But Cuba has been forced to survive in the face of repeated aggression by the world’s most powerful nation. For more than half a century the United States has actively sought to bring down the Cuban government and replace Cuba’s socialist system with capitalism. To this end, it launched a failed attempt to invade Cuba, has made countless attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and has supported and funded Miami-based Cuban exile groups that have exploded numerous bombs in Havana and who blew up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight, killing all 78 people on board.

In addition to all of these efforts to topple both the Cuban government and its socialist system, Washington has enforced the oppressive economic blockade of the tiny island for the past 55 years. And, under Obama, the United States has continued to fund pro-US groups in Cuba in violation of Cuban law. This history of aggression, which is ongoing, has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media, which has instead chosen to focus on the “political prisoners” in Cuba’s jails.

But who are these so-called political prisoners? Political prisoners are defined as those accused or convicted of crimes committed to achieve political objectives. In other words, they have broken the law. Such offenders are not “prisoners of conscience,” which are people engaged in non-violent activities that have been imprisoned solely for their political views. According to Amnesty International’s latest report, there are currently no prisoners of conscience in Cuba.

Media coverage of Obama’s visit has repeatedly focused on the Ladies in White organization, which protests weekly in Havana in support of so-called political prisoners in Cuba. The US media highlighted the fact that the Ladies in White protesters were rounded up by police during a demonstration on the day Obama arrived in Havana. These arrests have been repeatedly pointed to by the media and pundits as a graphic example of how Cuba violates the human rights of peaceful political protesters. As such, it would appear that arrested members of the Ladies in White constitute prisoners of conscience. But these analysts have conspicuously ignored an important component of Amnesty International’s definition of “prisoner of conscience,” which states, “We also exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow their own.”

Last August, Wikileaks published a memo dispatched from the US Special Interests Section in Havana to the State Department requesting $5,000 in funding for the Ladies in White. The memo also revealed that the US government had previously funded the group. It is illegal under Cuban law for Cuban organizations to receive funding from the US government, which is not surprising given that Washington’s stated objective for decades has been the overthrow of the Cuban government and socialism. Consequently, imprisoned members of the Ladies in White cannot be considered prisoners of conscience but they could be considered political prisoners that broke the law by receiving funding from the US government.

The Ladies in White are not unique, the US government has supported and funded many anti-government groups in Cuba in its efforts to replace socialism with capitalism in that country. Consequently, the Cuban government claims that many of the so-called political prisoners in its jails are Cubans who have received funding from a foreign government that is intent on achieving regime change. One such foreign program was conducted by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) which, under the guise of “democracy promotion,” distributed Internet and satellite communications equipment to Cuban opposition groups in direct violation of Cuban law. The project came to light when US aid worker Alan Gross, under contract to USAID, was arrested by the Cuban government in 2009. Such activities make it clear that it is the United States that has failed “to leave behind the ideological battles of the past.”

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne can only imagine the outcry in the United States if a foreign government such as the Soviet Union or China were funding anti-capitalist organizations in the United States during the Cold War in an effort to bring down the US government and overthrow capitalism. Undoubtedly any American citizens receiving such funding from ideological enemies in order to engage in activities that sought to overthrow the US government and bring down the capitalist system would have been considered traitors and charged with sedition.

And one can only imagine the response if a leader of the Soviet Union had visited Washington, DC and began publicly lecturing the US president and the American people about how flawed their capitalist system was and, during his visit, met with Soviet-funded, anti-capitalist groups in the United States that were seeking to not only overthrow the government but to bring down the country’s capitalist system. I think it’s safe to say that most Americans would be outraged. And yet Obama met with Cuban dissidents in the US Embassy while in Havana. Consequently, Obama’s visit to Cuba constitutes the 21st Century equivalent of such arrogance. In fact, it’s worse because it isn’t one superpower lecturing another, it is a superpower continuing to bully a small nation that poses no threat whatsoever to the United States.

Furthermore, according to the human rights group, The Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation, there are currently 60 political prisoners in Cuba. But this neglects the part of Cuba that has been under US colonial rule for more than 100 years: Guantanamo Bay. The United States currently holds 93 political prisoners in its internment camp in Guantanamo, most of whom have been held for more than 13 years without being charged with a crime or having their day in court. More than 50 of them have been cleared for release but there is nowhere for them to go because they are now, effectively, stateless. Perhaps Obama should have been more focused on living up to his campaign promise to remove these political prisoners from Cuba during his visit to Havana rather than lecturing the Cuban government about human rights.

In actuality, Cubans have no qualms about criticizing their government. I have visited Cuba on numerous occasions including living in Havana for three months last year. I have never encountered a Cuban who didn’t freely criticize their government’s policies in the same way that most Americans and Canadians gripe about their governments’ policies. In fact, the Cuban government encourages public debate about how to improve the country’s socialist system. However, advocating for the overthrow of the government and socialism is not permitted.

But then, in the United States, there is very little space in which to advocate for the overthrow of the US government and the capitalist system. The US Congress is overwhelmingly dominated by pro-capitalist Republicans and Democrats; all Supreme Court justices are appointed by the two dominant capitalist parties; alternative parties are barred from participating in election debates and have difficulty accessing campaign funding (even public funding); the corporate-owned mainstream media refuse to present anti-capitalist perspectives; and the grade school system does not educate our children about socialist or anarchist alternatives to capitalism. (And, by the way, Bernie Sanders is not a democratic socialist, he is a social democrat, which is a capitalist). The hegemonic structures that marginalize anti-capitalist views in the United States are much more insidious than those that defend socialism in Cuba, but they are nonetheless just as, if not more, effective.

Obama also promoted US-style democracy for Cuba when he declared, “I believe voters should be able to choose their governments in free and democratic elections.” The US president either ignored, or was ignorant of, the fact that Cuba is a democratic nation. This is because the United States arrogantly views liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of democracy. Why? Because liberal democracy is the only form of democracy compatible with capitalism.

A liberal democracy almost inevitably results in major political parties serving the interests of economic elites, which means corporations and their owners—the one percent. The result is gross inequality as the rich get richer and the poor struggle desperately with minimum wage jobs and under-funded social programs. In contrast, Cuba’s democracy is a socialist democracy in which citizen’s vote for individual candidates because political parties are not allowed to participate, thereby limiting the influence of private sector wealth to influence political policymaking. So the problem for Obama and corporate America is not a lack of democracy in Cuba, but the lack of a liberal democracy that serves corporate interests.

The United States uses its massive wealth and power to influence political parties in Latin American countries that are multi-party liberal democracies to ensure that they serve US interests when in power. But when, despite Washington’s best efforts, a party comes to power that challenges US interests, then Washington’s support for democracy goes out the window. The United States has repeatedly ousted democratically-elected governments in Latin America when those governments failed to serve US geo-political and corporate interests in the region. Just in the past 14 years Washington has overthrown three democratically-elected governments in the region that challenged the interests of US corporations and capitalism in general.

The 2002 US-supported coup of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez failed when millions of Venezuelans took to the streets demanding that their democratically-elected leader be returned to power. The Venezuelan military capitulated and returned Chávez to office three days after his ouster. In 2004, the US military—with Canadian and French support—ousted Haiti’s democratically-elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide because he dared to raise taxes on foreign corporations and double the minimum wage in the hemisphere’s poorest country. The new US-installed regime then proceeded to ban Aristide’s political party—by far the most popular in the country—from participating in future elections. And in 2009, under Obama’s presidency, the United States supported a military coup that ousted Honduras’ left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya and turned that country into the worst human rights disaster in the Americas. These examples are further evidence that it is the United States that cannot leave behind the ideological battles of the past whenever capitalist interests are threatened in Latin America.

US policy in Latin America—and throughout the world—has not been motivated by the promotion of democracy and human rights; it is intended to serve US corporate interests and entrench capitalism. This is why the most brutal right-wing dictatorships in Latin America during recent decades have been supported by the United States. And this is why left-leaning democratically-elected governments are ousted by Washington. It is only the most naïve and ignorant Americans, and the most naïve and ignorant US journalists, who take Washington’s rhetoric about democracy and human rights at face value. After all, if US foreign policy were motivated by democracy promotion and the defense of human rights, then how do we explain Washington’s support for undemocratic and repressive regimes such as the Saudi Arabian dictatorship?

The dominant human rights model under capitalism prioritizes individual rights—particularly the right to private property to establish corporations—to the degree that they cannot be significantly infringed upon in order to ensure that the collective—social and economic—rights of everyone in society are protected. This is why there is no right to food, housing or healthcare for citizens of the United States where, according to a 2009 Harvard University study, 45,000 people die annually due to a lack of access to the latter. But when a country such as Cuba defends the collective rights of all of its citizens with regard to access to food, housing, education and healthcare against the threats posed by those who seek to prioritize individual rights in a manner that violates the country’s socialist constitution, the Cuban government is portrayed as a major violator of human rights.

Obama made clear his desire to promote corporate capitalism in Cuba when he referred to the blockade by declaring, “It’s a burden on the Americans who want to work and do business or invest here in Cuba. It’s time to lift the embargo.” Such a declaration should come as no surprise given that his delegation was filled with US corporate CEOs. He then proceeded to tell Cuba how it should manage its economy by stating, “But even if we lifted the embargo tomorrow, Cubans would not realize their potential without continued change here in Cuba. It should be easier to open a business here in Cuba.” And then, in an effort to ensure that US corporations can exploit Cuban workers in the same manner they exploit poor Latin Americans in capitalist countries throughout the region, he declared, “A worker should be able to get a job directly with companies who invest here in Cuba.” Furthermore, in contrast to Obama and the US media’s suggestions that the economic reforms implemented in Cuba in recent years constitute a shift towards capitalism, in actuality they represent a redefining of Cuban socialism that seeks to improve the degree of economic democracy in country.

So while Obama is urging the US Congress to end the economic blockade of Cuba, it is clear that his objective remains the removal of Cuba’s socialist government and the replacement of socialism with capitalism. He disguises his imperialist objectives with arrogant rhetoric about democracy and human rights along with suggestions that Cubans could live like Americans under capitalism. But Obama ignores the fact that, geographically-speaking, the closest capitalist country to Cuba is not the United States; it is Haiti. And, in Haiti, 70 percent of the population lives in poverty and life expectancy is 20 years less than in socialist Cuba. Furthermore, Haiti is closer to the reality experienced by most Latin Americans living under capitalism than the standard of living enjoyed by most Americans. After all, it is not capitalism that allows us to live so well, it is imperialism.

“Washington’s hypocrisy…sustained by the whore media is incalculable. What does the new conflict in the Spratly islands really mean?  It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China.  Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California…”

The Bikini atoll explosions: The “indispensable nation” busy perfecting mass murder in paradise.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

A-Bomb crater, seen from high above.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.”  A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious  superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us.  The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people associate a “bikini” with horrid mass death?

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.  Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier.  Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union –  has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”.  According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.

What does this really mean?  It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China.  Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and  hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or  China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and  across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist.  He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure.  That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”.  The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

Obama: a supreme and sociopathic criminal and opportunist, yet hailed as preferable to the current opposition.

As presidential  election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia.  He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

As a loyal member of the imperial establishment, the favorable marketing of Hillary has been a done deal for a long time. (Via M.Mozart, flickr)

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons.  As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright  who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East.  She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton;  such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality,  racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war.  There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

About the Author

Pilger

This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun. John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

After each of these incidents—spontaneous and genuine or staged by the deep state—the establishment highly militarized security forces flood the streets. But it’s useless. A show of propaganda, reassurance. Like closing the barn after the animals have run away.

The Western powers know this. For many years, their own intelligence agencies — in study after study — have confirmed that the leading cause of violent “radicalization” among a small number of Muslims is the violent Western intervention in Muslim lands. These interventions are carried out for the purpose of securing the economic and political domination of Western interests over lands rich with energy resources, as well as their strategic surroundings. That they have not even the slightest connection to “liberating” people from religious or political persecution, or making the world “safer,” is glaringly transparent. They are about domination, pure and simple.

Indeed, this point is scarcely disputed, although champions of domination claim it is a good thing. For decades, one has heard the argument from American exceptionalists that “if we don’t do it” — that is, if we don’t dominate the world militarily and economically — “then somebody else will.” The implication, of course, is that such a “somebody else” will be far worse than our own divinely blessed, goodhearted selves.

There is a fiercely primitive worldview underlying this philosophy (which is held almost universally across the American political spectrum, and in those countries who cling to the coattails of American dominance). It says that violent domination is the only reality in human affairs: one must dominate, or be dominated. One must eat or be eaten. One must kill or be killed. There is no alternative. If “we” don’t dominate — by force if necessary, doing “whatever it takes” — then it is a given that some other power will do so. Domination and power are all that exists; the only question is how they are distributed, and who controls that distribution. And there is no price too high to pay in order to gain — or maintain — that control.

You can see how this primitive belief plays out in domestic politics, too. More and more, politics across the Western democracies (and other nations as well) are revolving around the question of who should dominate in a society — or more specifically, who feels their domination over society is being threatened. This dynamic is driving nationalist movements across the board. In the United States, it is expressed in the panic and dismay felt by an increasing number of white people — especially but by no means exclusively white males — that their “natural” domination of American society is slipping away. They want to “take our country back,” or else they’ll be overwhelmed — dominated — by a flood of unworthy others: African-Americans, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals, women, etc. This self-pitying fear has been rife in right-wing discourse for decades, and has now burst into the open, and into the mainstream, with the likely nomination of Donald Trump as presidential candidate of a major party.

The official fear—the natural posture of the ruling circles everywhere—spreads across frontiers. A member of the Counter Terrorism Centre (TEK) patrols the area in front of the Parliament in downtown Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, March 22, 2016. Hungary raised its terrorism awareness level to grade 2 after a series of attacks in Brussels. (Zoltan Balogh/MTI via AP)

Again, the dynamic of domination is key: since nothing exists outside this dynamic, since there is no other way, then one group MUST dominate the others. The idea of equal citizens working, living, and sharing together is a fantasy in this worldview. If blacks or immigrants or women or gays are perceived to have gained a small share in the national life, then that share must have been “taken” from the dominant group. And since, in this view, domination is the goal of all groups, since it is the organizing principle of human life, then those upstart groups are not just seeking a fair share of society’s bounty and freedoms and opportunities; no, they are actually aiming to subjugate the dominant group. In this extremely limited worldview, life is always a zero-sum game. To give someone else more opportunity means less for yourself, and your kind. The freer someone else is, the less free you are. There is only so much to go around. You will find more sophisticated and empathetic worldviews on grade-school playgrounds, or in wolf packs.

And so we come to the foreign policies of Western nations today. They are all, without exception, built on the goal of securing effective control (in whatever form) of economic and strategic resources for the benefit of their own power structures. Again, it is beyond dispute that these policies do NOT involve trying to make the world a better, safer place so that their own citizens might pursue their lives in peace. These policies manifestly do NOT involve trying to achieve “security” for their own people. Those who advance these policies knowingly and deliberately accept the fact that they will invariably cause destruction abroad and “blowback” at home. They know and accept that these policies will destabilize the world, that they will radicalize some of those who suffer from them, that they will lead to less security at home, that they will drain public treasuries and leave their own people to sink in broken communities with decaying infrastructure, mounting debt, shrinking opportunities, bleak futures and despairing lives.

They know all of this is true — not only because they can see it happening with their own eyes, as we all can, but also because their own experts tell them, time and time again, that this is so. But they accept all this as the price that must be paid to advance and maintain their dominance. In the words of Madeline Albright, when she was confronted with the fact that the US/UK sanctions on Iraq had at that time killed at least 500,000 children, our leaders believe this price “is worth it.”

In private, they no doubt tell themselves that it is the domination of their good and “special” nation, or the domination of the worthy “values” of “Western civilization” that they are trying to secure with their policies, by doing “whatever it takes.” But in practice, of course, the chief beneficiaries of these policies are invariably the ruling classes of the nations involved. This has become much more brazenly evident in recent years, as the conditions and prospects of even the middle classes are so clearly deteriorating. There is little room left to pretend that the “rising tide” of militarized hyper-capitalism is “lifting all boats” when even those who once benefitted from expanding opportunity (in the post-war boom) are now sinking. (The poor, of course, have almost always been invisible.)

People flee the airport in Brussels like stampeding cattle. Their comprehension of the causes of these events is not much higher than the bovines, either.

The people in Brussels — like the people in Paris, and like the far greater multitude of victims in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc — are, yes, “reaping the whirlwind” of Western foreign policy. The criminals who carried out the most recent attacks have adopted the mindset of our Western elites, who teach the world, day after day, that the destruction of innocent lives is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve your objectives. You can and must do “whatever it takes” — even if whatever it takes is, say, the death of half a million innocent children. Or a war of aggression that leaves a million innocent people dead. Or drone-bombing a wedding party. Or sending missiles into a hospital. Or sitting in the Oval Office — your Peace Prize gleaming on the mantelpiece — while you tick off the names of victims on your weekly “Kill List.”

We wonder how these terrorists can commit such barbarous atrocities as we see in Brussels — even while most of us happily countenance, even celebrate, far more extensive and continuous atrocities committed by our leaders in pursuit of domination. Then we pretend that the former has no connection to the latter. Yet the targets of these foreign policies live through a hundred Brussels attacks, a dozen 9/11s every year. We teach violence to the world — brutal destruction of individual lives, of societies and communities, of entire nations — yet are shocked when the world responds in kind.

I will say it again: there is absolutely no justification for the murder of innocent people such as we saw in Brussels today. None. But crimes of equal horror — killing innocent people, disrupting the lives of millions of others, and filling them with fear — are being carried out, routinely, and on a much larger scale, by the leaders of our Western nations and their allies. This is too is equally unjustifiable, and is worthy of the same level of rejection and outrage we rightly apply to the Brussels atrocity.