Terry Jones

Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror: Observations and Denunciations by a Founding Member of Monty Python

By Terry Jones

Nation Books, 2005

163 pages, $17.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/34700

Terry Jones scores a direct and cliche-free anti-war hit against the current "war on terror" that has dumped bombs and quisling governments on Afghanistan and Iraq. A former Monty Python star, Jones has gathered his "little bursts of indignation" in a splendidly entertaining and angrily barbed little book on the hypocrisies, lies and brutalities of the latest wars by the state terrorists in Washington and London (and Canberra).

"To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before", observes Jones, because it is well-known that "the best way of picking out terrorists is to fly thirty-thousand feet above the capital city of any state that harbors them and drop bombs — preferably cluster bombs".

Iraq's links to Al Qaeda, however, proved as mythical as its weapons of mass destruction. Less mythical, however, were the Bush administration neo-conservatives' long-held plans to establish a new base in the oil-rich Arab Middle East (and pick up fistfuls of dollars in the land of the defence gravy train and home of the "reconstruction" contract). Read all about it on their Project for a New American Century website, as Jones did with rising bile.

The stated "anti-terrorist" aims of the war against Iraq were indeed so far from reality that Jones thinks that President Bush must have been "secretly working as an Al Qaeda agent, whilst posing as the leader of the Free World". After all, the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, by uniting much of the Arab and Muslim world in hatred against the US and its loyal coalition partners, will make more terrorists — where none existed — intent on revenge.

Add the practice of "putting bags over people's heads", and a litany of other abuses in the prisons and torture chambers of the latest acquisitions to US empire, and the retaliation temperature rises even more. Of course, this is not really torture, explains Jones, because Western governments, by Western government definition, can not commit torture, and because, as explained by a spokesperson for US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, torture is only torture if causing severe pain is the aim rather than a means to the aim of extracting information. This "logic" frees up a grateful Jones to find out where his son goes after choir practice — by putting a bag over his son's head and chaining him to the radiator, and locking up his son's friends in the garage with "electrical charges applied to their genitals and sexually humiliating them".

"Torture" is not the only word to lie mangled beneath the linguistic rubble of the "war on terror". "The international community", "democracy" and "liberation" also got lexicographically mauled, and not just in Iraq. "After last week's shocking events in Venezuela" (Jones writes in April 2002) "in which President Chavez was ousted in a free and fair democratic coup, only to be returned to office two days later on what seems to have been little more than the whim of the people", Washington's word-manglers got to work.

"Legitimacy" to govern is not just a matter of a popular voting majority, elaborates Jones, because "one of the factors that confers legitimacy must surely be approval by the United States". Venezuelans can vote in Chavez as many times as they like, but if he is "not acceptable to Washington" then he doesn't have "legitimacy", especially in a country "that happens to be the third-largest supplier of oil to the US".

Whether it's super-patriots bombing Arabs abroad, secretly locking up Muslims at home and gagging dissent, or corporate kings counting the war dollars in their Wall Street counting-houses, Terry Jones lets loose an accurate and wickedly funny broadside in his own war on the "war on terror". I sincerely hope his cheek recovers from the pressure of his tongue being so firmly planted in it.