When Fidel Castro resigned last week it was amusedly remarked in a number of newspapers that the CIA had tried to kill him 26 times.
Poisoned wet-suits, exploding cigars, a beautiful female spy who would inject him with cyanide while he post-coitally snored, were amiably, cheerfully listed as though assassination were an almost jocular, humorous, harmless thing that Fidel shouldn't be too upset by.
No newspaper said killing foreign leaders was against the law, and trying to kill Castro was a horrible thing; as horrible, say, as killing Che Guevara or Benazir Bhutto or Ramos Horta. And no published letter to the editor grumbled about this. And nobody I know said how strange this was.
But let us imagine that John F. Kennedy were still alive, and on his 90th birthday last year The Age jovially noted that he’d done pretty well to survive 26 attempts on his life by Cuban beauties with hypodermics, poisoned bottles of French champagne, poisoned condoms, exploding Cuban cigars and the like, all arranged by Fidel Castro's secret service.
If we'd read that we wouldn't be amused at all. We'd be wondering why America had not, in reprisal, invaded Cuba and overthrown the evil, murderous dictator Fidel Castro, put him in leg-irons in Guantanamo and after a military tribunal trial of this "enemy combatant" lethally injected him.
This contrasting scenario shows that even in our minds America, and America alone, is licensed to kill.
Their license to kill has been evident for some time.
The three million shot, bombed and Agent-Oranged Vietnamese are not much held against them, the 800,000 Cambodians, the 500,000 Iraqis – or was it only 300,000? – nor the 3,000 Chileans they helped "disappear", nor Salvador Allende whom they helped drive to suicide, nor Che Guevara whom their accomplices found in the jungle and tortured to death.
Americans are licensed to kill
It's a fact of life we have stoically, jokingly, shruggingly come to accept. They are our overlords and they have permission.
One of their private companies, Blackwater, can kill anyone, anywhere, any time; any innocent woman or child or old person in any country, just so long as they "follow the correct procedures", follow "the rules of engagement". Just so long as they say "Stop! Go back!" in English and fire a warning shot above the car-driving housewife they then, with her children, blow to pieces.
Americans are licensed to kill, and the six million or so, once you count in Korea, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Serbia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Grenada, Haiti and Mexico they have assisted into oblivion, devastating their 50 million relatives, enraging their 16 million male cousins into thoughts of jihad and revolution, we should not compare, apparently, to the 100,000 Fidel Castro killed. Fidel Castro is a bad man. Fidel Castro deserves to die for those 100,000 killed over 50 years.
George Bush by contrast deserves to be forgiven for the 500,000 he killed – or was it only 300,000? – in five years because it was an honest mistake. He really thought there were weapons there, weapons buried in the sand, atomic bombs and things, so those 500,000 deaths and their 6 million devastated relatives are all right; those deaths are forgivable. He meant well.
Where does this attitude come from? Where does this belief come from? Why do we believe it?
Americans are licensed to torture too. They are only doing it, as the fine film Rendition shows, to save lives. So that makes torture all right, forgivable, justifiable, necessary even.
This attitude and this belief, which parallels al-Qaeda's (our cause is just and we must therefore, if need be, die for it, certainly mass-murder for it) and Ariel Sharon's and Mao Tse Tung's and Hirohito's and Pol Pot's and Hitler's, comes in part from Americans' disbelief in death, in the fact of death.
Most of them believe, about 78 per cent in the latest polls, because their churches teach them this is so, that death is only a small event in an ongoing life that lasts forever.
So if you kill someone, you're not inconveniencing him very much. If he's good, he'll go on to heaven. If he's bad, he'll get the eternal, screaming hellfire he deserves.
So if a helicopter gunship takes out a family of 21, grandmother, aunts, children, babies, and it turns out it was the wrong family, that's okay too. They're living somewhere else now, maybe in a good place. They should thank us.
Are Americans barbarians?
Oh yes. But don't tell them so. If you do they'll hunt you down to Bora Bora, and blow up the mountain you're in.
Their attitude to torture is different and derives, I think, from the 300 years they kept slaves, and the 80 more years they recalled the slave era fondly, weeping in Gone With The Wind for the good old days.
A slave you could rape, mutilate, whip, chain up, separate from his family, castrate if he looked at your wife the wrong way. You could impregnate his wife and sell your own subsequent bastard son for $20 because slaves were lesser beings, they were like working mules or bullocks, you could do anything you liked with them. You could whip them red raw. You could twist their genitals and watch them scream.
So it's not to hard, I think, for a culture with 300 years of slavery at its back, 300 years of unpaid labour that helped it to its present enormous wealth, to find Guantanamo acceptable, to find Abu Ghraib forgiveable, or water-boarding, or electrified testicles or sleep-deprivation by loud noise and bright unceasing lights, or snarling dogs, or dung-smeared Korans, or vile false news like Mamdouh Habib got, that his wife and children were dead.
For these, too, these heathen Arabs and Afghans, are lesser beings, dogs you can kick, mice you can experiment on, the way slaves were.
In becoming more like America, we should be careful not to become more like them in the matter of mass murder and torture.
Or perhaps you disagree.
And we should begin, if we can, to withdraw from them, by whatever international-legal means we can, and whatever pressure of international disapproval, by whatever editorials and articles and speeches in parliament we can write or utter, their license to kill.
Or perhaps you disagree.
