Transcript George Galloway's September 19 speech in Chicago
- From: "Eh?" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 18 Oct 2005 14:51:26 -0700
Transcript - George Galloway's September 19, 2005 speech in Chicago
October 18th, 2005
George Galloway, Member of the British Parliament, spoke on September
19, 2005 at Thorne Auditorium at Northwestern University Law School,
Chicago, IL as part of a national tour sponsored by The New Press, The
Center for Economic Research and Social Change, International Socialist
Review, and the National Council of Arab Americans. Loretta Capeheart,
Ph.D., introduced the speakers and served as moderator. Preceding Mr.
Galloway were Bill Davis, Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Ahmed
Shawki, Editor of International Socialist Review and a board member of
the National Council of Arab Americans; and Sabah Khan, a student and
member of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) chapter at University of
Illinois at Chicago. CAN collected donations for hurricane relief that
a group of students took to the Gulf States.
[To ensure accuracy, any quotes from the transcript text must be
compared with the audio of his speech. Please see Traprock's webpage
on the Chicago talk to download the audio programs of the speech, the
question and answer session, and the introductory remarks by the above
named speakers.]
***
Thank you very much. Chair, brothers and sisters, thank you very much
for that wonderful welcome and the introductory speakers who set the
scene for this meeting so very ably. I want to start off this evening
by telling you what I'm not here to do before telling you what I am.
I'm not here, and I make this point, especially as my name is George
*laughter*, I'm not here to re-colonize you. *laughter and applause*
I'm not here to tell you Britain knows best, though, of course, we
were an imperial power for rather longer *laughter* than you have yet
been, and, I hope, longer than you will be. I come from a long line of
anti-imperialist parents and grandparents. I am of Irish background,
and we've always hated the British Empire, always. *laughter and
applause* In fact, I remember very well coming home from school once
and telling my Irish grandfather that the teacher had said that British
had an empire so vast that, upon it, the sun never set, and my
grandfather answered, "that's because God would never trust the
English in the dark." *laughter and applause* I've never had cause
to doubt him about that. He did say "English." He was very clear
about English, not Scottish or Welsh. And the second thing I'm not
here to do is evince some of my critics. I've just been on Fox TV
with Bill O'Reilly. *laughter* Unfortunately, I wasn't live because
I had a few things up my sleeve about Bill O'Reilly. *laughter* But
I'd better not go to that bathroom humor in a mixed audience. But for
Bill O'Reilly and people like him, somebody like me is driven by what
they call (well, he doesn't call because he doesn't use big words)
visceral anti-Americanism. Well, I'm here to tell you that I am
probably the only man who can say that he is the great grandson of
almost certainly the only woman in the entire 19th century who
emigrated from America to Scotland *laughter* at a time when thousands
were sailing in the opposite direction. I think she got on the wrong
boat, as a matter of fact, but, if she hadn't, I wouldn't be here,
so there is nothing anti-American about me or anything I have to say
this evening. Neither are we against the troops. I saw somebody with a
t-shirt last night outside the meeting, 25 of them in a mass
demonstration of neo-cons outside the University of Wisconsin. She was
wearing a t-shirt, "we love the troops." Well, we love the troops.
That's why we don't want any more of them to be killed or to kill
other people on a pack of lies from George W. Bush. *applause* After
all, who are the troops? The troops are, in your country and mine,
conscripted by unemployment, low wages, poor prospects, racism,
recruiting sergeants in the high schools and in the car parks of the
shopping malls, mopping up on the dissatisfaction with the lives which
so many people in industrial and post-industrial Britain and America
suffer. How could we want those troops to be harmed? They are our
children, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors, our school friends,
and, as I hear the Vietnam veterans say, "isn't it always the way
that those sent in to fight in these wars are not the sons or daughters
of those who have most to gain from those wars?" Somebody once said
war is a thing where there's a worker on both ends of a gun. That's
why we say we love the troops so much. We're demanding their
immediate withdrawal from harm's way in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and
wherever else Bush and Blair have sent them. *applause*
And the other thing Bill O'Reilly put to me, and I wish he'd come
along to all my meetings, it would be good to have him in the front row
shouting these things *laughter*, it gets the blood coursing in the
veins, that I had said, he said, that America had brought 9/11 upon
itself. Well, let me say what I did say. Not just in the United States
but in the British Parliament, and not just now but four days after
9/11, when the House of Commons was recalled to discuss this criminal
act of mass murder which killed thousands of innocent people. I said,
you'll forgive me quoting myself, I said "it may appear that these
airplanes came out of a clear blue sky, but I believe that these
monsters emerged from a deep swamp of hatred and bitterness and enmity
which exists against us all over the world but particularly in the
Muslim world because of the policies of injustice that we have visited
upon them for so many years." Now I have a responsibility to say that
because I know that to be true, as someone who has spent more than
thirty years closely involved with the Muslim world and the Arab world
in particular. I have seen that swamp. I have walked around the edges
of that swamp. I knew that it was there before 9/11, and I knew that
something like 9/11 was a disaster waiting to happen. And I was
criticized for saying it in New York, but I believe that political
honesty requires me to say the same thing whichever city I'm in,
whichever country I'm in whatever time it is, because the truth has
to be told and has to be understood. *applause* We have to say, you
know, people say *something inaudible from the crowd*, I didn't catch
that, but let me infer what it might have been. And my apologies if it
was a supportive shout. You see, Bill O'Reilly and the crazed
fanatics like him, they want to hang Bin Laden around our necks. Bin
Laden has nothing to do with us. Bin Laden was invented by the United
States of America and by Great Britain *applause* and by the countries
which gave him weapons and money. As I started quoting myself, let me
finish quoting myself from ten years or more earlier. On the eve of the
fall of Kabul to Bin Laden and the so-called Mujahidin had been armed
and financed and bankrolled in every way, including politically and
democratically, by the United States and Great Britain. I said to Mrs.
Thatcher and Parliament, "you have opened the gates for the
barbarians, and a long dark night will now descend upon the people of
Afghanistan. They are the people that took Bin Laden into Afghanistan,
and then they massacred the people of Afghanistan for having Bin Laden
in their midst. How unjust is that?" I heard Mrs. Bush Jr. (I'm
going to come back to Mrs. Bush Sr. in a few minutes) and Mrs. Blair on
a radio broadcast synchronized swimming in the grief of the anniversary
of 9/11, and they asked us never to forget the heart-breaking messages
of farewell and love left by those American women on those planes from
their mobile telephones on the answering machines of their loved ones
at home. They asked us never to forget it as if we could. But, as I
said at the time, just because Afghan women don't have mobile
telephones, and their loved ones don't have answering machines, it
doesn't make their deaths delivered from the sky any less obscene
than the deaths of those American women on 9/11. *applause* But, as I
looked around, the faces of the powerful men (mainly men) in the
British Parliament whom I was addressing, I could read from their face
that that truth which to us is self-evident was not evident to them at
all. You see, we have to face the fact for the powerful people who rule
the world, the blood of some people is more valuable than the blood of
others. The blood of Americans is more valuable than the blood of
Afghans. The blood of Israelis is more valuable than the blood of
Palestinians. And the blood of Europeans is more valuable than the
blood of Iraqis. That's a self-evident truth. There's nobody
holding a minute of silence for the dead in Afghanistan. There's
nobody even counting the dead in Iraq. As Powell, I think it was, said,
"we can't be expected to count dead Iraqis." And, though this
self-evident truth may not be burnt on the minds of a majority of our
countrymen, believe me, there's not a Muslim in the whole world that
doesn't know the double standards that we have on this subject. They
know that their blood is worth less than ours, at least to us. And this
is one of the things which waters the swamp of hatred that I'm
talking about.
People asked me in that debate in Parliament and many times since,
"well, what would you do? What would you have done?" The first
thing I said is, whatever we do, it must make our position better
rather than worse. If we handle this the wrong way, we'll create ten
thousand new Bin Ladens. *applause* But if you ask me, if you press me
to explain how we got here. Here's what I have to say. You have to,
and, in the United States, I'm sorry to tell you, you, more than
anybody, have to grasp this simple truth, that the floor of the heart
of the crisis between east and west, between the Muslim world and the
rest, is the half-century or more of injustice visited upon the
Palestinian people paid for, organized, and armed by the United States
of America. *applause* There's no getting away from that point.
There's really no getting away from that. You see, most people in the
west hardly give a second's thought to the Palestinian people, but
Muslims think of Palestine almost every day. They think of Jerusalem,
where the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven from the roof of al-Aksa.
They know that Jerusalem and al-Aksa is in the hands of foreign
fighters who came from Brooklyn or London or Paris, who talk to the CNN
news in an American accent, talking about the fact that God promised
them this spot several thousand years before like some kind of estate
agent. *laughter* You saw them. You saw these settlers at Gaza having
to be prized out of their luxury homes. They did get a quarter of a
million dollars compensation, a point that was rarely made in the
newscasts: a quarter of a million dollars each compensation. But we
were being asked by the news to be grateful to General Sharon for
giving a quarter of a million dollars to people from Brooklyn who were
illegally occupying somebody else's land since 1967. *applause* Seven
thousand settlers occupying one third of the territory of the Gaza
Strip, the most densely populated place on Earth, with one and a half
million Palestinians occupying the other two thirds. Seven thousand
settlers consuming 30% of the water in Gaza, one and a half million
Palestinians, most of them living in the most ransid refugee camps,
unimaginable unless you've been there, in some cases decade after
decade, generation after generation. And when I watched as I did in
agonizing detail the story of the evacuation of Gaza, I learned all
over again the double standard that infuses this whole question and
which may leave most people in the west unmoved but which makes the
blood of all Muslims boil. General Sharon, to whom we must be grateful,
is a man with form. Last week was the 23rd anniversary of the massacre
of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. When thousands of
Palestinian refugees, undefended, unarmed men of pension age, women and
children, were butchered by the besieging Israeli forces and their
Lebanese falangist, fascist allies, there were no men to defend them in
the camps because the men had sailed away from the harbor of Beirut for
Tunisia and . .. beyond. They have done so under international
guarantee, a signed guarantee from the ambassador of the United States
of America that the families they left behind would be protected, but
no sooner had the ships sailed when these wolves fell upon the
undefended refugees, who were an international responsibility, and
massacred. Who was in charge of the operation? Who was literally
standing at the gates of the refugee camps, literally standing there at
the gates? The defense minister of Menachem Begin's government,
General Ariel Sharon, the same General Ariel Sharon for whom the red
carpet was rolled out in New York at the United Nations last week, and
we were asked to congratulate him all over again for his sagacity in
the Gaza Strip. Now when I'm talking about Sharon, I mean, I know
he's seen differently in some parts of the world. I mean, I heard
George Bush describing him as a man of peace. Even Sharon doesn't
consider himself to be a man of peace. *laughter* But George Bush
thinks he's a man of peace. *applause*
My friend, my comrade Ron McKay, sitting in the front row who works
with me, we met in 1977, nearly thirty years ago in the Sabra and
Shatila camps, and, together, a few years ago, we visited another
refugee camp, this time in occupied Palestine, called Jenin, two days
after the massacre there. It was still smoking, still smoldering. The
dead lay unburied under the crushed masonry. The camp, one square mile
in which ten thousand families had lived for fifty years. This camp is
a particular poignant example of the Palestinian tragedy because, for
those refugees who still had a roof, if they climbed up onto it, they
could literally see the shining city of Haifa on the sea, and every one
of those refugees came from that city of Haifa. So, for fifty years,
they've lived in a rat-infested refugee camp within sight of their
own houses, their own gardens, their own orange trees being picked by
people from London, from Paris, from Brooklyn. Can you imagine the
torture that that represents? And then there were massacres by General
Sharon's government, and the United Nations Security Council
unusually held an emergency meeting on a Saturday and passed a
resolution. I'm not making this next bit up. The resolution called
for Israel to allow inspectors to check reports of mass destruction of
the lives of refugees in the camp at Jenin, and Sharon answered, "get
stuffed. There are no United Nations inspectors coming in here." And
the United Nations promptly got stuffed, packed their suitcases, went
home, and nothing was ever said about the matter again. This double
standard may have escaped the notice of most people in the west, but it
didn't escape the notice of a single Muslim anywhere in the world.
Not a single one. *applause*
Now the second thing I answered that needs to be done, if we're going
to drain that swamp of the hatred that produced that kind of
monstrosity that occurred here on 9/11, occurred later on 7/7 in
London, occurred in Madrid and many other places, is that we have to
cease our policy of propping up virtually every puppet president and
corrupt king who rules the Muslim world from one end to the other.
Every one of these dictators. *applause* Again, you know, Bill
O'Reilly was real shocked at that point. Who, us? Are you talking to
us? I tell them, didn't you see the funeral of somebody who calls
himself King Fahd? Didn't you see all the western leaders descending
on one of the grimmest prison states in all the world, where women are
not allowed to drive, where they may not set foot outside their door
unless accompanied by a male relative, where nobody has ever voted for
anything ever in the whole history of the country, when you can't
even elect the secretary of a fishing club unless it becomes
contagious? This idea of elections, a country ruled by a tyrant king
where they chop off peoples' heads in public on Friday afternoons,
their blood spurting into the sand for the encouragement or the
discouragement of the others, a country run by a kleptocracy whose
purpose is to loot the wealth of their own country, loot it and spend
it in the casinos, in the bordellos, in the arms bazaars, in the stock
market and banks and speculation enterprises of western countries? Do
you know that Saudi Arabia thinks it has six trillion dollars in
American banks and in the American stock exchange? Of course, it only
thinks that it has that money because, if it ever dreamt of withdrawing
it, it would be confiscated overnight by any government of the United
States. So, in fact, this money does not even belong to them, let alone
belong to their country from whom it was looted. And all these western
leaders descended on Riyadh. None of them breathed a word about
democracy or liberty or freedom of any kind. They were there to kiss
the nose, as a prelude to kissing somewhere else, of the tyrant who
took the place of the tyrant they were laying in his grave. And so what
do you think Arab Muslims, Muslims around the world think when they
hear George Bush talking about democracy and liberty, when they see
him? He may have been going to collect his father's latest check.
George Bush Sr. has earned at least 10 million dollars from his
involvement with the Carlisle Group's handling of the wealth of the
kleptocrats of the House of Saud. And John Major, the former British
Prime Minister, is catching up. He's made two million. But he is a
considerably younger man with longer to go. Anybody think the United
States really wants democracy in Saudi Arabia? You've only got to
state that question, pose it in order to answer it. If there was a
democratically elected government in Saudi Arabia, the first thing it
would do is to close the American bases in Saudi Arabia. Try and get at
least some of their money back, and start investing it in their own
country, which has seen income per capita drop from $20,000 a year 15
years ago to $7,000 a year today. And maybe even invest a bit of it in
the rest of the Muslim world. Maybe even give a bit of it to the
Palestinian refugees in Jenin. You've only got to ask the question in
order to answer it. Does America really want democracy in Arabia? Fair
enough. If we don't want democracy in Arabia, that's one thing. But
don't say you want democracy next door in Iraq but no democracy next
door in Saudi Arabia. Because you'll just seem as a liar and a
hypocrite. *applause*
Let me give you another example . .. The somebody called President, at
least he calls himself that, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The United States
government asks us to believe that one of the fruits of the invasion
and occupation of Iraq is that there's just been the first ever free
Presidential election in Egypt. In fact, President Mubarak himself
announced that this was the first free Presidential election in Egypt.
Well, given that he has already served four six-year terms as
President, that's a fairly clear admission that he stole the power of
the Egyptian people over the last quarter of a century. The point of
this, President Mubarak got more votes in the free Presidential
election than he got in the four rigged Presidential elections
beforehand. I'm not making that up. Six years ago, in a rigged
Presidential election which he has now told us was rigged, he got 84.8%
of the vote. Not bad, I must tell you as someone who has been fighting
elections all my life. I've been quite popular, actually. You know,
I'm really pleased if I get 50% of the vote. But Hosni Mubarak got
84.8% of the vote in an election he said was rigged. And, a couple of
weeks ago, in a free election, he got 88.6% of the vote of the people
of Egypt. Well, if you believe that, you believe anything. And it goes
without saying that, if there really was a democratically-elected
government in Egypt, it would do in a week everything that must be a
nightmare to United States policymakers. It would close the Israeli
embassy in Cairo. It would kick out the Mossads. It would start
assisting the Palestinians instead of betraying them. It would once
again become the beating heart of the Arab world, showing its
leadership, showing its historic importance instead of being a slave
state with a puppet President who rules on behalf not of his own people
but of the governments of other countries. And so, I could go on. There
are so many others.
I was thinking the other day about the general. Remember him, the
General. President Bush, just before he was first elected, was being
interviewed on television. I don't know if they showed it here, but
it was endlessly shown to . .. the people of the world. Mr. Bush was
being asked about all these foreign leaders he was going to have to
deal with if he got elected as President of the United States. The
interviewer asked him (it was quite bold of the interviewer, I must
say), "Do you know who the leader of Pakistan is?" Bush answered,
"Sure. The General." *laughter* The interviewer said, "can you be
a bit more specific, maybe a name?" And Bush thought for a moment or
five, and he said, "we just call him the General." *laughter*
Don't act so surprised. This is a man who thinks that the people who
live in Kosovo are called Kosovarian. The people who live in Greece are
called Greecians. He thinks that the main problem with imports in the
United States is that most of them come from overseas. *laughter* So
don't act so surprised. At least Gerald Ford could chew a pretzel and
walk in a straight line at the same time. *applause* But, let me tell
you about the General, because the General is the leader of a country
of hundreds of millions of people, moreover, who now possess nuclear
weapons, a fact which doesn't seem to have caused any consternation
in the United States administration at all. They go to the ends of the
Earth to stop other people even dreaming of having nuclear power, but
the General, hey, he can have nuclear rockets if he likes. But the
General came to power in a military coup. He seized power in a military
coup. So much was this an offense against propriety that the British
government immediately suspended him from the British commonwealth and
put him on an arms embargo list. But that was until the day after 9/11.
Then he ceased to be called the General. He started to be called the
President, and then Mr. Bush then knew his name, and he gave him
everything that he wanted, not because he'd become any more
legitimate, any more democratic, but because he was now an important
ally of Bush in his so-called war on terror.
So when the Pakistanis and the Egyptians and the Saudis and Muslims
around the world hear our governments talking about democracy and
liberty and human rights, they don't know whether to laugh or cry,
but more and more of them are crying. And, of the many more who are
crying, some are crying tears so bitter that they're ready now to
support others who want to hurt us, want to give their lives for many
of ours. And, thus, the swamp becomes deeper still.
But the third main contributory factor to the growth of this swamp
I'm here to tell you went virtually unnoticed by anybody in the west
because I spent the best years of my life trying to raise the alarm
about the mass murder of Iraqi children under the sanctions imposed by
the United States and Great Britain on the people of Iraq. *applause*
It was described by a fine Democratic Party congressman, David Bonier
from Michigan, as infanticide masquerading as politics. An Iraqi child
was dying every six minutes of every day and night. I saw them. I saw
Iraq when it was a sea of misery with nobody looking, nobody listening.
I stood at the door of a labor ward in a hospital in Baghdad and
listened at the door to a woman giving birth by Caesarian Section
without anesthetic, and it's a noise that haunted me every night,
year after year, and drove me on in the campaign, I, and a very few
others, great Americans like Kathy Kelley of Voices in the Wilderness,
and very few others. I know that most people in the west didn't care
about those Iraqi children dying, but every Muslim cared about those
Iraqi children dying, and they couldn't understand why we could be so
careless about those Iraqi children dying if it was not for the reason
I mentioned at the beginning, that the blood of Arabs and Muslims is
cheaper than the blood of other people. Because if a million children
anywhere else were dying as a result of a policy being imposed by
elected governments in the west, it is undoubtedly true that that
policy would have come under greater attack, scrutiny, and eventually
been changed. But that's not what happened in Iraq. Instead, we moved
from the slow killing of the sanctions to the hot killing of the
invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we have to keep restating these
points because the media is determined to avoid them even now. This war
was based on a pack of lies from A to Z.From the first to the last, it
was based on a pack of lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
There was no link between Iraq and the atrocities on 9/11. There was no
connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but there is now. There's
plenty of al-Qaeda in Iraq now, and who's to blame for that? Who
brought al-Qaeda into Iraq, visiting upon now the people of Iraq the
same scourge that we visited upon the people of Afghanistan in the
1980's and early 1990's? And most pernicious of all was the lie
that the invading armies would be welcomed by flowers and rice. This
lie, told to our own soldiers, and there's 2,000 American boys lying
in the ground now, testimony to the fact that they were greeted with
something much hotter and much sharper than flowers and rice. Fifteen
thousand American boys wounded, maimed, scarred forever, many of them
in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives, for the rest of their lives
in a wheelchair, the next sixty years in a wheelchair because of that
pack of lies that sent them into this ignoble enterprise. And there's
more than 100,000 Iraqis dead according to Johns Hopkins University and
the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association. When I
mentioned this in a debate in New York the other night, my opponent
said that Johns Hopkins University, one of the world's finest
schools, and the Lancet, one of the most respected journals in the
world, were crazed fabricators. He really did say that, and I asked him
to repeat it, and he repeated it, and there was a group of maniacs in
the audience who were shouting "yes, crazed fabricators." Well,
I'll tell you this. If I had to choose between the work of Johns
Hopkins University and the Lancet or Christopher Hitchens and George W.
Bush, I'm with Johns Hopkins and the Lancet. *applause* Now all these
lies, all this death and destruction, the disfiguring of the face of
the international legal and political system, the bankruptcy of the
United Nations Security Council which said, "no, we won't agree to
war," and America and Britain said, "well, you get stuffed, we're
going to have the war anyway," the breakdown in trust that is now
evidenced in the New York Times poll that my comrade Ahmed talked about
earlier, when most people in both countries no longer believe in what
their government tells them, their confidence in our own system of
government perhaps fatally undermined. And all the extremism that's
been sewn, all the new dangers that have been laid for us, I tell you,
will blight the lives not only of every person in this room but their
children and maybe their children yet unborn.
This is a tremendous crime, but, when the French statesman Talleyrand
was informed of the murder of a political opponent, his aides said,
"it's a terrible crime," and Talleyrand answered, "yes, it's
a terrible crime, but it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder."
And that's what this enterprise is. It's a crime, but it's worth
than a crime, it's a blunder. It's a blunder that has turned the
world up-side-down, and it's not finished yet. If we don't withdraw
the British and American armed forces from Iraq very soon, Iraq may
plunge into an uncontrollable, unfathomable conflagration of civil war
on a confessional and ethnic basis. You're worried about oil at $70 a
barrel, you won't be able to buy a barrel of oil for any money at all
if a Yugoslav-style war breaks out on top of the world's biggest oil
field. And the people that brought us here are still in charge. George
Bush got re-elected - okay, let me rephrase that. *applause* Let me
rephrase that then. George Bush is still in power. Tony Blaire is still
in power. The generals, the intelligence chiefs, the editors, and the
journalists who were as much a part of the invasion of Iraq as the U.S.
Marine Corpse was *applause* are all still in power, and what are we
going to do about it? Are we going to try and hold these people to
account? We have a chance now to do it because things have begun to
change in this country. I can sense it. I can smell it, feel it on the
streets. First of all, when Cindy Sheehan, that brave mother, took to
the roads *applause* and besieged that permanent holiday home of George
Bush when he, oh, he retires there to his library. *laughter* He's
apparently colored in most of his books already. Cindy Sheehan has set
a fire burning underneath Bush and all these criminals who lead us
here, and then, I said I'd come back to Mrs. Bush Sr. I tell you, the
Bush administration stands naked in front of the whole world, and
it's an ugly sight, a very ugly sight. We knew there were malevolent
crooks, but we didn't know they were utter incompetents as well,
unable to organize the collection of dead bodies in their own streets
of their own cities a week after a natural disaster, unable to deploy
force to rescue their own citizens but ready at the drop of a hat to
send forces overseas to destroy other peoples' countries and destroy
their societies. I tell you, when I helped Mrs. Bush Sr. ,you know
Marie Antoinette just before the French Revolution, told that the
people were rioting for they had no bread, she asked them then why
don't they eat cake. Wasn't that Barbara Bush as they walked around
the Astrodome telling these poor people they've never had it so good,
how lucky they were, underprivileged as they were, to be in astrodome,
dependent on food hand-outs in the richest and most powerful country in
the world? I tell you, between Mrs. Sheehan and Mrs. Bush, things have
changed here big time, and you have the chance to contribute to that
change next Saturday. Every person here must be at that demonstration
in Washington, D.C. *applause* It's a must, an obligation to be here.
Now my last point is this. My favorite parliamentarian is Charles James
Fox, whose statue is the first one you come upon as you enter the
British Parliament through the St. Stephens entrance. Fox was expelled
twice from the British Parliament, first for supporting the American
revolution, the American freedom struggle from colonial rule, secondly
for supporting the French Revolution. Admittedly, he spoke a little
frankly on the second point. He tabled a motion in the British
Parliament congratulating the people of France on the execution of
their king and queen *laughter* and looking forward to the day when the
same fate befell all the other crowned heads of Europe. *applause* But
take yourself back in time, and imagine a conversation with Charles
James Fox that would run like this. "Are you sure you're doing the
right thing, helping these people? What if they win? What if they set
up their own country? What if it ends up being run by crazed
fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and George Bush and Richard Pearl
and Dick Cheney? Don't you think that's a bit risky?" *laughter*
Fox would have answered, "It's not my business who rules America.
It's the business of the American people alone who rules America."
*applause* He might have said, "I have only one choice to make,
whether I'm with the foreign occupation of their country or whether
I'm with their right to be free of that occupation of their country.
That's the only choice that I have to make." I told you earlier
I'm of Irish background. When the Irish people rose in 1916 at Easter
time and delivered the decisive blow against the British empire,
seizing the general post office in O'Connell street and proclaiming
the Irish republic, there were people in London who called themselves
progressives, sapiens, socialists even, who declined to issue a
certificate of approval for those Irish revolutionaries. Why? They
said, "these Irish rebels are priest-ridden, bog-trotting, Gaelic,
Celtic obscurantists who want to dig Ireland off into the mists of a
Celtic Brigadoon." But they forgot that the only certificate of
approval that was necessary was the certificate issued by the Irish
people themselves for that revolution. *applause* That's all that is
required. And I'm mentioning this because there are people who will
say to you, "you can't support the freedom struggle of the people
of Iraq because they might . .. be governed by religious people, by
people with beards and turbans who don't speak or act like us."
Maybe so. The longer we stay there, in fact, the more extreme the
likely outcome in the end will be, but nobody can choose who rules Iraq
except the people of Iraq. And that is a non-negotiable principle
demand. *applause*
Thank you. Just a last point, and I'll shut up and take some
questions. I know I'm speaking to a lot of people of a certain age
who know the Vietnam story and all its gore and misery. And I'm
addressing them as well as the others on this point. Half of the
American casualties in Vietnam fell between 1968 and the end of the
war. In 1968, the American government had already decided that it was
going to have to withdraw. In fact, Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace
negotiations in Paris to make sure that Humphrey lost the election and
that Nixon could win. And half of the 58,000 dead and half of the
wounded fell after the United States already knew that it had to leave
Vietnam. I can tell you the American administration already knows it
has lost the war in Iraq and that, the longer it stays, the deeper it
will sink, and the more blood will be added to that swamp of hatred
that I've been talking about all night. You know, the United States
lost all those men and killed all those Vietnamese in the interests of
a word which has now crept back into the vocabulary. It's a dreaded
word. I hate to hear it. The word is credibility. I hear these neo-cons
say, "we can't leave Iraq because it will destroy our
credibility." That's the word that send tens of thousands of
Americans to their graves in Vietnam. America will have to leave Iraq
sooner or later. It's much, much better for everybody if it's
sooner rather than later. The longer we stay there, in fact, the more
extreme the likely outcome in the end will be, but nobody can choose
who rules Iraq except the people of Iraq. And that is a non-negotiable
principle demand. *applause*
Thank you. Just a last point, and I'll shut up and take some
questions. I know I'm speaking to a lot of people of a certain age
who know the Vietnam story and all its gore and misery. And I'm
addressing them as well as the others on this point. Half of the
American casualties in Vietnam fell between 1968 and the end of the
war. In 1968, the American government had already decided that it was
going to have to withdraw. In fact, Henry Kissinger sabotaged the peace
negotiations in Paris to make sure that Humphrey lost the election and
that Nixon could win. And half of the 58,000 dead and half of the
wounded fell after the United States already knew that it had to leave
Vietnam. I can tell you the American administration already knows it
has lost the war in Iraq and that, the longer it stays, the deeper it
will sink, and the more blood will be added to that swamp of hatred
that I've been talking about all night. You know, the United States
lost all those men and killed all those Vietnamese in the interests of
a word which has now crept back into the vocabulary. It's a dreaded
word. I hate to hear it. The word is credibility. I hear these neo-cons
say, "we can't leave Iraq because it will destroy our
credibility." That's the word that send tens of thousands of
Americans to their graves in Vietnam. America will have to leave Iraq
sooner or later. It's much, much better for everybody if it's
sooner rather than later. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.
*applause*
***
.
- Prev by Date: Re: Being a Scot is Very Nice.
- Next by Date: Re: Hurricane - not politically correct
- Previous by thread: For Male and Female Customers
- Next by thread: GAME : http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
