Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id NAA06082 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 19 Sep 2001 13:28:03 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3102A6CFF9@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Why crash hijacked planes after we already *gave* them rocket launchers? Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 11:08:58 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Filter-Info: UoS MailScan 0.1 [D 1] Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi Aaron,
I have just one point to make in relation to your comments here.
Remember Nelson Mandela lead an organisation, the ANC, which was a terrorist
organisation (according to the apartheid regime), that's one of the reasons
he was in jail. Yet how many people today regard him as a terrorist? No,
today he's seen as a great statesman, hero for freedom and democracy - and
rightly so I should add.
The ANC, PLO and IRA, in their own terms, and in the the terms of many of
the people they represent are, or were, freedom fighters, not terrorists.
Denied the opportunity for political resolutions to their concerns, because
of the skewing of the states they reside in (against blacks in South Africa,
non-Jews in Israel, catholics in Northern Ireland), and lacking the manpower
and resources to conduct an open war, they resort to guerilla tactics. The
US supported the KLA in Kosovo (but not in Macedonia- which Bush when he
calls what just happened the first 21st century war, he needs to be reminded
of, not to mention the multitude of other conflicts that continue around the
world)- why? Because they were freedom fighters against an oppressive
regime, as were the Mujahadin in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
Bin Laden, on the other hand, is something entirely different from these
groups. His concern is indeed geunine terrorism- destruction and mayhem in
order to cause terror in the West, and if he's behind this act, even in
terms of simple inspiration to others, he has succeeded.
The EU is meeting to revise its policies on corodinating anti-terrorism
strategies, but only 3 of the member states actually have a statutory
definition of what terrorism is (Britain, unsurprisingly, is one of those).
When we bandy the term about we should distinguish between those with clear
grievances and goals (because whether we regard them as terrorists or not
depends on our position on those grievances), and those for whom terror is
the only goal.
I'm not suggesting that legimitates the actions of the IRA or whoever, only
that for such groups political resolutions may resolve the violent actions,
as happened in South Africa once apartheid was dismantled. Perhaps the WTC
attackers may also have grievances that can be resolved that will geuninely
bring an end to such actions.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Aaron Agassi
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 6:18 am
> To: coop@imaginaries.org; Critical-Cafe@mjmail.eeng.dcu.ie;
> memetics@mmu.ac.uk; Philosophize@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Why crash hijacked planes after we already *gave* them
> rocket launchers?
>
> It could be worse. It could have been an asteroids strike, for which we
> remain scarcely better prepared than where the Dinosaurs. (For only one
> frightening example, perilous near miss 1989fc wasn't even detected until
> afterwards!)
>
> The first real goal of terrorism is to oppress and to propaganda brainwash
> their own uneducated and poverty stricken constituency, the same Standard
> Operating Procedure as any other oppression by organized crime, dirty
> Cops,
> or Juntas, in their own neighborhoods.
>
> Indeed, the atrocities of the invading Taliban, including the mass graves
> in
> which Afghan widows where buried alive, rather bring to mind Pol Pot's
> Cambodia!
>
> The first thing to understand about terrorists, is that they deliberately
> choose the worst possible way to make their ostensible point to the rest
> of
> the world, about which they really couldn't care less! -And never actually
> want resolved...
>
> These are the reasons why the first thing terrorists like the IRA or the
> PLO
> have done is to assassinate their own moderates and massacre their own
> peaceful protesters, the only true martyrs following in the path of
> Mahatma
> Gandhi and Martin Luthor King, as traitors, summarily declaring all
> diplomacy hopeless. (Ironic when they themselves, entrenched, then run out
> of steam and seek to go politically legit.)
>
> And all of this is why bad government and dishonest business thrive on
> terrorism, just as terrorism thrives on the destabilization resultant from
> black opps would be puppet master foreign policy and unethical commerce
> with
> petty dictatorships. This is not war, but cynical symbiosis and
> collaboration!
>
> No surprise, then, that it appears that Saudi Billionaire Osama Bin Laden
> is
> another CIA creature, just like Sadam and Noriega. Because the Taliban was
> deemed useful against the Soviets, so resented mainly for teaching Afghani
> women how to read and write!
>
> How ironic that Bush Jr. has vowed, and with a perfectly straight face,
> not
> only to route out the terrorists, but also to smash their support network.
> What, is he dissolving the CIA? The West, not only the Taliban whom
> America
> armed, looked the other way for Bin Laden because he proved so useful in
> drawing fanatical cannon fodder for the Taliban in the ongoing Afghan
> civil
> war of
> attrition, the Russian Vietnam.
>
> But now further bombing can only stir the rubble. And with the farm land
> fallow, is anyone but the highly mobile Taliban well enough fed to move
> out
> of the way? Other than they, hasn't anyone who can, already fled? -As
> squalid and dangerous as life tends to be in the refugee camps at the
> border...
>
> Never the less, tax appropriations for counter-terrorism will be
> astronomical, unprecedented and open ended.
>
> And, once again, huge profits stand to be made by the 1% who control 80%
> (among 10% controlling 90%) of the world's wealth (as estimated by Forbes
> Magazine), the Corporations of the Multinational Military Industrial
> Complex
> who's lobbyists regularly give so generously to fund the campaigns often
> of
> *both* interchangeable candidates from our identical political parties, in
> each sham election.
>
> In a word, graft.
>
> This also explains why eminently feasible non lethal weapons (harmlessly
> inducing unconsciousness or nausea over vast territories and large
> populations, disabling electronics, and even temporarily sabotaging
> bridges
> without destroying them permanently) are not being developed more quickly.
> Too cost effective! And too merciful. No demand.
>
> How wonderful it would be to able to sedate them all, and let Interpol
> sort
> the guilty from the starving! But even such ought to be last resort.
>
> For a time, America's consciousness was raised by our disappointment with
> the Contras, our equal disgust with the corrupt Sandanistas who betrayed
> their own revolution, and delight at Nicaraguan popular success in
> democratically choosing a third alternative in an election. (Something we
> have not yet succeeded in accomplishing at home in America.)
>
> Ensuing American political support for the pro-democracy movement of
> Corazon
> Aquino in the Philippines was a proud moment and the rare exception.
>
> Another, less well known, was when the White House funded a group of
> Polish
> American business people to fly to Poland and set themselves up to
> disburse
> small business loans, and bring Poland back to vibrant economic life as
> the
> Soviet Empire collapsed, because Regain still considered the Poles only
> reluctant Communists, and our friends. (And, boy, weren't the Polish
> Aparatchicks, drooling at the prospect of carving up a Western pork-barrel
> for their own government pet projects, incensed, instead, to find
> themselves
> bypassed by aid direct to the private sector, not only small business, but
> even first time borrowing mom and pop enterprises!)
>
> If, instead, such political and economic intervention where standard
> Western
> foreign policy, for the proverbial ounce of prevention, the world could
> have
> been spared the rise of Petty Nationalism, Militant Islamic
> Fundamentalism,
> ethnic tension, cleansings, loose nukes and the KJB Mafia.
>
> Indeed, some say that the Marshall Plan should have included the Soviets
> in
> the first place, to avoid the Cold War from the beginning.
>
> Come to think of it, grass roots political revival and economic
> development
> of impoverished neighborhoods would make a wonderful domestic policy too.
>
> To quote Abraham Lincoln "Charity for all and Malice towards none." And as
> he might have put it if he lived today, a planet divided cannot stand. The
> need for Reconstruction in earnest has not abated historically, only
> expanded.
>
> Alas, most of the time, the West has simply stood by while pro-democracy
> movements where overwhelmed by Militant Fundamentalism and Petty
> Nationalism, in Iran when the Sheik fell, in most of Eastern Europe with
> the
> collapse of the Soviet Empire, and all around the world, with depressing
> consistency.
>
> And who *can* count upon help by the West? Why, the likes of Sadam,
> Noriega
> and the Taliban including Bin Laden! Then flag waving rah, rah, rah, and
> false surprise when our own foreign policy Frankensteins turn on us! For
> shame.
>
> Bush in daddy's footsteps, rallying our sad, sick world against the
> enemies
> of his father's creation! Noriega, Sadam, now Bin Laden. All Bush CIA
> protégés. And all of this is common knowledge. But what choice have we at
> this point? The public has been manipulated up against the wall, yet
> again.
>
> We have sown the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But responsible policy
> would
> put a crimp on graft, including war profiteering, energy price-fixing,
> insider trading, megga-mergers, liquidation and auto-cannibalization,
> pork-barrels, Corporate Welfare, tax loopholes for the rich, tax burdens
> for
> the working poor, slashed social services, bureaucratic waste, Eco-rape,
> Eco-preserves for the rich, and the exploitation of impoverished labor
> living under oppression in the Third World, bereft of any better choice or
> redress, in order to then intimidate First World labor with the threat of
> mounting unemployment, fired and then hired back as temps with no
> benefits,
> Vice, the War on Vice, and privatized prisons as a growth industry. All
> Neo-Malthusian Standard Operating Procedure.
>
> And the Running Dogs of the Oligarchs actually defend all such criminal
> manipulative coercion, extortion and violence, Monopolism hording the
> world's wealth, as Free Trade!!
>
> Without genuine democracy, *real* free trade and open market competition
> on
> a level playing field protected under the Rule of Law, true growth,
> Progress, automation, actual production and prosperity for all everywhere
> in
> the world, none of us can ever be safe. Not from terrorism, crime, AIDS,
> pollution, nor even the next asteroid strike. All needless and evitable.
>
> All the world wants to live the free and enlightened American dream, not
> the
> loony imperial American nightmare! Which America do we stand for? The cost
> of freedom is vigilance against scoundrels in power.
>
> Bin Laden is just another killer rich boy, a wanna be Bush. A tool. A
> player
> in the same endless and ugly game. Both Bush and Bin Laden have made
> themselves richer and more influential in the human suffering they are
> fomenting together.
>
> Indeed, it is said that there was a huge short sell on the stock market on
> the day before the attack.
>
> Do either Bush Jr. or Bin Laden really believe in what they are doing, and
> mean well? Perhaps there are no malicious intentions, but merely
> overwhelming and impersonal political and economic forces at work. And
> emotionally overwrought moral perception simply bends to fit. But does
> that
> make any difference, one way or the other? "A king of fools is a fool
> himself." The type believing their own lies...
>
> The question remains, how can they all be thwarted, without distinction?
> What can we do to change conditions for the better and reduce the
> dysfunctional (un!)diplomatic (pseudo!)political and (anti!)social causes
> of
> war, crime and terrorism, sooner rather than later? A question, first of
> all, that only obtains after honest definition and then acknowledgement of
> the problem. Because that is where any sensible discussion must begin.
>
>
> ===============================================================
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>
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