Interview with Prof. John McMurtry
By Prof. John McMurtry and Kourosh Ziabari
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?
