[cafe-sd] Fwd: Znet Commentary / Michael Albert / Calamitous Perspective / Sept 12

[Alejandra A]

>From: "Michael Albert" <muchaelalbert at hotmail.com>
>To: znetupdates-q at tao.ca
>Subject: Znet Commentary / Michael Albert / Calamitous Perspective / Sept 
>12
>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 03:48:08 +0000
>
>Calamitous Perspective
>By Michael Albert
>
>Sending a commentary on a topic other than today’s horrific events has
>seemed untenable. Addressing today’s events has also seemed untenable. That
>our web and email server has been inaccessible all day, depriving us of
>internet communications and of access to update ZNet hasn’t helped. It 
>seems
>web traffic was so great that it caused problems in Washington State, 
>around
>Seattle, where our servers are located.
>
>A simple chronicle of the day’s events would be superfluous. Known facts 
>are
>displayed on every TV station. Reliable deductions are relatively obvious.
>After routine take-offs four planes were commandeered by terror teams and
>simultaneously flown on dramatically distorted trajectories to demolish
>pre-selected targets. The devastation is not yet known, but is certainly
>horrific. What can one conclude other than that devastating suicidal
>terrorist attacks are eminently doable? Annihilating skyscrapers in the 
>U.S.
>or other developed countries is harder than the U.S. bombing cities in
>targeted nations, but it is evidently far from impossible.
>
>Good-hearted Americans will mourn these innocent and horrible deaths with
>dignity and with respect. Media analysts and politicians, however, will 
>soon
>use pictures of the rubble to seek increased police and military spending
>and greater state interventionary and surveillance powers. They will intone
>that killing civilians is cowardly and warrants swift and merciless
>punishment. They will however ignore having themselves supported the recent
>assault on Yugoslavia that terrorized that country’s civilian population to
>topple its despised government. They will also ignore that the U.S.-led
>embargo of Iraq has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, again
>to destabilize a hated government. Today’s terrorism was horrendously vile.
>It arose in a terror-infected world.
>
>People throughout the third world have long had their destiny held hostage
>by distant rulers. First world diplomats and entrepreneurs year after year
>pursue power and profit imposing nearly unimaginable third world calamity.
>Due to our distance from the victims and the endless mass media obfuscation
>of their plight, we first world citizens fail to realize that when a 
>million
>people starve because a poor country’s energies are commandeered to benefit
>multinational capital, it is murder. But, it is murder, and so third world
>populations have long endured near total dependence on choices made by
>distant authoritative leaders who are callous to their futures.
>
>The same abysmal condition has arrived, to a degree, for populations in
>developed countries. Those who died in today’s attacks also suffered a
>choice made by far away actors callous to the carnage they imposed. First
>world populations may henceforth share not the degrading conditions and
>daily poverty of the third world, but some of the fear of being held 
>hostage
>by others. To try to overcome this condition, but even more to enlarge 
>their
>already grotesquely bloated powers, first world leaders may in coming weeks
>challenge decades of gains in civil and legal rights, trying to turn back
>freedom's clock.
>
>Can anything curtail the carnage of capital, the carnage of terrorism, and
>the carnage of repressive reaction? Our best hope is to win institutional
>change that reduces profit-seeking and political subordination, while also
>reducing desires to lash out with mindless and inhumane terrorism.
>
>In coming weeks we may suffer a kind of celebration in America, a
>celebration of security and of power, a celebration of surreptitious
>information retrieval, a celebration of arms growth, and perhaps of
>assassination, all described as virtuous goals rather than uncivil
>abominations, all touted as if the terror victims will be honored rather
>than defiled by our preparing to entomb still more innocent people around
>the world. Normal good-hearted Americans will weep for the suffering that
>today’s events exacted and hope to create a world in which such hate and
>callousness disappears. But I fear that America’s leaders will cynically
>bulk up their ammo belts while seeking to make ubiquitous their listening
>devices—trying to relegate public freedoms to an incinerator.
>
>In this environment, people of good will must explain as often as necessary
>that terrorism is horrific and insane, but so to is capitalist business as
>usual. And we must not step back from dissent, but must instead work harder
>to oppose all kinds of injustice with massive public demonstrations and
>civil disobedience.
>
>
>
>
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