>> > I'd say 3000 dead at home, plus USAPA, are new reasons for that
>>opposition,
>>
>>Only if we buy your theory of karma (I'd be interested to hear you ground it
>>metaphysically).
>
>How 'bout a simple causal story. If we hadn't been mucking around
>with the mujahadeen in AFghanistan, had kept our bases out of Saudi,
>etc., Osama bin Ladin wouldn't have been interested in us.
***** [David Ross] _I'D LIKE to start out with the title of your new book. What do you mean by the terrorism "trap"?_
[Michael Parenti] THE ACTS of terrorism that took place on September 11 must be seen in a wider context. The reason these people attacked us are twofold. First there are the immediate causes. They're driven by an apocalyptic religious ideology. But at the same time the question comes up, "Why did they attack the United States?" Bush says it's because we're so free and prosperous. Well, Denmark is a lot freer and a lot more prosperous than we are, so is Sweden, so are a number of other Western European countries, but they are not being attacked in this same way. So we must try to look at the larger conditional causes of terrorism. The terrorist groups that have arisen in the Middle East and Central Asia have emerged from societies in which all popular coalitions and democratic movements have been destroyed by U.S. interventionism: Turkey, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and others. In country after country where democratic forces have tried to mobilize for political and economic democracy, where student leaders, labor union leaders, farm and peasant communal collective leaders, independent journalists, liberal clergy, women's rights advocates, various groups of people who have fought for social change in a democratic direction, these reformist democratic forces have been the object of the worst sort of oppression over the last half century. Democratic interests have been destroyed or left with nothing to hold on to.
Finding their economies, their cultures, and their societies spinning or sinking beyond their grasp, finding themselves with no control over their lives, many of these people, in a mixture of hope and desperation, turn to a kind of totalizing religious solution. One that actually preaches direct action and revenge against the evil empire, in this case, as they see it, America. But it's really not America that's doing this to them, it's the U.S. ruling class. America itself is a entity of 260 million people, of many diverse groups most of whom do not want to see their tax dollars expended and the blood of their sons and daughters spilled in far off places, the names of which they don't even know, and usually cannot even find on the map. They wonder why so much is spent on war and so little on things like local education. Their schools are falling apart. The roof on the school is leaking and the kids don't have sufficient textbooks, and school materials. And that's not just in inner cities. I know schools in California, in suburban areas, where the art teachers go out with their own money and buy art supplies for the students because the budgets have been cut back so much. And they're wondering why we have so much public poverty and so much private wealth, so much civilian poverty and so much military glut and military wealth.
U.S. leaders have built military bases all over the world. It seems U.S. forces have got to be everywhere, all over the world, occupying countries from Bosnia to Macedonia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Tashkent, more and more places at the taxpayer's expense. Meanwhile the quality of life in the U.S. is being neglected and deteriorating. So it's not really true that Americans are clamoring for empire. Despite the monopoly propaganda of the corporate media and national security state, Americans do at times question the terrible costs and burdens of empire. But during times of crises, real or fabricated, our leaders manage to convince people to rally mindlessly around the flag, telling them, "this is for democracy," "this is for our national security," "we've got to do this to fight terrorism." Well, what's happened? U.S. forces went into Afghanistan, destroying much of that already battered country-all supposedly to catch Osama bin Laden. They never caught him, and now they say, "Oh that's not very important anyway, we don't really have to catch him." The White House is now predicting that al Qaeda is planning some other terrorist strikes of major magnitude, coming soon. So what exactly was accomplished by waging war upon a weak impoverished battered country? People say, "Well what would you do?" I would go out and hunt the terrorist cells, specifically. I wouldn't go out and bomb whole cities and villages. That's like trying to catch a flea with a giant sledgehammer. But that policy has served George Bush and his reactionaries in Washington quite well under the guise of this terrorism battle. While the rest of us, you and I, saw September 11 as a horrible, horrible tragedy, they saw it as a golden opportunity and they've been pushing their reactionary agenda ever since. The first thing George II did to fight terrorism after September 11, was to call for an additional tax cut for the very rich. And the next thing he did was to jack up the military budget even more, another 50 billion until now it's close to 400 billion dollars. None of this enhances our security against terrorism....
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2125> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>