Toothpaste and Terrorism
TOOTHPASTE AND TERRORISM…
Can a History Lesson Show Us How They Are
Related?
By this time, we have all read… and cringed at headlines informing us that the Twin Tower airborne terrorists of bin Laden’s al Qaeda are at it again. Tony B and GWB will be taking credit for “saving us” from the Islamic Terrorists who were thwarted in their recent attempt to smuggle explosives aboard commercial airlines concealed in innocuous cosmetic containers. Which means, we fearful passengers will now be flying our unfriendly skies without shampoo, deodorant or… toothpaste.
What’s it all about, Alfie?
In this topsy-turvey world, could it be that what appears up is really down, and those who appear to be our “saviors” are actually the source of our collective torment and “code orange” endangerment?
Dr. Leonard Carrier, DW’s In-House Philosopher and Historian
Leads our Editorial Commentaries on Our “Code Orange”
Fear of Reprised Al Qaeda Terrorism.
Are These “I.C.B.M.’s” (InterContinental Ballistic Muslims)
The ones to fear, or is it rather the Statesmen whose Foreign Policy Incites them…
Or is it …both?
Can History Repeat Itself?
By: Len Carrier
Here’s a quotation to ponder:
“…we can see at work such internal psychological components as xenophobia, racism, and violence, interacting with such external social components as a rigid hierarchical social structure, a strong central power, intolerance of diversity (religious, racial, ethnic, sexual, or political), built-in mechanisms of violence to handle dissenters, regular use of violence to enforce laws, and a low regard for civil liberties.”
Can you guess the subject matter? The words appear on p. 227 of a book titled, Why People Believe Weird Things, written by Michael Shermer (2002). If you guessed that Shermer is talking about the Bush administration’s attitude about, and treatment of, Middle East Muslims, you would be wrong. Shermer is talking about the forces behind what happened when the Nazis took power in 1933, “…and began passing legislation against Jews, to Kristallnacht and other acts of violence against Jews, to the deportation of Jews to ghettos and labor camps, to the extermination of Jews in labor and death camps….”
Fast forward to the 21st century. Jews are no longer proper scapegoats for the failures of our authoritarian government, nor can world-communism be blamed for its inadequacies. The new bete noir is “Islamo-fascism.” This is the term now used by our kingly president and his court to whip public opinion to a frenzy before the November elections. Aided by right-wing fundamentalist Christians who call Islam “an evil religion,” supported by war-mongering government officials who never served a day of military service, and fueled by corporations that profit from war, we have an government that desperately needs a raison d’etre. All of Shermer’s descriptions of the Nazi mentality can be used to explain our treatment of Muslims under our occupation in the faraway Middle East, and in the not-so-far-away reaches of Guantanamo Bay. But, of course, it could never happen here. Or could it?
Thomas Jefferson said that every so often there should be a revolution, when the blood of patriots and tyrants needs spilling to nourish the tree of liberty. I’d like to think that he was speaking metaphorically, and that the tyrants are Bush and Cheney and their dissembling minions; the patriots are the ones who speak out against the tyranny; and the blood is the crop of new statesmen and stateswomen who will lead our Republic out of the desert and back to its constitutional principles. The revolution is completed, of course, after we’ve counted the all the ballots, and the election shows that we’ve thrown the rascals out.
Dusty (DW Foreign Policy Editor) opines:
Len, your words reminded me of what Bob Herbert wrote in the NY times only 90 days ago… I’ll excerpt some consonant language and resume my reflections afterwards…
NY TIMES:
May 15, 2006
OP-ED COLUMNIST
America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
“In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public’s fear is this president’s most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known…”
Dusty Concludes….
Len, I continue to appreciate your cautious optimism and balanced moderation, and concede there appears now some basis for it. Patriots may in fact not be totally powerless even in today’s world as we face the juggernaut power of combined corporate and fundamentalist distortion of Constitution, statute and verse for the service of the munitions, energy and power brokers of the world united in the now critically-massed core of Middle Eastern war. Wasn’t a turncoat hawkish neo-con Democrat in Connecticut just defeated by patriots including blog-warriors like Move-On.org and us… the key-tapping warriors of Democratswrite.com? An incumbent war-monger was defeated even as Middle-Eastern missiles (and Twin Tower terrorists) were flying!
But, while there is room for hope, let’s not forget that while we’re hoping, praying and tapping, we must continue to row towards shore. The point I would make is the point I made immediately after the Twin Towers were toppled on 9/11/01—we need to keep our eye on what’s actually happening, because, as in Orwell’s “1984”, we read one man presage a time which I submit has arrived, when there is a Big Brother combination of government and politically-controlled media sufficiently powerful and determined to make black appear white…and yes, by analogy, act as terrorists and yet cause us, through fear and constant utterance of the “BIG LIES” make innocents appear as though they are enemy…by assigning to them the same nature and name… “ TERRORIST’.
On 9/11/01, without doubt, Islamic terrorists bombed NY’s Twin Towers with our own airplanes. But, from the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves, ask yourselves whom they were bombing and burning? The answer is chilling but instantly clear and certain: “Western Terrorists”. They killed 3,000 of us because, in their hearts and minds, (AND IN OUR OWN HISTORY BOOKS) we, in alliance with Israel, since 1948, had mercilessly killed tens of thousands of them, and each time, using weapons of mass destruction: F-16’s (well, after the French fighters were either shot down or retired by 1950) tanks, smart bombs, missiles… good-old-innovatively-trustworthy western technological war machines. All with our blessings—and names—one them.
For the whole BALANCING STORY of who were “terrorists” and who were warriors seeking reprisals for former acts of terrorism, please be referred to my 9/11/o1 nationally-archived article, or hit the “articles” link on this website and scroll down to the July 25, 2005 article entitled “Stand Behind Me, America and Take Responsibility”…
So far, no one has pointed out to these idiot Islamic terrorists the perfect way they are playing into the hands of their arch enemies. Just as America is getting fed up with the war in Iraq, to the point they are voting out hawks even in the Democratic Party, they are, with perfect timing, fulfilling the Islamic witch-hunting prophesies of Wolfowitz, Wurmser, Cheney, Bush, Kristol, Perle, and yes- Lieberman and the rest of the neo-cons who warned us …
FIVE YEARS AGO….KEEP REMEMBERING THAT….FIVE YEARS AGO… FIVE YEARS AGO….
….That they “the terrorists” ….would DO IT AGAIN….UNLESS WE GOT THEM FIRST….
On this idiotic pretext our fascist regime in combination with its fatherland (England) demonized Afghanistan and Iraq as a pretext for war and waged it. After killing between 20,000 and 60,000 innocent Islamics in both countries (the numbers are subject to conjecture and dispute because our fascist, totalitarian government forbids or otherwise prevents the reporting of an accurate tallying of the civilian dead) it has the temerity to claim that the recently-thwarted assaults on us by would-be Islamic terrorists are confirmation of what Bush warned us of five years ago. Anybody ever heard the phrase “ordaining one’s own prophesy”? As I’ve said before, when Hitler had conquered and killed enough Frenchmen, those who rose up in protest and started rolling grenades under their lorry’s, dinner tables and beds were called “patriots”, or “resistance”. When Iraqi’s act in similar fashion against the American invaders of their sovereign country, they’re called “insurgents” and, of course, more opportunistically… “terrorists”.
That, my friends, is black doing its damnedest to paint itself white. My only question is, Mr. bin Laden, what the hell took you so long? Are those rumored stories of your terminal kidney disease and dialysis true?
Please don’t get me wrong. Please don’t conclude from my writing what I just did that I condone what was certainly a terrorist plot against innocent and good Americans. What I am pointing out is that this terrorist assault which was aborted with the assistance of Bush foreign policy was clearly caused by Bush foreign policy. Those travesties we have helped our Israeli allies commit for the past half century with their “eye for a lash” policy of Palestinian reprisals, we have ourselves…preemptively and independently more than doubled in the eyes and hearts of Islamics whose kin we have slain under false pretext in Iraq and Afghanistan and now (through military alliance and aid) in Lebanon.
And the lessons from history that we should be studying at this point? Easy. The exact ones Dr. Carrier and Bob Herbert teach: We are being manipulated by fear to believe in the biggest of all lies. Just as it was done in Nazi Germany. Only the names of the scapegoat villains have been changed. The fear is exactly the same.
The biggest of all lies is that dastardly declaration that one nation has the moral reason and right to launch and wage preemptive war against another sovereign nation where there is no evidence that such nation or its peoples are in the imminent process of launching such a war against us.
America used to be the country that opposed other countries which made the cataclysmic mistake of waging preemptive war…the last instance being our defense (albeit one tainted by our need to protect our oil supply) of Kuwait. Now white has clearly transmuted to black. We are the aggressors. We–the people–have gone along with our administration’s aggression because we failed to master the history lessons that Dr. Carrier and Bob Herbert would have us tardily research and remember: Fear can make cowards of us all. When we are sufficiently cowed, we will send our children into battle whether we are right or wrong.
Thanks Len, for leading us judiciously and with circumspection back to the history books. May the shaking of our fearful hands not keep us from our appointed tasks of …grasping them.
And the answer to the prefatory question is, of course- “It’s both.”
War is still the only enemy.
Dusty
August 11, 2006
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