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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
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