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.
The islamic nations must go the way of Troy, Carthage, and Azteca.
You misunderstand my statement. Whatever it takes to reduce the threat.
No one left to contemplate revenge.
Got it?
Okay. Clear enough. Buy up HotPoint stock then.
Ahh. Very eloquent. You sound like a prime candidate for America's first suicide terror squad. I'm sure that the Islamic suicide bombers were really deep thinkers just like you when they came to the conclussion that people who are part of America, or supporter of it, are useful only as fertilizer for next year's crops.
Do you even realise that you are cut from the same cloth as Islamic terrorists, or is that just as far out of your grasp as my simple call to "not stop thinking?"
See #321. You appear to be right. The moron actually thinks I misunderstood him. Be careful about what you say, though. He might add add you to The List. Of course, with a name like yours, you're probably on it already.
Ask you doctor for some more prozac, hide under the rock, keep repeating, help me Barney, help me Mr. ans Ms. Sociologist.
Your time is over, this is war and you are no longer useful.
You have to steal quotes for Michael Rivero?? Do you get a secret decoder ring with the tin hat? Do you even know what the Reichstag fire was?
Took several replies, but you finally showed your true colors.
You turd. You evil piece of s**t.
Finally, someone from another country who might actually understand. And a Canadian no less. Any chance we can trade Peter Jennings for him?
You're right. That was a very insensitive statement by me and I apologize to anybody that took offense to it. I was wrong to say that.
The sad thing is, I know exactly how they feel. Back in 1995 when Croatia attacked the Serbia Krajina and ethnicly cleansed 250,000 Serbs and killed thousands in a mere 3 days while being aided by the US, I could have slaughtered at least 1000 Croats by myself. All you had to do was keep the line moving for me and I could have kept the blood flowing. I wanted retribution so bad my hands were shaking.
That intense anger is difficult to sustain over a long period of time and eventually I came to my senses and was actually embarassed that I could feel such hatred.
Many of my friends were very worried about me and thought that I was completely losing my mind. At the time I was dating and madly in love with what I consider to be one of the greatest women that I have ever met. When I informed her of these feelings of hatred that I was feeling she became withdrawn from me, told me that she no longer knew who I was. The love of my life was no longer my partner.
At the time my American friends had absolutely no idea how I could feel such hatred. Now before my very eyes I'm watching what appears to me to pretty much the whole of America turn into the equivilant of blood thirsty Serb "ultra-nationalists". However you'll never hear the term ultra-nationalist used by Americans to describe what they are. For them the word is "patriots".
Although my posts will not contain the words that describe my personal desire to be the person to administer the extremely slow and painful death that I wish to see administered to the evil animals that are responsible for the carnage of Tuesday that has caused me to shed many tears and once again stir these feelings of hatred, rest assured that these feelings are still very often present. What I cannot muster is a sustained level of hate for long periods of time. I believe it may partially be because I'm just so emotionally exhausted from the near constant oscillations of emotions that have accompanied me during the last 10 years of the disolution of Yugoslavia.
Nobody understands the feelings of anger and outrage that Americans are experiencing now more than the Serbs. I bet that citizens of Belgrade from 1999 and citizens of New York from Tuesday could find much in common. I wish to God that neither city would have experienced such heartbreaking terror.
Again, I apologize for my insensitive statement to both you and anybody else I may have offended. However, I do believe that we must keep thinking. Hatred is a killer. We have prime examples of its fruits in New York and Washington.
The pure ignorance of the average american CNN-couch-potatoe is just amazing! So this guy doesn't remember the US lead NATO bombing of the Belgrade TV station. Was that something different? It was an act of state terrorism, that ended in the deaths of innocent people doing their job.
If the father of the killed make-up girl working for the Belgrade TV station decided to hijack an airplane and slam it in the WTC, would this guy then still ask the same question?
Blowing up buildings in other countries by whatever means, is not an "political thing"! The sad thing is, even after the disaster some people won't get it.
Well, cicero's son, you aimed your arrow unerringly at the achilles heel. Is the critique of the current wave (an irresitable tidal wave, it appears) of history meaningful, or is it all petulant childishness? Are those of us who reject the facile embrace of "God's will" as an explanation, lonely prophets or merely infantile egoists?
Why did someone like Augustine have the intellectual power to turn away from longing for the classical culture he so loved, and not only live through the change but put in place the very foundations of the next wave? Is it genetic-- hormonal?
Or does it just mean that some people grow up faster than others; growing up being the ability to say, with equanimity: "...Empires are not perfect...The alternative is worse. .."
You point out:"...Witness what happens when Empires retreat into themselves..." You seem to think they have any choice in the matter. I have no doubt our Empire will be able to marshal one last mighty battle cry. And when the dust settles, and we have a chance to examine more closely the inside of our skyscraper facade, we will find there is nothing left.
Growing up being the ability to perceive that it is all decay and corruption proceeding in elliptical waves until finally we are drawn, inexoribly, into the "final realization" where everybody ultimately dwells--Tamarlain, St. Francis, Idi Amin, Gregory The Great, Hitler, Anne Frank, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Martel, Joe Smith...
It seems unbearable...
Saturday night I attend my: "Is The Cloister Right For You?" seminar......
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