Last edited Mon Jun 23, 2025, 06:12 PM - Edit history (1)
in his excellent 2002 book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated — Archive.org link: https://ia601405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfTheLostGardens/VidalGore-PerpetualWarForPerpetualPeace.pdf
Vidal quotes from a piece appearing in Le Monde shortly after 9/11/2001 titled “Untimely Reflections” by Arno J. Mayer, professor emeritus of history at Princeton, noting that this piece was turned down everywhere in the U.S., including by The Nation, “where I (Vidal) have been a contributing editor for many years (and where my untimely reflections on September 11 were also turned down).”
Until now, in modern times, acts of individual terror have been the weapon of the weak and the poor, while acts of state and economic terror have been the weapons of the strong. In both types of terror it is, of course, important to distinguish between target and victim. This distinction is crystal clear in the fatal hit on the World Trade Center: the target is a prominent symbol and hub of globalizing corporate financial and economic power; the victim the hapless and partly subaltern workforce. Such distinction does not apply to the strike on the Pentagon: it houses the supreme military command—the ultima ratio regmun—of capitalist globalization even if it entails, in the Pentagon's own language, "collateral" damage to human life.
In any case, since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of "preemptive" state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g., bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein; and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel's violation of international agreements and U.S. resolutions but also its practice of preemptive state terror.
Vidal: “I should point out that
Le Monde is a moderately conservative highbrow publication and, for decades, a supporter of Israel. Arno Mayer himself spent ‘school days’ in a German concentration camp.”
Vidal’s book is scathing and thorough, full of irrefutable facts that paint a damning picture of American foreign policy. He also provides a handy (and eye-opening) list of American military campaigns similar to that included in this OP.
Vidal, by the way, was a WWII veteran who enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17.
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