``...I'm thinking about what I should write in a longer piece on this for the next LBO (which is about to awake from its overlong estivation). I've hinted at it here - how do you bring up the blowback-from-imperialism argument wihtout sounding callous? How can you see something as a monstrous crime at the same time you try to understand where it came from? ''
Doug
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I don't know. I gave it a shot. I'll keep trying. It depends on whether you want to convince anyone or write to a specific readership, or if you can feel free enough to put together something without worrying about its impact.
The core of the problem comes about because the US has a political tradition that presumes a moral superiority of national design and purpose. Such a presumption has to be examined at the same time as any important event, including mass terrorism. What is really in question is the status of this moral presumption. It is precisely this moral arrogance that so enrages other peoples as they suffer the material consequences of our policies around the world---exactly at the moment when we are lecturing them on how right we are to make them suffer. So understanding and explicating the full parameters of this blowback becomes part of an intellectual center to almost all our political discourse.
We have systematically oppressed, exploited, manipulated, and controled the fates of billions of people through our foriegn and military policies and most especially through our economic development policies for an entire century.
It has not been just and it is not right that our economic system has been seeking out the cheapest labor and most easily exploited resources. We began by performing these atrocities on ourselves in all the down trodden and poverty ridden centers of our own country from the city slums of the East at their very inception creating them in the process---to the most remote rural areas of the South and West, likewise creating them in the process. We have used the market conditions of our own and other peoples to take advantage of the poverty and limited development we found there for our own economic benefit. It is not just, and it is not right that we have threatened, gone to war, oppressed, and manipulated groups and classes of our own people as well as other people's cultures and political systems for the sake of extending our political power and our military security. These two systems which comprise the political economy have always work together, and violate the very moral principles we have presumed to be ours, by right and by history. In short we have done much evil in the world based on our own moral presumption and their suitably duplicitious codification as law which in turn we have given to ourselves and called our own higher purposes.
Does any of that justify or excuse the destruction of WTC and all the people who died? No, of course not. And yet all that must have been much the same sort of reasoning and justification of those who performed that destruction and slaughter. We have to acknowledge that in some sense, terrorism is also a mirror.
It is not emotionally callous or a moral failing to seek to understand the nature of human actions and reactions and especially their profound contradictions, since the point of these examinations is to understand the human condition and improve it.
Chuck Grimes