"Blowback"

[David Morris]

>From Dave Monroe [I'm assuming he agrees w/ the points he posts below]
>
>Chalmers Johnson, "Blowback," The Nation (October 15, 2001) ...
>
>"The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not 'attack America,' as 
>our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked 
>American foreign policy.

The distinction being attempted above is a joke.  I guess we should just 
consider those 6,000 people as incidental unfortunates in a war of foreign 
policies.

>"On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American 
>people that we were attacked because we are 'a beacon for freedom' and 
>because the attackers were 'evil.' In his address to Congress on  September 
>20, he said, 'This is civilization's fight.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50491-2001Sep30.html
By Boris Nemtsov
Monday, October 1, 2001;
MOSCOW -- The Russian people recognized instantly that the tragedies of 
Sept. 11 were attacks on the fabric of the whole civilized world. As we 
watched on television, no country could avoid imagining the same types of 
attacks happening in their homeland.

>This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over 
>abstract  values--as a 'clash of civilizations,' in current post-cold war 
>American jargon--is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading 
>responsibility for the 'blowback' that America's imperial projects have 
>generated.

I counter that the reverse is true.  The author's desire to skewer "American 
Imperialism" leads him to ignore, actually to argue against, the most 
obvious truths.

David Morris

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