Kourosh Ziabari/Fars News Agency Interview With Prof. John McMurtry

World-renowned Canadian philosopher Prof. John McMurtry argues that the US and its ally, Israel, violate the laws against armed aggression, occupation and crimes against humanity at will, while other world states are either their accomplices or afraid of taking any move against them since they will risk being labeled a rouge or terrorist state otherwise.

Prof. John McMurtry says that the US government is a gigantic mass-murdering machine which earns profit through waging wars, and is never held accountable over its unspeakable war crimes and crimes against humanity. He also believes that the US has become a police state, which treats its citizens in the most derogatory manner.

“I have travelled alone with only backpack possession through the world, and have found no state in which police forces are more habituated to violent bullying, more likely to draw a gun, more discriminatory against the dispossessed, and more arbitrarily vicious in normal behavior,” said McMurtry. “The US now leads the globe in an underlying civil war of the rich against the poor.”

“The US can … detain, kidnap and imprison without trial or indictment any US citizen or other citizens anywhere by designating them enemies to the US,” Prof. John McMurtry noted in an exclusive interview with Fars News Agency.

According to the Canadian intellectual, the United States statesmen have long supported dictatorial and tyrannical regimes and even funded and armed the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler in the period between 1939 and 1945.

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John McMurtry

"American Progress," or "Manifest Destiny." Painting
shows an American woman in the sky guiding pioneers
westward. (G. A. Crofutt, c. 1873.)(Library of Congress)

(Originally published in May 2003)

“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” ~ Hermann Goering

Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.

I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say that genocide was America’s defining political tradition. Then I realised that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25 million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia. In the case of the U.S., the story continued with the forcible seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state territories shortly afterward in 1849. U.S. troops under the slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its southern neighbour under the false pretext of avenging American blood, and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a presidential war hero. Even though a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a Anglo-British business strategy to impose free trade on the regions by financing the prior president, James Polk, into the White House as General Taylor’s commander.

In 1898, once again under the false pretext of self-defence (when the U.S.S. Maine sank from an internal explosion), the Philippines, Guam, Cuba in part, and Puerto Rico were seized from their peoples by another unilaterally provoked war. This war of aggression and occupation, like so many U.S. interventions since, was preceded by a media campaign of whipping up public hysteria and war fever. Media baron Randolf Hearst made the famous remark, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” not unlike the U.S. cable and network media daily drum-beat in recent months for war on Iraq. War is a major violence entertainment, and in close partnership with the Pentagon it can go on for months to divert the masses.

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John McMurtry

The following essay was delivered at a forum entitled "The Assault on Iraq and the War Against Democracy: How Should Canadians Respond?" held on Sunday March 23, 2003 in Toronto, Ontario, under the auspices of Science for Peace.

"It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." ~ Hermann Göring

Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.

I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say that genocide was America's defining political tradition. Then I realised that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25 million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia. In the case of the U.S., the story continued with the forcible seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state territories shortly afterward in 1849. U.S. troops under the slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its southern neighbour under the false pretext of avenging American blood, and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a presidential war hero. Even though a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a Anglo-British business strategy to impose free trade on the regions by financing the prior president, James Polk, into the White House as General Taylor's commander.

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Stephen Lendman

Steve Lendman: Grand Theft Cyprus: Part II (Part I)

Cyprus is tiny. Its population numbers about a million. Its GDP is miniscule by Western standards. It's 0.2% of Europe's economy. It's entrapped under Eurozone straightjacket rules. They impose financial tyranny. Dissimilar countries surrender monetary and fiscal control. Doing so abandons effective ways to combat recessions.

They can't devalue their currencies to make exports more competitive. They can't print money freely. They can't spend, spend, spend. Euro policy expert Bernard Connolly is considered the foremost European economic, monetary, and political integration expert. In his 1995 book titled, "The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe's Money" he explained and said the euro system a harebrained idea. It's doomed to fail.

Before the euro's 1998 introduction, he said one or more of Europe's weakest countries would face rising budget deficits, troubled economies, and a "downward spiral from which there is no escape unaided." "When that happens, the country concerned will be faced with a risk of sovereign default."

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Stephen Lendman

Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutional bill of rights, states:

"Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

dom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association."

Article 7 assures

"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person and the right not to be deprived thereof in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."

According to Yale Law Professor and constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson (1908 - 1981):

"Maintenance of a system of free expression is necessary (1) as assuring individual self-fulfillment, (2) as a means of attaining the truth, (3) as a method of securing participation by the members of society in social, including political, decision-making, and (4) as maintaining the balance between stability and change in society."

With no free expression right, all others are at risk at a time dissent is called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. Howard Zinn called it "the highest form of patriotism," and according to Voltaire, "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

In a post-9/11 climate, it's more than ever endangered, academic tenure affording no protection; to wit, Professor Denis Rancourt's University of Ottawa (U of O) March 31, 2009 firing, ostensibly for pedagogical reasons, but as he said:

"I was fired under the false pretext of having arbitrarily assigned high grades in one course in the winter 2008 semester. [To do so], the university had to dispense with due process. In the words of the professors' union's lawyer, my dismissal was 'both a denial of substantive and procedural rights....and a contravention of the basic principles of natural justice.' "

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