Doug
----
> The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
>
> As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..
> There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting
> misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with.
> Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for
> instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the
> right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure,
> there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays - for "our kids," no less
> - as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
>
> In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small
> segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is
> being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however,
> that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing
> petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral
> witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering
> in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most
> agonizing ways imaginable.
>
> Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the
> "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the
> systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral
> virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of
> "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So
> pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began
> literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by
> the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having
> their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" - or perhaps more
> outraged - than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."
>
> Property before people, it seems - or at least the equation of property
> to people - is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms.
> And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated
> turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of
> Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up
> to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the
> functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
>
> Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world - the
> Mideast, for instance - began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the
> streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's
> purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
>
> The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of
> delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption. So, too, were
> the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America's
> free-fire zones.
>
> Tellingly, it was at precisely this point - with the genocide in Iraq
> officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow
> of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of
> those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it - that
> the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on
> September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.
>
> Meet the "Terrorists"
>
> Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the
> face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by
> George Junior and the corporate "news" media immediately following their
> successful operation on September 11.
>
> They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less
> commit "the first acts of war of the new millennium."
>
> A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has
> been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" - now
> proudly emblematized by the United States - against the "Islamic East"
> since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More
> recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first
> lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of
> Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert
> Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you
> slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the
> Pentagon can be understood as acts of war - and they can - then the same
> is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The
> first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its
> very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under
> orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that
> can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they
> finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to
> their people as a matter of course.
>
> That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at
> the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.
>
> They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
>
> There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel
> killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside
> comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World
> Trade Center . . .
>
> Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were
> civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a
> technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial
> empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension
> of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly
> and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the
> word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively
> well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the
> costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in
> many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to
> see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly
> and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches
> and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of
> sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of
> infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way
> of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little
> Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd
> really be interested in hearing about it.