[969] in peace2
OPED: The War Comes Home (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Thu Sep 13 15:05:02 2001
Message-Id: <200109131905.PAA05524@no-knife.mit.edu>
To: peace-list@MIT.EDU
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Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 15:05:00 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Hi,
I just want to remind everyone that peace-list is
meant for posting announcements, fwds, solicitations, etc. I know
these are unusual times and I feel a bit hesitant to remind
the rules, but I am also afraid of people being overwhelmed
and needing to flee the list. The lists and contacts are
all described at <web.mit.edu/justice/www/email.html> The
list for discussion and debate is peace-makers@mit.edu
A few of us have have been threatened and/or assaulted due
to the drop poster in lobby 7. Please keep an eye on the
poster as you pass the lobby 7 area, it has been torn down
once already. I caught Chris Schnee in the act of defacing
the poster. I have heard of at least one case of profiling of a
student of Indian dissent by a CP. So, I am kind of rambling, but
be careful and look out for each other. And don't lose faith that
each of us can help to promote reason, tolerance and true justice
over hatred, scape-goating, mindless backlash, and state-sponsored
terrorism.
Power to the people and peace to us all,
Aimee
PS a few middle east sources:
Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky, search Chomsky Archives for online articles
search the web for Edward Said.
go to IMC Israel www.indymedia.org select Israel site from there.
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:55:50 -0600
To: koehler@wildrockies.org
From: Matthew Koehler <koehler@wildrockies.org>
Subject: OPED: The War Comes Home
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
Dear Editor,
Please consider printing one of the following opeds about Tuesday's
tragic and indefensible events.
The first is from Robert W. Jensen, Associate Professor at the
University of Texas; and the second from Rahul Mahajan of Peace
Action and the National Network to End the War Against Iraq.
Let us hope that those who committed these unspeakable acts are
brought to justice. Let us also hope and pray that the cycle of
violence and terrorism stops immediately, and that the global
community comes together in forgiveness, peace and love.
Millions of people in American and throughout the world are fearful
that a military response by the U.S. government that results in the
killing of thousands of more innocent lives will only assure that the
tragic cycle of violence continues.
Pray for peace.
- ------------
Stop the Insanity Here (669 words)
By Robert W. Jensen (September 13, 2001)
(Robert W. Jensen is an Associate Professor in the School of
Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He may be contacted
at (512) 471-1990 or rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu)
September 11 was a day of sadness, anger and fear.
Like everyone in the United States and around the world, I shared the
deep sadness at the deaths of thousands.
But as I listened to people around me talk, I realized the anger and
fear I felt were very different, for my primary anger is directed at
U.S. leaders and my fear is not only for the safety of Americans but
for innocents civilians elsewhere.
It should need not be said, but I will say it: The acts of terrorism
that killed civilians in New York and Washington were reprehensible
and indefensible; to defend them would be to abandon one's humanity.
But this act was no more despicable as the massive acts of terrorism
- -- the deliberate killing of civilians for political purposes -- that
the U.S. government has committed. For more than five decades
throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately
targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that
there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism. And it
has supported similar acts of terrorism by client states.
If that statement seems outrageous, ask the people of Vietnam. Or
Cambodia and Laos. Or Indonesia and East Timor. Or Chile. Or Central
America. Or Iraq, or Palestine. The list of countries and peoples who
have felt the violence of this country is long. Vietnamese civilians
bombed by the United States. Timorese civilians killed by a U.S. ally
with U.S.-supplied weapons. Nicaraguan civilians killed by a U.S.
proxy army of terrorists. Iraqi civilians killed by the bombing of an
entire country's infrastructure.
So, my anger on this day is directed not only at individuals who
engineered the September 11 tragedy but at those in the United States
who have engineered attacks on civilians every bit as tragic. That
anger is compounded by hypocritical U.S. officials' talk of their
commitment to higher ideals, as President Bush proclaimed "our
resolve for justice and peace."
Mr. President, the stilled voices of the millions killed in Southeast
Asia, in Central America, in the Middle East as a direct result of
U.S. policy are the evidence of our resolve for justice and peace.
That anger quickly gave way to fear, but not the fear of "where will
the terrorists strike next," which I heard voiced all around me.
Instead, I almost immediately had to face the question: "When will
the United States, without regard for civilian casualties,
retaliate?" I wish the question were, "Will the United States
retaliate?" But if history is a guide, it is a question only of when
and where.
The last time the U.S. responded to terrorism, the attack on its
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, it was innocents in the
Sudan and Afghanistan who were in the way. We were told that time
around they hit only military targets, though the target in the Sudan
turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory.
The talk of retaliation is in the air, most notably in the voices of
some of the national-security "experts" and officials who seem hungry
for retaliation.
Let us not forget that a military response will kill people, and if
the pattern of past U.S. actions holds, it will kill innocents.
Innocent people, just like the ones in the towers in New York and the
ones on the airplanes that were hijacked. To borrow from President
Bush, "mother and fathers, friends and neighbors" will surely die in
a massive response.
If we are truly going to claim to be decent people, our tears must
flow not only for those of our own country. People are people, and
grief that is limited to those within a specific political boundary
denies the humanity of others.
And if we are to be decent people, we all must demand of our
government -- the government that a great man of peace, Martin Luther
King Jr., once described as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world" -- that the insanity stop here.
# # #
THE WAR COMES HOME (739 words)
By Rahul Mahajan (September 13, 2001)
(Rahul Mahajan is an antiwar activist from Austin, Texas. He serves
on the National Board of Peace Action (www.peace-action.org) and the
Coordinating Committee of the National Network to End the War Against
Iraq (www.endthewar.org). He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca or
512-477-5902.)
The war that the United States has been waging against the nonwhite
peoples of the world for over half a century came home on Tuesday,
September 11.
Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that has
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.
The main practitioner of attacks that either deliberately target
civilians or are so indiscriminate that it makes no difference, is no
shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist, but our own government.
Where was the justified rage of commentators, analysts, and talking
heads when the United States attacked civilians across Iraq during
the Gulf War, referring to Basra, a city of 800,000, as a "military
target?" When they deliberately destroyed Iraq's water treatment
systems, and for ten years carefully rationed the chlorine needed to
treat the water and the medicines needed to fight an explosion of
water-borne disease, while over 1 million Iraqi civilians died?
Where was it when the United States invaded Panama, in blatant
violation of international law, shelled a lower-class neighborhood of
Panama City for hours, broadcasting demands for surrender in English,
not Spanish, and then bulldozed many of the estimated four thousand
(mostly civilian) dead into unmarked mass graves?
Or during Guatemala's genocidal dirty war against the indigenous
Mayan population, inaugurated after a CIA-sponsored military coup in
1954, supported by the United States through the 1980's, which killed
a quarter of a million people? When the United States financed an
army of thugs to rape, torture, and murder innocent peasants in
Nicaragua?
When NATO destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Serbia? When, on
hundreds of occasions since December 1998, U.S. planes dropped bombs
on Iraq?
None of these victimizations of innocent people in other countries by
our government justifies the victimization of innocent Americans by
any foreign agency (and we must remember that there is yet no
conclusive evidence about who committed these atrocities). But they
do help to explain the anger many people feel against the United
States, and the symbols of its power.
Everybody (so it seems) is beating the drums of war, in a way not
seen since Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush, speaking to the nation
yesterday, said "We will make no distinction between the terrorists
who committed these attacks and those who harbor them," suggesting
that retaliation will not only be swift and severe but
indiscriminate, that it will target the innocent citizens of the
country from which the perpetrators happened to plan this attack.
Our imperial fantasies of being able to destroy entire countries
without incurring a single American casualty, of being able to
antagonize half the world and simultaneously assure complete safety,
have crumbled when brought into contact with reality. We must find a
different way, but, unfortunately, most Americans seem to have
decided that what we really need is more of a failed and untenable
policy.
In this Orwellian world we have lived in for almost six decades, we
have internalized the debasement of language so thoroughly that we
rarely question it. We have been told, and have thought, that our
"national security" is imperiled by Cubans' desire to live free of
external domination, by anything that threatens U.S. corporate
profits, that it is rests on the ability of our government and our
corporations to control the rest of the world.
Now, confronted with the first significant threat to real national
security in a long time, we must finally see that our security is not
enhanced by military aggression against other countries, by buildup
of expensive military equipment that could not possibly have availed
against an attack like this, or by attempts at total economic
domination of the Third World.
Massive retaliation will just keep us locked in a cycle of violence.
We have come to the sharp limits of the security that can come from
the boot on the neck, and must, instead, try what can come from the
open hand.
Mutual disarmament and peace based on global justice are the only
way. Let us be first in peace as we have, for so long now, been first
in war.
# # #
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