The ‘Empire of Chaos’ or living in the age of impunity By William Bowles

[Joanne98]

Aug 1, 2008

Review: International Justice and Impunity - The Case of the United States, edited by Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer and Diana G. Collier. Clarity Press, 2008.

Impunity: N. Nonliability, exemption, let-out, immunity, special treatment.
Impunity: Vb. Exempt, set apart, absolve, grant immunity, are just some of the descriptions my Roget’s Thesaurus lists for the word impunity.

Other descriptions listed by the Thesaurus are perhaps even more apt:

Owe no responsibility, be free from, have no liability, spare oneself the necessity, exempt oneself, excuse oneself, the list goes on…

“The American ambassador to the United Nations in the middle of the 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has thus congratulated himself in his memoirs, for having rendered “totally ineffective, on the instructions of the State Department, all measures taken by the United Nations ”. — ‘Rudolph El-Kareh, The American Politic in the Middle East, Force, Impunity, Lawlessness.’ (p.64)

Another way of describing impunity is that ‘might is right’ but a ‘right’ reinforced and delivered by the corporate media’s complicity in the process of granting immunity (invisibility) to those who practice mass murder and genocide on a scale that almost defies description.

The book is divided into three sections: Part I: From Hiroshima to Guantanamo; Part II: Humanitarian Law: Legal and Moral Values to Defend and Part III: In Pursuit of an End to Impunity.

The collection of essays gathered together in ‘International Justice and Impunity’ encompasses the views of many people and organizations united by one thing, namely the examination and condemnation of the ‘right’ enjoyed by the United States and its principal allies the UK, the EU and Japan, to be extremely selective about international law and human rights, applying such laws as and when it suits them to and simply ignoring the self-same international laws when it doesn’t.

Of course such behaviour by the imperialist states is nothing new but given the power of a hegemonic global media to blank out the crimes of the US and its allies, impunity takes on an ominous significance given the awesome power the US employs as it seeks to extend its control of the world and its resources.

Again (and again), I have to return to the simple fact that without the corporate (and state) media’s collusion in this massive sleight-of-hand such deceptions would be well nigh impossible to carry out. And, if I have a criticism of the book it is the omission of a section that directly addresses the role of the mass media in delivering the imperialist message, without which it would be difficult to persuade us to go along with the slaughter and the barbarity practiced by those who impudently like to call themselves civilized.

The process is plain to see for anyone who cares to look; it’s the media equivalent of saturation bombing. The names Zimbabwe, Darfur, Tibet, Islamist, Hamas, Hizbollah, Chavez, Cuba, immediately come to mind but over the years the list is an extremely long one.

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/the-%e2%80%98empire-of-chaos%e2%80%99-or-living-in-the-age-of-impunity-by-william-bowles/

[bemildred]

1. Well, it is amazing to read these fuckwits overtly comparing themselves to Imperial Rome.

But if we bring up Caligula or Caracalla one of those guys, then we are being obnoxious.