>But the issue is not merely justification but the accusation implicit in the
>left's causal arguments that the Sept 11 attacks were foreseeable and thus
>the US goverment has responsibility for those results and thus voters,
>including those who died, are responsible for their own deaths.
>
>It is quite coherent to argue that the Sept 11 attacks were unjustified, yet
>foreseeable, and therefore the US government bears responsibility for those
>results. That is precisely the explicit line of a number of sectarian
>groups and the implicit line of many other leftists.
I'm currently swayed by Counterpunch's thesis:'foreseeable-in-theory-but- unforeseen-by-those-rendered-innocent-by-their-reliance-upon-and-trust-in American-commercial-media-for-their-view-of-the-world-and-their-nation-state's p lace-in-it'.
I remember Chomsky saying something about how the American people wouldn't let their government do what it did, if only someone did the job Edmund Burke thought the media was for and could enduringly do.
Like actually tell 'em.
On that account, voters are as innocent as their mainstream media is ethnocentrically, introspectively, complacently, ignorantly, narrowly, ahistorically, decontextualisingly, misleadingly, culpably unenlightening.
They were actually more innocent even than that, of course. We cyber-lefties love to think we are blessed with special insight - certainly we actually enjoy access to some of the pluralism Shrubya reckons characterises America - but we're demonstrably at least as impotent before the institutional brute facts of our political economy as anyone else. And as for the vote - it allows distinctions of brands, not quality - and sometimes doesn't allow even that small distinction to be expressed ...
It was mass murder, Nathan. But if history, western foreign policy settings, and corporate media manage to avoid the sorts of interrogation the counter-intelligence community, the Taliban and the airlines are fielding, well, the alleged defamation of the actually innocent dead will be the least of our concerns.
Cheers, Rob.