COMMENTARY: By Chris Hedges
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province.
They were terrorised by heavily armed American execution squads for decades.
It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarised police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability.
What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called “imperial boomerang”.
Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland.
The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself.
But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of colour.
We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This commentary was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.
Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz
