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December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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December 17,
2001
Who Opposes the War?
By C.G. Estabrook
When we look back at the great state crimes of
the last century -- German militarism, Soviet authoritarianism,
American imperialism -- we comfort ourselves by descrying in
each case dissident movements that bore the stifled conscience
of humanity. But in the current circumstances, haven't the critics
of what we're told is the first phase of the "War on Terrorism"
been proven wrong? Hasn't the success of the US attack on Afghanistan
silenced all objections to it? Won't the anti-war movement now
go away?
Well, no -- to all three questions. Opponents
of the war will not go away, even as the media salivate over
which country will be the next beneficiary of America's cleansing
blood-letting. Somalia? Iraq? The Philippines? Iran? Terrorists
are everywhere, it seems: there is opposition around the globe
to the US and the business culture it spreads. The media is avid
to ferret them out, hanging on every word from Pentagon press
releases, but they don't seem to be able to see anti-war actions
and demonstrations, at home or abroad.
There has of course been success of a
sort in the Afghan phase of the new crusade: Professor Marc Herold
of the University of New Hampshire, who has been compiling the
data from a variety of international sources, says that by the
second week of December the American military had killed at least
as many civilians in Afghanistan as died in New York on September
11. We now have as much innocent blood on our hands as Osama
bin Laden may have on his.
"But," the defenders of the
war cry, "the critics of the war claimed that the bombing
would cause a famine that would kill millions of people! And,
ha ha, that hasn't happened! The ordinary sort of famine in a
drought-stricken and impoverished country is just going to be
somewhat worse than usual, as the result of American actions
-- so the pacifists were wrong!" But what the critics of
the war condemned was the undoubted willingness of the Rumsfelds
and Bushes to have millions of Afghans starve, if that's what
was required to control Afghanistan. They'd already taken steps
in that direction.
Domestically, the anti-war movement has
had to oppose the administration's invasion of civil liberties.
The excesses of Ashcroft's Department of Justice (as ill-named
these days as Rumsfeld's Department of Defense) bear comparison
to the "Red scares" that followed both World Wars.
Called the Palmer Raids (from President Wilson's Attorney General)
after World War I and McCarthyism (from the dipso junior senator
from Wisconsin) after World War II, both were major government
programs, including Republican and Democrat administrations,
that should not be shrunk down to the names of two buffoons.
They were "rectification campaigns," the real enemies
of which were not the suspected radicals and terrorists whom
they were ostensibly directed against, but the general populace
of the US, amongst whom dangerous ideas of social reform and
the restraint of corporations had gotten loose before, during,
and after the war years.
The war party in Washington is quite
conscious that they are conducting a public relations campaign
directed to the American people. As they were trumpeting the
War on Terrorism, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked what victory
would consist of; he replied that victory would consist of convincing
the American people that it would be a long war. In mid-November
the vice-president, emerging from his secret cave, said that
"after the Afghanistan campaign is over, America could use
military action in a second wave of attacks directed against
states which harbor terrorists ... up to 50 states could be targeted
for a range of action, from financial and diplomatic to military..."
September 11 has given license to an
orgy of killing by the US, a common enough activity predicted
by the Irish socialist James Connolly, whom the British executed
in 1916. "One great source of the strength of the ruling
class," he wrote, "has ever been their willingness
to kill in defense of their power and privileges. Let their power
be once attacked either by foreign foes or by domestic revolutionaries,
and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill and kill and kill.
The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small
value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked
contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionaries to shed blood."
Their willingness to shed blood on September
11 calls into question the revolutionary nature of the (CIA-founded)
terror networks. But in the bloody history of Western imperialism,
September 11 meant that "now, for the first time, the guns
have been pointed in the opposite direction," as Noam Chomsky
has said. The crimes of that day are being more than equaled
by US crimes now in progress -- to say nothing of the long train
of abuses stretching back literally centuries. The only way that
they can be lessened is for a vigorous and honest US anti-war
movement to call the country's vicious and vapid leaders to a
halt -- as it has before.
Carl Estabrook
teaches at the University of Illinois and is the host of News
From Neptune, a weekly radio show on politics and the media.
He writes a regular column for CounterPunch.
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