[992] in peace2
Fwd: FW: "Violence Doesn't Work" (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Rios)
Mon Sep 17 11:27:10 2001
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Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 11:27:49 -0400
To: eit@tep.org, peace-list@mit.edu
From: Marc Rios <mrios@MIT.EDU>
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>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 13:08:32 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Jeff Machota <jmachota@shout.net>
>To: prc-core <prc-core@prairienet.org>
>Subject: FW: "Violence Doesn't Work" (fwd)
>
>September 14, 2001
>
>Howard Zinn: "Violence Doesn't Work"
>
>The images on television have been heartbreaking.
>
>People on fire leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up. People in
>panic and fear racing from the scene in clouds of dust and smoke.
>
>We knew that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon
>dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the terror among the
>passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, the fire,
>the end. Those scenes horrified and sickened me.
>
>Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and
>sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment.
>
>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.
>
>We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea that this
>would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent people. But what do we
>do
>with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly
>just
>to show how tough we are? "We shall make no distinction," the President
>proclaimed, "between terrorists and countries that harbor terrorists." Will
>we
>now bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in
>the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate, to "make no distinction"? Will
>we
>then be committing terrorism in order to "send a message" to terrorists?
>
>We have done that before. 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?
>
>Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the Israeli
>government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't work.
>
>And innocent people die on both sides.
>
>Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need to think
>about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the
>victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out
>terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs,on peasant
>villages. In Latin America, where we supported dictators and death squads in
>Chile and El Salvador and other countries. In Iraq, where a million people
>have died as a result of our economic sanctions, And, perhaps most important
>for understanding the current situation, in the occupied territories of the
>West Bank and Gaza, where a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel
>military occupation, while our government supplies Israel with high-tech
>weapons.
>
>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.
>
>We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not
>given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every
>ocean, have not given us security. Land mines and a "missile defense shield"
>will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the world. We
>need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their
>own people. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is
>conjured up by the politicians of the media, because war in our time is
>always
>indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is
>terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
>
>Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for guns,
>planes,
>bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people - for free medical care
>for everyone, education and housing guaranteed decent wages and a clean
>environment for all. We can not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some
>of our political leaders are demanding, but only by expanding them.
>
>We should take our example not from our military and political leaders
>shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and nurses and medical
>students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst
>of
>mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance
>but
>compassion.
>
>-
>Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive.
>
>The Progressive magazine
>http://www.progressive.org
