"There is a hole in the universe. It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe. That missing something, strange to say, is a grasp of nothing itself. Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens."
K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe : How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
Thomas Pynchon--Gravity's Rainbow
"Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this."
- Martin Heidegger
"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, -- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."
Thomas Pynchon--Mason & Dixon
"Much Madness is divinest Sense-
To a discerning Eye-
Much Sense - the starkest Madness-
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail-
Assent- and you are sane-
Demur- you're straightway dangerous-
And handled with a Chain-" Emily Dickinson
"It's 1983 all over again here in the USA; open scorn for international accords, a brand-new Cold War, and a corrupt Evil Empire run by aging ideologues with heart problems. Europe's got the 21st century all to itself!"
"I find a definite upside here -- I'm feeling 18 years younger! We '80s cyberpunks always hankered to be heroic dissidents in a corporate-dominated dystopia. Cue those syndrums, maestro, it's war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace!" Bruce Sterling
Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada 100,000 people est. via JIMWICh
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wtc-filter
: articles and links relating to the 11 september attack on the world trade center
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Some selections from my Commonplace:
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
Albert Einstein, New York Times Magazine, 09/11/1930
"Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom."
Albert Camus, The Rebel
"All democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the republicans and mugwumps know it. All the republicans are insane, but only the democrats and mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."
Mark Twain, What Is Man and Other Philosophical Writings
"How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness in righteous? One man must not kill. If he does it is murder. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder...Only get enough people to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?"
- Adin Ballou, "1845"
"Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
"In masculine hands logic is often a form of violence, a sly kind of tyranny." Simone de Beauvoir, Second Sex
"In practice all men are atheists; they deny their faith by their actions." Ludwig Feuerbach
"It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other." Aldous Huxley, This Timeless Moment
"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them." Alfred Adler, Quoted in Phyliss Bottome's Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom
"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have." James Baldwin, The fire next time
"Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: the same tricks played over and over again, still trepan them."
David Hume, Essays
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
"The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show."
Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
How innocent are any of us? I thought. How innocent can any of us be when billions of us are being deprived.. In the face of huge amounts of wealth. I could suddenly hear the worldwide clammer for recriminations. I silently wished we were all in the global village as equals. Then I thought that I'd rather be in a village of 100 people.. Self sufficient.. Where leaders couldn't be 'elected' by spin. I was dreaming again. What if...
Then I thought that we had all deserved this; that we hadn't taken care of our own. That we had let them fester in heaps of fundamentalist rubble until they had puked their disease all over us. Do we have to test each other's bravery so much?
Then I think of my song 'I Hate The White Man', which was written so long ago now, and was written because I was outraged by the actions, ignorance and attitudes of western Europeans and Americans. The same people who are outraged by events that seem to impact upon their greed and overweening wealth, but who forget all too easily what they might have done to cause these events, and then, to compound the felony, forget about any of it altogether. As if nothing happened. Arrogant.
People who go to see fantasy films about 'Braveheart' or the romance of the Viking conquests, without realising that the same spirit will still be alive in humans of all shapes and sizes until at least the next step on the evolutionary ladder. That it is a fact of life. Here and now. There will always be the disaffected and disenfranchised; until we really take care of all our own. Until we give ourselves enough time to be able to realise that doing so is the only real key to human fellowship.
This isn't anything that poor old George or the American hegemony will even remotely consider. What they will want is revenge. I need only say it once.... When they think that they have found the perpetrators of the events of Sept 11 2001; and they have 'tried' them, and ascertained their guilt, THE WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT THEY COULD THEN DO WOULD BE TO COMMIT THEM TO JUDICIAL MURDER. This will only turn these people into martyrs, and a new generation will then seek their own retaliatory form of 'justice'. My advise will not be heeded. I don't have insurance cover.
Poor old George. He made a speech which you could see and hear that he was reading from a place to one side of the camera. It was embarrassing. I felt for all of his nation who don't believe him. I winced. He was almost smiling because he thought that he had read it right. Every time he didn't make a mistake there was a weird kind of surreal joy in his eyes. It was awful. "We'll get those folks"!! He said. And how inappropriate that sounded. It could after all, have been four Timothy McVeighs at the time.
I feel very sad today. Very sad to have witnessed such an unnecessary loss of life. The clowning and cavorting of the Wall Street masses did not deserve annihilation. They needed a serious wake up call. But wipeout isn't really that useful. Even in the land of Eldridge Cleaver. The Black Cloud of armed jehovahs witnesses into the middle of the party was very unrefined. The world of 'The Dharma Bums' was getting there anyway. It would probably only have taken another ten years of relentless world news-go-round to have effected huge areas of western life with a degree or so more humility. Maybe even longer than ten now, given the likely setback.
As I've just said to one of my American friends, America is this great lumbering giant who's been looking for trouble for decades, but on the other hand is the source for so many of my inspirations, and those of my friends. Republican fascism is hard for me to take; to have been so angered by Vietnam, and horrified by the American destruction of President Allende in Chile and the subsequent sponsorship of the murderer Pinochet.
And yet so hugely inspired by the freedoms of the jazz age, 'Bird' and Miles, Kerouac and the Beat Poets, Steinbeck and Hunter Thompson. The USA is a great juvenile melting pot, and that's all there is to it. The great sprawling American landscape of diners and canyons, cowboys, hobos, dancers and trippers is part of my lifestyle. It is still a weird and wild frontier, and even in it's most obnoxious manifestation, much more acceptable, benign and romantic than any grim blinkered worship of a fantasy deity which one could be required and compelled to worship five times a day.
A living experiment with millions of tides, attitudes and quirks powered by at least the idea of freedom of expression. And developing. And though I rail against the many obvious injustices, at least I am free to do so. But to want to turn everything from Morocco to Egypt, from Turkey to Pakistan, to lead, is not the right way. It's exactly the wrong way. What America now has to do is what we've all done in the last day, which is to take a good look at ourselves. And what we're doing in the world. And to the world. (...)
And let America now go out into the world. Not as tourists, but as equals in it's hope and despair. Not to gape at Buckingham Palace or the Eifel Tower, but to look into the eyes of nations, and to take home some understanding. Not to further sour the world with retaliation, but to teach the world a lesson with restraint. To attack another nation is only to contribute to further reaction and to eventually bringing the whole pack of cards down.
Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater Digest
: I really advice getting on this mailing list. At the best of times it is a great source - in times of crisis it is an invaluable one.
Television viewers who turned to Fox News on Friday for coverage of the terrorist attack also saw a message scrolling across the bottom of their screens -- National Mental Health Assistance: 800-FOR-TRUTH.
Unknown to the cable news channel, the phone number connects to a Church of Scientology center in Los Angeles, where Scientologists were manning the phones. ....
Michael Faenza, president and chief executive of the National Mental Health Association, called the hotline number "outrageous" and said Scientology "is the last organization" emotionally vulnerable people should call. via Ken Layne
Above all, we should not forget this golden rule, which is going to become the measuring stick of international relations: the desire for equality. One man is worth another. I haven’t seen much of a response this week to the deaths of more Palestinians. And when we have learned to respond to the genocide of 500,000 Rwandans as we do to the tragic fate of those who lost their lives in New York, then we will have learned how world order is preserved. We still live in a world where one man’s life is not worth another’s. This is how the South views the catastrophe in New York. Globalization aggravates inequality yet stirs up a desire for equality that has never before been seen. Because from now on, everyone has the means to measure.
We are told that in this time of crisis, all good Americans should rally around the president and the flag.
I will rally, but not around a leader calling for war or a symbol of nationalism.
It is easy to understand the emotion behind the chanting of "USA, USA." But I will not chant.
In this time of crisis, I will rally around policies that seek peace and security, for all people everywhere. And instead of chanting, I will speak quietly about the grief we all feel, and loudly about the need to resist our leaders' plans for global war.
Clear Channel, the world’s largest radio network, has sent out a list of some 150 "lyrically questionable" songs by everyone from the Animals to the Zombies to its radio stations, recommending that the songs not be aired.
The Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Kansas "Dust in the Wind"
The Beatles "Ticket To Ride"
The Beatles "Obla Di, Obla Da"
Bob Dylan/Guns N Roses "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
Louis Armstrong "What A Wonderful World"
Peter Paul and Mary "Blowin' in the Wind"
Simon And Garfunkel "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
Cat Stevens "Peace Train"
Cat Stevens "Morning Has Broken"
Hollies "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother"
Don McLean "American Pie"
John Lennon "Imagine"
James Taylor "Fire and Rain"
Thoughts on grief, anger and action from Working Assets' presidentworkingforchange
For me, since it is unclear at this moment who ordered, funded, orchestrated and benefited from these attacks, I am simultaneously enraged at those who actually committed them, profoundly sad at all of the innocents who died and whose lives go on but are shattered, and afraid both for my children and for the path my country may choose. Nearly 90 percent want war, the surveys say -- but against whom?
I must admit to having no patience for those who write a quick paragraph condemning the attacks but then move instantly and at great length into recounting all the bad things our government has done, including training and funding Bin Laden. I know all that and sometimes more, and yet it seems to me not to be the main point. ,,,,
We will oppose any attempt by the Bush Administration to use the deaths of our citizens to justify policies that made no sense before or after. And we will continue to oppose U.S. policies, like the sanctions against civilian trade with Iraq that made no sense before or after.
We will identify ways for individual citizens to give, donate, and help with the immediate needs of the victims and survivors. Many special funds are springing up already, so stay tuned for that. We will also use our Diversions newsletters to let people know of vigils, religious services and other means of coming together to share our sadness, anger and compassion. And we will continue to use our citizen action programs and donation programs to fight for a more just world.
We are periodically reminded that profound evil walks among us. Once we know who and why, we can debate and ponder the ifs -- what if the United States had a different foreign policy, what if the Soviets had not invaded Afghanistan, what if paranoid near-fascists were not trained in the U.S. military, what if religious leaders ceased to use God to justify unspeakable acts, what if security was higher . . . if, if, if.
Until then, we should condemn the murderers, honor the dead, comfort the victims, defy those who argue for premature conclusions and a quick violent response, and attend to our own grief so that we have strength for the never-ending journey toward justice to which we have committed ourselves.
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. (...)
"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
[After a pause. ] "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! -- The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
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$40 Million to the Taleban
Bush’s Ship Of Fools Gets Hijacked By The Taliban
Buzzflash Editorial I originally posted this in May - The original link has expired but a copy is available here
For a Presidency that makes it hard to keep up with its dizzying pace of lies and hypocrisy, the Bush administration grant of $43 million dollars to the barbaric Taliban regime deserves a special spot on the White House wall of infamy....
One could argue the immorality of subsidizing a government that treats women like cattle, tortures dissenters, and forces non-Muslims to wear identity badges, among other crimes against humanity. That would be bad enough, but the U.N. just condemned the Taliban for allowing the cultivation of an opium crop and benefiting from its sale! So not only is the Bush Incorporated "grant" to the Taliban an inexcusable subsidization of a stone age band of faith-based zealots, it is a horrifying example of gross incompetence at taxpayer expense....
That's our $43 million that Bush is turning over to the Taliban extremist hoods. If they can pull the wool over Bush's eyes, God knows that the lunkheads in the White House will be easy pickings for our more powerful adversaries....
These ideological zealots, sucked at the breast of the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, are playing an amateur game of cards in a dangerous world of street smart knaves.
And we’re paying the price for the Bush team’s ignorance and arrogance.
On behalf of the women and oppressed minorities of Afghanistan, we should bow our heads in shame. And then we should cross our fingers and hope that God will guide the Bush ship of fools to a shore of sanity and morality.
When Bush says ""We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these attacks and those who harbor them," does he include those who armed and trained the attackers? If he does, and Bin Laden turns out to be involved, doesn't that put the U.S. in a tricky situation, since the CIA armed and trained him when they needed a pawn to use against the USSR in Afganistan? If we don't critique ourselves we lose.
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Kenny l Liu (Evacuate and Flush) e-mailed me the text of another article by William O. Beeman who
teaches anthropology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. A specialist on Middle East Culture, he has written extensively on fundamentalism and terrorism. He has worked for the past four years in Tajikistan, where he has been able to monitor developments in Afghanistan. If I find an on-line link to this I'll post it.
The United States risks a severe miscalculation in dealing with the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon on Tuesday. This event is not an isolated instance of violence. This is not an "act of war." It is one symptom of a cancer that threatens to metastasize. The root cause is not terrorist activity, as has been widely stated. It is the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world. Until this central cancerous problem is treated, Americans will never be free from fear. (...)
Osama bin Laden ...
will not cease his opposition until the United States leaves the region. Paradoxically, his strategy for convincing the United States to do so seems drawn from the American foreign policy playbook. When the United States disapproves of the behavior of another nation, it "turns up the heat" on that nation through embargoes, economic sanctions or withdrawal of diplomatic representation. In the case of Iraq following the Gulf war, America employed military action, resulting in the loss of civilian life. The State Department has theorized that if the people of a rogue nation experience enough suffering, they will overthrow their rulers, or compel them to adopt more sensible behavior. The terrorist actions in New York and Washington are a clear and ironic implementation of this strategy against the United States.
Above all, Americans need to remember that the rest of the world has an absolute right to self-determination that is as defensible as our own. A despicable act of mayhem such as those committed in New York and Washington is a measure of the revulsion that others feel at our actions that seemingly limit those rights. If we perpetuate a cycle of hate and revenge, this conflict will escalate into a war that our great-grandchildren will be fighting.
Statement from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
Now that the Taliban and Osama are the prime suspects by the US officials after the criminal attacks, will the US subject Afghanistan to a military attack similar to the one in 1998 and kill thousands of innocent Afghans for the crimes committed by the Taliban and Osama? Does the US think that through such attacks, with thousands of deprived, poor and innocent people of Afghanistan as its victims, will be able to wipe out the root-cause of terrorism, or will it spread terrorism even to a larger scale?
From our point of view a vast and indiscriminate military attacks on a country that has been facing permanent disasters for more than two decades will not be a matter of pride. We don't think such an attack would be the expression of the will of the American people.
The US government and people should know that there is a vast difference between the poor and devastated people of Afghanistan and the terrorist Jehadi and Taliban criminals. via randomwalks
I wish I had something profound and intelligent to say about this. I could mention that it is a horrible fact in this world that sometimes, in order to get attention, a violent slap in the face is required but I suspect that would do nothing to comfort the families of the dead and the wounded. (And yes, I know all about how US aggression needs to be countered and how we should have forced Israel back to the mediating table so just save it: nothing excuses this, and we all know that.) I could cry out for vengeance, but that wouldn't really be in line with my feelings. I could try and tell you all that violence solves nothing, but sometimes violence works and those that use it get what they want. It's a cold hard world, of course...but none of that addresses the way I actually feel right now.
I'm proud of us, you see. We live such short lives, that can end so suddenly and in such violence. And even though those that ended those lives may well go unpunished, and that they too are human and thus diminish us all with their actions, tomorrow we will go on living. We'll clean up our cities and go on. Nothing can stop us. We are the heroes of this story, and it may have its unbelieveable horrors, but we keep on telling it anyway. I think it is important that we do so, that we not give up those elements of our national identity like freedom of expression or any of the other essential rights we have held as Americans but rather use this event to cling more tightly to them. And I hope that we will, in direct defiance of those who would have us so terrified that we do their bidding.
I find I am grieving not only for the dead and the bereaved, and for the horror of this particularly vicious act, but also for those whose hatred of us is so great, for those who see the arrogance in this "superpower," and for all of the misunderstandings and the gridlocked minds throughout the world. It makes me think of how, in the few, unfortunately, heated arguments I have experienced, I feel an overwhelming sense of my brain being tied in knots, of the foggy, dense greyness of attempting to communicate when walls and defenses are rising up quickly all around me.
"Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it. It is a terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often have to suffer for the sins of the guilty. When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?...
President Bush has authorized continued bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush, senior, invaded Iraq and Panama. President Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes. ....
Did we think the people who lost their families and friends and property in all that destruction would love America for what happened?"
Most books about modern cities and their buildings see them mainly as a collection of historical factoids or architectural styles. Divided We Stand identifies the World Trade Center as a key symbol of the turning point between two eras of urban life: the industrial and the informational.
In your book you draw a disturbing parallel between mindsets of master-builders and terrorists. Could you expand on this?
First of all, whether we like it or not, the modern skyscraper city, along with the suburbs that rings it, represents the corporatization of the metropolis. It is a city engineered and built for finance, not for people. From the late 1940s through the '70s, the urban renewal movement, operating under the banner of "slum clearance," flattened American cities and displaced populations at a rate comparable to that of the devastation caused by World War II in Europe
What emerges when you juxtapose mega-development with terrorism is a kind of unity of opposites. Both master-builders and terrorists consider everyday life at street level to be absolutely trivial. The former carry out make their plans the rarefied air of executive boardrooms; while the latter carry out their schemes, quite literally, underground.
Both master-builders and bombers adhere to single-minded cataclysmic visions - either the creation of a bright, corporate future; or a return to the "fundamental" values of the past. Both visions are abstract projections of an ideal world which has nothing to do with the here-and-now.
But the most frightening aspect of these men is that they appear incapable of connecting their actions with real world consequences for other living, breathing human beings. To them, people are insubstantial - the plan is what is real. When you think like this, whether on is a futurist or a fundamentalist, it becomes possible - even desirable - to push aside whomever and whatever gets in your way. One can justify yourself without ever falling prey to doubt, or guilt. One comes to believe that one actually knows what is best. One grants oneself a monopoly on truth, and no amount of reality-checking can challenge it.
Members of fundamentalist movements see themselves as saviors of society. For this reason they are able to justify almost any action, however extreme, and any personal sacrifice, however great, for their cause. There is a tendency to see the world in black and white terms. People are clearly enemies or friends. Actions are good or bad. The unrelenting commitment and conviction of the members of the movement is eventually the element that often leads the larger society to see them a social threat, even when their methods and strategies are peaceful
All of these movements invariably create a dual myth. This myth links a supposed Golden Age in the past with a Utopian future. The past Golden Age is seen as a time when the members of the movement or those they identify with were strong, vital, and in control of the world. The Utopian future presages a time when movement members will return to that sense of group strength and wholeness. In seeking to do this, they adhere to a clearly specifiable orthodoxy, but no easily predictable political ideology. They are as likely to be liberal as conservative in their solution to the problem. Religious belief is the most frequent motivating and organizing principle, although purely secular concerns may also dominate. Most cultures have seen a number of fundamentalist revival movements throughout their history, and all such movements appear to have common features which bear a resemblance to general human ritual practice.(...)
Religious orthodoxies are seen to be like Kuhnian paradigms because the constitute all-encompassing world views with set assumptions and theories of how the world operates. In fundamentalist movements orthodoxies are more than theory. They are bodies of inviolate belief to which all members must subscribe to remain in good standing within the movement.
When you said that my family, friends, and neighbors helped a bunch of Evil men murder thousands of people, I know that you believed it. I also know that you thought you could get away with turning a national tragedy, an act of war, and the mass murder of innocents and warriors to your own political and financial advantage. You thought you could rabble-rouse among your fellow true believers and not be noticed by rest of us who watch your legions of religious fanatics with an uneasy eye. You thought that we would be distracted by our own grief long enough for you to preach your gospel of hate to your minions and get away with it.
You were wrong, fat boy........
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"Man is...the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight."
-Mark Twain with a melanchoic tip o' the hat to FMH
The days of the "great game", when Moscow and London vied for control of Central Asia, are over. The new game which is developing is fraught with danger, both for Afghanistan and the whole region.
This brief survey shows that most of the attacks on Western interests can be traced to a network of radical Sunni movements based in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. What is striking about these new movements, of which the Taliban are the prototype, is the contrast between their political radicalism and their ideological conservatism. It is this which distinguishes them from large Islamist movements like Khomeinism. The mudslinging of the Western media should not blind us to the fact that the Taliban arouse a sympathetic response in a sector of Muslim public opinion (4). Their sole point of reference is the sharia, and their outlook is uncompromisingly conservative and profoundly Sunni in character. (...)
The Sunni fundamentalist movements are capable of spectacular attacks and portray themselves as the vanguard of struggle against the United States. But in fact they are largely disconnected from the real strategic issues of the Muslim world (except in Pakistan and Afghanistan). Their distinctive feature is their internationalism and lack of territorial base. Their activists wander from jihad to jihad, generally on the fringes of the Middle East (Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia). They are indifferent to their own nationalities. (emphasis mine) They are thus disconnected not only from existing states (especially Iran), but also from the large Islamist movements, which have disowned their offspring. via Blivet
Meanwhile, the "girly-men" Liberals and their strident molls scratch their heads and wonder how and why Tuesday happened. ...
I believe the Liberals are largely responsible for much of what happened Tuesday, and may God forgive them. ...
My job and the job of all Conservatives now, is to keep Liberals out of power as long as humanly possible. Our country is not safe when Liberals are in power. How much more evidence do we need?
Everyone is swallowing Samuel Huntington's thesis about the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’ It is easiest to divide the world into two. Today on CNN William Bennett (who wrote a book about morality after he was our Drugs Czar) announced that the answer really was black and white. We are at war. We are at war with Islamic fundamentalism. We know who Islamic fundamentalists are. So we should, in fact are almost obligated to, go and destroy them. The words ‘them’ and ‘there’ have received more use today than I have ever heard before. Rarely do we hear proper nouns anymore. ...
The country wants blood. Convinced of the conclusion we must reach, our investigators will supply our leaders with the facts they require. Nobody I have talked to is talking deterrence or defense. The only words we use are retribution and revenge. When I ask my friends how they will know when they have exacted enough revenge, I am told this is a rhetorical question. When I ask from whom they should extract revenge, they look at me as if it is obvious. I ask, even if every existing terrorist (by the broadest of definitions) is killed, what do they plan to do to those who are inspired by their martyrdom to follow them? ...
...the best, most accurate and decent response will take more time than anyone desires to give it....
Calling this a war and not a crime or a terrorist act changes the way we think about everything. We accept as part of the vocabulary the assumptions about which we should be thinking the hardest. Instead of suspects, we have enemies. Instead of rules of evidence, we have rules of engagement. Instead of investigations, we have operations. Instead of considering limits on what is acceptable or reasonable behavior, we announce that desperate times call for desperate measures, which justify anything. Like the notion increasingly expressed that innocent civilians may well ‘have to’ die to get at ‘the terrorists’... ‘I say, bomb the hell out of them,’ Senator Zell Miller, Democrat of Georgia, said on Wednesday. ‘If there's collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable.’ Amazingly, we have already accepted one of the most critical problems without serious thought...
Am I willing? Can I bear to narrate this into normality, 40 hours after they crumbled and fell? To craft a story: and then, and then, and then? Will the words I’m spilling here seem fatuous or hysterical or naïve by the time they’re read? Likely so. I’m failing and relieved to fail. I’m disgusted with myself for consenting to try. Speculation feels obscene. So does this self-indulgent self-castigation. Except, there may be some slim value in offering to a rapidly toughening future some hint of the white noise of one human imagination failing, on what they’re calling the Day After, to yet meet the task at hand. The channel surf of denial and incomprehension: an extremely local report.
On Tuesday morning, a piece was torn out of our world. A patch of blue sky that should not have been there opened up in the New York skyline. In my neighborhood--I live eight blocks from the World Trade Center--the heavens were raining human beings. Our city was changed forever. Our country was changed forever. Our world was changed forever.
...we must hold, as if to life itself, to a fundamental truth that has been known to all thoughtful people since the destruction of Hiroshima: There is no technical solution to the vulnerability of modern populations to weapons of mass destruction.
Man, however, is not merely a technical animal. Aristotle pointed out that we are also a political animal, and it is to politics that we must return for the solutions that hold promise. That means returning to the treaties that the United States has recently been discarding like so much old newspaper--the one dealing, for example, with an International Criminal Court (useful for tracking down terrorists and bringing them to justice), with global warming and, above all, of course, with nuclear arms and the other weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical.
Rediscovering ourselves as political animals also means understanding the sources of the hatred that the United States has incurred in a decade of neglect and, worse, neglect of international affairs--a task that is highly unwelcome to many in current circumstances but nevertheless is indispensable to the future safety of the United States and the world.
If we are to be "the brightest beacon of freedom and the best hope for humanity" then now is not the time to be saying things like "God may have mercy on them, but we won't." Now is the time for real leadership. Now is the time for deep reflection and resolve to find real solutions to the cancer of violence and fear that is infecting the world.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell said gays, feminists, "pagans," and a host of liberal advocacy groups have made "God mad" and must share the blame for the terrorist attacks this week
"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,’" Falwell said on the program, which was broadcast nationally.
"Well, I totally concur," Robertson told Falwell, "and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government."
"He should say that the United States will no longer be the world's largest seller of weapons, that we will begin to decrease our extravagantly wasteful military budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a second."
What will Bush do?
"Within the week, we will be bombing somebody somewhere," McCarthy says. "This is what his father did, this is what Clinton did." (...)
"We have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy says. "Nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste."
Instead of bombing, we should start teaching peace.
"We are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard of the side of violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don't teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them violence."
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Charles Cotner at Sixdifferentways: Today, My Left is Not Your Left
Dealing in propaganda for political points in the immediate aftermath of a mostly unrelated mass killing of innocents is not the type of dirty game I expect from the left. I want to believe, and do believe, that those sharing my beliefs are on the side of human compassion. Don't allow the radicals to denounce one sort of capitalism while stockpiling all the political currency they can grab in the same breath. Am I suggesting open dialogue and free criticism be silenced? Of course not. I am against the timing. You must understand news reaches us today faster than ever before. So fast, in fact, that millions of people in my country actually watched these events as they happened in nearly real time. The US is a huge and connected country. Your critiques reach us just as fast. In the future give people a week to recover. Wait for more facts, and practice some journalistic ethics and compassion.
[ While I can sympathize with this feeling I can't quite agree. What is desperately needed at this time is greater understanding of some of the roots of this mess - far too many more lives are at stake. There is never a time when humane, progressive voices are not needed, particularly when drowned out by the voices of jingoism and hate. - mw ]
...the events in the U.S. this week will also have other impacts on the manner in which activists on the left who consider themselves part of an anti-corporate- or anti-capitalist- globalization movement proceed in the struggle for global justice.
For one thing, it is virtually certain that Tuesday’s events will function to legitimize the criminalization and repression of all forms of political dissent in North America. For many, though by no means all of us, this will substantially increase what is at stake when we organize and protest.
Tuesday’s events and the corporate media’s responses to them have also fanned the flames of racism and xenophobia - and particularly of arabophobia - that already lay smoldering in North American society. Such racism demands a response from us that is both immediate and sustained. ....
Finally, as George W. Bush builds his coalition of states in preparation for a retaliatory strike against an as-yet-unidentified "enemy," the pro-war chauvinism with which the U.S. administration and the North American media are responding to the terrorist strikes also demands our attention.
All of these considerations will impact how activists, organizers and others on the left will go on with their work against injustice, exploitation and imperialism. Just what sort of response the different parts of "the movement" will come up with will depend on all us, and will necessarily be the result of a great deal of discussion and debate.
Yet, I am not angry at the terrorists, or Osama bin Laden, or at any of the international bogeymen our leaders tell us to fear. My anger is directed instead to our current administration and to previous administrations. My anger is directed at the failure of American Presidents to pursue an agenda of social justice. My anger is a furnace when I reflect on the culture war of the past thirty years. My anger is deep and intransigent at the American government’s deliberate persecution of leftists. ...
Cynical people have always dismissed pacifism as unrealistic, but such people couldn't have imagined suicidal bombers, people who believe so strongly in their cause that they were willing to die for it. Now pacifism probably doesn't seem so extreme. Turning the other cheek is the right response. (And tightening airport security, of course.) (...)
We now know for a fact that the heart of humanity is still ticking. Now, when so many hearts are open, is the time to solidify that, ratify that, accept that. Life is not flat and uneventful. We can change. The best way to isolate evil, if it really exists, is to surround it with love. via higgy's
As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.
We are at war, they said. And I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
It is the old way of thinking, the old way of acting. It has never worked. Reagan bombed Libya, and Bush made war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, to "send a message" to terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington. Isn't it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn't work, only leads to more terrorism?(...)
Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.(...)
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.
The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely out-sourced to experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes: though the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has never been more inward looking, less worldly. (...)
The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which twisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens share their pain.
The great motivator of political action in the 20th century was ideology: socialism, fascism, national liberation. In its name, people were ready to murder massively and, in a better version, to die for their cause, their fellow humans and the future. But willingness to die for a cause is not the same as a deliberate choice to kill oneself for it. Political ideologies are secular and thisworldly; their horizon of hope lies in this world, where their followers want to build something better; all of which will be lost to them if they die, though not to others who may benefit.
The world-view that motivated Tuesday's events is different. Its horizon is otherworldly. It sees this world in the frame of another world, the supernatural and an afterlife. It is, in other words, religious; not just religious but fundamentalist and simplistic. ....
It sees its cause not in social change but in a cosmic "titanic struggle between good and evil," according to experts quoted by The Globe's Marcus Gee. In an eerie parallel, President George W. Bush said this week that America was in a fight between good and evil. There are days when it seems that George Bush and Osama bin Laden deserve each other.(...)
You can't hunt it down because no country is its home; its home is despair, delusion and faith in values such as cosmic war and an afterlife. You can't "make them pay"; they're already dead. You can't threaten their families and communities; that's what started the cycle. But if you can't destroy it, you can try to defuse it....
By that, I mean deprive it of the soil it lives in. ... Today's soil is the despair and sense of injustice in places such as the Mideast. Communities have been created that laud these gestures, as one sees at Palestinian funerals. "Terrorism experts say the approval of the community is an important reason why terrorists do what they do," wrote Marcus Gee. You defuse this by eliminating the worst cases of wretchedness that sustain it.
The fanatics themselves wouldn't vanish. And fanaticism itself may be a human perennial. But there would be massive relief among huge numbers who yearn mainly to live decent, unharassed lives. The despair, mania and hate that sustain the fanatics would largely be withdrawn.
Would this mean "giving in to terrorism"? No, it would be a strategy to cut off its oxygen. It would also be the right thing to do, but think of that as merely collateral damage.
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[letter in the Globe and Mail, September 12]
"Ironically, it is the citizens of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, who can best empathize with New Yorkers and other Americans horrified by the terrorist attacks on their city. During the 72 days of terrorist bombing by NATO to force the Yugoslavian to sign the hated Rambouillet accords, an American plane sent a rocket into the top of the tall office building housing the offices of the governing socialist party. Shortly afterward, a second plane sent a rocket into the base of the building, where firefighters and rescue workers were gathered."
Should we go out and get the people who blew up our buildings? Of course we should. If we can't get them nonviolently law, should we start dropping bombs on impoverished countries? Maybe we should, if it will actually achieve the stated goal. A world that has graduated beyond the traditional conceptions of war may not be able to avoid military action, regrettable as it always is. Evil is real, whatever excuse it might present. The important thing is to draw a distinction between military action, as the exercise within a framework of international law of the power of a legitimate democratic state, and war, as the imposition of a total social order that is the antithesis of democracy, and that, in the current technological conditions of war, has no end in sight. We can reorganize our infrastructure along more intelligent lines, and we urgently should. But more fundamentally, war will end only when the rest of the world enjoys the same institutional conditions of justice and freedom that we do. We can hasten that day by supporting civil society, education, reconciliation, institutional reform, Internet connectivity, and nonproliferation throughout the world. Or we can retreat into a conservative conception of war as a way to live our lives. That is our choice now, in our policies and in our hearts, as we decide how to act on the pain that we feel.
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To a Man With a Hammer
Some Thoughts on the Pentagon and World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks
By Robert X. Cringely
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail," wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation's enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren't thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things WHETHER THEY ARE WARRANTED OR USEFUL OR NOT.
I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. (...)
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan , a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. (...)
If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else? via randomwalks
At any rate, I can't change the world. I can't turn the clock back. I can't eradicate hated or racism or intolerance. I can't force the irrational to be rational. I can't bring the dead back to life. I don't know how to calm or comfort anyone. I don't know how to ease anyone's pain or fear; I haven't been able to ease my own. I'm completely heartbroken, and I feel completely helpless. For the first time in my life.
However, feeling helpless is unacceptable to me, so I've decided to make some changes the only place I can right now: in my own life. I'm going to spend more time with my sweet husband. I'm going to take some classes. I'm going to draw some pretty pictures (on paper!). I'm going to stress less and laugh more. I'm going to have some new experiences. I'm going to meet some new people. I'm going to gain my strength back so that (maybe) I can make changes outside of my life as well.
Outlook Not So Good
Chris Lehmann on the CIA's predictions for our global future [ A prescient piece from Feed that I posted last December ]
Intelligence Traffic in America had fallen on hard times long before the ascension of George II made it so painfully clear how little American power and operational intelligence have to do with each other. Still, it was a curious convergence of events that saw the National Intelligence Council issue its soothsaying report on America's role in the New World Order, Global Trends 2015, just as the president-elect set about appointing a cabinet disinclined to cast the world's only superpower as a leader of new global consensus. Rarely, in other words, has an exercise in Washington's noble tradition of ex officio public résumé-flogging seem so poorly timed.
...the report also teems with dark forebodings of new global terrorism and cybercrime, fueled by renewed resentments of what the report terms, in unexplained scare quotes, American "hegemony." (Does the CIA, which has spent so much of its Cold War career propping up the unlovely conditions designated by this unlovely word, now mean to suggest that they no longer exist? Or, in the ultimate nightmare vision of the post-Cold War world, is American hegemony now downgraded in wonkish argot to an ironized Eggers-ian catch phrase?)
...what’s most striking about this jargon-heavy assemblage of scenarios and trajectories is what it leaves unsaid. First, there’s the sticky question of just how the CIA, an agency that’s drifted through the first decade of the post-Cold War era without any discernible mandate -- and that, to put things delicately, has not figured large in the democratic destiny of many nations -- has come to claim pride of place in the business of forecasting the optimal conditions for the extension of democracy across the globe. It's a bit like expecting Rudy Giuliani to assemble an investment prospectus for the porn industry. (...)
But more troubling still is the persistent failure to acknowledge any American responsibility for the grim conditions that seem to be gathering force in the not-too-distant future. ...
More ominously, the report cautions that America's huge and growing advantage in accumulation of arms (it notes at one point that non-U.S. defense spending has dropped fifty percent since the end of the 1980s) may succumb to darker intangibles: "Nonmateriel elements of military power -- strategy, doctrine, and training -- will increase in importance over the next 15 years in deciding combat outcomes."
At such moments, you can sense the growing desperation in the precincts of high spookery: There just has to be an enemy out there, mastering the conventions of "nonmateriel" combat subterfuge. Then again, this particular judgment call may well prove inadvertently prophetic, after all: There probably is every reason in the world to think that a Bush-led America, however extravagantly armed, runs a much greater risk of being simply outwitted.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. ................
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. ......................
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it's too easy to simply talk of "deranged minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?"
...even if you reject religious language, you can see that the willingness of people to hurt each other to advance their own interests has become a global problem, and it's only the dramatic level of this particular attack which distinguishes it from the violence and insensitivity to each other that is part of our daily lives.
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us - that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger, and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives. (...)
This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have forgotten how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so used to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for us, how we can use them toward our own ends. The alternatives are stark: either start caring about the fate of everyone on this planet or be prepared for a slippery slope toward violence that will eventually dominate our daily lives.
Tolerance.org forum provides an online space for teachers, parents, guardians, and concerned citizens to discuss events and issues about hate and tolerance.
More Resources for helping children deal with the 9-11 attacks listed at Random Walks
As the shock wears off, keep in mind this feeling of being able to meet people's eyes, of making connections, of shared purpose and trust with your neighbors, and try to find a way for that to happen without the carnage.
We are calling on the political and military leadership of the United States and its allies to seek justice rather than revenge, and in doing so, break the horrible cycle of violence and suffering. During these difficult times, we call for tolerance and for people in the U.S. and around the world to stand firm against the persecution of innocent Arab and Muslim peoples.
We vow to redouble our collective efforts towards social, racial, economic, and environmental justice, civil liberties for all, and nonviolent conflict resolution. Our hearts and thoughts are with the victims and their families. We join people around the world in praying for peace. via random walks
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at an Arab-American community centre in Chicago, a firebomb was hurled at a mosque in Montreal, and in Australia, aggressors threw stones and bottles at a busload of Muslim schoolchildren.
In New York, a 75-year-old drunken man tried to run over a Pakistani woman in a shopping mall parking lot. He then followed her into a shop and threatened to kill her for "destroying my country".
In Illinois 300 protesters, some waving American flags, tried to march on a mosque in this south-west Chicago suburb last night.
Several other incidents were reported in Canada, where five school children with Arabic-sounding names were assaulted in Oakville, Ontario.
In Australia, the school bus attack took place in Brisbane. In Sydney, a Lebanese church was daubed with swastikas and an attempt was made to burn it down.
The White antiracist course of action is a sober, critical watchfulness, first of oneself, then of other White folks, for signs and displays of racism against people of color, especially Arab-Americans. Watch for it. Refuse and resist it. Raise your voice against it: in your community, on your favorite mailing lists and Web discussion forums. Name it for what it is - irrational, jingoistic hatred - and name it forcefully and with dispatch.
...there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind yesterday's firestorms. We will be told about "mindless terrorism'', the "mindless" bit being essential if we are not to realise how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.
Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Last night, I remembered some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learnt what this means.
From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric.
Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
We hear a lot these days about the "secularization" of American society, but one has to ask whether social forces that trim the sails of extremism are really bad for society. A key to our success may lie in the moderation of the mainstream.
Before dismissing these extremists as wholly atypical, it must be remembered that there is no major religious tradition that has not been involved in a holy war. It is a horrible reality–proven again and again in history and around the globe–that a sense of religious truth and righteousness has the power to motivate believers to kill hundreds and thousands of innocent victims. A tremendous force for good, religious fervor also finds its way down darker corridors.
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Rational Fanatics
(This article was originally published in the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Policy. )
...suicide terrorism, both ancient and modern, is not merely the product of religious fervor, Islamic or otherwise. Martha Crenshaw, a leading terrorism scholar at Wesleyan University, argues that the mind-set of a suicide bomber is no different from those of Tibetan self-immolators, Irish political prisoners ready to die in a hunger strike, or dedicated terrorists worldwide who wish to live after an operation but know their chances of survival are negligible. Seen in this light, suicide terrorism loses its demonic uniqueness. It is merely one type of martyrdom venerated by certain cultures or religious traditions but rejected by others who favor different modes of supreme sacrifice. (...)
In fighting suicide bombers, it is important not to succumb to the idea that they are ready to do anything and lose everything. This is the same sort of simplistic reasoning that has fueled the widespread hysteria over terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The perception that terrorists are undeterrable fanatics who are willing to kill millions indiscriminately just to sow fear and chaos belies the reality that they are cold, rational killers who employ violence to achieve specific political objectives.
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Bush, Caught Between Force And Policies By Piero Sansonetti translation of an editorial by Piero Sansonetti, which appeared in Unità on 13 September 2001. liberalartsmafia
What is the right kind of reprisal for the loss of 20 or 30 thousand human lives? Exterminate an equal number of persons somewhere in Africa or Asia? Or to kill ten times as many, half a million, an entire city, two cities, as has been done in the past? In the macabre absurdity of these questions, here is the blind alley where the US military as well as US policymakers find themselves. The US is cornered on one side by the awesome ferocity - by the incredible destruction - of a terrorist attack and on the other by its stale foreign policy - monotonous, inadequate, and sterile - which became outdated by another hundred years in a single day: September 11.(...)
What type of "sensible" military options are available at a time like this? There are none. You don’t have to be a leftist, or a "liberal" or a progressive to understand this. All you need is an ounce of common sense.
William Plaff, a distinguished American commentator wrote a editorial published yesterday in the International Herald Tribune entitled Attacks Show That Political Courage Is the Only Real Defense.
...rather than seek the ideas of young, and possibly female, experts with new ideas, Washington Post op-editors give column inches to Nixon administration Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Nixon speechwriter George Will. The Post editors are apparently time-warped by the soothing sounds the failed patriarchs of the past: Former Nixon advisor Donald Rumsfeld, and former Nixon administration bureaucrat Dick Cheney, our vice president "in charge of the government," as network television reassuringly put it, while President Bush officially went missing when Manhattan's towers crumbled.
Kissinger, Will, Safire, Rumsfeld, Cheney -- the names of middle-aged and well-fed white guys who lost the Vietnam War to precisely the same breed of committed, angry brown men capable of living in deprivation as Osama bin Laden. Their conventional wisdom then, as now, was to attack the state that harbored the network, with American boys sent in to fight a jungle war against an invisible, committed enemy. via random walks
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost certainly lies.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. via Ethel
...as an American citizen, I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Bush Crime Family for having disengaged from the peace process in order to rattle their petty sabers for no other reason than enriching themselves personally. They have given the world the finger, and that action is now bearing
its poisonous fruit.
The aftermath of the attacks did not offer a flattering exhibition of America's leaders. For most of the day the only Bush who looked composed and in control was Laura, who happened to waiting to testify on Capitol Hill. Her husband gave a timid and stilted initial reaction in Sarasota, Florida, then disappeared for an hour before resurfacing Barksdale airbase in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he gave another flaccid address with every appearance of bring on tranquilizers. He was then flown to a bunker in Nebraska, before someone finally had the wit to suggest that the best place for an American president at time of national emergency is the Oval Office. ...
"Freedom," said George Bush in Sarasota in the first sentence of his first reaction, "was attacked this morning by a faceless coward." That properly represents the stupidity and blindness of almost all of the mainstream political commentary.....
Three planes are successfully steered into three of America's most conspicuous buildings and America's response will be to put more money in missile defense as a way of bolstering the economy.
Diverse coverage of tragedy focused on challenging some of the quick assumptions being made by mainstream media toronto star
These dreadful events have revealed the best and worst of the mainstream press. On one hand, the incredible capacity to cover events as they unfold and to relay important information directly to the public; on the other, the incessant regurgitation and repetition of information, the endless talk that, in the end, didn't say much at all.
In stark contrast was the diverse and often excellent coverage of the day's events in the alternative media, almost all of it online and almost all of it focused on analysis, debate and challenging some of the quick assumptions being made.
Terrorism through lens of the alternative press
Diverse coverage of tragedy focused on challenging some of the quick assumptions being made by mainstream media
And now what baby girl? Will we shed the blood of innocent babies so much like you, to demonstrate to the world how precious your life is? You had best hope not baby girl. Because if so you will never be safe. Not now, and not when you are old enough to understand, and fear, and tremble, like I am right now.
We will be signing a death warrant. If not yours, perhaps that of some other baby girl or boy. Maybe one that was being born at 8:42 this morning, while others were dying in mass death. .....
So welcome to the world, dear baby girl. And sleep well tonight. And remain young for as long as you can. For one day, not so far from this day, everything will change again. As it always has.
And rivers of blood will be added to rivers of blood, all of it red and flowing downhill as blood tends to do as it seeks its own level. And mountains of bodies higher than the towers brought down on this day will be stacked: In the name of God. In the name of money. In the name of security. In the name of revenge. In the names of people with names like Osama and George and Ariel or Allah or Jesus.
Or to satisfy our desire for real, real, reality TV. So much so, that eating rats will seem like a day at Disney.
"It is impossible for us to comprehend what we experience as reality without preexisting concepts, that is, theories we carry that mediate how we apprehend the world. These theories necessarily speak to us in categories, enabling us to interrelate various aspects of our perception. Intellectual imperialists, however, permit their categories to settle into stereotypes--fixed categories that operate as rigid, complete, even dogmatic barriers to critical reassessment. Because stereotypes ‘sum up' the world all too completely for the intellectual imperialist--they are experienced as nature's ‘givens' -- people who engage in stereotypical thinking may be especially blind to the degree to which theory mediates their sense of reality. They may fool themselves into believing that they have achieved unmediated access to the world of raw data, attaining ‘mastery' over their knowledge in a way that feels, but is not detached and disinterested." Peter M. Shane, Why Are So Many People So Unhappy? Habits of Thought and Resistance to Diversity in Legal Education, (1990)
God dammit, I'm Canadian
I was doing better today, until a short while ago when I was at a cafe for breakfast. As I stood in line, someone (very loudly and in a very accusing tone) asked: "Are you from Afghanistan??" All eyes turned upon me, burning, each one accompanied with accusatory frowns. Needless to say, I very sheepishly said: "I am not from Afghanistan.", then I quietly left ... with an empty stomach and almost crying.
I felt so small and I now feel so unsafe and uncomfortable. worldnewyork
Be sure to read the comments on this - 81 and counting.
- All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.
What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this bin Laden guy except this one fact - WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA! Don't take my word for it - I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out.
When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commits acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.
We abhor terrorism - unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me.
Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers!
We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.
Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes? In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again.
Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in. It doesn't have to be like this. Found on indymedia.org, an anti-copyright site. From Michael Moore's e-mailing list. It comes with the message, "please distribute." MichaelMoore.com
Our collective, emotional public response is to want vengeance. Who would feel differently? It's hard to say why this happened, but there has been so much bloodshed around the world that the U.S. has been associated with -- often with much higher death tolls than this attack but with fewer cameras present -- that it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the same feelings we have this week -- of fear, vulnerability, rage -- are the feelings that motivated this cowardly attack in the first place. That was territory no media reports dared venture into.
So just how do you punish supposed "cowards" who are obviously willing to die for their cause? Given recent history, the punishment phase will most likely involve bombing the shit out of Libya, Iraq, etc. until we feel good about ourselves again, while Israel carpet bombs any Palestinians it can find. Yep, that'll stop the killing.
this breakneck coverage, this bombardment of suffering and vengeance, this constant presence of media is forcing our country to plow through and act without thought. worst of all, it is mechanizing our humanity. a giant in a frenzy does not have time to mind the houses, the children, the families he rampages through. the pace must be slowed. we must find a way to come to a halt. there is no TRUE quick, drive-thru answer or programmed solution. there must be grieving and understanding. there must be connection and awareness. there must be tolerance and respect. but foremost, we have to spread the concept of compassion amongst one another before the “hunt” destroys us internally, further isolating us from one another. we have to have compassion for ourselves and those around us who do not know any other way. there has to be understanding, we must work towards connection and it will not be easy. all these methods are important but compassion must be NOW before it truly is too late. the lives of innocent men, women and children depend on our ability to do so.
There are a lot of politics now, bombs aching for release in their bays, a lot of men - almost all men - with an inner smile and an outer frown, waiting to push buttons. People on the left and right are figuring it out for us. This will mean the loss of liberties, this will mean a more military state, this is the beginning of a new warrior state, the state which hosts these terrorist organizations is responsible, and on and on.
When I began crying I thought, ``Bury the dead. Bury the dead and tell each one of their mundane American stories, all with the same ending, and make everyone read all 10,000 or 30,000 or whatever, and see if that makes people thirst for more blood, when it's all told out, when they've heard the stories of all the dead, and when they understand that America will go and put the ending on tens of thousands of other stories, in Afghanistan or wherever we decide, then ask if they want that to happen, or if they want to figure out some way around it.'' via randomwalks
While we lack the moral leadership we might have hoped for in our current President... someone who could have convincingly turned our righteous indignation, our blind fury, our grief into something constructive and positive for all of us... we are fortunate that we have not been able to react with our indignation, fury, or grief. For the repercussions of such a wanton act would have been inconceivable.
Now, with time to consider we can act with judgment. We can afford to look into the political grievances our terrorists have against us. We can learn from our failures in foreign policy and move towards multi-lateralism... instead of going alone, we can build friendships with other nations, strengthen our alliances, disengage from entanglements, build trust instead of fear, and reduce our exposure to madness.
This will never be a world free from terrorism for one simple reason: terrorism works. It achieves its objectives. The question we have before us today is how do we proceed. And can we proceed in a way which insures, not endangers, our liberty and our way of life.
In Manhattan, we aren't in a state of war, we're in a state of mourning. And for the whole country to join us right now would be a really good idea.
911: Watching the watchers
A weblog exploring media coverage, citizen response and historical precedent
Geov Parrish WorkingForChange
The broadest goal today of progressives is one that transcends any ideology: we, all of us, as individuals, must become aware and participating citizens of the world, not just the U.S. We have to pay attention beyond our flimsy borders, and we must demand that the U.S. treat others as we would have them treat us. Because no matter who was behind yesterday's attack, it's certain that they felt they were treating us as we have treated others.
Playing into right-wing hate
As the dust settles, radical conservatives have found their enemies
Bill Berkowitz WorkingForChange
The war that the United States has been waging against the nonwhite peoples of the world for over half a century came home yesterday.
Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that may have killed thousands of innocent civilians. It is a crime against humanity of the highest order, and the sympathies of all right-thinking people must be with the families of the victims.
But we must understand what led to it, and draw the right lessons from it, or as Santayana suggested, we may be condemned to relive it.
Let us not pretend that this was the only harvest in history that was never sown.
