Mukul Kesavan: Ark of Atrocity

“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven”: Harold Pinter; Nobel Speech, 2005.

NB: Harold Pinter’s scathing honesty about American cruelty deserves close reading; as does this article by Mukul Kesavan, one of India’s sharpest political commentators. What I have written below is merely an addendum.

Vietnam War 1955 -75: Upto 3.4 million military + civilian deaths

US backed Indonesian coup (1965-66) & massacre of PKI members and supporters: 500,000 to 3 million deaths

CIA backed Chilean coup of 1973: General Pinochet persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics, resulting in the executions of 1,200 to 3,200 people, imprisonment of upto 80,000 people, and the torture of tens of thousands

Operation Condor (established by General Pinochet after the coup of 1973). A state-terror colloboration between Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, financed and supported by the USA between 1975 & 1985. Estimates of killed or disappeared opponents of dictatorships: 50,000 killed, 30,000 disappeared, and 400,000 imprisoned

Angolan Civil War (1975-2002): Absorbed into the Cold War with the USSR, Cuba and Eastern bloc vs the USA, Israel and South Africa. 800,000 killed and 4 million displaced

According to the Gaza Health MInistry, 73,789 Palestinians have been killed (21,000 of them children) since October 2023. This figure does not include those missing and buried beneath the rubble, which will raise the figure of dead alone to far beyond 100,000 – on Septermber 16, 2026, the United Nations human rights agency warned that recent discoveries of thousands of bodies recovered from rubble of Gaza may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’. These are predominantly of women and children, and could constitute war crimes.

Further reading:

Alfred W. McCoy; Cold War on Five Continents; (2025)

Hugh Wilford; The CIA: An Imperial History; (2024)

Greg Grandin; America, América: A New History of the New World; (2025)

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

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The one thing that this twenty-fifth commemoration brings into focus is the epoch of American violence flagged off by 9/11

Mukul Kesavan

We had returned, content, from a screening of Dil Chahta Hai and parked in the driveway when I heard CNN playing on the small television in my mother’s room which was unusual because it was the time that she usually watched her serials. I peeped in through the bedroom window that overlooked the driveway and saw the second plane fly into the South Tower. I spent the rest of the evening trying to call New York to discover the whereabouts of my nephew who worked in one of the smaller buildings of the World Trade Center and learnt afterwards that he had been late to work and was en route in the subway when the planes struck.

The next August, we moved to New York for a couple of years and the first week we were there, we visited Ground Zero. I don’t remember much, if anything, of the scene there, just lots of black net and sheeting that obscured pretty much everything. PS 321, the public school my children attended in Brooklyn, still had a banner draped from its roof with “una familia” or “a family” emblazoned on it in several languages, including Arabic.

In most ways, at least to the outsider, the city seemed normal given what had happened a year ago. Some parents at the school spoke of leaving New York to leave the trauma of 9/11 behind but for the most part, the tenor of our life there was set by play dates, PTA meetings and the ordinary business of raising children. The people we met in the neighbourhood were uniformly kind and welcoming and apart from the century-old plumbing in our shared brownstone, we had no complaints.

The one fly in our ointment was the journalism that America produced. This was ironical because when I heard that my wife was about to be temporarily posted to New York, my first thought was that I’d finally get to read first-rate newspapers and magazines routinely. The New York Times and The New Yorker would become synchronised with my life, not back issues I caught up with in libraries. I hadn’t bargained on 9/11 making them unreadable.

I had a preview of the sheep-like stupidification of journalism in Narendra Modi’s India a dozen years before it happened here in, of all places, New York. This was that patriotic time when ornaments of the liberal press like Judith Miller in The New York Times and David Remnick in The New Yorker were making the case for invading Iraq. Miller wrote detailed scoops about how Saddam Hussein was buying aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons. Colin Powell stood up in the UN Security Council and solemnly told the world that Saddam had quantities of powdered anthrax that could sow death and terror across the world. He held up an empty glass vial to illustrate how much destruction the dictator could wreak with a little ampoule.

Every desi who watched Powell’s telecast performance knew he was lying. We didn’t have any special insight into intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, WMDs in the shorthand of the time, but we knew that netas used silly props like that vial to make their lies sound plausible. Americans were clearly less cynical about their leaders because the next day’s newspapers were full of ‘if Powell says there’s evidence, then Saddam must have WMDs’. In fact, there was no evidence at all, except for that vial prop and a sketchy schematic of a long, truck-like vehicle that was meant to be a mobile laboratory capable of brewing quantities of anthrax and other toxins.

Powell would later call his presentation a blot on his career and a major intelligence failure. This was shameless buck-passing. The failure was his; his political masters — George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — wanted to go to war so Powell found them a ‘smoking gun’ by choosing to believe the lies that Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqi expatriates were peddling. Miller’s defence of her credulous reporting was a damning but representative sample of American journalism at the time. She said, years later, that she “was accurately conveying wrong information”. Miller argued that her job was to report the consensus of the intelligence community, not to second-guess it. She also knew it in her gut: “I knew Saddam Hussein, he’d thrown me in jail (years earlier). I knew how horrible he was… I made the same intellectual leap that the analysts made — knowing Saddam, knowing what he’d done in the past, (I had) high confidence that he was hiding and keeping (WMDs).”

Despite the appearance of normalcy, 9/11 deranged America. The Department of Homeland Security, founded during the first few months of our stay there, was a symptom of this derangement. The idea of a capitalised ‘Homeland’ should give any liberal pause: it is a way of making a country a bunker. The energy invested in combating enemies without, will, as night follows day, be redirected at enemies within. There is an umbilical connection between the founding of the Department of Homeland Security and Donald Trump’s ICE raids that saw masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents attack, kidnap, and kill not just illegals but citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security begat ICE. It was created as one of the Department’s most powerful agencies. Congress granted ICE a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to protect national security and public safety in response to the events of 9/11. The State apparatus created by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney enabled the depredations of Donald Trump.

Just as China was entering the WTO, a step that enabled the greatest economic transformation the world has ever seen, the United States of America used the unipolar moment and 9/11 to stamp its own licence to kill. As China built, America rampaged. The one thing that this twenty-fifth commemoration brings into focus is the epoch of American violence flagged off by 9/11. In this quarter of a century, the US and its allies have attacked and tried to conquer Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Palestine. This is not an exhaustive list.

Its NATO allies and its henchmen in the so-called Abraham Accords (Israel and the United Arab Emirates) have enabled such devastation, ruination and genocide that we should find a name for this broederbond that historians can handily remember. The Axis of Evil is taken; the Meridian of Malevolence, perhaps? If that doesn’t slide off the tongue, how about the Ark of Atrocity?

When Christopher Hitchens became a born-again neo-con, he wanted to invade Iraq because he yearned to be part of a revolution. Having confected a world-historical enemy — ‘Islamofascism’ — he was going to overthrow it in Iraq, with a little help from his hard-Right, deep State friends. It was a squalid end to a lively intellectual career, but he did make history of a sort. The American counter-revolution that he had a hand in enabling, grew and grew and has now, under Trump, begun devouring its children.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/ark-of-atrocity-september-11-had-deranged-america-prnt/cid/2179657

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Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize lecture; 2005

The CIA: An Imperial History

The Ghosts of Kennan: Lessons From the Start of a Cold War. By Fredrik Logevall

‘Truth is one of our rights’: victims of Indonesia’s bloody past want more than regret from their president

Zionism & Americanism are the front lines of Western civilisation and freedom in our world today: Pete Hegseth US Secretary of Defense

Biden Is the Latest President to Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History

The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson

Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors

Henry Kissinger was the definition of elite impunity

Roaming Charges: Kissinger – the Dr. Caligari of American Empire