American imperialism has made a major contribution to the 1.3 billion global avoidable deaths in the period 1950-2005. The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters can be seen as the New Nazis.
by Anwar A. Khan
But this temerity is irremissible under any setting. Bangladesh is an independent and sovereign country like that village headsman’s country. We have not forgotten what they did (despicable role) in 1971 to our just cause when we were fighting life and death in liberating our own land from the cruel clutches of Pakistani army and their local mango-twigs.
Who is that ignominious headsman to create loudness in the news media oftentimes sitting inside our country to dictate us how to run our own country?
The other day this bootleg pretending him to be a mighty powerboat said that upholding human rights is at the core of the US foreign policy. Press freedom is also an important issue of the US foreign policy. He said there would be no excuse on these matters in our country at a discussion of the Diplomatic Correspondents Association of Bangladesh at the National Press Club.
That contraband valet de chambre added, "I want you to know that the US Embassy takes that obligation seriously and is doing what it can to fulfill it." Sitting inside Bangladesh, he has been uttering such combat-ready words against Bangladesh and its government. It means he and his compadres are involved in a deep-seated cabal – machinate to unseat the present government from power which has steered the country to pull-up Bangladesh to a majestic-level of altitude.
The overarching pretension of America is that it believes itself to be the final telomere of every human society. It believes, in the words of a US military officer in Stanley Kubrick's macabre masterpiece "Full Metal Jacket" that: "inside every gook is an American trying to get out." Gook here, of course, being a placeholder for any non-American Identity. This pretension to being the universal destiny of human society is not an accidental facet of American Identity; rather it is the basis of it. Without this prime symbol with which to frame the American symbolic order, American Identity itself disappears. This much has been admitted by many.
Columnist Roger Cohen of TNYT has made this acute observation, "America is an idea. Strip freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world and America itself is gutted." But these are the ornaments of power with which they adorn their mythical being. So it is down to America and it is down to everywhere. American White House is now an abode of Neomys anomalus under the presidency of Joe Biden with a newfangled government activity. It gibes in definite, but not specified or identified paths. It has, rather, chartered a shape of authoritative political orientation of Germany and Italy of Hitler, Mussolini… which the world witnessed during their regimes, but with respect to history trenchant lineaments finicky to the governmental economic system and acculturation of America in this century.
What about the human rights situation and the state of democracy in that inglorious fellow’s country (America)?
Can they cannot stop so many extrajudicial killings which have been going on in their own country unabatedly?
His abracadabra harangue on the so-called US priorities of human rights, democracy, and media freedom in Bangladesh tantamount to directly meddling into the internal affairs of Bangladesh… And this is again unpardonable act for him and likes of him.
Americans are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and they hide and disguise themselves from themselves.
We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every American heart.
Mark Smith argues in his book American Business and Political Power; corporations are most likely to get their way when political issues are out of the public gaze. It is when the "scope of conflict" expands that the power of organized interests is easiest to challenge. That is why business invests so much money in politics to keep issues off the agenda.
The 30-year interregnum of US global hegemony,” writes David Bromwich in the journal Raritan, “has been exposed as a fraud, a decoy, a cheat, [and] a sell.” Today, he continues, “the armies of the cheated are struggling to find the word for something that happened and happened wrong.”
The United States can’t see further into the future than other countries. It is not an indispensable nation in the world.
Nearly one hundred thousand US citizens go missing in the USA each year and even children are deprived of reuniting with their Hispanic parents. "Ask the USA about their issues and not about Bangladesh. The USA is not obligated to govern and help improve this country of ours."
Why the US obstructed the broadcast of RT TV (a Russian TV channel) if it wanted freedom of press?
If they want accountability, why there has not been any punishment or accountability of the US security forces/police that have killed over a thousand citizens, mostly black and Hispanic, each year?
Why should we not ask those questions to that village headman about his skullduggeries? If we believe their election process is fair, then why young Americans don't have faith in their election procedure and they hardly vote. Why their vote count is around 25 percent in each election? Does it represent a participatory election code of conduct?
The 4th of July is Independence Day for the United States of America and commemorates the 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence for America, the key passage of which is “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Unfortunately, American racism has grossly violated the proposition that “all men are created equal” and the worst form of racism involves invasion of other countries. The US has invaded about 70 countries since its inception and has invaded a total of about 50 countries since 1945. The World needs to declare a transition from the 4th of July as Independence for America Day to the 4th of July as Independence from America Day.
This piece derives heavily form the work of US academic Dr. Zoltan Grossman's article “From Wounded Knee to Libya: a century of U.S. military interventions,” Gideon Polya's book ‘Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (that includes a brief history of all countries since Neolithic times) and William Blum's book “Rogue State.”
This above list includes instances of violent deployment of US forces within America (e.g. against demonstrators, miners etc.), and includes small-scale bombing and military intervention operations, military evacuations of Americans and specific instances of explicit threats of use of nuclear weapons. The list does not include the 1801-1805 US Marine Barbary War operations against Barbary pirates based in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, and also ignores massive US subversion of virtually all countries in the world.
The human cost of these US interventions has been horrendous. A major component of war or hegemony-related deaths is represented by avoidable deaths from violently-imposed deprivation. Since 1950 the UN has provided detailed demographic data that have permitted calculation of such avoidable deaths, year by year, for every country in the world.
1950-2005 avoidable deaths total 1.3 billion for the whole world, 1.2 billion for the non-European world and 0.6 billion for the Muslim world, the latter carnage being 100 times greater than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) or the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death for their so-called strategic reasons. Currently 18 million people die avoidably each year in the Developing World on Spaceship Earth with the US in charge of the flight deck.
According to Canadian Geographer Professor Jules Dufour: “The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.
American imperialism has made a major contribution to the 1.3 billion global avoidable deaths in the period 1950-2005. The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters can be seen as the New Nazis. The World, including ordinary Americans (1 million of whom die preventably each year) must shake off the shackles of endless American One Percenter warmongering, imperialism and mendacity.
The US has dropped 326,000 bombs on people in other countries since 2001, recently in Syria.On February 25th, 2021 President Biden ordered U.S. air forces to drop seven 500-pound bombs on Iraqi forces in Syria, reportedly killing 22 people. The U.S. airstrike has predictably failed to halt rocket attacks on deeply unpopular U.S. bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution to close over a year ago.
The so-called Western media reported the U.S. airstrike as an isolated and exceptional incident, and there has been significant blowback from the U.S. public, Congress and the world community, condemning the strikes as illegal and a dangerous escalation of yet another Middle East conflict.
But unbeknownst to many Americans, the U.S. military and its allies are engaged in bombing and killing people in other countries on a daily basis. The U.S. and its allies have dropped more than 326,000 bombs and missiles on people in other countries since 2001, including over 152,000 in Iraq and Syria.
That’s an average of 46 bombs and missiles per day, day in day out, year in year out, for nearly 20 years. In 2019, the last year for which we have fairly complete records, the average was 42 bombs and missiles per day, including 20 per day in Afghanistan alone.
So, if those seven 500-pound bombs were the only bombs the U.S. and its allies dropped on February 25th, 2021, it would have been an unusually quiet day for U.S. and allied air forces, and for their enemies and victims on the ground, compared to an average day in 2019 or most of the past 20 years.
On the other hand, if the unrelenting U.S. air assault on countries across the Greater Middle East finally began to diminish over the past year, this bombing may have been an unusual spike in violence. But which of these was it, and how would we know?
As with the human casualties and mass destruction that these hundreds of thousands of airstrikes cause, the U.S. and international media only report on a tiny fraction of them as dictated by America. Without regular U.S. Airpower Summaries, comprehensive databases of airstrikes in other war-zones and serious mortality studies in the countries involved, the American public and the world are left almost completely in the dark about the death and destruction our country’s leaders keep wreaking in our name. The disappearance of Airpower Summaries has made it impossible to get a clear picture of the current scale of U.S. airstrikes.
The World must make the Fourth of July Independence from America Day. Tell everyone you can. And the village headsman sahib, how would you respond?
-The End –
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs
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