Posted on 09/13/2001 6:33:57 AM PDT by getoffmylawn
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
This, from a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing.
Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television Commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.
When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10?
If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon - not once, but several times - and safely home again.
You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.
I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those." !
Stand proud, America! Wear it proudly!!
When a caravan leaves the village all the village dogs bark -- but caravans do not stop for barking dogs.
The British author of this posted article is a barking dog and his supporters on this thread are its fleas.
The great majority of the British public will support Prime Minister Blair's determination to participate -- militarily -- with the United States.
So will the people in the rest of NATO. So will the people of Russia, China, India and France, countries headed by rational intelligent leaders who will (I predict) support or even assist our military in its anti-terroristic efforts.
As those events unfold in coming weeks, this barking dog and its fleas will be remembered, if at all, as irrelevancies.
(If you're interested in a more typical British/European reaction, go to this site: THE NO LONGER MISSING LINK)
So you are saying the people in New York and Washington had it coming. Is that correct?
No, you moron. The embargo killed the people, not the regime. The embargo has been singularily ineffective in its objectives but has been a magnificent people-killer and enemy-maker.
Of course , youre suggesting that our actions should have been different, right? Like what? Befriending Hussein and telling "The Jews" to take a hike ? (thats usually the underlying theme with "you people")
How dare you call yourself "nonstatist" when you talk about what "our actions" should have been? Join the war machine, knee-jerk.
... a book written by Graham Greene a very close friend of Kim Philby, Joseph Stalin's favorite British traitor.
... a book written by Graham Greene a very close friend of Kim Philby, Joseph Stalin's favorite British traitor.
... a book written by Graham Greene a very close friend of Kim Philby, Joseph Stalin's favorite British traitor.
We don't have a choice about going to war. We are there. The question is whether we fight or surrender.
I was going to say that the option was DeGaulle or Petain. but that isn't true. Petain, whatever you think of him, at least had the excuse that his nation had been defeated in the field and was no longer capable of engaging in large-scale regular warfare.
The option here is DeGaulle...or Quisling.
I might waste the time to ask myself if I didn't know you were the smartest man in the world, pulling numbers out of your butt to ask asinine hypotethical questions.
My answer is
You called for millions of deaths within a couple of weeks. But taking out Afghanistan won't be enough. You'll have to start with 150,000,00 Arabs. Who's next? A billion Chinese, maybe? 3/4 of the humans race seems about right.
As for the nonsense about taking cookies to bin Laben and Saddam, just remember who armed them both. Yup, the dear old US of A. Reagan, as I recall. Seems to me that you war mongerers have been doling out a lot of cookies over the last few years.
It is painfully apparent, by your terminology for the War of Northern Aggression, that YOUR ancestors took part in the destruction of the American Republic and the erection of the grotesque Leviathan of today.
Sorry to see that; sorry to say that; --but it is the bottom line. Now the buzzards have come home to roost. I recommend secession of the American South, Midwest, and most of the Northwest as the best possible solution. Let's repair to The American Republic while we can.
What was done to the American South in 1861-1877 is being done to the rest of the planet today and they are not gonna lay down and die while we do it.
"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE ANYTHING MORE UNTRUE. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." -- H.L. Mencken
Yes, I have heard of Kim Philby. Isn't it ironic, that the Russians seem to be backing us on this? After all we went through in the cold war, they seem to back us. Amazing.
You think you understand something? You understand nothing.
I notice how you and your couple of other like minded brainiacs play tag and congratulate one another, and circle your wagons, and revel in your imaginary struggle. Just like all the elitist, socialist, corrected people do, to feel sorry for themselves, to feel mock offense and to look to others to place blame for their comforting "oppressed" status.
Hate begins here, in the flagrant injustice and violence of daily life, in the corruption of the rich and the mindless poverty of the poor, in the absence of proper social mechanisms to do anything about it. And who is responsible for this? It requires a rather special character to be able to lay the blame for social failure where it properly belongs, on the people who comprise one’s own society. Much easier, more satisfying, to blame everybody except oneself. And haven’t Westerners themselves been putting their shoulders to that wheel by reiterating for many years that the plight of Arabs and Muslims has nothing to do with their own conduct or culture, but only with colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, Zionism, globalization? And that we are, therefore, guilty for whatever they may do?—David Pryce-Jones, Why They Hate Us
Gumption - Apologies for pooling 2 replies into one but the thread is so slow that it speeds things up. Plus getoffmylawn may have something insightful to add as well (including his/ her comments in #100).
I understand what you're saying, and I know that you're not someone to just blindly call for blood. I can see why the US would feel that they had to do something; but if it's not the right 'thing' then it could cause even more problems.
The people of Afghanistan (the probable target) are already suffering horribly and the vast amount of refugees moving through Europe are Afghans trying to escape the Taleban. They are not the enemy, and bombs do not discriminate.
If this was Bin Laden then he and those involved should be hunted down, but he is not representative of the Aghan people. He is, however, supported by a huge number of Islamists around the globe, many of whom are motivated more by their dislike of the US than by Bin Laden himself.
Even if there was a military response, who would be the target? Why would it be acceptable to kill any innocent people as punishment for something they had absolutely no control over? Besides which, it would just make things worse and be followed by more attacks both on the US and elsewhere.
Killing people doesn't solve anything. This was a terrorist attack; the West should not lower itself to respond with more terrorism. The only way forward is to look closely at why this happened, find and punish those responsible, and then review the entire approach by the US towards the rest of the world.
Recall troops from the areas where they should not be deployed such as the Balkans; scrap the missile defence plans (which are totally redundant anyway); deal with other countries with greater respect and readiness to listen rather than just 'kick ass'; and work with all countries to redress the balance of global security. That includes sticking to the Charters that have worked so well since WWII, which e.g. specified that Nato should be a defensive organisation and not attack other countries unless a member was under attack and requested support.
America, under Clinton, saw fit to break a number of charters and conventions and do whatever it chose. Of course that's going to stoke up hate and violence.
Greene was a congenital anti-American.
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