Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador and an outspoken opponent of the wars and the police state methods in the West (in particular, a leading defender of Julian Assange), writes on Aug. 12 that he has “finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part ... is a force for evil.”
He notes that he tried to expose the torture by Western forces during the “War on Terror,” only to be reprimanded for exposing classified material. He writes: “Somehow I mentally compartmentalized this as an aberration, due to overreaction to 9/11 and the unique narcissism and viciousness of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. I did not lose faith in Western democracy or the notion that the Western powers, on the whole, were a positive force when contrasted with other powers. It is a hard thing to lose the entire belief system in which you were brought up—probably particularly hard if, like me, you had a very happy life right from childhood and were highly successful within the terms of the governmental system. I have however now finally shed the last of my illusions and I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part—call it ‘the West,’ ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘neo-liberalism,’ ‘neo-conservatism,’ ‘imperialism,’ ‘the New World Order'—call it what you will, in fact, it is a force for evil.”
He continues: “Gaza has been an important catalyst. I am not lacking in empathy, but my knowledge of the horrid butchery by the Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya was an intellectual knowledge, not a lived experience. Technology has brought us the Gaza genocide—which has so far killed fewer people than any of those earlier NATO-member perpetrated massacres—in gut-wrenching detail.... If only the people of Mosul and Fallujah had had modern mobile phone technology, what horrors we would know.”
He adds regarding Gaza: “That there would be a limit to the number of Palestinian civilian deaths they could accept, the number of UN facilities, schools and hospitals destroyed, the number of little children torn into shreds. I thought that at some stage human decency must outweigh Zionist lobby cash. But I was wrong.”
