Ang mga gapos na ipinataw sa kalayaan sa tahanan ay hindi kailanman natanggal sa mga sandata na ibinigay para sa pagtatanggol laban sa mga tunay, nagpapanggap, o haka-haka na mga panganib sa ibang bansa.
- James Madison, 1799
The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
– Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century (September 2000)
Today’s terror attacks were major atrocities…that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt.The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc.It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom…In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains…The prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.
– Noam Chomsky, September 11th, 2001
Think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities?’
– Condaleeza Rice, White House National Security Adviser, sa United States National Security Council, Setyembre 12, 2001.
Through the tears of sadness, I see an opportunity.
– George W. Bush, Setyembre 14, 2001
My initial, week-one response to 9-11 combined shock, cynicism, and naiveté. Shock: at the sheer carnage, the horrifying audacity of zealots ready to die and kill en masse, and the grisly spectacle of jetliners full of human beings exploding into flames and the twin towers disintegrating.Cynicism: in response to government and media authorities’ claim of surprise at the occurrence of a major terror attack on the United States from the Arab world and especially at official claim that the attacks were motivated by hatred of the supposedly freedom-loving ‘American way of life.’Within ten days of the attacks, president Bush told the US Congress that the enemies of the US were ‘the enemies of freedom.’Americans are asking, ‘ he noted ‘ ‘why do they hate us?’ They hate,’ Bush answered, ‘our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote’ – denied tens of thousands of illegally disenfranchised African-Americans in Florida in the pivotal 2000 presidential election, more than enough to swing the outcome to Bush – ‘and assemble and disagree with each other.’
According to Chicago Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman one day after the attacks, ‘America’ had ‘become a target’ because foreign tyrants and terrorists were threatened by and jealous of our superior, democratic ‘way of life.’By Chapman’s estimation, the core ingredients of that glorious American way were ‘prosperity,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘openness,’ individualism, and ‘love of freedom’ for ‘ordinary people.’
Sa totoo lang, walang nakakagulat tungkol sa pag-atake ng mga zealots ng Arab background sa Washington DC at New York City. Ang mga motibo sa likod ng pag-atake ay maliit kung anumang kinalaman sa damdamin ng mga militanteng Muslim na terorista tungkol sa kalikasan ng panloob na lipunan ng America. Ang ikinabahala nila at sa katunayan ng maraming Arabo tungkol sa Amerika ay ang panlabas na patakaran ng Estados Unidos sa loob at paligid ng pangunahing lugar ng pag-aalala at ambisyon ng mga salarin – ang Gitnang Silangan mismo. Kung si bin-Laden at ang kanyang mga tagasunod at mga katulad ay hinimok ng pagkamuhi sa kalayaan at demokrasya ng Amerika, bakit sila ay matatag na nasa panig ng US noong huling bahagi ng dekada 1980, kung ang Amerika ay nagtamasa ng higit na kalayaan sa tahanan at demokrasya kaysa sa tag-araw ng 2001 ?
The answer, of course, was American foreign policy.The US in the Reagan era funded extremist Islam as part of its late-Cold War campaign the ‘evil’ Soviet Union.And if bin-Laden and the rest were so angry at the internal freedom and democracy of ‘infidel’ Western nations, then why were Canada, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland (to name a few non-Islamic democratic states) right to be much less worried about major attacks from al Qaeda? These countries had as much and possibly more (particularly if you consider socioeconomic security and removal from the threat of poverty to be key components of modern liberty) internal freedom and democracy than the US. What they didn’t have was America’s terrible terrorist record of destructive intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere.
More cynicism, in response to the ease, rapidity and confidence with which Bush and his advisors, collaborators, and enablers in government and media identified ‘us’ (Americans) with ‘good’ and ‘them’ with ‘evil.’ Sadly, the terror attacks were all-too morally consistent with a long and bloody record of US behavior and policy.As Arundhati Roy has noted, ‘the US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land.Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle.’Further:
‘In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. ‘goodness’ peaked during World War II.Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away…Drowned out in by the noisy hosannas is [America’s] most barbaric, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on the civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The war was nearly over.The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come were not a threat to world peace.They were civilians.Just as the victims of the World Trade Center bombings were civilians.Just as the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Iraq because of US-led sanctions are civilians….Since the Second World War, the United States has been war with or attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.This list should also include the U.S. government’s covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed.It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.It should include America’s role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which over one million people were killed.It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly and indirectly to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.’
Back in the imperial ‘homeland,’ Chapman’s outraged formulation ignored rampant poverty, authoritarianism, class rule, powerlessness, racial inequality, mass incarceration, depression, oppression, and misery.It evaded the epidemic of non-freedom in a savagely unequal and plutocratic land, where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth and a possibly higher percentage of its politicians and policymakers. It equally ignored related connections between the suffering experienced by others, American policies, and America’s hyper-consumerist, ultimately ecocidal ‘way of life.’
The naivete came in the form of my initial hope that the September 11th terror attacks would provide an opportunity for Americans to honestly confront our domestic and related foreign policy records and to look at our selves (I’ll use first person plural since I am a US citizen) and the world in ways that challenged the selective vision of conventional American wisdom.A chance, perhaps, to stand down our entrenched psychic and ideological defenses, to understand how and why we cause ourselves and others pain, why millions across the world resent us (many to the point where they could applaud 9/11) and how we might stop the vicious circle of injury at home and abroad. Nine-eleven, I wanted to believe, was a chance to face our inner demons and choose sanity, to lose our self-absorbed innocence in ways that might permit us to lose our manufactured innocence about how much harm our policy makers and ‘democratic American System, capitalism’ (as Tom Brokaw described the dominant US system of socioeconomic management and hierarchy on 9/11) have been causing others, and to drop our longstanding sense of special historical superiority to the rest of the world.
Habang pinapanood ang nakakagulat na drama, walang komersyal, para sa mga oras at araw sa pagtatapos, naisip ko na kumikinang ako ng isang pagkakataon para sa positibong pag-aaral at demokratikong pagbabago. Siguro, naisip ko, ang mga itim na ulap ng trahedya sa New York, Pennsylvania, at Washington at sa mga screen ng telebisyon ng Amerika ay dumating na may pilak na linya. at pira-pirasong karanasan sa pang-araw-araw, na pinangungunahan ang neo-liberal na pagkakawatak-watak ng lipunan sa isang bagong kahulugan ng tungkuling sibiko at pakikipag-ugnayan sa publiko.
I was wrong.Nine-eleven was an opportunity alright, but it was seized primarily by the privileged American few, strongly represented in the White House, to exacerbate existing tendencies of inequality, empire, and denial.It was used by the rich and the powerful and their authoritarian allies to increase the already outrageous over-concentration of wealth and power at home and abroad and to tar all who opposed this aristocratic agenda as ‘enemies of freedom’ and allies of terrorism. It was used to divert attention and concern away from stunning socioeconomic and racial disparities, spiritual crisis, ecological collapse, declining societal health, chronic overwork, mass civic disengagement, soulless consumerism, and countless other problems that arise from the increasingly unchecked operation of the American System.It was used to privilege the right (repressive and militaristic) hand of the state over the left (social and democratic) – the policeman, prosecutor and prison warden over the librarian, welfare worker, teacher, and lifeguard.It was exploited to help the White House assault the relevance of international law and the sanctity of America’s own justly prized commitment to civil liberties. It was used to change the subject away from the need for true democracy, peace, and social justice, and to enable the ascendancy of a ‘belligerent nationalism’ that constructs community on the basis of fear and mindless conformity rather than democratic possibility. It was used by ‘elites’ to speed up the American public sector’s ongoing transformation into a repressive, neo-liberal ‘garrison state.’
Ang mahina-kaliwa/malakas-kanang estadong ito ay lalong kumikilos bilang kaunti pa kaysa sa awtoritaryan na ahente ng mga dikta ng kapital. Pinapalitan nito ang kahabagan ng panunupil at ginagawang kriminal at militarisasyon ang mga suliraning panlipunan na nagreresulta mula sa paglalim ng sosyo-ekonomiko at kaugnay na hindi pagkakapantay-pantay ng lahi sa loob at labas ng bansa. nagsasagawa ng malawakang paglilipat ng kayamanan at kapangyarihan mula sa mga programang panlipunan patungo sa militar, na kapansin-pansing sapat sa panahon ng tumataas na kahirapan at kawalan ng trabaho sa tahanan, na pinalala ng napakalaking pagbawas ng buwis para sa iilan.
The renewed ‘war on terrorism’ fed by 9/11 has ‘functioned,’ to quote Noam Chomsky writing about the Cold War in the early 1970s, ‘as a marvelously effective device for mobilizing support…for ventures that carry a significant cost, economic and moral.The citizen must agree to bear the burdens of imperial wars and government-induced production of waste, a critical device of economic management.He has been whipped into line by the fear that we will be overwhelmed by an external enemy if we let down our guard’ (Chomsky, For Reasons of State, 1970, p.xxxvii).
Sa opisyal na pampubliko at pangunahing (corporate) na bersyon ng media ng tila permanenteng digmaang ito, ang mabait, mapagmahal sa kalayaan at mabait na Estados Unidos ay nakikibahagi sa isang marangal na pagsisikap na protektahan ang sarili nitong mga tao at sa katunayan ang mundo mula sa masamang salot ng terorismo. tunay na bersyon, ginagamit ng administrasyong Bush at ng mga kliyente at kaalyado nitong super-pribilehiyo sa nangungunang estado ng militar at pagkakakulong sa mundo ang banta ng terorismo bilang takip at dahilan para sa mga patakarang nagpapalalim ng hindi pagkakapantay-pantay at panunupil sa tahanan at nagpapalawak ng kapangyarihan ng imperyal sa ibang bansa. Ang mga patakaran at gawi na ito ay umaatake sa mga pangunahing kalayaang sibil sa tahanan at ibinabalik ang mga proteksyong panlipunan at pang-ekonomiya sa isang bansang hindi na pantay-pantay sa industriyalisadong mundo. .Pinalawak at binabalatan nila ang suporta ng US para sa terorismo ng estado na isinasagawa ng mga bansang tulad ng Israel, Russia, China, Indonesia at iba pang mga estado na ang mga aksyong pagpatay laban sa mga katutubo at sinasakop na mamamayan ay karaniwang inilalarawan sa benign at suportadong mga termino ng mga gumagawa ng patakaran ng US at dominanteng media ng US. Direkta nilang tinatakot ang milyun-milyon sa Gitnang Silangan, kabilang ang mga tao sa Iraq. Ang mga patakaran at gawi na ito ay nagdaragdag hindi lamang sa panlipunan at pang-ekonomiyang kawalan ng katiyakan kundi pati na rin ang direktang pisikal na kawalang-katiyakan sa tinubuang-bayan ng mga mamamayang Amerikano.
Taking brutal advantage of a terrorist attack it helped create and failed to prevent, the American power ‘elite’ is edging ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ closer and closer to something like fascism. A second Bush II administration looms ominously on the near horizon, with ugly plans for most of humanity, at home and abroad.
Street will speak on ‘The Media and Its Role in Shaping the Electorate’s Opinions,’ Tuesday September 14th, 7 PM, at the Hothouse Town Forum, The Hot House, 31 E. Balbo, Chicago, IL (312-362-9707).
Paul Street’s book EMPIRE AND INEQUALITY: AMERICA AND THE WORLD SINCE 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004) will be available in late September 2004.Street can be reached at [protektado ng email]
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