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.
In a sea of dross it is nice to see a fellow survivor occasionally. I fear that the soccer boobettes are in over their heads and their Garthettes have been somehow emasculated.
Thank God for the Heroes of Flight 93; would that they had awakened sooner.
One definition of "understand" from the American Heritage Dictionary: "To know and be tolerant or sympathetic toward."
Well let's be what we are, bad. Nuke these f*ckers! and their little dogs too!"
My adult speaks: "Ed, we are already dead. You told me that before the gate opened, just before your craft hit the beach at Normandy that you and your brothers were all thinking you all were already dead. You didn't want to be there. You wanted to be with your wife and children at home, safe, loved and warm. But the evil in the world put you on that craft to face death.
Ed, they think we are evil. Am I evil? What did I do to make them hate me. I want to stay home with my wife and children. But I know the evil in this world won't let me stay home. I'm already dead."
Ed survived and the nation was victorious over Nazi Germany.
Somebody, somewhere, obviously thought that the US was deserving of this, and far more.
The United States' foreign policies have ticked a lot of people off, including a fair number of Freepers. Anti-American terrorists don't go to the effort of training their people to fly planes full of Americans into large American landmarks just for the fun of it. They do it for a reason. If that reason is our support of Israel, they may be disappointed by our lack of a change in policy in response to their killings. But there may be other policies in place that deserve serious review if we're going to avoid seeing other American landmarks destroyed and other Americans killed.
But, if you have a rod or other device for spanking, I suggest you save it for the perpetrtors of this attack, their supporters, and the long list of apologists we have endured in this world for the last 4 decades.
If the rest of the world wants to, it is certainly welcome to adopt free market economics, democratic political systems, and systems for ensuring their basic civil liberties. At that point, they may, after some time to learn what having real lives are about, cast off their envy and enjoy the rewards that are open to all in this world.
Instead, most of the "developing" nations sit in dungheaps called nations, listening to masters (which operate said dung heaps as family businesses) tell them that the "Evil Americans" are oppressing them.
The time is short, I hope, for Chamberlain-esque hand wringing about the "reasons" why they hate us. They hate us because they have been told to. They hate us because because because wastes of human skin like the author of this whine fest have told them that it is valid for them to hate us. They hate us because apologists assume that we have what we have based on immoral actions, not understanding what freedom and energy can accomplish. They hate us because it is easier (and safer) to believe their leaders and not change their own systems and leaders to gain actual freedom.
They hate us because we have hated our own liberty and nation for the last 40 years and agreed with them.
gosh I dunno genius, with a name like Seumas, whadya figure the chances are?
THAT is an extremely good analysis.
Thank you!
Oh, puh-leese!
I have visited six of seven continents, and I have lived on three.
I like to visit Europe, to admire the monuments and works of art that our European ancestors created to further the advance of civilization.
I love to converse in French with the jeunes philosophes on the Left Bank-because they don't expect that I can, and because it is so easy to deflate their absurd pomposities.
I also always kiss the ground when I get home, to our sweet land of Liberty, because I can tell the difference between the past of Western civilization and the eurotrash filth who have gone so far to ruin it.
This time, we won't need much from the eurotrash to save civilization-the battle has moved on. We will look down as we fly overhead, however, and wonder how the degenerate remains of our ancestors will be coping with the coming wave of refugees.
Good luck.
I've lived overseas, and I always found that the America-haters were a tiny minority of the locals, a much smaller percentage than among, say, the paleo-cons on FR.
Not really. Just the same old few Lefties, America bashers, Jew haters....LOSERS.
Read the thread. Mostly patriots.
The same anti-Semites who were saying the same thing last week, and the week before. Though some of them were registered under other names then...
I expected this article to bring a bunch of rabid dogs out of the woodwork, but I had no idea there would be this many.
I believe that human nature is essentially the same no matter where a person lives. What we see here spewing all over this thread is the spawning of new American terrorists. If these people screaming for blood had lived in one of the countries that have been injured by the American governments actions, they probably would have joined Bin Laden's forces years ago.
Sadly, I believe the cycle of violence will continue as America's newly "sworn" in battalion of terrorists attack the terrorists that have attacked us causing a new battalion of terrorists to swell from their ranks and so on and so on. Based on some of these posts, I imagine what happened on Tuesday is to be repeated on American soil. We'll have the rabid dogs of this post to thank for it.
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