September 28, 2001

Things Really Could Be Much Worse

Now for a Note
of Good Cheer

By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

We've been surprised, listening to some friends and acquaintances in Humboldt county, northern California, and up in Portland, Oregon, who say they're afraid. Afraid of what, we ask. In this case, after that crime against humanity known as the September 11 attacks, some fearful people were concerned about further terrorist attacks, war, dire onslaughts on the Bill of Rights, or a blend of all three.

We may yet see just such a dread combo, but to be honest about it, we've been somewhat heartened, far beyond what we would have dared hope in the immediate aftermath of the awful onslaughts. Take the pleas for tolerance and the visit of President W. Bush to a mosque. Better than FDR, who didn't take long to herd the Japanese-Americans into internment camps.

Of course President WB was been dishing out some ferocious verbiage about dire retribution and an endless war against terror, but what do you expect? You can't kill 7,000 or so, destroy the Twin Towers, knock a hole in the Pentagon and expect soft talk. And of course there's been plenty of waving of the Big Stick, with B-52s taking off and aircraft carriers churning across the oceans of the world, but again, what do you expect?

In times of national emergency there are always those who see opportunity. The Department of Justice has been trying to expand wire-tapping and e-surveillance for years. The Pentagon and State Department have long chafed at the few existing, puny restraints on their ability to arm tyrants, train their torturers, give them money. So far as the Office of Homeland Security is concerned, we needn't expect Gov. Tom Ridge, who presided over the savaging of constitutional protections during the demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in July 2000, to be sensitive to constitutional issues. But even here let us offer a couple of grains of encouragement.

For one thing the FBI, CIA, FEMA, Pentagon and Coast Guard will see the Office of Homeland Security as a bureaucratic threat to their turf and move swiftly to neutralize it. We have no doubt that these seasoned bureaucratic fighters will soon be leaking information discreditable to Ridge and the
OHS.

For another, the reaction in Congress to Attorney General John Ashcroft's wish list has been encouragingly skeptical, considerably better than a few days earlier, when Rep. Barbara Lee stood as a single voice of courage against the stampede of all her colleagues to give the President full war-making powers. At this juncture we would never have expected to cheer Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, as he thundered his indignation at Ashcroft for presuming to use this emergency as the pretext for resuscitating every DoJ attempt of the past ten years to savage further the Bill of Rights.

War fever? Maybe, but we can't say we feel that crackle in the air. Plenty of flags of course, but they seemed to symbolize national togetherness rather than dire national purpose. In town, the store keepers and customers were mostly making cheery jokes about the presidential command to keep the economy afloat by shopping. Dan Schorr laments the lost language of national sacrifice, but between Churchillian "blood, sweat, toil and tears" and "Shop till You Drop," we'll take the latter any day.

In times such as these the role of the press is to beef up national morale, instill confidence in the leader, pound the drum. Here too things aren't nearly so bad as they might have been. Two weeks after the attacks CounterPunch got an e-mail from Bill Blum, who's written masterful records such as Killing Hope of the crimes wrought in America's name by the CIA and other agencies down the years.

Blum attached an article by Sandy Tolan from the September 20 edition of USA Today, titled "Despair Feeds Hatred, Extremism". "Yes," Tolan wrote, "The men in the four doomed airliners were filled with hatred and a twisted interpretation of Islam. But this explanation alone is not sufficient. It does not account for the flammable mix of rage and despair that has been building up in the Middle East since the Gulf War's end."

Tolan vividly described the "humiliation and anger of a population living under decades of occupation: Israeli bulldozers knocking over families' ancient stone homes and uprooting their olive groves; military checkpoints, sometimes eight or 10 within 15 miles, turning 20-minute commutes into 3-hour odysseys; the sealing off of Jerusalem and the third-holiest shrine in Islam to Muslims across the West Bank; the confiscation of Jerusalem identification cards, and hence citizenship, from Palestinian students who'd been abroad for too long; the thirst of villagers facing severe water shortages while Israeli settlers across the fence grew green lawns and lounged by swimming pools; U.S. M-16s used to shoot at stone-throwing boys."

Easy, concluded Tolan, to dwell only on the madness of Wahabbite Islam, but "much harder is to understand that our own failure to witness and address the suffering of others -- the children of Iraq, for example -- has helped create fertile recruiting ground for groups seeking vengeance with the blood of innocents." This, mind you, in one of the largest circulation newspapers in the country.

"I think," Blum wrote in his email, "that if this article can appear in USA Today, then some good may come out of the tragedy yet. And it's one of many I've read, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, the past two weeks that mentions truths about the US role in the world that are normally filed by the media under leftist propaganda garbage'. The Post quoted Castro at length about American imperialism, without putting him down. To we leftist propagandists, it's all old stuff, but to the American mass mind, it's 'huh?'."

How truly terrible it would be if Americans utterly declined to think about their history, even if only to reject the notion its relevance. That would imply a sense of absolute moral and historical self-assurance equivalent to that of bin Laden. In no way do we sense this to be the case today and that's the most heartening omen of all. CP

For a dissenting view, read Steve Perry's latest column on the advent of Fourth Generation Warfare:
The Pentagon's Blueprint for A New Kind of War

CounterPunch:
Complete Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath

-- Cherri (jessam6@home.com), September 30, 2001

Answers

Have you read Al Martin's comments on this Homeland Security Office, Cherri? He paints quite an ugly picture [even for a conspiracy advocate.] Notice the black helicopers towards the end. "Bring on the spall, Baby!" [oops...there I go quoting from The Jackal again.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), September 30, 2001.

It Doesn’t Matter "What Made These People So Angry." What Matters is to Eliminate Them. FrontPageMagazine.com | September 26, 2001 By: Jamie Glazov URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/glazov09-26-01.htm

"WE HAVE TO TRY to understand what made these people so angry."

How many times I have heard this stupid remark – in reference to the recent horror in New York -- I do not know.

I have also had the privilege of hearing the Left’s other favorite line: "The Americans really had this coming to them" and, of course, the all-time Leftist favorite: "But what about Oklahoma?"

Arguing with these people is like arguing with members of the flat-earth society.

"We have to understand what made these people so angry."

Really? For what particular reason? To understand how it is that these terrorists became demonically possessed? Ok, I can see that. But for the sake of minimizing their responsibility so that blame can be attributed to the United States? No, I don’t think so. But that is exactly what the professional anti-American milieu now seeks to do in its war cry for this

"understanding."

When a bunch of sociopaths hijack a plane filled with innocent people and drive it into a building populated with thousands of other innocent people, the first thing on any civilized person’s mind is not the desire to empathize with the rage of the perpetrators. It is to recognize evil, and to ascertain whether anyone that was involved in it is still at large. If any guilty parties are still at large, then a person with integrity would preoccupy himself with the hope that they are brought to justice.

Personally, my idea of justice in this case would involve a public torturing session, and then a flogging, preferably followed by a hanging – or something similar to that genre.

"We have to understand what made these people so angry."

The individuals who have shared this particular wisdom with me over the last several days have consistently expressed it with a bizarre whimpering tone. Their disposition always tends to suggest that they are among the last few sensitive people on the planet. They are, you see, feeling the pain of the terrorists, and, of course, of all the people in the world who have been oppressed by capitalism in general – and U.S. imperialism in particular. No one but them seems to have the anointed capacity to feel the pain of subjugated peoples. These anti-American pilgrims are a voice crying out in the wilderness. It’s a very tiring job.

"We have to try to understand what made these people so angry."

Um, no, actually we don’t.

My question: should we also have to try to understand what made Hitler so angry? How about what made Ted Bundy so angry? How about Pol Pot?

Of course we have to try to understand what made evil people evil. That’s because it is our human obligation to recognize evil. But my point is that if a mother and her daughter were brutally raped in their home by an intruder, our primary concern would have to be catching the perpetrator and punishing him – not reveling in what might have caused his pain.

Let’s get something straight: the psychos who just carried out their terrorist attacks in America did so not because of anything that America did, but because of what America is.

The Islamic terrorists hate America because they hate modernity. Motivated by their shame and humiliation of living in their impotent and despotic worlds, they are driven by an all-consuming rage. They cannot reconcile themselves with the fact that their world vision cannot adapt to the world that they actually happen to be occupying. So instead of changing the vision, they have to destroy the world that stands in its way.

The Islamic fanatics have the choice to turn to democracy and freedom as the answer to their problems, just as they can finally permit women to have an education and the right, among other things, to show their faces and paint their fingernails. But no, instead they rationalize that they must turn back to the model of Islam as originally introduced 14 centuries ago.

The kind of people who have absolutely no value for human life, and who believe that they are going to paradise after blowing themselves up with innocent people, are not going to be made "less angry" by something that America starts doing differently. The only thing that America could do to stop making these people "so angry" is to disappear from the face of the earth.

But that’s not going to happen.

So it means that one side has to go.

Let’s get it done.

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.. His father, Yuri Glazov, was a Soviet dissident during the Brezhnev era, who signed the Letter of Twelve, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. His mother, Marina Glazov, also participated in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, actively typing and circulating Samizdat - the underground political literature. To avoid imprisonment, Yuri Glazov took his family out of the USSR in 1972 and settled in Canada in 1975, when Jamie was 9. Today Jamie battles socialism from his high-tech warroom in Toronto. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. E-mail him at jglazov@home.com.

-- Free (Lance@Research.Service), September 30, 2001.