Re: "Alienation"? was Re:ETUR@Î

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> I have no idea what Ian means in his remarks below, but Carol's are totally
> off the wall.

I haven't found an accurate way to word the question yet -- but it is
definitely not "off the wall." What I'm asking for is an imaginative
effort to see the world through the eyes of probably a couple of billion
people who are (in respect to 'us') radically _other_. And let me remake
a distinction I made earlier, I think on lbo. The 'perpetrators' of 911
were, seemingly, mostly from Saudi Arabia and mostly from reasonably
comfortable, even wealthy backgrounds. Leaving aside (and that is a big
leaving aside) their religion, they did not _personally_ suffer from
U.S. global mastery. They were 'merely' angry. (Note: I used the weakest
word I could think of, "gripe," in my original query, expecting readers
to fill it in with substance.)

But mere personal anger, mere personal fanaticism, does not, ordinarily,
generate mass terrorism: at most it gives us a Colombine incident. The
terrorist has to have some grounds for believing that (s)he represents,
speaks and acts for, something greater than his/her mere personal
feelings. That is where the Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Africa come in. Just
as the Narodniks (falsely?) thought they were 'speaking' for the masses
of the oppressed Russian peasantry, not merely their own rage and
frustration, so al Quaida can only operate as it does because they can
tell themselves that they do it in the name of those oppressed millions.

> Whatever gripes or criticisms someone may have with the US
> don't justify killing thousands of innocent people here who have done
> nothing to harm them.

Just compare the tone of the term "criticism" (in respect to monstrous
U.S. crimes) with all the emotional power behind U.S. 'critics' of al
Quaida and 911. The response is simply all out of proportion to the
actual human suffering involved. When the announcement of Pearl Harbor
interrupted the radio broadcasting a Bears-Cardinals game some 60 years
ago, the response I still remember was that of one of my aunts (my
favorite aunt in fact) who saw it as a joke: "they" could not possibly
be attacking "us." I think there is a lot of that shock involved in
responses, right and left, to 911. How dare "they" attack US! I still
maintain that they were _not_ attacking "us"; they were attacking the
U.S. government in the only way they knew how, and "we" got in the way.
The obscene phrase "collateral damage" literally applies.

(Incidentally, if you look back through my posts on 911 you will notice
that I ceased using the jargon phrase "innocent people" whether I was
referring to victims of Hiroshima and Vietnam or 911 and substituted the
more neutral phrase, "civilians." I started but never pursued a project
a year or so ago of collecting the jargon terms used by those who
condemn leftist jargon. Posts on 911 should offer a rich harvest of such
terms.)

> There are lots of ways to resist US domination that do
> not involve mass murder.

Come now. The U.S., with all its titanic resources, has never worked out
a way of attacking its enemies without resorting to mass murder. Tell me
one of those ways -- and no utopian descriptions allowed. Those ways
have to account for U.S. power and the U.S. willingness to use that
power without restraint.


> I will add, too, that the specific program of al
> Quaida, the apparent perpetrators of the 9/11 massacre, has nothing to do
> with advancing any goal that anyone on the left could care to propose--not
> that it would have been better if it had a left program.

Granted. But leftists in the U.S. have a basic obligation (Chomsky is
good on this) to oppose the double standard of judgment by which the
U.S. is always assumed to be innocent (not just until proven guilty but
period, regardless), and enemies of the U.S. are assumed to be guilty
(of something). There is a matter of burden of proof here. Until
positively demonstrated otherwise, in the case of enemies of the U.S.
the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend applies." It will
not always hold, but the burden of proof in all cases will be on those
who deny that a given enemy of the U.S. is a friend of the human
species.

As to whether al Quaida has absolutely _nothing_ to do with _any_
possible legitimate goal -- probably but not certainly. Someone said of
Napoleon,

			Thank god such men be but few
		though they build up human courage

Frankly, it is not up to those living in the u.s. (or any of the OECD
nations) to decide whether this is true or false of al Quaida for those
billions living under the weight of the u.s. empire.

> > > [clip]
> >===========
> >When gripes take on the scale and complexity of 9-11 the binary of
> >legitimacy and it's other are literally mangled and the Hobbesian
> >realm manifests itself -even in a post-Westphalian sense.
> >
> >Ian

I myself often find Ian's short posts a bit cryptic, but I would
construe this in part as suggesting that the unchallenged and seemingly
(for the time being) unchallengeable power of the U.S. has created a
world DISorder in which anything goes.

Carrol