The images on television have
been heartbreaking.
People on fire leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up.
People in panic and fear racing from the scene in clouds of dust and
smoke.
We knew that there must be thousands of human beings buried
alive, but soon dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine
the terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as they
contemplated the crash, the fire, the end. Those scenes horrified
and sickened me.
Then our political leaders came on television, and I was
horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of
vengeance, of punishment.
We are at war, they said. And I thought: they have learned
nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth
century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a
hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met
with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea
that this would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent
people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic,
strike out violently and blindly just to show how tough we are? "We
shall make no distinction," the President proclaimed, "between
terrorists and countries that harbor terrorists." Will we now bomb
Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in
the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate, to "make no
distinction"? Will we then be committing terrorism in order to "send
a message" to terrorists?
We have done that before. It is the old way of thinking, the old
way of acting. It has never worked. Reagan bombed Libya, and Bush
made war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a
pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, to "send a message" to
terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington.
Isn't it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through
violence doesn't work, only leads to more terrorism?
Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by
the Israeli government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't
work.
And innocent people die on both sides.
Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need
to think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who
have been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where
we carried out terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster
bombs,on peasant villages. In Latin America, where we supported
dictators and death squads in Chile and El Salvador and other
countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as a result of
our economic sanctions, And, perhaps most important for
understanding the current situation, in the occupied territories of
the West Bank and Gaza, where a million and more Palestinians live
under a cruel military occupation, while our government supplies
Israel with high-tech weapons.
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering
we are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on
in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we
begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of
our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go
beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.
We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military
budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world,
our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines
and a "missile defense shield" will not give us security. We need to
rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons
to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need
to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up
by the politicians of the media, because war in our time is always
indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War
is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for
guns, planes, bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people -
for free medical care for everyone, education and housing guaranteed
decent wages and a clean environment for all. We can not be secure
by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are
demanding, but only by expanding them.
We should take our example not from our military and political
leaders shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and
nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been
saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not
violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.
Howard Zinn is a columnist for The
Progressive.