The Swedish paper Expressen September 20, 2001.
We were ordered to become Americans.
The other night Swedish fighter planes patrolled our skies. According to the defense ministry this was a link in our heightened readiness towards terrorism. In reality the fighter planes was just requisite’s in the political theatre which the prime minister and the media is writing with enthusiasm and cooperation. The title of the play is “We are all American’s” and it was started on the “Expressens” front page. The prime minister stated that the terror attack against the USA I reality was an “attack on us all”.
This is of course not true. The terrorist must have been dumbfound from surprise when they heard about the Swedish fighter planes in the North European night. More obvious targets than the World Trade Center, Pentagon and probably the White House is difficult to imagine. The Terrorists attacked the USA imperialism. No human being on earth could have misunderstood the message.
The will to become American isn’t very difficult to understand when it comes to the enthusiasts on for example the Svenska Dagbladet editorial page which has been writing in perverted glee all week because the terror attack has given an opening not only to express love for everything American but to hateful attacks on all perceived to be enemies of the USA. Those have got what they deserved, that’s what’s happen if you criticize the USA. Then you become a terrorist.
So we were all ordered to be Americans. Our grief which we were ordered to manifest collectively, was according to orders greater than any other incident after the second world war.
The terrorists that attacked USA killed an incomprehensible number of innocent people, some estimates goes up to ten thousand lives. It is about a third of the number of just as innocent people which were killed when Israel attacked Lebanon in the beginning of the eighties. That is if you count only the civilian lives. Uniformed lives are according to western standards of far less value. No one of the writers of editorials in Stockholm did however come up with the silly idea of one single minutes silence for those victims, just as little as we saw any of those bloodthirsty people make us all Lebanese.
USA is the great mass murderer of our time. Alone in the Vietnam war and its neighboring countries 4 million lives was lost. Not a single minute of silence in Sweden.
Racism explains a lot but not all the way if one should try to figure out the grotesque injustice we use when we value the lives counting the dead.
When President Clinton had difficulties with the public because Monica was to testify about the cigar, he sent cruise missiles over Afghanistan and Sudan. What those bombs actually hit in Afghanistan is unknown today. In Sudan the American weapons destroyed half of the country’s capacity for producing medicine, in a factory which was built with the support of the UN. Those actions probably took some of the heat off the embarrassing publicity around Clinton. After all he just killed a few anonymous Muslims, No minute of silence there either.
The current waving of the American flag is an even gloomier explanation than our unequal treatment of the value of human life. The flag wavers want us to go to war on the American side. It is us white in the rich world against the Muslim world. The American regime has explained that we are now at war. It is probably not a puny revenge we can prepare for. Several Stockholm newspapers have already joined us in the war through openly advocating both a crusade and religious war. That’s what it means when we are all Americans.
But alas, we are Europeans. We are the only power on earth that can stand up against the Americans if they carry out their alleged plans of a long and holy war. A war between the worlds white and the worlds Muslims would if nothing else lead to a disaster of Biblical proportions in our own Europe, where about 40 millions citizens are Muslims.
We are thus not Americans. We are Europeans. The terrorists from the hassled and frequently mass murdered Muslim world for obvious reasons attacked USA and not Europe. And they didn’t do it, as one of the editorial writers in one of the most esteemed morning papers suggested because they were envious of the US standard of living. But to revenge millions of murdered people.
Defense for terrorism? Of course not. My very modest suggestion is simply that we should look at American wars of terror with the same spectacles as we use on Muslim terrorism.
Written by Jan Guillau