?Us? and ?Them? ? the New Shape of Conservative Racism
05/12/2003 - ?Little Jesus, give me the power to bomb the Iraqi children in order to make gift of their
bowels to my mother who will use them as a rope to dry our clothes.? This prayer is from G W Bush, as
characterized by ?Les Guignols de l?Info? of the French TV channel Canal+. At this, Jesus stepped
down the cross and walked out of the church saying ?Damn! I quit. Carpentry in my father?s workshop
was finally the best job I missed.? With Bush now chanting his victory over the Saddam regime, but also
over thousands of Iraqi children massacred by his coalition?s bombs, this story is not far from reality.
Who else than current White House tenants are responsible for the innocent Americans victim of the new
escalation of terrorism?
Ndzana Seme
Like Jesus, Pope John Paul II rejected the prayers Bush addressed to God prior to his war in Iraq,
stating that such prayers ?have nothing to do with God.? Knowing that the Pope is the Patriarch of the
West, it is clear that the West had rejected the Bush administration?s international policy as immoral and
anti-Christ. And these were the hardest words a Pope had ever used to express the Catholic
Community?s indignation.
When we joined the world chorus in condemning the Bush administration?s stubbornness to attack,
destroy and invade a weakened nation, some labeled us as weak and unpatriotic. Yet there is no greater
patriotism than the one that tries by all means to prevent the wanton loss of compatriot lives.
By their show of mass bombings over weak nations, the Bush administration frightens no nation with any
alleged American superiority. Instead, the beneficiaries of the Conservative White House?s imperialist
policy are Al-Qaeda and Europe, not the American people.
Pictures of Iraqi children mutilated by American missiles have fueled an unprecedented anti-American
sentiment, which gratuitously offers Al-Qaeda and Ossama Bin Laden more and more sympathizers in
the Middle East and abroad.
The Bush administration?s inability to intelligently manage the 9/11 events, most of all by avoiding to fall
into Al-Qaeda?s hoop net that tries to demonstrate that Americans are evils, has created what may
become irreparable. Therefore this administration must bear the entire responsibility of the new escalation
of terrorism launched today in Saudi Arabia, the Ossama bin Laden?s home country Al-Qaeda set the
mission to free from American troops.
?You are with us or you are against us,? in addition to drawing an ?Axis of Evil?, calling governments
pygmies or unlawfully engaging a war despite the UN Security Council?s opposition, are facts that
worried European governments. Since then, there is a preemptive reaction rising in Europe with the
ambition to building a strong European economy that would more efficiently compete with American
products, a strong currency that would supplant the US dollar?s world supremacy, and a strong
European army that would blow up the NATO.
Obsessed by their soft money donors? interests, the Bush administration easily fell into Al-Qaeda?s hoop
net when they started treating Americans of Middle Eastern origins as ?them.? Salon?s writer Tim Grieve
rang the alarm bell on this matter a couple of weeks ago when he wrote: ?Under Attorney General John
Ashcroft, America is becoming an Orwellian state where people are locked up and no one can find out
why -- least of all a compliant Congress [?]the Bush administration won't say why it's holding individual
detainees at Guantánamo Bay; it won't disclose the factual basis for its prosecution of Zacarias
Moussaoui; and it won't say how many immigrants it has detained or deported in INS proceedings. It
won't say how many of us are having our telephones tapped, our e-mail messages monitored or our
library checkout records examined by federal agents.?
It won?t say how and where the Iraqi or Afghani civilian victims of its bombings can seek justice and
reparations. Those victims have no rights because they are labeled as ?them.? All it is concerned about
are contracts for the reconstruction of the devastated countries to reward its soft money donors' inner
circles.
In his highly mediatized, country round campaign for reelection, G W Bush preaches an economic plan
reduced to a single remedy: tax cut. While his administration rashly increases government expenses by
waging wars overseas, using current and future-years taxpayer money (which is called deficit), only
clairvoyance, not science, may demonstrate that tax cuts are the solution to the current economic crisis.
Congressman Elijah E. Cummings made the point last week when he joined 202 House Members in
voting against the Bush-Republican Tax Bill. "Currently, the unemployment rate is 6.0%. However, my
Republican colleagues have refused to extend the unemployment insurance program to the hundreds of
thousands of workers who will lose their benefits at the end of the month,? Cummings said.
"For some reason, my Republican colleagues are choosing to respond to this crisis by proposing [?] a
dividend tax cut, that would give households with incomes of more than $1 million per year an average
tax cut of $42,800 [?] This amount of $42,800, is almost three times the 2003 federal poverty line for a
family of three, which is $15,260. So, while one group is being forced into poverty, another group is
gaining wealth. This tax policy is simply robbing the poor to give to the rich. It is sickening and simply
un-American? the Congressman concluded.
Un-American? Not at all Mr. Cummings, because only the unemployed and the poor are un-American,
since they are ?them.?
In a Gallup poll conducted a few days after the war on Iraq began, 29 percent of black Americans
voiced support for the war, a dramatic drop off from the 59 percent who had backed the 1991 Desert
Storm operation. The 71% of African Americans who oppose the Bush administration?s imperialist
policy have not a short memory and know that they are the historical ?them? of the United States.
They are the main target victims of the coming FCC vote on more media ownership concentration
following the successful embedding of corporate media with the White House during the war, which will
definitely toll the knell of the American democracy. For the Bush administration, democracy is not ?us?,
except to embellish their demagogic speeches. White Republicans only are "us".
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