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The Global War on Terror identifies a complex of operations mounted on the basis of a massive deception. [1] This deception was meant to provide justification for an elaborate scheme of imperial globalization extending to wars of aggression directed especially at target zones in the Middle East and Eurasia.

The designers of the Global War on Terror created, armed and heavily publicized a replacement enemy following the demise of the Soviet Union. Almost immediately after the events of September 11, 2001, the governments of the United States and its satellite countries edified police state and surveillance state powers domestically. These draconian actions coincided with a new round of foreign invasions overseas.

The Global War on Terror is being pressed forward on many military, political, economic, cultural and psychological fronts. Both domestically and internationally these operations have severely undermined even the minimal protections for human rights and civil liberties that the Western countries had formerly equated with their now-hollowed-out liberal democracies.

The misrepresentation of the 9/11 crimes promote the lie that war can be a viable remedy for terror. What an absurdity! Warfare is the very quintessence of terror, a primary motivator, facilitator and medium of the most extreme forms of terror. Fighting a Global War on Terror makes about as much sense as spying on the public indiscriminately in order to identify threats to our privacy. [2]

The Global War on Terror was declared very quickly to prevent a real reckoning with the lies and crimes of 9/11. Evidence of the rush to avoid a real investigation of the crime scene included the quick decision to cart away the structural steel remnants of the three obliterated World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan. Before any investigation of the evidence contained in this material took place, this vital forensic resource was sold as scrap metal for export to China.

Even before the explosive pulverization of the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11, 2001, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barack, postulated on BBC News that the main culprit was probably Osama bin Laden. Barack went on to advocate the “launching of an operational concrete war against terror…. a globally concerted effort against all sources of terror.” [3]

The official explanations disseminated on the very day of 9/11, without any formal investigation whatsoever, have not been substantially altered to this day. The conception of a War on Terror invokes imagery consistent with the most classic justifications for imperial expansion. Historically the paradigm of civilization’s imperative to ascend over savagery has been utilized to justify the imperial conquest of new territories together with the elimination and repression of the peoples indigenous to the annexed lands. [4]

The post-9/11 onslaught of manufactured imagery highlighted media depictions of savage Islamic terrorists engaged in ruthless opposition to very idealized renditions of Western Civilization’s freedoms. There have been few restraints on the invasive assaults on consciousness entailed in this psychological operation. This crusade of recrimination often invokes religious symbols to plant connotations of savagery on the demonized Islamic enemy.

Through their wholesale trafficking in manufactured deceptions, Western governments along with some of their corporate patrons and clients have gone very far in instrumentalizing the political currency of fear. A major aim of the protagonists has been to control the attitudes and actions of their own domestic populations. This mobilization of engineered fears has helped clear the way for the military invasions of Muslim majority countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

The Deployment of Demonology Along the Expansionary Course of US Empire Building

The Global War on Terror draws on symbols, legends, associations and public myths far older than the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, the very document that announced to the world the creation of the United States of America included a provision that arguably constitutes the original conception underlying the Global War on Terror. In this sense, the roots of the Global War on Terror far predate the events of 9/11. They go back to the very origins of the United States on July 4, 1776 when the makers of an Anglo-American secessionist movement announced their intention to exit the British Empire and found a New World republic. [5]

The American Declaration of Independence begins with some of the most memorable phrases in the history of political manifestos. Clearly, however, Black slaves and the Indigenous peoples of North America were not meant to be covered in the bold pronouncements that seemed on the surface to advance the principle that all people should be subject to universal protections for human rights.

Drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, much of the Declaration of Independence was written as a list of allegations directed at the British imperial monarch, King George III. One of the concluding condemnations alleged the British sovereign had sided with the Indians against his own Anglo-American subjects in the Thirteen Colonies.

In the language of the Declaration, Native Americans are depicted as “merciless Indian savages,” the original terrorists against whom the founders of the United States asserted their own self-conception as civilized citizen settlers. The Declaration declares that King George has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.

The racial profiling of Native Americans as merciless savages predisposed to “undistinguished Destruction,” in other words, to indiscriminate acts of violence against all “Ages, Sexes and Conditions” anticipates contemporary notions of terrorists and terrorism. The provision can be read as a kind of declaration of war against those Aboriginal peoples possessing territories situated along the future course of the US republic’s transcontinental expansion. Implicit in the provision’s wording is the genocidal trajectory of the Indian wars to come. This trajectory of imperial aggression established genocidal patterns later expanded upon in the post-9/11 Global War on Terror.

Much, therefore, would flow from the Declaration’s characterization of the Indigenous peoples of North America as savage terrorists, as malicious impediments to the acquisition, ingestion and transformation of a vast Indian Country into the primal proprietary capital of the United States.[6] It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this indication of what the US founders had in mind when they set out to replace the empire building of the European powers. In their demonization of Native Americans as a race of savage terrorists, the original architects of the new republic conceived of a new kind of expansionary polity meant as a vehicle for the imperial aspirations of European migrants and their native-born progeny.

There were many groups that would be transformed into savage enemies along the course of the imperial journey that would see the United States become the most militarized entity the world has ever seen. In its growth to transcontinental proportions, and then in its expansion from the status of a hemispheric to global superpower, the US government chose its friends and set up its foes with calculated geopolitical dexterity.

It was not a huge stretch to revise the conception of merciless Indian savages to become those Mexicans inhabiting large territories ceded to the United States through an American conquest that culminated in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago of 1848. It was not a huge stretch to revise the conception of merciless Indian savages to include the indigenous Hawaiians whose sovereign claims advanced by Queen Liliuokalani were overthrown with the backing of US Marines in 1893.[7] It was not a huge stretch to revise the conception of merciless Indian savages to encompass those Filipinos whose indigenous freedom struggle in the early twentieth century was inspired by the life and literature of José Rizal. [8]

The color-coded demonology of the United States began with a war directed at British Red Coats and at Red Indians. In the course of the twentieth century, Red Communists provided a global transnational enemy whose image was often manipulated to justify a variety of operations ranging from assassinations, to covert regime, to outright invasions.[9] Especially after the humiliation of the US Armed Forces in Indochina, the military operations of the US Empire were often conducted through the agency of proxy armies.[10] One of these proxy armies was assembled with the help of Saudi and Pakistani agents to overthrow the Soviet-backed government of Mohammed Najibullah in Afghanistan.

Seen in retrospect, this US-backed recruitment, arming, financing, training and directing of a Wahabi-oriented fighting force in Afghanistan in the 1980s would alter the dynamics of global geopolitics.[11] This successful initiative helped end the Cold War in the favour of the United States. It helped entrench patterns of imperial manipulation essential to the engineering of the Global War on Terror in its current incarnations.

While this means of bringing about regime change in Afghanistan was somewhat novel, the operation continued and built upon older patterns of imperial manipulation put on full public display, for instance, in 1916. In a much-romanticized episode of imperial history, British agent Lawrence of Arabia helped encourage a pan-Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Already by 1917 the extent of the betrayal of T. E. Lawrence’s promises that the British government would respect Arab independence was illustrated. The broken promises were marked in the French-British partition of the Middle East in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then in Lord Balfour’s authorization of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

As we have seen, a segment of the US-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan was assigned the role of the main 9/11 culprits. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi veteran of US-backed regime change in Afghanistan, was cast as al-Qaeda’s evil genius seeking to advance the creation of a global Islamic caliphate. Before even the fall of the Twin Towers, bin Laden was blamed for pointing Muslim madmen at the hijacking of passenger flights to attack the Pentagon in Washington DC and the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan.

To this day these audacious lies, based on “evidence” obtained through illegal torture, remain the foundation for the foreign policy of many governments including those of USA and Israel. The characterization of al-Qaeda as the host entity to extremists said to be responsible for the 9/11 crimes has never been renounced by the US government.[12]This stance is based on an initial fraud together with an ongoing cover-up all supported by a systemic destruction, misrepresentation and misinterpretation of evidence. The characterization of al-Qaeda as the main culprits of 9/11 continues, notwithstanding the treatment of the entity by several governments as allied instruments of the US-led project of regime change in Syria.

The connection between the US Indian wars and the Global War on Terror was dramatized by use of the code name, “Geronimo,” to identify the person said to be Osama bin Laden. Until well into the 1880s Geronimo famously led a fierce Aboriginal resistance pointed against US expansion onto Apache territory.[13] The connection drawn between Geronimo and bin Laden by US national security operatives came to light in 2011 after the Saudi CIA operative blamed for 9/11 was supposedly killed by members of Navy Seal Team Six in Abbottabad Pakistan. We have ample cause to surmise that this event was fabricated rather than real, that Osama bin Laden had died long before the tenth anniversary of the events of 9/11.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Declaration of Independence and the Anglo-American Roots of Israel

Many have interpreted the Declaration of Independence together with the US Constitution as indicators of the luminous wisdom actualized by the US founders in creating the institutional and ideological basis of the United States. This view has caused some to see the numerous violations of basic human rights done in the name of the Global War on Terror as aberrations.

I see it differently. The Global War on Terror gives expression to serious injustices whose origins are embedded in the USA’s founding instruments. The provision in the Declaration of Independence on “merciless Indian Savages” is no mere footnote to history. Instead, it highlights paradigms of antagonism that for many generations have demonized those situated along the course of America’s frontier expansions. The virtual declaration of war implicit in the Declaration of Independence’s condemnation of King George and his “merciless” Indian allies helps explain the expansionary zeal still fundamental to the superpower’s character.[14]

Ironically, the US revolt from British imperial rule helped establish and extend new systems of imperial expansion.[15] The protagonists of this settler imperialism seized control of older trajectories of empire building originating with the dominant powers of western Europe. Both the European and settler varieties of forced expansion into other peoples’ territories were justified in the language of civilization’s assumed prerogative to ascend over savagery.

As we have seen, there has been a long progression of Indigenous peoples on the receiving end of US settler imperialism. Prominent among the more recent victims of settler imperialism are the indigenous Palestinians facing Israeli variations on the expansionary energies inherited from the Anglo-American empire.[16]

Disagreements over how to deal with the Indigenous peoples on the frontiers of British North America played a significant role in opening the schism from which the United States emerged from a severed British Empire. What had King George done to bring upon himself the accusations from the US founders that he was guilty of “bringing on” the “merciless Indian savages” against the Anglo-American colonists?

The answer to this question leads to the content of an important constitutional instrument issued thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was promulgated in the name of King George III. It established the terms for the incorporation of the former New France into a dramatically expanded British North America. One element of the Royal Proclamation created a fourteenth British North American colony to be known as Quebec. This new polity in the British Empire was home to many of the inhabitants of the former New France. It was peopled primarily by Roman Catholic, French-speaking settlers whose feudal-style settlements were concentrated along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.

The Royal Proclamation introduced a new type of polity into the British Empire, a region described as “lands reserved to the Indians as their hunting grounds.” This vast Indian reserve covered the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley.[17] A distinct western border was imposed on the Thirteen Colonies. Anglo-American settlers were prohibited from entering the Indian reserve and purchasing lands directly from the Indigenous peoples.

Provision was made in the Royal Proclamation for the gradual expansion of Euro-American settlements under imperial regulation. A key element in this expansionary process was the need to obtain Indian consent. This rule was contained in the provision where King George proclaimed in the royal “We”, if at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said Lands, the same shall be Purchased only for Us, in our Name, at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that Purpose by the Governor or Commander in Chief of our Colony respectively within which they shall lie. [18]

These imperial restrictions placed upon Anglo-American settlers generated much resentment among various constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The territorial additions to British North America were perceived by many as the spoils of conquest seized between 1754 and 1763 in the course of French and Indian War. The imperial protection of so much good arable land for continued use as an Indian habitation and hunting ground offended many pioneer farmers together with land speculators seeking new territory to acquire and exploit.

Moreover, the Royal Proclamation's new imperial rule that Indian people had to consent to the spread of Euro-American settlements onto their ancestral lands seemed contrary to many expectations. This aspect of the Royal Proclamation seemingly added insult to injury from the perspective of those preparing to expand westward now that the French imperial presence had been pacified and removed through British force of arms.[19]

Some have interpreted the decision making that led to the Indian provisions in the Royal Proclamation as an imperial effort to persuade the Indigenous peoples of the North American interior to willingly join the British Empire. The part of the Royal Proclamation requiring British imperial officials to obtain Indian consent for the expansion of Euro-American settlements was meant to reassure to the First Nations that they would not be subject to armed annexation of their Aboriginal territories.

The reservation of much of the North American interior as an Indian hunting ground was also seen by some as a boost to the fortunes of the Montreal-based fur trade and the kind of mercantile relationships this business sustained. The proprietors of British manufacturing industries did not want to face direct competition from colonial businesses. The fur trade provided for a classic mercantile exchange of a raw materials for the industrial products of British factories. This promotion of mercantilism was also reflected in the Royal Proclamation’s discouragement of inland settlements that would tend to give rise to inland businesses becoming competitive with British commercial establishments.

King George’s Royal Proclamation, therefore, did indeed encourage Indian people to stand their ground in the face of Anglo-American incursions onto their ancestral territories. The Royal Proclamation advanced an impetus within the British Empire that began to take into account some aspects of the shared human rights of the Indigenous peoples. On the other hand, the wording of the Declaration of Independence promoted a move away from the limited and imperfect recognition by the British imperial sovereign that Indigenous peoples retained an Aboriginal title in their ancestral lands.

This distance between the Indian provisions in the Royal Proclamation and the American Declaration of Independence anticipated the eventual emergence of the United States as the more aggressive partner in the continuum of imperialism expressed in the rise of the Anglo-American empire throughout the course of the twentieth century.

The imperial aggression of the United States throughout the nineteenth century was reflected in a series of Indian wars. These frontier wars became more concerted after the US Civil War led to the imperial rise of the federal authority in the United States to unchallenged pre-eminence, first domestically and later internationally. The dramatization in motion pictures of the US Indian wars provided an early subject matter for the rise of the Hollywood Dream Machine. This generator of myth and legends for international export would become a major instrument for the global rise of US soft power.

The US Armed Forces worked closely with the US Railway Companies in clearing the American lands of Indigenous peoples and containing the survivors in circumscribed Indian reservations. Oftentimes US officials allowed free reign to settler vigilantism directed at the extermination of Native Americans especially when new frontiers of resource extraction were being opened up. Those overseeing the California Gold rush were particularly notorious for giving license to an unrestrained genocide of Native people conducted by influxes of miners greedy for spoil.

The Indian removal policy of US President Andrew Jackson was one of the pre-eminent episodes in the genocide of First Nations anticipated by the reference to Indian “savages” in the American Declaration of Independence. In 1830 Pres. Jackson pushed through Congress a law requiring all Indians east of the Mississippi to migrate to a designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee Nation successfully opposed the new law in the US Supreme Court. This jurisprudence notwithstanding, the Cherokee were pushed by the federal armed forces from their plantations in Georgia. This dark episode in US history is remembered as the Trail of Tears. The ordeal of the Cherokee is just one of many similar sagas of forced removal in one of the most ambitious efforts ever attempted in the sad and unseemly history of ethnic cleansing

The physical pressure put on Native Americans to give up ground for the rise and expansion of the United States was accompanied by a host of psychological pressures to abandon their cultural heritages. Some of this pressure was applied through the operation of educational institutions such as the Carlyle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Like many of its type, this institution engaged in a program said to be devoted to “killing the Indian” in order to “save the man.” [20]

Between 1783 and 1871 the United States developed its own system of making treaties with the Indians on its moving western frontiers. The general rule was that these so-called “treaties” were not transacted until Indian groups were completely disarmed, demoralized and rendered subordinate to the US Armed Forces. After 1871, when the US military apparatus emerged as victorious over the proponents of states’ rights, the US Congress moved to shut down altogether the system of making treaties with the Indigenous peoples within the international boundaries of the United States

Many aspects of the genocidal treatment directed at Native Americans in the transcontinental expansion of the United States went forward in the name of Manifest Destiny. This same methodology of conquest was re-enacted in the treatment of Palestinians in the establishment and expansion of the Jewish state of Israel. This treatment was re-enforced by the linkages connecting the Old Testament theology of New England’s Calvinist founders with the Israeli embrace of the Jewish Torah as a book of divine revelation.

An outgrowth of both the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the effort by the US superpower in 1947 to gain international consent for the UN's establishment of Israel through UN Resolution 181, the horrific fate visited on the Palestinians can be seen as an extension of the Anglo-American empire into new frontiers of expansion in the Middle East. There are formidable geopolitical implications in the axis of self-understanding linking the “exceptionalism” claimed by the United States and political preoccupations of those that see themselves God’s Chosen People.

ENDNOTES [1] There is a very extensive literature demonstrating the inconsistencies between the evidence and the official narrative of 9/11. A good starting point into this literature is to be found in the ten books by Prof. David Ray Griffin debunking various aspects official story. One of these volumes presents a compelling overview. See Prof. Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up and the Expose (Northampton Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2008)

[2] Anthony J. Hall, “When War Is Promoted as a Remedy for Terror, Salem News, Sept. 7, 2011

[3] Ehud Barack Interview on BBC News on the morning of September 11, 2001 on the BBC International Service, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRA5dgI4NJA

[4] See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, Or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (1877: New York: Gordon Press, 1976)

[5] See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997)

[6] Francis Jennings, The Creation of America Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

[7] Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company, 1898); Helana G. Allen, The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii, 1838-1917 (Glendale California, A.H. Clarke, 1982)

[8] Craig Austin, Lineage, Life and Labors of Jose Rizal (Manilla: Philippine Education Company, 1913); Fred Poole and Max Vanzi, Revolution in the Philippines: The United States in a Hall of Cracked Mirrors (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984)

[9] See Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA interventions Since the Second World War, Updated Edition (New York: Zed Books, 2014)

[10] Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Harmony, 2005)

[11] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)

[12] See, for example, Ali Soufan and Daniiel Freedman, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011)

[13] Anthony J. Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp. xi-xxix

[14] See Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in Defence of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto Dundurn Press, 1992)

[15] Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997)

[16] See Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997)

[17] Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Mississippi in British Politics: A Study in Trade, Land Speculation and Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution, 2 Vols. (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1917)

[19] Robert A. Williams, Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)