On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> The truth is that the American policy elite do not trust the American
> masses to support them in all actions necessary for the maintenance
> of imperial power. American elite secrecy and hypocrisy is, in a
> sense, a tribute to the latent capacity for democracy and solidarity
> with others that ordinary Americans do possess.
>
A bit of anecdotal evidence to back up Yoshie's point here: the most common reaction I've gotten from my students when s11 comes up is "Why did they attack us? We've never done anything to them!" Like most Americans, they're often clueless about the historical and political context here. They do not say, "Yeah, I know U. S. foreign policy is pretty brutal: we support dictators, we fund terrorists to overthrow democratically elected governments, we train "specialists" to torture and intimidate local populations, we bomb water supplies and civilian infrastructure to cause widespread hardship in "enemy" nations." They don't know the facts. I have to side with Noam on this one: we need careful documentation and dissemination of the facts about U. S. foreign policy. And we can't depend on mainstream mass media to provide the facts, for the reasons Yoshie outlines above.
Miles