"...if bin-Laden and the rest were so angry at the internal freedom and democracy of "infidel" Western nations, then why were Canada, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland (to name a few non-Islamic democratic states) right to be much less worried about major attacks from al Qaeda?"
A chance, perhaps, to stand down our entrenched psychic and ideological defenses, to understand how and why we cause ourselves and others pain, why millions across the world resent us (many to the point where they could applaud 9/11) and how we might stop the vicious circle of injury at home and abroad. Nine-eleven, I wanted to believe, was a chance to face our inner demons and choose sanity, to lose our self-absorbed innocence in ways that might permit us to lose our manufactured innocence about how much harm our policy makers and "democratic American System, capitalism" (as Tom Brokaw described the dominant US system of socioeconomic management and hierarchy on 9/11) have been causing others, and to drop our longstanding sense of special historical superiority to the rest of the world.
As Arundhati Roy has noted,"the US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land.Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle."Further:"In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. "goodness" peaked during World War II.Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away...Drowned out in by the noisy hosannas is [America's] most barbaric, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on the civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The war was nearly over.The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come were not a threat to world peace.They were civilians.Just as the victims of the World Trade Center bombings were civilians.Just as the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Iraq because of US-led sanctions are civilians....Since the Second World War, the United States has been war with or attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.This list should also include the U.S. government's covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel's U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed.It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory.It should include America's role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which over one million people were killed.It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly and indirectly to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists."[...]Nine-eleven, I wanted to believe, was a chance to face our inner demons and choose sanity, to lose our self-absorbed innocence in ways that might permit us to lose our manufactured innocence about how much harm our policy makers and "democratic American System, capitalism" (as Tom Brokaw described the dominant US system of socioeconomic management and hierarchy on 9/11) have been causing others, and to drop our longstanding sense of special historical superiority to the rest of the world.
Paul Street/ZNET 10.Sep.04
Brokaw represents a lot of decent people. The problem is the truth undermines the only thing holding their lives together. So they can't afford to acknowledge it, even when they see it. Capitalism and democracy have been conflated, been made to seem synonymous, but it's just the opposite. Capitalism must be set aside when it's time to vote democratically.
The rest of the time there is no "people", only individuals competing against each other for individual gain. Then, when it's election time, the "people" are expected to set aside all that individual competition and act for the common good.
And afterwards, go right back to the dog-eat-dog of business-as-usual.
So, not surprisingly, most people act as they've been taught and encouraged to, and vote from their pockets, selfishly, with no regard for the common good at all.
Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic, not easily compatible, systems. It isn't democracy that's hated and attacked by the militants and fanatics who are reacting to America - it's capitalism, or more accurately, what capitalism has created out of the raw materials of democracy in the United States.
