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9/5/2002 (1:14) |
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Why They Hate America-in Britain
by Jonathan David Farley, D.Phil.
As I write this, I sit only one mile from a people who are at war with America. They are not poor, illiterate, or Muslim. In fact, they are mostly white, Christian, and middle-class. They are students at Oxford University, in England.
Wadham College (which is part of Oxford University) declared war with the United States when America started carpet-bombing Vietnam. The stately, ancient Oxford hall boasts a well-kept, manicured lawn, which the students still call Ho Chi Minh Quad.
Of course, the state of hostilities is mostly facetious (Oxford's Trinity College and Balliol College have also declared war-against each other), but not entirely. The English philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of the most renowned thinkers of the twentieth century, convened a war crimes tribunal in the 1960's, in which he accused the United States of crimes against humanity. They may not be shouting, 'Death to America,' but Brits have long scoffed at American imperiousness.
Since September 11, Americans have asked, 'How could anybody hate us so much?' And we've mostly been coming to the wrong conclusions. (Novelist Salman Rushdie recently wrote that Muslim extremists hate America because we eat bacon sandwiches! )
I'm not an eloquent writer like Mr. Rushdie; nor am I a vegetarian extremist. But as a mathematician, I can put two and two together; and, at the risk of inflaming American opinion, I'd like to opine why the British feel 'they' hate 'us.' That reason is state-sponsored terrorism.
America has long accused nations like Iraq, Sudan, and Cuba of sponsoring terrorism. But, according to ABC News, it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military who, in the 1960's, drafted plans to commit terrorist attacks. 'We could blow up a U.S. ship in [Cuba's] Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,' read one report, code named Operation Northwoods. The American people would then demand that Castro be deposed. Cold 'Worriers' still believe Castro wants to bring Americans to our knees. (I say, Bill Clinton did enough of that already.)
During the 1980's, the U.S. fought a secret war in Central America, supporting murderous regimes in El Salvador and Honduras that used death squads to terrorize civilians, murder priests and rape nuns. Many of the generalissimos who conducted this reign of terror were trained in the School of the Americas-in Georgia. Their training manuals included instructions on how to torture.
Chile's dictator, Pinochet, who specialized in dropping his political opponents out of airplanes, came to power after a CIA-orchestrated coup, during which the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, was murdered. The Congo was plunged into forty years of chaos after the U.S.-backed dictator, Mobutu, seized power, following the murder of the democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba.
The U.S. government occupied Haiti for decades and, later, supported that country's brutal dictators, the Duvaliers. It sustained the dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, even after his people overthrew him. The Shah of Iran persecuted his own people with our tax dollars; yet we pretend that Iranian anti-Americanism is unprovoked.
(I do recognize that, despite America's faults, at least we have the freedom to criticize the government. In Iran, peace activists-like my hero Martin Luther King-would be shot.)
When the U.S. stops sponsoring terrorism, and starts cracking down on terrorism at home (the KKK and the LAPD), the English may start respecting our moral leadership. As things stand, British newspapers are as likely to call George Bush 'the mad bomber' as they are Osama bin Laden. Despite British involvement in the war, 54% of Britons think the bombing should be suspended.
It's easy to dismiss anti-American mobs in brown countries. But we'd be fools to dismiss the English, our closest allies; and a significant number of them are saying, America's not at war with terrorism: It's in bed with it.
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Dr. Jonathan David Farley is a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Oxford University and a Green Party candidate for Congress in Tennessee (www.GreenTN.org).
http://www.tswj.org/
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