Anniversary

[kjkhoo at softhome.net]

billbartlett at dodo.com.au wrote:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>>>Do you actually have evidence that many leftists have refused to 
>>>>condemn 9.11 terrors?
>>>
>>>All the time. On this list, in print, and in many conversations. A 
>>>few people even said we deserved it - heard by my own ears, and 
>>>not hearsay.
>>>
>>>Doug
>>
>>I don't travel in the same circle as yours as far as conversations 
>>go, but on this list and in print, whom do you have in mind?
>
>I freely admit to believing Americans deserved it. As I've said of 
>course, that doesn't mean I refuse to condemn it, or even that I 
>lack sympathy. Doug has it in his mind perhaps that to believe that 
>Americans deserve it amounts to supporting it. But of course it 
>doesn't logically follow. I don't have to be either for or against 
>them.

Count me in on this.

No, let me rephrase it. The US deserved it. That doesn't mean the 
persons, Americans and otherwise, who were the victims deserved it. 
Nor does it mean that the act was moral. Nor even that it was an 
intelligent act.

The US media has it about that Americans talk about where they were 
when it happened. I would like to talk about what I thought and felt 
when it happened.

It was around 9:30 pm our time. My wife phoned me from her hotel room 
in another town to tell me the news. I said, "No. It can't be true." 
I switched on the TV and my first reaction was horror. Then, that it 
was blowback, but who would have thought it would take this form. 
Then the towers collapsed -- and more horror. Reverting to a 
forgotten language, I said to a friend that whoever had done it were 
objectively agents of US imperialism.

I keep to that view and those sentiments. But a year on, I confess 
the horror has receded in the face of other horrors and what the US 
has done and is doing, in particular over Palestine. And the drift of 
this and associated threads on lbo-talk hasn't helped. Sorry.

kj khoo