Zone/911 - 18 October 2001

[Doug Millison]

Excerpts of an anlysis of the post-911 situation featuring many elements of
the political-historical worldview present in Pynchon's fiction:

http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html

WHO TERRORIZES WHOM?
October 18
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

One of the marks of exceptional hegemonic power is the ability to
define words and get issues framed in accord with your own political
agenda. This is notorious at this moment in history as regards
"terrorism" and "antiterrorism."
 
Since the September 11 attacks, two truths have been indisputable
and universally reported. One is that the hijacker bombings of the
World Trade Center and Pentagon were atrocities of a monumental
and spectacular scale (and media coverage of that day's events
alone may have generated more words and graphic images than any
other single event in recent history). A second truth is that the
bombings were willful acts of terrorism, accepting the basic and
widely agreed-upon definition of terrorism as "the use of force or the
threat of force against civilian populations to achieve political
objectives." And let us also recognize that "sponsorship of terrorism"
means organizing, and/or underwriting and providing a "safe harbor"
to state or nonstate agents who terrorize.
 
But there is a third indisputable truth, although much less
understood, let alone universally reported: namely, that from the
1950s the United States itself has been heavily engaged in
terrorism, and has sponsored, underwritten, and protected other
terrorist states and individual terrorists. In fact, as the greatest and
now sole superpower, the United States has also been the world's
greatest terrorist and sponsor of terror. Right now this country is
supporting a genocidal terrorist operation against Iraq via "sanctions
of mass destruction" and regular bombing attacks to achieve its
political objectives; it is underwriting the army and paramilitary
forces in Colombia, who openly terrorize the civilian population; and
it continues to give virtually unconditional support to an Israeli state
that has been using force to achieve its political objectives for
decades. The United States has terrorized or sponsored terror in
Nicaragua, Brazil, Uruguay, Cuba, Guatemala, Indonesia/East
Timor, Zaire, Angola, South Africa, and elsewhere. And it stands
alone in both using and brandishing the threat to use nuclear
weapons. It has for many years provided a safe harbor to the Cuban
refugee terror network, and it has done the same for a whole string
of terrorists in flight from, among other places, El Salvador, Haiti,
Vietnam, and even Nazi Germany (see Christopher Simpson's
Blowback).
 
[...]
 
All serious observers recognize that the U.S. actions against
Afghanistan have and will cause many, many more deaths than the
6,000 killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But U.S.
power and self-righteousness, broadcast and justified to the whole
world by a subservient media machine, assure that what the United
States does will neither be called terrorism, nor aggression, nor elicit
indignation remotely comparable to that expressed over the events
of September 11--however well its actions fit the definitions. The
same bias extends to other Western countries, diminishing in scope
and intensity from Britain to the others, and weakening further in the
Third World. In the Middle East, for most of the population the bias
disappears and U.S. terrorism is called by its right name, although
the U.S.-dependent governments toe their master's line, if
nervously. In these more remote areas the press speaks a different
language, calling the United States a "rogue state par excellence
repeatedly defying international rulings whether by the World Court
or by U.N. resolutions when they have not suited its interests" and a
"bandit sheriff" (The Hindu, India), and speaking of this as an "age of
Euro-American tyranny" with tyrants who are merely "civilized and
advanced terrorists" (Ausaf, Pakistan).
 
[...] by taking it as the starting premise that the
United States is only a victim of terrorism, one loses the opportunity
to educate people to a fundamental truth about terrorism and even
implicitly denies that truth in order to be practical. We find that we
can't do that. After one of us (Herman) authored books entitled The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (with Noam
Chomsky) and The Real Terror Network, the latter featuring the
gigantic U.S.-sponsored terror network that emerged in the years
after 1950, and after following U.S. policy for years thereafter in
which terrorism has been very prominent, he (and we) consider the
notion of the United States as an antiterrorist state a sick joke. [...]

[This essay is a Commentaries distributed as a premium sent to Sustainer
Donors of Z/ZNet; to learn more about the project, consult ZNet at
http://www.zmag.org.  If you disagree with the views expressed in this
essay, you may contact the authors via ZNet.]


* * *
Zone/911 is an occasional enewsletter published by
www.Online-Journalist.com. It seeks to gather together shards of  the
shattered geopolitical crystal palace loosely linked by tangential threads
that lead, eventually, and sometimes in very roundabout ways, to the works
of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. Article excerpts appear without prior
authorization of their originating publications under established "fair
use" principles. Readers are encouraged to click on the enclosed urls and
read excerpted articles in their entirety,   gather information from a
broad spectrum of sources, and use their brains to integrate their own
understanding of the post-911 Situation.



Doug Millison - Writer/Editor/Web Editorial Consultant
millison at online-journalist.com
www.Online-Journalist.com