In the new British Channel 4 documentary Shoot to Kill, about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in London, a policeman called “C12” declares that “because of his actions [Jean Charles], and the information we received, I could only conclude that I had to act or we were going to die.” Eleven shots to the victim to remove the doubt! In the back. Of the eleven, seven shots went directly to the head.
After the pulverization of Jean Charles de Meneze on July 22, 2005, in order to justify the crime, the British police claimed that Jean Charles had disobeyed the officer’s orders and that he had suspicious attitudes and clothing. Witnesses told the public that he had jumped the subway turnstile and run for the train.
All these accusations were denied. Jean Charles was only wearing a denim jacket, he wasn’t carrying a backpack, and he normally went through the turnstile. In fact, it was agent C12, dressed in plainclothes, who jumped the turnstile to follow the Brazilian, who was working in London, and the acts were confused by a witness.
Britain was on edge, for just two weeks before, 52 people died in a terrorist attack on the tube.
Shortly after the revolting death of Jean Charles de Menezes, I published the text “To Die by Mistake” on CounterPunch. There, I wrote that “If there is a license to kill, to shoot at the heads of beings that move, that order is certainly not directed to dogs. It is directed to something of a much lower and obnoxious order, inferior, much more inferior to dogs, though it may walk (simulates walking), speak (simulates speaking), think (simulates thinking) and smile (simulates smiling). A thing that terror refers to as terrorism.”
Now this new documentary Shoot to Kill leads us to ask: Who really is a terrorist? In all right-wing governments, the terrorist is the one who must be destroyed, eliminated for reasons of state. This is what Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians have been like, and it doesn’t matter that the terrorists are women, children or hospital patients. In the Vietnam War, the imperialist U.S. government referred to the heroic Viet Cong patriots in this way:
“Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War.” They accused their enemies of precisely what the empire’s soldiers were doing, and worse, to civilian populations.
So it was in the Algerian War, when Algerians rose up against the terror of domination by the French colonialists. The National Liberation Front (FLN) was called a terrorist organization by the French state. The film The Battle of Algiers was seen by 40 officers at the Pentagon, who were encouraged to evaluate and debate the central issues of the film, such as the advantages and costs of using torture and executions to uncover the plans of the enemy, the “terrorists.”
So it was during the Brazilian dictatorship, when the terrorist state murdered women, young people and patriots in the war against subversion. My recent novel Never-Ending Youth talks about this:
“From what the repressors were calling ‘terrorists’ when they put the faces of local adolescents, most of whom wanted to embrace the world, on ‘most wanted’ posters and pasted them all over Recife. The repression always attempted to simplify its defamation campaigns. According to mendacious propaganda meant to spread fear of the Brazilian State, ‘terrorists’ were young people like Luiz do Carmo who once asked me, surprised by the absurd semi-material world I inhabited, ‘How are you going to listen to Ella Fitzgerald without a victrola?’
The repressive forces were ferociously pursuing young people, humanists, poets, and workers—all of us were portrayed as dangerous ‘terroristas.’”
I read the report of a witness to the assassination of Jean Charles, who had seen the eyes of the man immobilized on the ground: “If you look at the photos, his eyes seem to be small, but when I saw his face for only a second, because it was all so quick, his eyes were quite, quite open. He seemed very, very scared.”
Again from CounterPunch, “When I saw that report, I felt as if I had got a punch on the stomach. The small eyes that opened wide with fright, with a pistol pointed at his head, were mine, ours, our children’s, our brothers’ and sisters,’ all non-British peoples’. The Asiatic eyes of all us terrorists.”
The terrorists are those that the state points out that they are. Like Jean Charles de Menezes, now recalled in the documentary.
We hope it will be an indictment of who the state calls a terrorist: Jean Charles de Menezes or any of us—writers, patriots, socialists, immigrants, citizens.
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