The Ghosts of 9-1-1 by Ward Churchill
Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens
As ye sow, so shall ye reap Galations,6:7
September 11, 2001, will now and forever be emblazoned in the shorthand of popular consciousness as a correlation to the emergency dialing sequence, "9-1-1." On that date, a rapid but tremendous series of assaults were carried out against the paramount symbols of America's global military/economic dominance, the Pentagon and the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center (WTC), leaving about one-fifth of the former in ruins and the latter in a state of utter obliteration. Initially, it was claimed that as many as 5,000 U.S. citizens were killed, along with 78 British nationals, come to do business in the WTC, and perhaps 300 other "aliens," the majority of them undocumented, assigned to scrub the Boors and wash the windows of empire.
Even before the first of the Trade Center's towers had collapsed, the "news" media, as yet possessed of no hint as to who may have carried out the attacks, much less why they might have done so, were already and repeatedly proclaiming the whole thing "unprovoked" and "senseless." Within a week, the assailants having meanwhile been presumably identified, Newsweek had recast the initial assertions of its colleagues in the form of a query bespeaking the aura of wide-eyed innocence in which the country was by then, as always, seeking to cloak itself. "Why, the magazine's cover whined from every newsstand, "do they hate us so much?"
The question was and remains boggling in its temerity, so much so that after a lifetime of spelling out the reasons, one is tempted to respond with a certain weary cynicism, perhaps repeating Malcolm X's penetrating observation about chickens coming home to roost and leaving it at that. Still, mindful of the hideous human costs attending the propensity of Good Americans, like Good Germans, to dodge responsibility by anchoring professions of innocence in claims of near-total ignorance concerning the crimes of their corporate state, one feels obliged to try and deny them the option of such pretense. It is thus necessary that at least a few of those whose ravaged souls settled in upon the WTC and the Pentagon be named.
At the front of the queue were the wraiths of a half-million Iraqi children, all of them under twelve, all starved to death or forced to die for lack of basic sanitation and/or medical treatment during the past ten years. These youngsters suffered and died because the U.S. first systematically bombed their country's water purification, sewage treatment and pharmaceutical plants out of existence, then imposed a decade-long--and presently ongoing--embargo to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair or replace most of what had been destroyed.4 The point of this carefully calculated mass murder, as was explained at the outset by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, father of the current Oval Office occupant, has been to impress upon the Iraqi government--and the rest of the world as well--that "what we say, goes."5
In other words, though no less bluntly: "Do as you're told or we'll kill your babies."
Much has been made, rightly enough, of how U.S. governmental agencies, corporate media and academic elites collude to provide only such information as is convenient to the status quo.6 It is thus true that there is much of which the public is unaware. No such excuse can be advanced with respect to the fate of Iraq's children, however. Not only was the toll publicly predicted before U.S. sanctions were imposed, but two high UN officials, including Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, have resigned in protest of what Halliday described in widely reported statements as "the policy of deliberate genocide" they reflected.7 Asked by an interviewer on 60 Minutes in 1996 whether the UN's estimate of child fatalities in Iraq was accurate, U.S. Ambassador to the UN cum Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confirmed it before a national television audience.8
"We've decided," Albright went on in a remark prominently displayed in the New York Times and most other major newspapers, "that it's worth the cost" in lives extracted from brown-skinned toddlers to "set an example" so terrifying in its implications that it would compel planetary obedience to America's dictates in the years ahead.9 Such were the official terms defining the "New World Order" George Bush the elder had announced in 1991."
One wonders how information about what was happening in Iraq could have been made much clearer or more readily accessible to the general public. Claims that average Americans "didn't know" what was being done in their name are thus rather less than credible. In reality, Americans by-and-large greeted Albright's haughty revelation of genocide with yawns and blank stares, returning their attention almost immediately to what they considered far weightier matters: the Dow Jones and American League batting averages, for instance, or pursuit of the perfect cappuccino. Braying like donkeys into their eternal cell-phones, they went right on arranging their stock transfers and real estate deals and dinner dates, conducting business as usual, never exhibiting so much as a collective flicker of concern.
In effect, the U.S. citizenry as a whole was endowed with exactly the degree of ignorance it embraced. To put it another way, being ignorant is in this sense--that of willful and deliberate ignoration--not synonymous with being uninformed. It is instead to be informed and then ignore the information. There is a vast difference between not knowing and not caring and if Good Americans have difficulty appreciating the distinction, it must be borne in mind that there are others in the world who are quite unburdened by such intellectual impairments. They, beginning with those most directly targeted at any given moment for subjugation or eradication at the hands of American "peacekeepers," know above all else that professions of ignorance inherently preclude claims of innocence in such circumstances.
There was a time, oddly enough, when it could be said that the U.S. stood at the forefront of those endorsing the same principle. How else to explain its solemn invocation at the time of the Nuremberg Trials of a collective guilt inhering in the German populace itself?11. One would do well to recall that the crimes attributed by Americans to Good Germans were that they'd celebrated a New Order of their own, looking away while the nazi crimes were committed, never attempting to meet the legal/moral obligation of holding their government to even the most rudimentary standards of human decency.12. For these sins, it was said, they, the Germans, civilians as well as military personnel, richly deserved the death and devastation that had been rained upon them by America's "Mighty Eighth" Air Force and its British counterpart.13. In sum, they'd "brought it on themselves."
Some People Push Back
To be sure, I've "oversimplified," committed "reductionism" and "compared apples and oranges" in offering the preceding analogy. That was Germany, after all, while this is the U.S. The situation here is of course much more "complex." America today, unlike Germany a half century ago, is a "democratic," "multicultural" society. Its courts offer a prospect of "due process" in dispute resolution absent under the nazis.14. Most importantly, unlike the situation in nazi Germany, there is a discernible opposition in the U.S., an active counterforce to the status quo through which progressive social, political and economic change can ultimately be accomplished without resort to the crudities of bullets and bombs, never mind the scale of atrocity witnessed on 9-1-1.15.
These things duly remarked, it must also be said that the implications embodied in such counter-forces must be tested by their effectuality rather than their mere existence. On this score, the practical distinction between formal and functional democracy has been remarked by numerous analysts over the years.16. As to the merits of the U.S. judicial system, one might do well to begin any assessment by asking Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), Dhoruba Bin Wahad or any of the hundreds of other political activists who have been entombed on false charges or are now serving dramatically inequitable sentences in American prisons.17. One might ask as well those sent to death row on racial grounds,18. or who number among the two million predominately dark-skinned people--a proportion of the population larger than that of any country save Russia--consigned to the sprawling archipelago of forced labor camps forming the U.S. "prison-industrial" complex.19.
Turning to America's vaunted "opposition," we find record of not a single significant demonstration protesting the wholesale destruction of Iraqi children. On balance, U.S. "progressives" have devoted far more time and energy over the past decade to combating the imaginary health effects of "environmental tobacco smoke"20. and demanding installation of speed-bumps in suburban neighboyhoods21.-that is, to increasing their own comfort level--than to anything akin to a coherent response to the U.S. genocide in Iraq. The underlying mentality is symbolized quite well in the fact that, since they were released in the mid1990s, Jean Baudrillard's allegedly "radical" screed, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, has outsold Ramsey Clark's The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq, prominently subtitled The Children are Dying, by a margin of almost three-to-one.22
full: http://coloradoaim.org/Wardchurchillghostsof911.htm
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