[Peace-discuss] Letter

[David Green]

This letter was submitted to the DI:

The vast majority of 9/11 observances in this country cannot be seen as 
politically neutral events. Implicit in the nature of these events are the 
notions that lives lost at the World Trade Center are more valuable than lives 
lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere; that the motives of the 
9/11 attackers had nothing to do with genuine grievances in the Islamic world 
regarding American imperialism; and that the U.S. has been justified in the 
subsequent murder of hundreds of thousands in so-called retaliation.
The observance at Saturday’s football game was no different. A moment of silence 
was followed by a military airplane flyover; in between, Block-I students 
chanted “U.S.A., U.S.A.” This was neither patriotism nor remembrance in any 
justifiable sense, but politicization, militarism, propaganda, and bellicosity. 
The University is a public institution that encompasses the political views of 
all, not just the most (falsely) “patriotic.” Athletic planners should cease 
exploiting events for this political purpose.
The overwhelmingly white, privileged, chief-loving Block-I students should be 
ashamed of their obnoxious chicken-hawk chant, while less privileged members of 
their cohort fight and die in an illegal and immoral war for the control of oil. 
Athletic administrators need to free events from patriotic observances, which in 
this country cannot be separated from implicit justifications for 
state-sponsored murder.
 
David Green


      
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