queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2001-09-28 01:41 am
queerbychoice) wrote2001-09-28 01:41 am
"If the American Population Had the Slightest Idea of What Is Being Done [to Afghan Civilians] in Th
Thanks to Frank Aqueno for this great link:
Noam Chomsky on terrorism - interview conducted September 19, 2001
"Killing Civilians: Behind the Reassuring Words" by Norman Solomon
Noam Chomsky on terrorism - interview conducted September 19, 2001
"The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand. I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled."Please Note: The above comments are already outdated: Pakistan has now indeed obediently withdrawn all such aid. The World Food Program run by the United Nations estimates that 5.5 million people in Afghanistan (which is one quarter of Afghanistan's entire population) will starve to death by the end of this winter unless that humanitarian aid is restored to them.- Noam Chomsky
"Killing Civilians: Behind the Reassuring Words" by Norman Solomon
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what do you think of this?
Sent by a friend to me:
The School for Violence (http://www.laweekly.com/ink/01/45/cover-knode.shtml)
particularly:
So whats your solution to terrorism? How do we fight it?
Theres a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy and they have to be simultaneous. In the short term, Im afraid that military response against terrorist bases in nations that fund and support terrorism is necessary.
Youve shocked me. The New Age community, the Dalai Lama, are calling for peace and love. I associate you with them philosophically.
The pure peace and love response is the flip side of the kill and hate response. Neither is realistic, and both ignore the psychosocial dynamics of terrorism weve been talking about.But violence only breeds violence, you said it yourself.
If youve got a psychopath lunging at you with a knife, thats not the time to talk about peace and love. Its the time to defend yourself to save your life. The time to talk about peace and love, and to put them into action, is before that person becomes a psychopath. If were to effectively address the festering problems that breed terrorism, we have to deal with the foundations of violence. We have to think of the long term. Any war on terrorism is doomed to fail, just like the war on drugs, unless we address the deepest historical, cultural, social, economic, political and psychic forces that produce terrorism. This is urgent in our high-technology age.
help!!!
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This is all so sad, it just breaks my heart, all the pain and suffering in this world. I saw the video on CNN or something today showing Afghanistan women getting shot in the head and I think it's because they were victims of rape. What is wrong with this world?
oLd News!
See? (http://www.msnbc.com/news/630181.asp?0cb=-61724124)
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One possibility that comes to mind is that the U.S. didn't really back away from anything but simply doesn't have the necessary authority over the U.N. to stop them from sending food? I know that Pakistan's government had agreed to stop sending food, but maybe the U.N. had never agreed to it in the first place, so now the U.N. has just taken over sending all food in, and Pakistan's government is just sitting on the sidelines watching.
But like I said, I don't know exactly what's going on with that; the news reports have been awfully spotty.
Re: oLd News!
Re: what do you think of this?
If youve got a psychopath lunging at you with a knife, that is indeed the time to defend yourself, with any degree of violence necessary to save your life. I support self-defense. But war is a very different issue. If we're going to try to catch the individual people who are actually responsible for committing acts of terrorism, then what we need is highly specialized intelligence agents to track them down one by one, and prosecute them under the international crime laws. But when the U.S. government is talking about WAR and bringing in random ignorant 18 year old soldiers, then they're not trying to track down the individual people who are actually responsible for committing acts of terrorism. Random ignorant 18 year old boys off the street are not going to have the skills to track down and identify and collect evidence against terrorists - so anytime they bring in those army soldiers, what they're doing isn't at all equivalent to grabbing a knife away from a lunging psychopath and stabbing the psychopath with it. Instead, what they're doing is equivalent to deciding that after the psychopath runs off into the crowd and escapes, oh, I have a bright idea - let's just drop a great big bomb on this entire city and kill everybody in it!
We have good reason to believe that there are terrorists in Afghanistan, yes. But we also have good reason to believe that some of the terrorists' collaborators are still running around right here in the U.S. Obviously though, we'd never dream of deciding to bomb American cities to make sure we kill off those terrorists lurking in them - because that would kill a whole lot of innocent people, which is precisely what we're supposedly trying to stop people from doing.
Well, there are millions and millions of innocent people in Afghanistan too, and it's nothing but sheer racism for us to be any less horrified by the idea of killing those innocent people than we are by killing the innocent people who happen to live in America instead.
The article you quoted states:
"The time to talk about peace and love, and to put them into action, is before that person becomes a psychopath. If were to effectively address the festering problems that breed terrorism, we have to deal with the foundations of violence. We have to think of the long term."
It should be obvious to anyone by now what effect the terrorist attacks have had on American citizens' willingness to kill innocent people in foreign countries. The fact that innocent people in our country have died has made the vast majority of Americans a whole lot more eager to start killing innocent people in Afghanistan. But having learned this unfortunate fact about human nature, surely we should be smart enough to understand that if we do kill innocent people in Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan are likely to react in very much the same way as Americans have: a whole lot more of them will become a lot more eager to lash out at the country that's killing their own family members, so then far more people in Afghanistan will be inspired to become anti-American terrorists.
Re:
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Bush Administration to Join U.N. Effort to Raise $584 Million for Refugees (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/international/28DIPL.html?searchpv=past7days)
Re: what do you think?
I'm not a military strategist, security specialist or war-monger. But one of our government's arguments that makes sense to me is this: since terrorists work by surprise and learn from their mistakes and adjust to our adjustments to them, since there is no way to defend every possible target from every imaginable threat at every moment, the only real defense against terrorists is as they say in football a good offense. This might mean murdering prospective mass-murders before they can act. What say you? Is this brand of concentrated pre-emptive self-defense war?
If we're going to try to catch the individual people who are actually responsible for committing acts of terrorism, then what we need is highly specialized intelligence agents to track them down one by one, and prosecute them under the international crime laws.
To follow up on my question above. It's as if you know that a psychopath down the block from you, who killed someone last week is going to the knife store tomorrow. Why not go to the gun store tonight and come home and take him out? But seriously, is pre-emptive self-defense--which I consider the best tactic available to fight terrorists--just?
Just about everyone agrees we need better intelligence--human spies to get close to these organizations. But most people have no understanding of how insular and difficult to penetrate these terrorist groups are. I'm not sure that our intelligence capability will be closer to the heart of any of these groups five years from know than they are now. Because of this, should we wait around spying on them or collecting evidence or should we kill them?
Attacking any states that sponsor, harbor, tolerate terrorists makes some sense to me. We have to be careful about how and when and take advantage of whatever weapons we have (from economic sanctions to covert assassinations). It seems to me that the one weak spot a so-called non-state entity like Bin Laden and Al Quaeda has is this: they need a place to sleep. There are so many benefits to having no country, no responsibility, no targets, nothing to lose. But even a loose organization with no home address is made up of people who need to put down their heads and rest at night. If we make the stakes of allowing this to occur in any nation on earth ludicrously high, there will be no rest whatsoever for the terrorists.
Well, there are millions and millions of innocent people in Afghanistan too, and it's nothing but sheer racism for us to be any less horrified by the idea of killing those innocent people than we are by killing the innocent people who happen to live in America instead.
Racism? That's what Afghan tribes and warlords do to each other. All the rainbow coalition of bomb'em now Americans of whom you speak are much more ethnically diverse and tolerant than you could ever find in
Afghanistan. Timeless tribal/ethnic wars are what makes that land so hard to stabilize and understand. Racism is what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia. America sucks and could be so much better in so many ways and Rodney King and Cincinatti and all that, but racism as a reason for wanting to kill Afghanis? I'll accept ignorance, but not racism. As I'm sure you're aware: Most muslims are not Arabs. No Afghanis are Arab. Racism for killing turban-clad sheiks at convenience stores, perhaps, but not for wanting to bomb Afghanistan.
The big scary problem of terrorism in this age of mass destruction is that it takes only one person. A tyranny of one. How ridiculous and how thoroughly undemocratic. As awful as he was, Hitler had to have the charisma to snow an entire nation before he did his evil. Bin Laden has only to fool a few hundred, like David Koresh but with an atom bomb. How stupid that humanity has come to this. I pine for the days when terrorists wanted something. Instead of just an end to everything.
Re: what do you think?
Look here, don't scare me like that. I have enough lunatics on the planet to deal with already without having to add you to the list. Grab hold of your sanity and hold on tight and don't let go.
"It's as if you know that a psychopath down the block from you, who killed someone last week is going to the knife store tomorrow. Why not go to the gun store tonight and come home and take him out?"
If you know he killed someone last week, then there are crime laws already in place that will allow us to lock him up where he won't kill anybody else. That's perfectly standard criminal procedure.
"I'm not sure that our intelligence capability will be closer to the heart of any of these groups five years from know than they are now. Because of this, should we wait around spying on them or collecting evidence or should we kill them?"
Uh, that would be committing mass-murder of innocent people ourselves, and would make us no better than the terrorists who killed innocent Americans. If you start disregarding the need for evidence and just go around killing any old person who you get it into your head that because they belong to some particular group like "Afghan citizens" might be wanting to kill you, then next thing you know the U.S. government will get it into their heads that all queers are likely terrorists too and they'll start killing us without any evidence too.
"Attacking any states that sponsor, harbor, tolerate terrorists makes some sense to me."
There is no country I know of anywhere that doesn't sponsor, harbor, or tolerate terrorists. It's been well known for ages that many members of the Irish Republican Army who are wanted in the U.K. for terrorism have found refuge in New York City and continue to fund the IRA from across the Atlantic. As a British acquaintance of mine put it, if Tony Blair really took Bush's rhetoric about squashing any states that sponsor, harbor, or tolerate terrorists seriously, then he should finish off the job that the terrorists did on New York City, and flatten the entire state of New York to make sure all the IRA fugitives are dead.
"All the rainbow coalition of bomb'em now Americans of whom you speak are much more ethnically diverse and tolerant than you could ever find in Afghanistan."
Uh, excuse me, but the fact that a population is ethnically diverse within itself does not make them incapable of being racist against a separate population. Of course, the hatred I'm talking about is really based on geographic location rather than strictly on race, so the most accurate word would be "nationalism," but people seem to be a bit slow to grasp how horrific nationalistic prejudice is, so I use the word racism to drive home how similar it is. To place a lesser value on the lives of the innocent people living in Afghanistan, en masse, than on the lives of Americans is IN NO WAY ONE SINGLE JOT LESS DISGUSTING, HORRIFIC, AND TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE than placing a lesser value on the lives of Black people than on the lives of White people. The country where a person lives is in no way any fairer basis for judging a person's "value" than the color of their skin.
Re: what do you think?
Uh, you've been watching way too much mainstream American media propaganda. Osama bin Laden has state perfectly clearly thousands of times exactly what he wants: he wants the American armed forces out of the Middle East, where the American government has been bombing Iraq continuously for the past decade; where the American military has been stationed in Saudi Arabia for ten years helping support an unpopular and extremely oppressive regime against the will of most of the Saudi population; where the American government has been giving money and weapons to both sides of numerous opposing forces for decades and encouraging wars just because the more divided the Middle Eastern governments are from one another, the easier it is for the american government to manipulate one or another of them into selling us oil cheaper; and where American-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq for the past decade have caused one and a half million innocent Iraqi civilians, most of them children, to starve to death, all because of the actions of an Iraqi government which was never very popular in the first place and which originally came to power only because the U.S. funded Saddam Hussein and supported him during the Cold War.
Bin Laden has been perfectly clear for years about what he wants. What you need to ask yourself now is what we want: why the American government doesn't just stop funding and encouraging wars in the Middle East like bin Laden wants, and whether it's worth it to you to have 6,000+ American civilians killed, plus several million innocent civilians throughout the Middle East whose deaths over the past decade were hardly even noticed or commented on by the American media, all in order to keep the price of your oil down. Because that, you need to understand, is precisely the trade-off the American government is making. Lowering oil prices is first priority; saving lives is second.
Re: what do you think?
If you know he killed someone last week, then there are crime laws already in place that will allow us to lock him up where he won't kill anybody else. That's perfectly standard criminal procedure.
If it were as easy as catching the people and putting them on trial, if that would eliminate the threat of future terrorism, that would be fine with me. Is it really a deterrent for people who are looking forward to an eternity in paradise?
My hypothetical is not stretching in the way I meant it to. What I am trying to convey is a sense of emergency. Is there time for our drawn-out form of criminal justice? Just like there was no time for everyone to get out of those buildings. Carpet bombing innocent ethnically diverse yet internally racist foreign nationals won't do anything. But I have no problem with precise preemptive assassinations of suspected terrorists. The burden of proof has to be different in a war. To wait for the terrorists to bring the battle to us again is to lose. Too late.
If you start disregarding the need for evidence and just go around killing any old person who you get it into your head that because they belong to
some particular group like "Afghan citizens" might be wanting to kill you, then next thing you know the U.S. government will get it into their heads
that all queers are likely terrorists too and they'll start killing us without any evidence too.
Hitler and Bin Laden hate queers way more than our government? Our government made terrible mistakes in the past but not without reason. We had reasons (not good reasons) for the Japanese internment. It was a shameful period, but there were reasons. It was an overreaction that won't be repeated today. If queers had led the attacks then I would have no problem with queer profiling. At some point in this specific case PC positions on racial profiling become useless. It is useless to scream "racial profiling!" just because we're looking for mostly Arabs and Muslims. Show me White, Japanese, Queer, Jewish members of Al Quaida and I'll gladly sign on to profiling them as well.
If you feel so deeply for the terrorists and the radical Islamists that support them, go try to be queer in their countries. Try to be a woman.
continued...
Re: what do you think?
tolerate terrorists seriously, then he should finish off the job that the terrorists did on New York City, and flatten the entire state of New York to make sure all the IRA fugitives are dead...
If you can prove to me that U.S. government officials knowingly harbor and support the IRA, then go ahead and let Britain bomb us. Your example is clever but the comparison is totally outrageous. Does the IRA pay for our government? Bin Laden's made plenty of payments to the Taliban. They know where he is. They won't give him up. IRA? You think our FBI just lets them go? That we're not after all of them as well? That's silly.
If you mean nationalism, not racism, say it and say it loud. That was an important clarification for me. I've been frustrated by all the calls of racism from the pacifist community. But nationalistic prejudice is a good clarification and I thank you for it.
Btw, I have no bone to pick with the innocent people of Afghanistan. Only with their rulers who beat them down and let Osama play with chemical weapons in their backyard.
Osama bin Laden has state perfectly clearly thousands of times exactly what he wants:
Stating irritants is different from having negotiable demands. Perhaps you've been reading and listening to too much radical media. The radical media would like us to flagellate ourselves for our country's past mistakes without really learning from them and on top of that make us feel like we deserved this attack.
Bin Laden doesn't simply want any single one of what you call demands (usually demands are made publicly, formally and can not be confused with statements of opinion) and what I call excuses for terror. If we solved all these problems tomorrow, he wouldn't know what to do. Not because he would
do no more terror. But because he'd have to dream up new concrete grievances to justify his total hatred for the USA.
Another clear sign that Bin Laden is not interested in attaining any concrete goals is that he has never claimed responsibility for any of the attacks, including those for which he has been legally indicted in the US according to your dear standards of jurisprudence. People who want actual things have phone numbers and addresses and that take responsibility for what they've done. The PLO has phone numbers and web pages. If Bin Laden wants something actual, why doesn't he?
If Bin Laden wants anything it is more abstract and more horrible than any of his so-called demands. He wants an end to the West. It couldn't be more clear. He's waiting for WW III to erupt from one wrong move on any front. He doesn't want to conquer Europe or America like Hitler. He just wants us
to destroy ourselves and/or allow ourselves to be destroyed by his scary fairytale of a pan-Islamic superstate. This is why we have to be so careful
about who we kill. But make no mistake. We have to be willing to kill and die for this. Our enemies certainly are.
I'm sorry for those Iraqi deaths. Maybe we could have saved those lives by killing Saddam ten years ago.
So what's your solution? No oil? No stability in these governments? What's your solution?
(I'm sorry if I seem angry or virulent in my responses. I'm just so desperate for an answer and I appreciate your willingness to debate this with me.)
Re: what do you think?
I believe that in a time of emergency, it is more important than ever to do the right thing and not rush into making mistakes. The terrorists do want specific things from us, notably for our government to stop killing innocent people in the Middle East, and if we just kill more innocent people and we don't start making a reasonable effort to address those issues, then we are extremely likely to inspire more people to become terrorists.
"If queers had led the attacks then I would have no problem with queer profiling."
I would. Let me put it this way: a few days ago I was reading an interview, it was an old interview from the early '90s and it was in the book Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings by Gore Vidal. Anyway, Larry Kramer (founder of ACT UP and author of the excellent novel Faggots) was interviewing Gore Vidal, and Gore Vidal asked him at one point in the interview, "Why don't you just fuck Bush and give him AIDS, and say 'This will happen to the next President and the next and the next, until the government starts funding AIDS research sufficiently?'"
Larry Kramer answered in a way that shocked me. He said something like this (and I can give you the exact words if you want when I get home and have the book in front of me): "Don't think that we haven't thought . . . Bush has a nephew at the University of Pennsylvania. We've talked around some ideas like that."
You understand what this means, yes? Larry Kramer was threatening terrorist acts against an innocent person, simply because the innocent person happened to be the nephew of President Bush the First. Well, I don't support that. And yet, I do support everything that I've ever heard of ACT UP actually having put into effect, and I've been known to say very good things about ACT UP (and even Larry Kramer himself - he's an excellent novelist, at least) many times. Furthermore, my best friend was an active member of ACT UP New York for years, and met and talked to Larry Kramer in person there many times. So my best friend was a member of an activist organization whose leaders, or some of them anyway, were contemplating terrorist acts against innocent people.
If the U.S. government followed the same advice with ACT UP members that you seem to be recommending in regard to Middle Eastern "suspected" terrorists who we don't have any solid evidence against, then my best friend could be killed. But you better believe I don't feel that would constitute "justice." My best friend would never kill anyone; he simply shared the same concerns as Larry Kramer, without wanting to resort to such violent methods of achieving them.
And most importantly, perhaps: if any government were to execute my best friend, I'd not only be furious - I'd start wanting to kill some people in that government myself, and I'd be willing to die for that cause, just like the suicidal hijackers were. Of course, I don't believe killing innocent people could ever be my style, but you see the direction it all leads, and some people obviously, unfortunately, have much looser definitions of "innocent" than I do.
Re: what do you think?
The issues that make people angry at us are completely different from specific negotiable demands or grievances. I'm not sure you understand my point. I have never disagreed with you about the fact that certain U.S. foreign policy conundrums have righteously angered and/or been manipulated to anger a slew of Middle Easterners. The problem with terrorism, especially this new brand, is that there are no actual concrete demands.
Not even the pretext of negotiation or responsibility. Not like the terrorism of old, whence hijackers would state "free our 57 jailed comrades!" and nation states would say "we need more time" while planning a commando raid. Nope. The new-style terrorists have focused talking points of hatred that they use to incite new recruits and spice up their home videos, but when it comes to anything we could actually do to make them stop--no dice. In their minds we've already gone way to far. There's nothing left but to destroy the infidel West entirely. From within. Playing all our strengths against us in asymmetrical war with no stated goals and no responsibility. Demoralizing us in a death of a thousand cuts.
The real Pandora's box of terrorism is a never-ending cycle of low intensity conflict. Terrorist groups that once had stated goals, such as Hamas and Hezbollah now exist only to disrupt the possibility of any actual resolution to their problems. The extremism feeds on itself, the dug in warriors don't know how to think or act outside of their box. What I'm trying to say is this: even terrorist groups that begin believing that they seek specific goals inevitably lose site of them and become entrenched in a hate so all-encompassing that they will not settle for anything less than the absolute eradication of their enemy from the face of the earth. Bin Laden has preemptively skipped the stage of faux demands. Unfortunatley, it seems, he's advanced the art of terror in many ways.