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News :: Miscellaneous |
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ACCESSORY BEFORE THE FACT |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sam Smith, The Progressive Review
(No verified email address) |
01 Oct 2001
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Among those who escaped injury in the recent disasters was an American establishment responsible for the costliest military defeat against a foreign adversary ever to occur on home soil. |
CNN didn't tell you that, but aside from the internecine Civil War, the largest number of American deaths in battle on our mainland prior to the recent assaults occurred during the Revolutionary War - about 4,500. Actual battle deaths - not all on the mainland or even in our colonies - during the War of 1912 were 2,300; the Mexican War, 1,700; the Spanish American War, 400; and at Pearl Harbor 2,400. In September, over 6,000 Americans were lost when the biggest and best funded military in world history was defeated by a handful of guerillas armed mainly with knives.
In normal circumstances there would be talk of courts martial (as there was in the case of Pearl Harbor) and impeachment (as there was during the Vietnam War). Instead we have been conned into waving the flag on behalf of an establishment that has shamefully failed the country through a combination of arrogance, greed, stupidity, unpreparedness, carelessness, and corruption.
Consider, for example, the fact that we are now getting lessons on patriotism from politicians and journalists who spent the past decade tossing American sovereignty down the drain in the name of "free trade." Consider that our military, alienating the restless in scores of country, turned out to be a cause of our troubles rather than of their elimination. Consider an intelligence establishment that help train the guerillas who have now turned on us. Consider the politicians who undermined our safety to please the oil and defense industries or who endangered our lives in order to support Israel and gain the campaign rewards that followed. Consider a foreign policy intelligentsia that could not tell the difference between realpolitik and realstupid.
This is not cause for unity, flag-waving and loyalty to the latest political puppet of a decadent elite that has led us into such a crisis. It is cause for shock and anger, for citizen inquiries and investigations into the questions the think tanks, Congress and the media refuse to ask, and for a Solidarity-type movement in which Americans who love their land, the freedom they once possessed, and the decency to which they aspire come together not just to bring peace in a war-mad moment but to cause a transformation in how power is exercised.
I was asked the other day what I would do if I were president. I declined the hypothesis because, I said, the only way that would happen would be if the Green Party had come to power, which would mean that America would have already have been acting in a far different manner than it is today and thus the attacks would have been far less like even to have occurred. I might have added that it was a little late to be seeking the advice of those who have repeatedly sought a different course and who, in return, have been scorned, kept off the ballot, not invited to debates, and blacked out of the media.
Further, the American establishment, despite its shameful and disastrous failure, refuses even now to listen to other than itself. Check this out by counting how many minutes on mainstream TV or inches in your paper are devoted to non-military, non-violent solutions to our problem.
Of course, the establishment would have you believe that the guerillas sprung from the global forest like the Big Bad Wolf going after Little Red Riding Hood. It relies heavily on the American faith that bad things have only two sources: accident or someone else's evil. The idea, such as was imbedded for centuries in maritime law, that a collision often involves divided fault, is alien to us save in a few instances such as when an abused spouse shoots her husband. Yet we must now face our proportional responsibility not only in the name of honesty but in the name of survival. Nations can not well endure on such a diet of denial as ours.
The question of what one should do at this moment is clouded by another truth: there may actually be no adequate defense against that which we fear. To believe that we will be safe if we only ban, search, and spy on enough things, and jail enough people on enough specious grounds, is a path towards madness. Like the individual suffering from agoraphobia, we will become prisoners in our own rooms.
The possibility of no available defense is frightening until one realizes that we live happily with it every day in other contexts. For example, no husband and wife adequately protects themselves from being murdered by each other or by their children. Yet, most do not sleep in bulletproof vests nor pat the kids down each time they walk in the house. That's because we have found other ways of assuring the safety in these relationships based on means beyond those used by the military and police. Similarly, despite the often heated nature of labor negotiations, I have never heard of a mediator going into the conference room fully armed.
To define the possible solutions to this crisis as only those of war and security is to admit defeat, for it is on this level that we are most vulnerable. Yet these appear to be virtually the sole tools our establishment understands. Thus not only has it brought unprecedented shame and danger to this land, it proposes - with unbridled hubris - to compound its errors by more of the same.
The rest of us, whether out of moral sense or pragmatic grasp, must no longer enable such madness but tell those who have failed and betrayed us that they may not, must not, damage further our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
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