Conquest and Censorship

by Douglas Valentine

After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s army buried its fallen comrades, but left the corpses of the English defenders to rot in the fields where they lay.

Such is the brutal nature of war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering and humiliation on the vanquished.

What the United States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is only marginally different.

William the Conqueror made no pretense about his brutal subjugation of the English.  They hated him and resisted his occupation for twenty years, during which time he took all their property and gave it to the Norman upper class.  Over 300,000 English people were murdered and starved (one fifth of the population) and some 300,000 French and Normans were planted in England in positions of authority. 

An English nobleman was likely blinded, castrated, and thrown in a dungeon in one of the hundreds of prison William built across the countryside to terrorize the population into submission.

England ceased being England, and William repented his sins on his deathbed.

While the U.S. subjugation of Iraq and Afghanistan is following much the same pattern, it is different in one respect.   Unlike William, whose oppression was done in the light of day, the U.S. conceals its crimes to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American “exceptionalism.”

Covert operations, cover-ups, and deception are essential because, without the belief in its inherent moral superiority, the American public might not support its government’s plundering of foreign nations on behalf ofAmerica’s ruling class.

The U.S. policy of not identifying or accurately counting foreigner killed in recent American conquests is a good example of why this Big Lie is employed.

The U.S. has an official policy of not counting the number of people it has killed and crippled, rendered homeless, starved, condemned to sickness, disease and insanity.  Thus it is impossible to quantitatively measure the amount of misery America has visited upon Iraq, which of course makes it easier for the U.S. Government to pretend that all this death and suffering was for Iraqi benefit.  

There are reports of five million orphans in Iraq.  That’s three times the number of Englishmen William conquered.

In the face of such immense numbers, it is easy to forget that each person matters, as much as you matter.  Someone knows who these people are.

More to the point, in many if not most cases the U.S. Government – the hired killers in the military and the CIA – know perfectly well the names and identities of each and every person they murder, maim, or render an orphan.

They don’t tell you, but they know.

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