someone would cite Israel as a country of occupation. It is a shame that there is no oil there as that would fit so nicely with the argument. One has to reflect why Israel is there, how it came to be there and what should be done about it.
   It is rather like Ireland or the Yugoslavia that was. There is no gain behind our involvement, just a problem that we are tied to, but whichever way you look at it ‘occupation’ is the wrong word. If only the Israelis would do what we would like them to do, I could at least acknowledge that they are under our influence, but even this is far from the truth.
   As for the Islamic ‘purists’ who you talk about. there is nothing ‘pure’ about them. They may well feel that Eygypt is a ‘western satrapy, but as that is the country that went to war with Britain and France over Suez and has fought Israel, I find the logic a little lacking.
   If a country can do business with the west, then they are western satrapies. Well then, are Iran and The Sudan, Chinese satrapies?
   I think that you have it the wrong way around; your brain should doubt his conclusions, however much your instincts agree.
   A good read though and he so well captures the excuses who we call our leaders who lead us into the present Iraq mess.

   Posted on 20-Mar-08 at 2:11 am | Permalink
4. Alexander Harper said:

   I have been travelling, hence the hiatus in this correspondence:

   ‘Occupation’ is incorrect and it was careless of me, writing in haste, to have used that word. Perhaps I should have said ‘Jewish settlement of’ and/or ‘large scale immigration to’ Israel, which has been perceived by many Arabs as an occupation.

   In 1917 my grandfather fought with his regiment of Punjabis in the Mesopotamia campaign (completely irrelevant but only inserted by me for colour), which resulted in the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks from the region and their contracting back into Anatolia and, post Balfour declaration, the beginning of Jewish, mostly Ashkenazy, immigration to Palestine/Israel. They were welcomed to begin with but as my grandfather said, ‘You can’t get 2 pints into a pint pot’ and hence the problems we have been having ever since the mid-1930s as immigration built up and the Palestinians were increasingly displaced. It is an incredibly complicated problem, which can take tomes to analyse but can I suppose best be oversimplified by the one word ‘Lebensraum’.

   Purists: well of course they are not pure. They are for the most part useful fools being manipulated by knaves and fanatics. For me the word purist does not imply purity because I have seen it juxtaposed too often with bigotry, intolerance, violence, cruelty and a narrowness of vision but I recognise that philologically speaking I might have used the wrong word again.

   Gamal Abdel Nasser took Egypt to war over Suez and he was most certainly not a satrap of the West and is still a hero in the Arab world among those who resent what they perceive to be excessive Western influence in their countries exercised through local ruling class proxies. Anwar Sadat took Egypt into its last (disastrous) war with Israel after which he bravely but sensibly made peace with them and this of course cost him his life at the hands of his ‘purists’.

   The western powers and the growing Asian powers of China and India seek to exercise control or at least infuence over the countries upon which they depend for their raw materials. In the case of the Middle East this is oil. The Iranian and Sudanese governments’ disgraceful behaviour towards their own populations gives the West the justification to criticise them and a fig leaf as in the case of Iraq to legitimise regime change. Disgraceful behaviour towards their local populations by the governments of Zimbabwe, N.Korea and Myanmar to name but a few does not seem to cause such heart searching amongst our leaders or newstime on air because they do not have enough raw materials to prick our consciences. If China had not recently appeared as a competitor, pragmatically prepared to support Iran and Sudan because of their oil, do you not suppose that the West would by now have installed governments of its own choosing in those countries? China today is much stronger today than it was five years ago and had Saddam survived long enough to team up with them he would probably be untouchable today. In that context the ‘oil’ invasion did not take place a moment too soon. We can talk about morality as much as we want but we are probably reentering an era of resource wars, of which the world has seen many before. That is if Mother Nature does not change all the paradigms in the meantime…

   Posted on 23-Mar-08 at 4:37 pm | Permalink