> L.A. WEEKLY - SEPTEMBER 13 - 19, 2002
> A Year Later Only fear and loathing remain
> by Marc Cooper
>
> Especially for the left, September 11 offered a unique opportunity to
> come back home, to find commonality and identification with a society
> from which too many progressives and radicals have felt alienated and
> estranged.
The point is to change society, not to identify with it. In the total system, what we call society is a mask of repression -- it is what people do because they must, as opposed to what they might still become.
> Instead, from the left, we get a steady stream of "yes/buts." Yes, to
> all the above -- but we killed more people in Vietnam. Or yes, but we
> created Osama bin Laden (a patent lie).
Bush Senior did indeed create Bin Laden. This is well-documented: the Taliban, the ISI, al-Qaeda were all products of the CIA's operation in Afghanistan. And now UN forces have to clean up the mess the defunct US Empire made (EU forces on the ground, plus the EU police).
> On this anniversary of September 11, without guilt or hesitation, I
> mourn their deaths.
And *I* mourn the hundreds of millions killed by neoliberalism, IMF austerity packages, and Wall Street's gutting of Latin American and SE Asia -- and then go out and do whatever I can to stop the fearsome violence of the total system.
-- Dennis