Interview with Prof. John McMurtry
By Prof. John McMurtry and Kourosh Ziabari
![mcmurtry mcmurtry](http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/mcmurtry.jpg)
A world-renowned Canadian philosopher argues
that the United States holds the world record of illegal killings of
unarmed civilians and extrajudicial detention and torturing of prisoners
who are detained without trial.
Prof. John McMurtry says that the U.S.
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 U.S.
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 citizen 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.
John McMurtry is a
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada. In
2001, Prof. McMurtry was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
for his outstanding contributions to the study of humanities and social
sciences. His latest major works are his 15-year study, “The Cancer
Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure” and three monumental volumes
commissioned by UNESCO for its Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems
entitled “Philosophy and World Problems.” McMurtry’s articles and
writings regularly appear on different newspapers and online magazines
across the world.
Prof. McMurtry took part in an in-depth
interview with FNA and responded to some questions regarding the U.S.
project of the War on Terror, its military interventions in Iraq and
Afghanistan and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The following is the
text of the interview.
Q: Prof. McMurtry; it was following the 9/11
attacks that the United States launched its project of War on Terror.
The venture has so far cost the lives of thousands of innocent, unarmed
civilians across the world, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and Libya; however, the civilian cost of the Global War
on Terror has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media and the
politicians in the West. Why do you think they’ve overlooked the
enormous rate of civilian casualties resulting from an endeavor which
was purportedly aimed at exporting democracy and liberal values to the
world?
A: In the US’s so-called War on Terror, by far the
greatest and most systematic terrorization of civilians is in fact
perpetrated by the US state itself. Unarmed citizens are murdered across
the world as ‘collateral damage’, ‘illegal enemy combatants’ or other
license of impunity. The US state conceives itself as above
international law along with ally Israel, but this reality is taboo to
report and so too all the killing and terrorization of civilians. One
can truly say that “the historical record demonstrates the US is
provably guilty of continual lawless mass murder of civilians across the
world”, but the truth is unthinkable within the ruling ideological
regime. Consider for example, the US-led deadly civil wars and coup
d’etats in Venezuela and Ukraine as well as Libya and Syria. They mass
terrorize and destroy societies into defenseless dependency so that
their resources, lands and markets are “free” for transnational
corporate exploitation. Yet the meaning is un-decoded. Ignorance is
built into the syntax of acceptable thought.
Q: Many immigrants who
seek refuge in United States from the four corners of the globe in
search of a better and more prosperous life think of America as an
absolutely free, democratic and open society with abundant opportunities
for economic and social progress. However, you’ve argued, as many
scholars did, that the United States is a police state. Would you please
elaborate more on that? Do you believe that these immigrants and
asylum-seekers are not told the whole truth about the United States or
are somehow deceived?
A: Deception allies with ignorance. I define a
police state as a society in which there is unlimited state power of
armed force freely discharged without citizen right to stop it. While
the men at the top always proclaim their devotion to the public good, an
endless litany of crimes against human life is permitted by legally
terrorist offices, central directives, and bureaucratic channels. Thus
in “free and democratic America”, more citizens are caged than any
country in the world, and over 80% have perpetrated no violence against
[any] person. While the US accuses others of inhuman persecution and
despotism, it holds the world records for caging non-violent people, for
violent killings of civilians, for spy surveillance of everyone, and
for mass murders of innocent people across international borders. Even
kicking the tire of a VIP vehicle may be prosecuted as an act of
“terrorism”. 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. The US now leads the globe in an underlying civil war
of the rich against the poor.
Q: What’s your viewpoint on the recent laws and
legislations that have stipulated limitations on the civil liberties of
the U.S. citizens, including the PATRIOT Act of 2001, which was widely
criticized and protested at? It’s seen as a discriminatory measure that
violates the privacy of the American citizens and the foreign nationals
traveling in the States. Isn’t it so?
A: The repression of civil rights by the US goes
far deeper than violation of citizen privacy to which the media confine
themselves. The Patriot Act together with other laws like the Military
Commissions Act, the Defense Authorization Act, the Homeland Security
Act and the Protect America Act, mutating to the Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act, form a systematic curtailment of civil rights and
freedoms. Spying on everyone across borders is the accompanying
apparatus of the National Security Agency which has been recently
exposed in its totalitarian global snooping and dirty tricks. Department
analyst Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers summarizes the post-9/11
situation in the US as “a coup … a steady assault on every fundamental
of our Constitution for executive government to rule by decree”. What
makes these new laws and licenses tyrannical is their selective
suspension of established constitutional rights to habeas corpus, the
right of the accused to see evidence against him/her, the right to one’s
chosen legal defense, the right to trial without indefinite detention,
and other rights of due process of law including to free speech and
organization that can be construed as supporting “illegal enemies”. As
to who these “illegal enemies” are, this is determined by the US
president without legal criterion, proving evidence or verification
required. The US can thus detain, kidnap and imprison without trial or
indictment any US citizen or other citizen anywhere by designating them
enemies to the US. This arbitrary power has most infamously instituted
US presidential right to kill individuals and those around them at will
by robot killer drones – all crimes against humanity and war crimes
under international law, but again taboo to report in the mass media or
question in international security meetings themselves.
Q: The U.S. government has traditionally supported
the oppressive regimes that are widely considered as dictatorial and
tyrannical. Some examples include the successive U.S. governments’
support for the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and Israel.
Isn’t such an approach contrary to the democratic principles which the
U.S. Constitution is said to be oriented on?
A: Certainly the US has long supported dictatorial
and tyrannical regimes. In fact US corporations and banks led the
funding and arming of Hitler and the Nazis even during the 1939-45 War,
and official US support of murderous dictatorships afterwards has been
normalized since the CIA’s foundation in 1947. In the years since 9/11,
US government has covertly directed funding and arming of the most
destructive armed forces including jihadists, not only in the nations
you mention, but in Syria and before that Libya, Iraq, Somalia, and
Afghanistan and many much less known places like Mali. Ukraine has been
similarly launched into civil war and escalated oppression by US-led
destabilization, covert Special Forces, and local fascists.
Yet the US Constitution itself has no clear
resource to prevent such international crimes, the founding US fathers
themselves being mainly rich slave owners and leaders of the genocidal
Western expansion against first peoples which England had forbidden in
1763. In fact, despite some stirring phrases without binding force, the
ultimate concern of the US Constitution is the protection of private
property and wealth at the top against the masses and democratic
reversal. The ultimately governing value is profitable and unfettered
private commerce, the “commerce clause” being the only way found to
enforce the civil rights of Blacks. The opening slogans of “life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness” seem inspiring except that happiness
cannot be pursued, life needs do not ever enter into consideration, and
liberty without the means to exercise it is nonsense.
Bear in mind that Supreme Court decisions have
further granted the constitutional freedom of private money hoards to
control politicians, public speech and elections themselves.
Transnational corporations which are the global vehicles of the world’s
ruling money sequences have at the same time multiplying powers with no
obligations, while other societies’ rights have been effectively erased
by international trade treaties which recognize only corporate rights
and strip societies of their economic sovereignty and public resources.
Corporate rights to dominate public speech and elections have been
twisted out of even the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protecting the
civil rights of ex-slaves. In short, a near total expropriation of
rights by Big Money has shown how anti-democratic the US Constitution
has been made. I think that only the rule of life-protective law with
the force of international law can regulate this global money-power
dictatorship back into coherence with life support requirements now
violated at every level, with or without a revolutionary uprising.
Q: Over the course of
20th century, the United States has been involved in several covert
foreign regime change actions, and as the Foreign Policy magazine notes,
it has toppled seven governments in the last 100 years through
masterminding and engineering coups across the world, including the 1953
coup d’etat against the popular government of Iranian Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddegh or the 1973 coup in Chile that brought down the
government of President Salvador Allende. Is such sponsorship of coups
and regime change actions the characteristic feature of a democratic,
peace-loving government?
A: There has been almost no coup or government
overthrow since 1945 not led by the US. The examples you give of
Mosaddegh and Allende are sea-changes of history in which elected,
socially responsible and peaceful governments led by men of the very
highest quality have been criminally usurped. This perpetual and
increasing destabilization of other states and societies along with
other gravely degenerate trends are systematically tracked in my 15-year
study The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/ from crisis to cure. In the US
itself, the three powers of supreme legislature, executive and court are
now all controlled by the same money party selecting for the same
full-spectrum predation of life and life support systems everywhere to
multiply themselves. Yet still the long record of the US state and its
oligarch allies destroying societies across the world is unspeakable in
the mass media because they themselves are financed and advertised in by
the same transnational corporations that demand the resources and
territories of societies everywhere. The carcinogenic global causal
mechanism is ever more evident and catastrophic, but not recognized.
Q: More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks,
there are still several unanswered questions about the tragic event,
including the origins and motives of the perpetrator, the role of
foreign intelligence organizations in masterminding the attacks and the
behind-the-scenes benefits of the attacks for the U.S.
military-industrial complex. As you note in your writings, it was not
Osama bin Laden who spearheaded the 9/11 attacks. Who is the real
culprit? Did the 9/11 attacks play into the hands of the Bush
administration to set in motion its lethal project of War on Terror and
start invading different countries?
A: My recent monograph on the Internet, “The
Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State” is a definitive
answer to these questions. The turning-point event is laid bare step by
step as a mass-murderous construction whose scenario is anticipated and
contrived by US geostrategic planners with the official investigation
completely concealing the basic fact that fireproofed steel
infrastructures collapsed at the speed of gravity into their own
footprints against the laws of physics. Moreover the first question of
forensic justice – cui bono, who benefits? – is ruled out from the
start, although every subsequent policy, decision and new power served
the interests of the Bush Jr. regime and the US military-oil complex
against the welfare of the American public and the world, especially
Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.
Unfortunately conspiracy theories miss the inner
logic of the strategic event and the system disorder driving it. The
official conspiracy theory is absurd, but every disbeliever in it is
pilloried as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ – the reverse projection which is
the signature operation of US propaganda. Always blame others for what
the US does as the reason for attacking them. One might laugh at the
same old propaganda psy-op and fabrications trotted out endlessly, but
the terrible reality is the 9/11 construction has had effectively
sabotaged international progress in solving the world’s gravest
problems. It has dismantled the global peace movement that was reaching
an historical peak in 2001 to stop US-led militarism after the Cold War.
It has successfully suppressed world-wide uprisings against a US-led
global corporate dictatorship despised and opposed by ever more citizens
across America, Europe and the world. It has even formed the draconian
laws and police practices needed to squash the world-wide environmental
movement across the world at same time. 9/11 has, in short, vastly
empowered the corporate money system devouring human and planetary life
by falsifying opponents as “terrorists”. But who joins the dots of the
Great Repression?
Q: Since its inception 66 years ago, CIA has been
involved in numerous covert sabotage, anti-sabotage, assassination,
propaganda, destruction and subversion plans against other countries,
and during the course of all these covert actions, it has violated
different internationally recognized treaties and regulations as well as
the sovereignty and territorial integrity of these nations. Are these
actions and gambits legal or illegal? If they are illegal, then why
doesn’t any international organization investigate the crimes and hold
the U.S. government accountable?
A: Yes this is a turning-point issue of the world.
But the US record as a rogue state is unspeakable in the mass media
because they are financed and advertised in by the same transnational
corporations that demand the resources and territories of the world by
threat of trade-investment embargo and the point of the gun of US and
NATO forces. This is what the lawless but unnamed US reign of terror
achieves – not only by war crimes and crimes against humanity, but by
economic ruin for any society resisting transnational trade treaties and
demands which recognize only foreign corporate rights to profit. If the
underlying causal mechanism is taboo to recognize, unaccountability is
the result. Blame is instead diverted to US-designated enemies – like
Iran or Russia or Venezuela – and the society-destroying disorder
rampages on.
In fact there are many life-protective
international laws to hold the US accountable to, but every one of them
is repudiated by the US so as not to apply to itself ; laws and
conventions against nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical
weapons, landmines, small arms, international ballistic missiles,
torture, racism, sexism, child abuse, arbitrary seizure and
imprisonment, crimes against humanity and war crimes, military weather
distortions, biodiversity loss, and international climate
destabilization. Yet this record remains taboo to track or publish even
as the US demonizes others for “defying the laws and norms of the
international community”.
The US and ally Israel thus violate the laws
against armed aggression, occupation and crimes against humanity at
will, but who even knows or cites the laws? For example, when the US
was about to perpetrate the supreme crime of invasion against Iraq in
2003 with no lawful grounds, no-one raised the issue at the Security
Council, including the Iraqi diplomat there. As one who later debated on
Canadian public television a leading US geostrategic analyst three days
before the criminal bombing of Baghdad began, my statement that he was
“advocating war crime and should be arrested for doing so” was deleted
from the live broadcast. The cornerstone of international law is thus
silenced while the media go on calling opponents “unpatriotic” or
“terrorists” – as in Nazi Germany. If law-abiding states do not stand
and join for the rule of international life-protective law, there seems
no end.
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