Re: [GreenYes] An Article by Wing Commander Ravindra V Parasnis (retired)

[Grifola8@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/17/01 4:53:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time, chris@grrn.org 
writes:

> While I don't condone this attrocity, I can't
>  help but wonder: what does this obviously well-trained,
>  well-funded group think our nation could 
>  have done to earn such animosity?

"Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those 
responsible for these cowardly acts."
                    -- George W. Bush

"We're going to find out who did this and we're going after the bastards."
                    -- Sen. Orrin Hatch

"We will find the people responsible for these cowardly acts and justice will 
be done." 
                    -- U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft

"Together we can defeat these forces of evil." 
                    -- Ariel Sharon

"I say bomb the hell out of them."
                    -- Sen. Zell Miller 

In the aftermath of Tuesdays inconceivable tragedy, America has descended 
into an orgy of nationalism, bloodlust, and jingoistic grandstanding.  Before 
we travel too far down this road, we would do well to ask ourselves "why did 
this happen," and by way of answering, brace ourselves for a bitter dose of 
truth.

Since the onset of World War II, and particularly from 1980 onward, the 
United States has become an all-powerful, monstrously corrupt global empire 
that has underwritten the murder, torture, and enslavement of millions of 
civilians worldwide.  Those who would deny this charge should look into the 
postmodern histories of Chile, Indonesia, Guatemala, pre-Khomeini Iran, 
Haiti, The Philippines, El Salvador, and Panama, just to name a few glaringly 
obvious examples.  In the particular case of Palestine/Israel, we used the 
plight of European Jews as pretext for establishing a strategic beachhead in 
the Middle East, arbitrarily dissolving a sovereign state and dooming its 
populace to what has become a blatant genocidal campaign perpetrated by our 
very own puppet Rogue Nation.  For millions of Palestinians and other 
marginalized Islamic cultures, what happened in New York was an exact 
corollary of our own actions in Dresden and Hiroshima.  What say?  Those 
operations were defensible as acts of war?  If you were Palestinian, you 
would know that the Arab-Israeli conflict IS a war, always has been.  You too 
would feel cornered, hopeless, compelled to throw your life away in a futile 
gesture of defiance.  Denied of legal recognition or any real economic or 
military power, pushed back into regions that are all but uninhabitable, the 
Palestinians fight for survival with anything that comes to hand, be it 
nothing more than a rock.  They aren't cowards -- they've only been painted 
as such by the trickery inherent in the term "terrorism."

War is just terrorism dressed up with lies.

It has long been popular (in America) to express outrage at the demise of our 
own indigenous people -- now that it's too late to do much about all that.  
Why can we not see that the Middle Eastern malaise represents the same 
pattern, and that this blood splashes onto OUR hands every time we step on 
the gas or light the stove?  America is the proverbial Land of Milk & Honey.  
By any sane historical standard, we live in a paradise!  How has this come 
about?  Luck?  Magic?  The rewards inherent to virtue?  Guess again.  There 
are huge hidden costs to our good fortune.  Displacing those costs to 
powerless parties, human and otherwise, is the whole purpose of our 
planet-gobbling corporate empire.  Where was your shirt made?  Who picked 
that broccoli?  The hundreds that died mining the copper that breathes life 
into your television, what nationality were they?  We live in a land of 
surreal, unsustainable bounty only because we're almost literally squeezing 
the life out of the world's voiceless disowned billions.  As horrible as it 
was, what happened in New York can be seen as a desperate attempt to bust our 
narcissistic bubble.

It's not wrong to feel outraged by last Tuesday's events, but it is wrong -- 
nay, blindly hateful -- to refuse to recognize a certain element of justice, 
and to see that ruthless reprisals will only lead to an endlessly escalating 
cycle of destruction.  This cycle will benefit only one party: the tiny elite 
that feed at the military-industrial trough.  This says volumes about the 
tenor of the "facts" that are being spoon-fed to us, and about who we should 
truly be fighting against...

Squaring off with and annihilating the "guilty parties", and thus slaking our 
thirst for revenge, will solve NOTHING.  It will only produce another 
generation of orphans, forged by circumstances to a white heat of hatred we 
can scarcely imagine.  They will walk into movie theaters wearing overcoats 
lined with C-4.  They will devote enormous mental energies to secret 
gene-splicing projects.  NO ONE WILL PROTECT YOU FROM THEM -- NO ONE CAN.  
The career liars who populate our government will claim this ability only to 
induce you to live under their microscope -- er, uh, "intelligence umbrella". 
 The power of governments is predicated wholly on their ability to kill, and 
on the reluctance of adversaries to face this deterrent.  Knowing a hatred so 
pure that it overrides their fear of death and thus negates this power, this 
enemy has discovered an ultimate weapon and a clarity of purpose that any 
amount of 'bombing to hell' can only deepen instead of diminish.  Tuesday's 
nightmare made this clear.  Do you really want your children to face more of 
the same?

So what can we do?

Like them, We The People own a power larger than any government can claim.  
We can defuse this situation by stepping down from our confrontational 
stance.  We can acknowledge the validity of their hatred and dissolve the 
inequities that feed it.  We can face the past squarely, truthfully, and then 
approach the future with humility and a healing hand.  Nothing else will work.
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