[Newspoetry] Fwd: A Really Smart, Well-Written Response

[Dirk Stratton]

>I rarely forward anything, but I thought Newspoetry folk would like 
>to see this.

--dirk

>By HOWARD ZINN, Howard Zinn is the author of "The
>People's History of the United States."
>
>
>BOSTON -- How can we possibly turn from the
>heartbreaking images of last week's disaster, and the
>emotions evoked in us, to thinking calmly about
>terrorism and what to do about it?
>
>Horrified and sickened as I was by what happened, I
>was again horrified and sickened by the statements of
>our national political leaders as they appeared on
>television and 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 20th century, from a hundred years
>of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of
>terrorism and counterterrorism, of violence met with
>violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
>
>We can all feel a terrible anger at those who killed
>thousands of innocent people in the insane belief it
>would help their cause. 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? It is in the nature
>of bombing (and I say this as a former Air Force
>bombardier) to be indiscriminate, to "make no
>distinction." Will we then be committing terrorism in
>order to "send a message" to terrorists?
>
>You hear politicians and military people saying there
>will be regrettable but necessary "collateral damage."
>They used that same term in describing the deaths of
>civilians in U.S. bombings of various countries,
>whether Iraq or Panama or Yugoslavia.
>
>When Timothy J. McVeigh defended his bombing of the
>federal building in Oklahoma City, leaving 168 people
>dead, he too used the term "collateral damage,"
>remembering no doubt, how it was used in the Persian
>Gulf War, where he served. My "Webster's Collegiate
>Dictionary" defines "collateral" as "accompanying or
>related, but secondary or subordinate." Both McVeigh
>and the leaders of our government have considered the
>toll of human life secondary to whatever else was
>destroyed, and therefore acceptable.
>
>When McVeigh was executed, the Boston Herald ran a
>huge headline that read "It's Over." But we know now
>how wrong that was. It was not over. And it will not
>be over until we stop concentrating on punishment and
>retaliation and think calmly and intelligently about
>what to do about terrorism.
>
>History can be useful, and there is a history of
>terrorism and reactions to it. We have answered
>terrorist acts with force again and again. It is the
>old way of thinking, the old way of acting. It has
>never worked.
>
>Former President Reagan bombed Libya after a terrorist
>action in a discotheque in Germany. The bombs were
>never intended to strike "the actual terrorists:"
>Indeed, it was never clear who the terrorists were.
>But the bombs did kill a number of people, including
>Moammar Kadafi's adopted 3-year-old daughter. Former
>President Clinton, after the bombings of the U.S.
>embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, sent 75 cruise
>missiles (each a weapon of mass destruction) to hit a
>presumed training camp in Afghanistan and what was
>described as a chemical weapons manufacturing plant in
>the Sudan. It turned out that the factory in the Sudan
>was not that at all, but a pharmaceutical plant, and
>that its destruction deprived huge numbers of Sudanese
>of medicines they needed.
>
>The claim, in all of these bombings was that we had 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, that it only leads to more
>terrorism? And isn't it the terrorists themselves who
>explain their awful deeds by saying they need to send
>a message to the world?
>
>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.
>
>We need new ways of thinking. 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. We
>need to pull back from our overbearing posture astride
>the globe, with military bases in nineteen countries,
>with our warships on every sea. Our presence in Saudi
>Arabia is a particular provocation to Osama bin Laden,
>but also to other Saudi nationalists. We supply Israel
>with high-tech weapons, while in the West Bank and
>Gaza over a million and more Palestinians live under a
>cruel military occupation.
>
>We should remind ourselves that the awful scenes of
>death and suffering we are now witnessing on our
>television screens have been endured by people in
>other parts of the world for a long time, and often as
>a result of our nation's policies. We can now imagine
>their fear, because of the fear we are all
>experiencing for ourselves and our children. We need
>to understand how some of those people will go beyond
>fear and anger to acts of terrorism.
>
>Our own fear will remain until we begin to think
>differently about what constitutes real security. 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, a "national 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 or 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.
>
>Yes, we can tend to immediate security needs. Let's
>take some of the billions allocated for "missile
>defense," totally useless against terrorist attacks
>such as this one, and pay the security people at
>airports decent wages, give them intensive training,
>hire marshals to be on every flight. But ultimately,
>there is no certain security against the
>unpredictable.
>
>True, we can find Bin Laden, if he was indeed the
>perpetrator of last week's tragedy, and punish him.
>But that will not end terrorism so long as the pent-up
>grievances of decades, felt in so many countries of
>the Third World, remain unattended.
>
>We cannot be secure so long as we use our national
>wealth, for guns, planes, bombs and nuclear weapons to
>maintain our position as a military superpower. We
>should use that wealth instead to deal with poverty
>and sickness in other parts of the world where
>desperation breeds resentment. We need to become an
>economic and social superpower.
>
>Here at home, our true security cannot come from
>putting the nation on a war footing, with the
>accompanying threats to civil liberties that this
>brings. It can only come from using our resources to
>make us the model of a good society, prosperous and
>peacemaking, with free, universal medical care,
>education and housing, guaranteed decent wages and a
>clean environment for all.
>
>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
>vengeance but compassion, not violence but healing.
>
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