Monday, October 30, 2006

Dishistory

Dis-history is what I call what the "information" on TV and in the media these days that is being recorded for history.

An example of dishistory is the war on terror. As historian Howard Zinn and author of the People's History of the United States explains, "I don't accept the war on terror. The war ITSELF is the terror." You've got to have nothing but sorrow for the people of Iraq.

The US supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to help make stronger the man responsible for the Iraqi's misery. First Saddam fought a long and bloody war with Iran (the US gave weapons and info to Saddam) and then invaded Kuwait to start the Gulf War. After the US-led coalition ousted the Iraqi Army, in which we left the Kurdish to be attacked and also George H.W. Bush promised help if any faction rose against Saddam and when the Shi'ite in the South did, Bush turned his back and Saddam slaughtered them.

Through the 1990's we had economic sanctions that only persecuted the people due to lack of food and medicine, Saddam enriched himself while the people suffered. Then we have Bush's Iraq War with the shock and awe opening salvo on the Iraqi people. Three and a half years later and the people are still being killed. A John Hopkins study suggested 650,000 Iraqi's dead since the war started. Another estimate is that one million have left the country. And who knows how many maimed and poor and starved and homeless and displaced and sickened due to the war there are. We know that they only get electricity a few hours per day, this three years and more into the war.

People don't want to admit that Iraq is in a sectarian civil war. Dishistorians look back and see no precedence in their version of history. They don't see that civil wars of the past have always had things like fuctioning government and economy occuring during the war. Look at the US civil war, though different in style, the war fought on while cities and towns not involved (the vast majority of them) went right on manufacturing things and farming. The people of Iraq farm and have an economy but also a shaky government, and the war and Baghdad violence goes on around them. Car bombs, IEDs, highjackings and torture killings, this is no place to live for the Iraqi people.

Dishistory barely looks at how the Iraqi people have suffered in more than two decades of wars and sanctions. If Bush wants to include Iraq in the war on terror then my only conclusion is that he wanted to terrorize the Iraqi people themselves, because war IS terror.