I
want to say, first of all, that I am grateful
to the students who organized this rally, and
deeply honoured to express my solidarity with
the people resisting US and British occupation
in Fallujah and across Iraq. The value of any
university in a democratic society is determined
not by how much information it manages to cram
into the heads of its graduates over the course
of three yeas; nor by its success in contributing
to the profit margins of local or multinational
corporations; the worth of a university in a democratic
society should be gauged by whether it succeeds
in preparing informed women and men whose knowledge
can be put to use in solving the massive problems
facing humanity. We live in a world of deep and
increasing inequality; a world gone mad on war,
on endless war; and a world in which ordinary
people feel excluded from any real say in the
societies in which they live and powerless over
their day-to-day lives. And you have today redeemed
the reputation of this university—or at least
offered it the chance of redemption. Because in
the rubble and corpse-strewn streets of Fallujah
today where, as we speak, dogs and cats are living
off of the carcasses of our fellow human beings
murdered by the American war machine, humanity
faces one of its darkest hours. And by being here
you have taken a stand on the side of light.
Humanity
faces darkness today, as it did when the European
powers descended on Africa to profit from the
sale and exploitation of some 20 million human
beings sold into slavery. And we should remember
that they were bought and sold with the approval
of the establishment of the day—the churchmen
and the politicians, the brightest legal minds
and the most prominent journalists of the day
rationalized slavery, calling it a ‘school
of civilization’ and a means of bringing
Christianity to the heathen savages. Humanity
stands today peering into the darkness, as it
did when fascism rolled out its massive technological
superiority and wrought its revenge on those Jews
who chose to resist in the Warsaw Ghetto, pummeling
them into dust while almost the entire ‘civilized’
world stood silent. Humanity faces the darkness
today, as it did a generation ago, when American
imperialism, confronted with the courage of the
Vietnamese people, unleashed the dogs of war on
an impoverished land, dropping seven million tons
of bombs and millions of gallons of poisonous
chemicals on an impoverished people. And they
did so with impunity, and with the assent of ‘respectable’
public opinion, until the Vietnamese people and
young people like yourselves in the antiwar movement
forced them out.
I
will agree with that pampered child of the American
ruling class George Bush and that sniveling coward
Tony Blair about one thing: the survival of democracy
is at stake in Fallujah. And it is not only Iraqi
democracy that is threatened: this war, this endless
war that they promise us, threatens democracy
here in Belfast, in Dublin, in London, and in
every corner of our world. But the survival of
democracy depends not on the triumph of the American
and British war machine, but on the defeat of
the Bush/Blair project in Iraq and across the
Middle East. Democracy will not come to the Middle
East at the hands of those who lied systematically
and ignored the antiwar majorities in London and
Dublin to bring on their war; who starved Iraq
for more than a decade while life slowly, painfully
faded for a half million of its most vulnerable
people; democracy will not come at the hands of
those who have stood shoulder to shoulder with
the Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon while the
Palestinian people are slaughtered in their dozens
and their hundreds and in their thousands; who
have littered the Iraqi landscape with unspeakable
war crimes; who derive humor and some perverse
pleasure from their management of the torture
cells in Afghanistan and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib;
who have for decades propped up a string of corrupt
and vicious Arab dictatorships in order to maintain
their hold over oil; who have criminalized Arab
and Muslim communities across the world; and who,
finally, have engineered a media blackout so that
the world will not know the horrible crimes they
are committing today—at this very hour, at
this very minute—in Fallujah and across Iraq.
Democracy
will have a chance in the Middle East, real democracy
will have a chance in the west—only if we
succeed in defeating Bush and Blair’s plans
for the region. The test of this generation lies
in Iraq—just as the test of another generation
was in the streets of Selma and Prague and Paris
and Hanoi—we will be judged on whether we,
together with the Iraqi people, can build a resistance
capable of putting some manners into those who
would extinguish human freedom in the name of
profit. The Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara,
in a speech before the UN General Assembly against
an earlier episode of western war crimes in the
Congo, said something entirely appropriate for
the situation we now confront in Iraq:
“Our
free eyes now look towards new horizons, and are
able to see what our condition as…slaves
kept us from seeing only yesterday: that ‘western
civilization’ conceals under its lovely façade
a gang of hyenas and jackals. That is the only
possible name for those who have gone on a ‘humanitarian
mission’ to the Congo. Carnivorous animals,
feeding on defenseless peoples: that is what distinguishes
the imperial “white”…All the free
men in the world must stand ready to avenge the
crime of the Congo.”
The
jackals and hyenas of our own day today reside
in the White House and in Downing Street, and
their paid mercenaries, depleted of whatever humanity
they once possessed, roam the streets of Fallujah
and Mosul, with our brothers and sisters in their
crosshairs. All the free women and men in the
world must stand ready to avenge the crime of
Fallujah.
Brian
Kelly (personal capacity)
University Lecturers Against the Occupation of
Iraq
(ULAOI: pronounced “You Lie”)
18 November 2004
