War on the beggars
In John Pilger's article today for the Guardian, he writes: This is the Kafkaesque world that Bush's America has imprinted on the recently acquired additions to its empire, real and virtual, rising on new rubble in places where human life is not given the same value as those who perished at Ground Zero in New York. One such place is a village called Bibi Mahru, which was attacked by an American F16 almost two years ago during the war. The pilot dropped a MK82 "precision" 500lb bomb on a mud and stone house, where Orifa and her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, lived. The bomb killed all but Orifa and one son - eight members of her family, including six children. Two children in the next house were killed, too.
Her face engraved with grief and anger, Orifa told me how the bodies were laid out in front of the mosque, and the horrific state in which she found them. She spent the afternoon collecting body parts, "then bagging and naming them so they could be buried later on". She said a team of 11 Americans came and surveyed the crater where her home had stood. They noted the numbers on shrapnel and each interviewed her. Their translator gave her an envelope with $15 in dollar bills. Later, she was taken to the US embassy in Kabul by Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who had lost her brother in the Twin Towers and had gone to Afghanistan to protest about the bombing and comfort its victims. When Orifa tried to hand in a letter through the embassy gate, she was told, "Go away, you beggar."
Those who wish to tell the truth about our world have only a small voice - and most definitely Pilger is a truthteller, his message often painful, always impassioned, but never having the aim of misleading - easily drowned out by the liars who make it possible for people like Bush and his crew to run our world, but it's essential that they keep speaking out.
They are conning us, and by conning us, they rob us of our humanity. They tell us that they are fighting for us, ridding us of a scourge, but it is us they are fighting, those like us, the many who stand in the way of the enrichment of the few.
We are also beggars, strangers at their feast, disempowered, almost slaves. We are richer than the poor devils in Afghanistan but we do not own our world - it's long been carved up by those who seek to deny us our right to it.
You are with us or against us, they bellowed, our self-righteous leaders.
Against, I say. Against those who would kill the Gul Ahmeds of this world for gas and oil. Against those who wish the world their way and will destroy it piece by piece to have it. Against those who will not share, whatever name they masquerade behind, whatever creed they use as the veil for their greed.
With these people, and these, and these. With Pilger.
posted by Dr Zen @ 9:12 pm
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