“…the warmakers were still avoiding the eyes of their victims.” …
” Then I noticed a framed photo of a young soldier on the piano top. ‘That’s our son, our Perce,’ Mrs Sykes said. ‘He had it taken on his last leave, on his nineteenth birthday’. A glance across those faces made it unnecessary to ask what had befallen Perce. But, when I got up to go, I went across and looked more closely at him; he’d been a stocky youth, open-faced, a pleasant-looking chap. His father came up beside me and was looking over my shoulder. ‘He was a right good lad, Perce,’ he said, ‘a real worker. Would give anybody a hand; they all liked him.’ And on my way home by the dyke-side, on the empty road between fields of corn blowing like water, I suddenly yelled, ‘Oh you bastards! You awful bloody bastards! You didn’t need to have started it…”
(Both passages from “A Month in the Country” by the British writer J. L. Carr, The Folio Society, London, 1999, Introduction by Ronald Blythe, pages 9 and 84 respectively. The war referred to in the book is WWI.)
Who are the “warmakers”? Who are those “bastards”?
Are they the ones we see at the proscenium, at the foreground? Are they the Kaisers, the Hitlers, the Churchills, the Bushes, the Rumsfelds, the Cheneys, the Wolfowitzes, etc? Or, are they the elite (corporate or other) who are the real warmakers? Does it matter who they are? It only matters if they are going to be brought to justice. Also, it matters very much who are the people they use as tools to make war. The Eichmanns of the warmakers.
Take Condoleezza Rice. A black woman who is used by the white warmakers to promote their murderous agendas. The Rice case is interesting and instructive.
(Note: The use of “black” instead of African-American is considered by me as more true and honest. Blacks are “black”. So what? Why do they have to “inform” whitey about their continent of origin? It seems that Rice agrees with this. When she was taunted by students for firing a Chicana dean at Stanford U., she retorted: “You can’t pull that on me. I’ve been black all my life.”)
But, is Rice “black”? Or, better, does Rice consider herself to be “black”? The fact that Rice tries to “change” the color of her skin by covering it with expensive clothes (a tradition in her family) is rather amusing. What is very serious, is her basic view of the world: one should strive to be not only better than the person next to him but “twice as good” (again a tradition in her family).
This point of view of the world is the core of the nazi “Weltanschauung” (view of the world). The “predictable” part of this attitude of Rice is that it results in a feeling of superiority not only over ordinary whites but in a rather overt contempt of blacks. At Stanford University:
“During the Rice years (1993-1999), the tenure of women professors declined, as did the number of African-Americans on the faculty. At a faculty meeting a political scientist tried to introduce a resolution to make affirmative action an explicit criterion in granting tenure. Rice strongly opposed it-‘as long as I am at Stanford’, she vowed”. (Newsweek, Dec. 16, 2002). It seems that a brief look at the background of Rice might be helpful in explaining this point of view of the world.
Connie Rice ( a first cousin of Condoleezza’s) describes the outlook of the family as: “Religion, religion, religion. The Rices were kind of joyless except for Condi’s dad. But if there’s one thing about Rice kids, there is nothing crushed about us-not our spirit, not our intellect, nothing. We just can’t be conquered”. (The Washington Post Magazine, Sept. 9, 2001).
If we assume that humans innately have the potential to think rationally, then it is reasonable to ask: do people really believe in the resurrection, the salvation, etc of the Christians? Also, if they do not why do they profess to “believe”?
Let us take the blacks in America. Slaves in America, being human, and therefore rational, turned into “believers” and exploited to the utmost any chances offered by religion in their struggle to survive. Black women, even more than their white sisters have been striving to become “socially acceptable”, by being “believers”.
This is not the place to discuss this personal thesis of mine about the existence of ONLY “believers” and not believers in history. Yet, it is reasonable to assume that religion (or “Religion, religion, religion”) is a tool to a more “comfortable” life. As to being or not being “conquered”, Connie Rice should think about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church multiplied by a few THOUSAND US bombs in Iraq.
Another crucial element in the background of Rice is her “religious” belief in “strategy” (again a pervasive mantra in the family). During her testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks she repeatedly referred to “strategy”. Strategy, a Greek word, is composed of “stratos'”(“army’ “) and of “agein” (to “lead”).
Of course, Rice would have been glad to “lead” the US “army” of mercenaries in Iraq (including the torturers), but that task was destined for more benign Aryans as Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. However, when Price uses the word “strategy” in relation to her life she does not use it in the ordinary sense of “a careful plan or method” (a neutral sense) but she uses it in the sense of the word “stratageme”, that is ” a cleverly contrived trick or scheme for gaining an end” (a morally loaded sense).
In relation to race she says, “You need a strategy to deal with it”. She goes on: “My parents were very strategic… ” According to Dale Russakoff (of the above Washington Post Magazine article) Rice’s mother “had a strategic grasp of the power of her purse”. Another “strategic” attitude of the Rice family was to keep its distance from the Civil Rights Movement.
It is probable that the person who started Rice towards the path that led to her present position was Josef Korbel, a Czech refugee from communism who taught at the University of Denver, where Rice was a student. Korbel, a Soviet specialist, obviously was teaching his courses with the “approval” of the US Intelligence Community.
One cannot imagine Andrei Amalrik, the Russian author of the 1970 “prophetic” book “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”, teaching at U. of Denver. Amalrik, a historian and playwright, was expelled from Moscow University in 1963 for political reasons. In 1965 he was sentenced for “parasitism” to two and a half years’ exile in Siberia. Amalrik was not “fit” to teach in the US for the same reasons he was not “fit” to teach in the Soviet Union.
Korbel besides being the “intellectual father” of Rice is the physical father of Madeleine Albright, the “dynamic” former secretary of State. The Korbel influence on Rice turned her into an (expert) “Europeanist”, as she herself acknowledges. (International Herald Tribune, April 6. 2004).
So, with this background as a tool, Rice built a strategy for impressing the white people that “count”. The final stage of success was reached when she impressed Barbara’s brilliant son.
In assessing Rice’s success-story it would have being easy to suggest why does not Condoleezza Rice try to impress e.g. Arundhati Roy? We think it more realistic to suggest to Rice to try to impress the “18-year-old Detroit (black) girl who reported that she had been a looter (in the 1967 Detroit riot)”.
Interviewer: “What is a Negro then if he’s not an American?”
Respondent (18-year-old black girl): ” A Negro, he’s considered a slave to the white folks. But half of them know that they’re slaves and feel that they can’t do nothing about it because they’re going along with it. But most of them they seem to get it into their heads now how the white folks treat them and how they’ve been treating them and how they’ve been slaves for the white folks.”
The above quoted text is found on page 76 of the “Report of The National Commission on Civil Disorders” of March 1, 1968 (also known as the “Kerner Report”).
Rice is proud of the power of her intellect. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that she understands that the members of the Bush family, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc in reality see her as a (politically) USEFUL (black) facade. They could have had dozens of Aryans with the same professional “qualifications”.
Why then she allows herself to be a tool of a fundamentally Nazi group of individuals? What could be the result of the comparison of Rice’s moral behavior to the moral integrity of the (then) 18-year-old Detroit black girl?
One could easily ignore all of the above: the religious “belief”, the stratagems, the climbing up the white ladder, etc. What one cannot ignore is the choice of Rice to be part of a group of murderous “warmakers”. She knew that the group would kill tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and in Iraq. She knew that torture by Americans is not an “isolated incident” practiced by “bad people”. She knew and she knows much, much more.
Condoleezza Rice is one of the rare individuals in the world that has access to the names and to the US Government files of the individuals that have been torturing people for the last 50 years under the guidance and supervision of Americans. If Condoleezza Rice considers herself a moral person she could do what Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers) did.
She can make public the US files of the Greek torturers: John Lambrou, Mallios, Babalis, Karapanagiotis, Theofilogianakos, Hatzizisis, Tsalas, etc, etc., who had been torturing Greeks under the aegis of the US Embassy. Also she can make public the US files of the corresponding torturers in Turkey, in Honduras (John Negroponte can help her in this), in Guatemala, in El Salvador, In East Timor, In Haiti, in Chile, in Brazil, in Argentina, and on, and on.
What she could do by making these files public is make known to the world two things: First, who were the American “handlers” of these torturers? And second, for how long this “handling” lasted?
Condoleezza Rice has brought herself in an immensely difficult situation. The group of murderous people that she now serves will eventually be brought to justice. There are going to be Nurembergs! And in those Nurembergs the “Eichmanns” of the “Leaders” will have to pay the price of their participation in the shedding of the blood of women and children.
History shows us that the end of the barbarous Leaders is punishment. It will take time to reach the new Nurembergs. But they are going to take place. Papon (the French Nazi collaborator) was put in prison in his nineties.
If my assessment is wrong then there is no hope for humanity. Then, Condoleezza Rice has nothing to be uncomfortable about.
P.S. In my Commentary of Feb. 5, 2004, I mentioned: “During WWII, when the resistance against the Nazis reached a really threatening point for them, they applied the rule of the ratio: for one German soldier killed, 200 civilians were executed by the Nazis”. In Falluja the Iraqis killed 4 US mercenaries (a.k.a. contractors!). The Americans killed about 700 Iraqis in revenge. The ratio is 175 Iraqis for each American.
I assume that Condoleezza Rice is taking part in the “dignification” process of Qaddafi. The following testimony from an eyewitness (fellow-engineer) might help her in her task: A couple of decades ago that engineer from his hotel window in Libya saw a couple of Libyans being brought by Qaddafi’s uniformed people to a vacant lot adjacent to the hotel. With the use of 4 cars and ropes the Libyans were dismembered. Who knows for what great crimes?
Finally. In her testimony before the 9-11 commission Rice said that the peoples of the world hate the Americans “for what we are.” If by “we” she means the US elites, she is right. If by “we” she means the ordinary Americans, she is wrong. Why does she pretend to be wrong?