|| Terrorism and Globalization
||
|| by Doug Henwood
|| <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=henwood20011121>
||
|| -clip-
||
|| But the biggest absence of all was the recognition that there's
|| something different about this war as compared to recent
|| military interventions over Kosovo and Kuwait.
Just to reiterate: The record shows that Kuwait was Daddy Bush's bait to lure punch-drunk Western stooge Iraq into becoming a rogue state overnight, thereby ending its role as a regional power and gaining the US a firm strategic foothold in the Gulf.
||
|| Charles Brown wrote:
||
|| It is not so much hard thinking as facing a truth that hurts: Uncle
|| Sam is a thug. Most people don't want to face that truth.
Doug:
||
|| Yes Uncle Sam is a thug. You know that, I know that, most everybody
|| here knows that. Most of the U.S. population doesn't, and would
|| regard *you* as a thug if you said that. The U.S. working class is
|| solidly behind Bush's war. If you're a Marxist, and I assume you
|| still are, what do you do about that? Do you take the Third Worldist
|| line that the U.S. working class is hopelessly corrupted by
|| imperialism, and therefore is the enemy and not the instrument of
|| potential revolution? That's one point of view, and it has the nice
|| benefit of exempting its holder from any form of political advocacy
|| or action at home, since the real struggles are conveniently located
|| thousands of miles away. If you don't believe that, what do you do
|| and say to the 95% of your neighbors who support the war and don't
|| think of Uncle Sam as a thug?
||
|| Doug
I don't recall anyone else stating the main problem so clearly and succintly.
2 years ago you posted a book review of Ace Hayes's The Redneck Manifesto. Here's a book excerpt from your post:
> "Riddle me this, Candy Pants - what portion of lowbrow white rage has
> NOTHING to do with n-word hatred and instead bubbles up from the
> accumulated traumas of being a historically shit-upon laboring class?
> Is it thinkable that these so-called Angry White Males may be more
> furious with their white bosses than with their black coworkers? What
> degree of their white-knuckled hatred might conceivably arise from
> generations of being annihilated on the front lines of war, shot down
> by company police, and chewed up like sausage by industrial
> accidents?
Substitute commie hatred, Arab hatred, Moslem hatred, etc. for n-word hatred, and you might find a key to the present conundrum.
US corporations are filling their pockets as we speak with money looted from the treasury, money which should have been going to a security net to protect the workers from the recession. US corporations have bent over backwards to bribe and sweet-talk the Taliban, using the State Dept. and CIA as errand-boys, while the Talibs were chopping off hands and feet, shooting women, and harboring ObL whose mug was on two Interpol red bulletins. Installing a "stable government" of bandits in Kabul means the Afghan people get robbed and raped daily but the US corporate investment in Central Asian oil is safe and the southern pipeline route is open. Bandits can be bribed and threatened, unlike religious fanatics.
So there is plenty of evidence to show workers that their bosses got them into this mess and are now cashing in on it. There is even more evidence that a lot of the bearded bad guys who are constantly plotting to kill Americans were paid, protected, and hosted by the CIA, brainwashed in "refugee centers" in the US, and trained on US military bases. The main difficulty of getting this message accross is that it's not visual and can't compete with televised propaganda. I think that's the challenge. Put up some web sites with pictures, charts, maps, and video, and you're bound to get attention.
Hakki