I’ve been trying to be upbeat and happy. Didn’t want to keep reiterating all the bad things….
But they are so bad. I just keep finding out so much more..
Now I have run into Noam Chomsky’s speech on ‘The New War on Terror’ :
The New War Against Terror
By Noam Chomsky
October 18, 2001 – Transcribed from audio recorded at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT The Talk (audio)
Here’s a tiny little paragraph from it:
Colombia and Turkey
The worst human rights violator in the 1990’s is Colombia, by a long shot. It’s also the, by far, the leading recipient of US military aid in the 1990’s maintain-ing the terror and human rights violations. In 1999, Colombia replaced Turkey as the leading recipient of US arms worldwide, that is excluding Israel and Egypt which are a separate category. And that tells us a lot more about the war on terror right now, in fact.
Why was Turkey getting such a huge flow of US arms? Well if you take a look at the flow of US arms to Turkey, Turkey always got a lot of US arms. It’s stra-tegically placed, a member of NATO, and so on. But the arms flow to Turkey went up very sharply in 1984. It didn’t have anything to do with the cold war. I mean Russian was collapsing. And it stayed high from 1984 to 1999 when it
Human Nature Review – Volume 1, 2001, Page 45
The New War Against Terror
reduced and it was replaced in the lead by Colombia. What happened from 1984 to 1999? Well, in 1984, [Turkey] launched a major terrorist war against Kurds in southeastern Turkey. And that’s when US aid went up, military aid. And this was not pistols. This was jet planes, tanks, military training, and so on. And it stayed high as the atrocities escalated through the 1990’s. Aid fol-lowed it. The peak year was 1997. In 1997, US military aid to Turkey was more than in the entire period 1950 to 1983, that is the cold war period, which is an indication of how much the cold war has affected policy. And the results were awesome. This led to two to three million refugees. Some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the late 1990’s. Tens of thousands of people killed, 3500 towns and villages destroyed, way more than Kosovo, even under NATO bombs. And the United States was providing eighty percent of the arms, in-creasing as the atrocities increased, peaking in 1997. It declined in 1999 because, once again, terror worked as it usually does when carried out by its major agents, mainly the powerful. So by 1999, Turkish terror, called of course counter-terror, but as I said, that’s universal, it worked. Therefore Turkey was replaced by Colombia which had not yet succeeded in its terrorist war. And therefore had to move into first place as recipient of US arms.
I am simply speechless.