NP Al Qaeda (was Re: re Re:

[Doug Millison]

At 6:25 AM +1100 7/2/02, jbor wrote:
>Isn't this, er, wrong? Weren't the September 11 attacks caused by Al Qaeda
>men who were already in the US, some of them as residents, even citizens?


And viewed, as are all immigrants in this country, as the Other, outsiders
who don't really belong here in the good old USA because they won't
"assimilate", because they insist on all that icky multicultural stuff like
continuing to practice their own religions and speak their own languges and
eat their smelly dirty food.  That's why it has been so easy for the Bush
the Younger, Slayer of Evil-doers to salt hundreds and hundreds of them
away in prison and suspend the Constitution without more static from the
American people.

 If it helps, think of them sort of like those Afghani refugees you all
have been so eager to help down there in Australia -- you know, forcing
them into the position of doing a Herero-like racial suicide as the only
way to protest the inhumane conditions of their incarceration.

I think our European friends have a similar experience with guest workers
and other immigrants and resident aliens -- I know of this first hand from
my time in France and The Netherlands, at least.

>Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that it was the previous US
>Administration's (pseudo-Left Democrat) unwillingness or inability to
>confront the looming horizon of terrorism which allowed the deliberate and
>tactical "scattering", the heinous attacks themselves, and the conservative
>political backlash we are now experiencing?

No.  I think you (we all do) have a lot to learn about what the previous
Administration actually tried to do about bin Laden and about who and what
probably prevented those efforts from succeeding (the NY Review of Books
ran an interesting series of stories some months ago that illuminated some
of this, in a particularly even-handed way)  -- deep-seated resistance to
change on the part of  careerists most of whom probably came in during the
Reagan-Bush years and are fighting to hold their turf until their upcoming
retirement, plus the usual infighting between the FBI, CIA, and the rest of
that alphabet soup of US  intelligence agenices, and the meddling of
corporations and individuals with interests in the Middle East and Central
Asia they don't want disturbed.   Bush Jr. is rightly getting the blame for
blowing the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership out of Afghanistan and forcing
them ever-deeper underground, as far as I can tell.

I expect you already know  all this and are just disagreeing for the sake
of an argument, however, but it's still worth it to bring in some a
balancing view.


 >Isn't the election and
>increasing popularity of the more right wing governments in the West, and in
>the East also, and the reversion to even more conservative policies and
>leaders, due to the general public's lack of faith in "the Left's" stand on,
>and ability and willingness to counter, terrorism?

No. Isn't it the rise of neofascism orchestrated by global capital with the
acquiesence and active assistance of the mass media outlets and other
cultural insititutions that global capital now controls, which have
co-opted and corruped the masses as Pynchon shows in his novels, especially
GR, Vineland, M&D?  A movement that's being actively opposed by a growing
minority of people who haven't abandoned human values>   The bumper sticker
on my car says, "I'd Rather Be Smashing Imperialism".  (You *can't know* if
I mean this as a joke or not.)


>The analogy you make between the Lambton Worm scene in _M&D_ and the Vietnam
>War is totally inapt as well.

I don't agree with the parameters you try to erect and enforce with regard
to the approach to textual criticism you seem to favor, remember?   At any
rate, it's just an observation that came to mind as I was re-reading Ch 60
the other day, expressed here in freespeechspace, although I do think it
could be supported by going through GR, Vineland, and M&D and digging out
the allusions to the Vietnam War, which was an ongoing tragedy for all
involved at the time Pynchon was working on GR and began working on M&D.
Feel free to disagree, however, and read M&D as you like.


>
>Doug Millison wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> It's tempting to think of the Worm coiled around the White House, whose
>> occupant is so quick to identify an Evil Other and seek to slay it, no
>> matter what the cost or how suicidal the project might be.
>>
>> That Enemy able "to reassemble itself and fight on" sounds a bit like the
>> the US's opponent in  Vietnam, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army, in
>> the 60s and early 70s when Pynchon is believed to have begun work on this
>> novel...and like the al Qaeda forces that Bush the Younger, Slayer of
>> Evil-doers more recently scattered around the world.
>>
>>