By Dr Gideon Polya
11 September, 2013
Countercurrents.org
On 11 September (9-11) decent people around the world remember Chile’s 9-11 in 1973 (3,000 murdered in the US CIA-backed military Coup), the launch of the peace and non-violence Satyagraha movement by Gandhi in South Africa on 9-11 in 1906, and the 2001 US 9-11 atrocity involving 3,000 killed, almost certainly by the US Government with likely Israeli complicity, that was used by the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters as an excuse for the US War on Terror that has so far killed 9.5 million Muslims by violence or violently-imposed deprivation (see “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ). However on 9-11 Mainstream media exclusively trumpet the lying Bush “official story” of the US 9-11 atrocity. This article attempts to restore the balance.
1. Chile’s 9-11, the 1973 CIA-backed military Coup.
After Socialist President Dr Salvador Allende won the 1970 Chilean presidential election, the US CIA embarked on a campaign to remove him and backed strikes by right-wing business people and their supporters. Despite these foreign-backed strikes and a declining economy, Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition gained 43.2% of the vote in the March 1972 elections. A first attempt at a coup by the US-backed military failed in June 1973 but massive US-backed destabilization occurred through strikes, demonstrations and judicial and political interventions. On 11 September 1973 the US-backed military took over the country and President Allende died in his violently besieged presidential palace. 40,000- 50,000 Chileans were subsequently arrested and abusively imprisoned, many were tortured and 3,000 were killed. The US-backed Chilean military junta under mass murderer General Augusto Pinochet was to abusively rule Chile until 1990 (see “1973 Chilean coup d’état”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat ).
Human death is the bottom-line measure of the social impact of wars, dictatorships and indeed of all social policy. While variously reporting violent deaths due to human actions, Mainstream media and mendicant academics typically ignore non-violent avoidable deaths due to human-imposed deprivation. Avoidable deaths (avoidable mortality, excess deaths. excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) can be defined as the difference between the actual deaths in given period in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful , decently-run country with the same demographics and can be readily determined from UN Population Division demographic data. Avoidable deaths from deprivation under Pinochet in the period 1973-1990 totalled about 300,000, a figure 100 times greater than the 3,000 violent deaths attributed to the Pinochet régime (see Chapter 5, Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/body-count-global-avoidable-mortality_05.html ).
Of course, the US-backed Chile military Coup on 9-11 had a chilling (pun intended) effect on the whole world – the US had a policy of successively subverting and pressuring countries to change their policies and governments and, if that failed, of backing internal coups – indeed if all the foregoing failed, the US would invade. This doctrine of US imperialism has been exposed by William Blum in his best-selling book “Rogue State”, by John Perkins in his important book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and Phillip Agee in his book “Inside the Company. CIA Diary”. Post-war US global hegemony has come at an enormous human cost. Thus since 1950, global avoidable deaths have totaled 1.3 billion on Spaceship Earth (over 50 million in Latin America alone) with the US in charge of the flight deck.
Baltasar Garzón (Spanish jurist and currently head of Julian Assange’s legal team) writing in the UK Guardian on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Chile’s 9-11 observed: “ The CIA no longer runs amok in South America, yet the US is still trying to influence and control sovereign nations in Latin America: American “soft power” may be more subtle than the crude subversion that sank the entire continent into internal conflict and military repression throughout the 1970s and 80s, but the imperialist mindset remains. This same mentality that gave us the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan also now continues with the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen – which fly in the face of international legal norms. And finally, we see the United States still wedded to cold war doctrines of state secrecy and surveillance in its persecution of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and its spying on the communications of foreign citizens and governments” (see Baltasar Garzón, ”Remembering Chile’s 9-11: democracy’s final triumph over General Pinochet”, UK Guardian, 10 September 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/09/chile-911-pinochet-baltasar-garzon ).
2. Humanity’s peaceful 9-11 – Gandhi’s Satyagraha launch, 1906.
On 11 September 1906 in Johannesburg , South Africa , Mahatma Gandhi launched his Satyagraha (“truth force” or “insistence on truth”) movement before 3,000 oppressed South African Indians. This movement was an inspiration for non-violent resistance around the world, from the Indian Independence movement to the US Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King. Thus Arun Gandhi (the South African-born grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and co-founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Memphis , Tennessee , that promotes nonviolence in conflict around the world. ): “ Satyagraha is the pursuit of truth. My grandfather believed that truth should be the cornerstone of everybody’s life and that we must dedicate our lives to pursuing truth, to finding out the truth in our lives. And so his entire philosophy was the philosophy of life. It was not just a philosophy for conflict resolution, but something that we have to imbibe in our life and live it all the time so that we can improve and become better human beings ” (see Amy Goodman and Arun Gandhi , “Satyagraha 100 years later: Gandhi launches modern non-violent resistance movement on Sept. 11, 1906”, Democracy Now, 8 September 2006: http://www.democracynow.org/2006/9/8/satyagraha_100_years_later_gandhi_launches ).
Science is the most successful human approach to solving problems and involves the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses. Science critically involves truth, and lying (untruth) simply delays the ultimate achievement of better science-based models of reality. Indeed rational risk management that crucially maximizes societal safety successively involves (a) accurate information, (b) science-based assessment of the data, and (c) informed systemic change to minimize risk. Unfortunately the presently dominant US and Western neoliberal capitalism involves a horrible perversion successively involving (a) lying, spin and censorship, (b) spin-based analysis involving the selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position, and (c) blame and shame with war and illegitimate sanctions as the most horrific and deadly outcomes. Disembodied or private truth is not enough – the truth has to get out. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.
In contrast to Chile ‘s 9-11 (over 0.3 million killed from violence or from imposed deprivation) and the US 9-11 atrocity (9 million Muslims subsequently murdered by violence or war-imposed deprivation), Satyagraha has ultimately saved billions of lives. Avoidable deaths from violence, deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease in British India totalled 1.5 billion (or 1.8 billion if you include the so-called Native States). between 1757 and Independence in 1947. Thus, for example, despite a high birthrate, the Indian population failed to grow significantly under rapacious British rule between 1870 (population 303 million) and 1937 (population 303 million) whereas it exploded after Independence in 1947 (345 million) to a current 1,221 million in 2013 (see “India: historical demographical data of the whole country”: http://www.populstat.info/Asia/indiac.htm ). Avoidable deaths totaled 1.3 billion post-1950 but would have been hundreds of millions greater but for Satyagraha and self-determination in the Third World – huge negative body count due to “insistence on truth”, but utterly ignored by lying Mainstream media (see “Boycott Murdoch media”: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottmurdochmedia/ ; “Censorship by the BBC”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbythebbc/ ; “Censorship by The Conversation”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/censorship-by ; “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/home ; “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ ; “Censorship by The Age”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/censorship-by-the-age ; “Censorship by ABC Late Night Live”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbyabclatenightlive/ , “Censorship by ABC Saturday Extra”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbyabclatenightlive/censorship-by-abc-sat and “ABC fact-checking unit & incorrect reportage by the ABC (Australia’s BBC)”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/abc-fact-checking-unit ).
3. US (& possibly Israeli) WTC 9-11 atrocity, 2001.
The September 11 (9/11, 9-11) 2001 atrocities, in which a total of 2,995 people are reported to have died, destroyed 3 buildings in the World Trade Center, New York, severely damaged the Pentagon and involved a further incident in which a plane crashed in Pennsylvania (see “September 11 attacks”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks ). The “official version” of 9-11 due to the pathologically dishonest US Government is well known – it allegedly involved 4 passenger planes seized by a total of 19 Muslim hijackers (of whom none came from the US Alliance war zones of Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan); the North and South Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) (which were each struck by a plane) and a third building (WTC7) (which was not struck by a plane) allegedly collapsed gravitationally as a result of structural steel weakness from fires; part of the Pentagon was destroyed when a passenger plane allegedly hit it precisely at the level of the ground floor; and a fourth passenger plane allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought with the hijackers.
The “official story” came from the pathologically dishonest Bush Administration (see “Study: Bush, aides made 935 false statements in run-up to war”, CNN, : http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/23/bush.iraq/ ). The “official story” is utterly bizarre and unprecedented; has been presented by groups of people with an appalling record of lying by omission and commission, namely successive US Administrations, the governments of the US Alliance in general and the Mainstream Media (MSM); and has been upheld by a process of highly flawed “official inquiry” (see “9/11 Commission Report”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission_Report ). Further, unlike the sustained Israeli attack on the defenceless USS Liberty in international waters in 1967 (34 US servicemen killed, 171 wounded; see “USS Liberty incident”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident ), in the case of 9-11 there were no survivors to bear witness and no survivors to be potentially tried in a court of law.
Numerous science, engineering, aviation, military, intelligence and geopolitics experts dispute the bizarre, lying Bush “official story” and conclude that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by controlled demolition and that elements of the US Government had to have been involved. Indeed some experts claim that Apartheid Israel was involved (for a compendium of such expert opinions see “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ ). Professor Niels Harrit, an associate professor of chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the prestigious 9-Nobel-Laureate University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark , together with a team of colleagues published a study in a peer-reviewed chemical physics journal showing that all dust samples studied contained unexploded nanothermite high explosive, damning evidence for demolition of the WTC buildings and hence of US Government involvement in the atrocity (see Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journals, vol.2, pp.7-31 (25), 2009: http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM and Niels Harrit, “The seventh tower”, 911truth.dk (a translation of a feature article printed in the Danish newspaper Information on 31 March 2007) : http://www.911truth.dk/first/en/art_Harrit.htm ).
The 9-11 atrocity was used as an excuse for the US to launch a Zionist-promoted War on Terror that has killed 9.5 million Muslims since 2001 through violence or war-imposed deprivation (see “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ), the breakdown being 2.7 million (Iraq), 5.5 million (Afghanistan), 1.1 million (Somalia), 0.1 million (Libya) , 0.1 million (Syria) and goodness knows how many in French-occupied Mali and US devastated Yemen and NW Pakistan. These horrendous estimates are consonant with the huge number of Muslim refugees that now total over 20 million, the breakdown being 7 million Palestinians, 5-6 million Iraqis, 3-4 million Afghans, 2 million Somalis, 1 million Libyans, 3 million Syrians (including 2 million Internally Displaced Persons), 1 million Myanmar Rohingyas and about 2 million Pashtun refugees generated by US drone attacks and US-backed war in NW Pakistan. However the carnage does not stop there because the budgeted cost plus the long-term accrual cost of the US War on Terror has been $4-6 trillion and the cost of Apartheid Israel to the US has been estimated at an horrendous $40 trillion.
The horrendous financial cost of Israel to Americans has now reached a gigantic $40 trillion in today’s dollars. However the human cost involves the preventable deaths of millions of Americans – passive mass murder of Americans in an American Holocaust inflicted by the fiscal perversion of traitorous Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist One Percenters committing $8-10 trillion to ethnic cleansing and active and passive mass murder of Muslims abroad in support of Apartheid Israel instead of keeping Americans alive at home. The Zionist-subverted American Government support for Apartheid Israel in circa 2008 dollars totals about $40 trillion, the breakdown being (1) $3 trillion (1948-2003), (2) $4-6 trillion (Zionist-promoted Iraq and Afghan Wars), (3) $0.7 trillion (Value of a Statistical Life- or VSL-based cost of 88,000 US veteran suicides since September 2001) and (4) about $30 trillion (one quarter of the VSL-based cost of 15.6 million preventable American deaths since September 2001). This is an under-estimate because it does not consider the millions of preventable American deaths before 9-11 linked to Zionist subversion and perversion of America (see Gideon Polya, “ American Holocaust, millions of untimely American deaths and $40 Trillion cost of Israel to Americans ”, Countercurrents, 27 August 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270813.htm ). In addition, it is estimated that 1 million people have died from opiate drug-linked causes due to the US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to 93% in 2007, the breakdown including 200,000 Americans, 50,000 Iranians, 18,000 British, 10,000 Canadians, 8,000 Germans and 4,000 Australians (see “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ ).
4. Conclusions.
The US has invaded about 70 nations since 1776 (see Gideon Polya, “ The US has invaded 70 nations since 1776 – make 4 July Independence From America Day ”, Countercurrents, 5 July 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm ) and continues to variously pervert, subvert, threaten, invade, bomb or occupy every country on earth. Haiti , Mali , Somalia , Palestine , Syria and Afghanistan are variously occupied by US Alliance forces and the US is currently bombing the Yemen and NW Pakistan. Following the example of the Chilean 9-11 in 1973, US-backed forces in Egypt in 2013 responded to the “excuse” of US-backed demonstrations to destroy in a Coup Egypt’s first ever democratically-elected government , this being coupled with the killing of thousands of democracy supporters, the imprisonment of hundreds (thousands?) of democracy supporters, and seizure of Muslim Brotherhood assets. Based on unproven allegations of Syrian Government use of poison gas, war criminal Obama is threatening to invade Syria and tip the balance in favor of the rebels who US state terrorism has been supporting with training, money and weapons (one can only hope that worldwide opposition to this adumbrated US war crime plus the sensible Russian plan to put Syrian gas weaponry under international control will save Syria from further massive devastation).
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently stated of Obama’s threat s to attack Syria “As I have repeatedly said, the Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security. The use of force is lawful only when in exercise of self-defense in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter and or when the Security Council approves such action.” Invasion of Syria by US state terrorists under Obama would be illegal and the worst of war crimes.
Decent people around the world must oppose endless US state terrorism and war criminality by (a) urging and applying (as far as is practicable) Boycotts , Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all goods and services of the US, Apartheid Israel and their allies as long as they commit and threaten war crimes against humanity, and (b) by informing everyone they can – peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.
Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .