El Commandante
7th December 2001, 21:27
Here is an article that I was pointed in the direction of, some good points are raised. This wasn't written by me so I can't take any of the credit or criticism.
My Country is a Terrorist State:
I am an American
That's a shocking title, isn't it.
The problem is that, as much as I want to say otherwise, it's true.
"But how dare you say that of your own country! Have you no patriotism?", someone shouts from the back of the room.
Ah, but it's the most patriotic thing I can say, actually.
Why?
Because I am responsible for all actions taken in my name, and therefore for the actions taken by the government which claims to represent me. When officials holding office in that government take actions which violate the very spirit of that country, I am only unpatriotic if I ignore them.
Or, to put it in the words of one of those government officials:
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.
-- Theodore Roosevelt.
When someone says "You shouldn't say that about your own country", they mean either "You should refuse to believe it even if it's true", or "You should deny it, even if it's true". Otherwise patriotism would not be a factor, because you'd simply be speaking an untruth.
But does anyone really believe that we should be either lie to others or ourselves, about something so important? Is it really patriotic to ignore the truth?
In other words:
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
-- G. K. Chesterton
Is it unpatriotic for Chinese citizens to complain about their brutal, oppressive government? Of course not.
Oh, it may be suicidal, but it's not unpatriotic.
What is unpatriotic is standing by and ignoring the abuses of people in charge of one's own government, especially in a "democracy", where those abuses are done in your name.
When Saddam Hussein threatens to build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the people of that country have no say in it. Their attempts to overthrow him have all resulted in their own wholeesale slaoughter.
But when officials in the US government build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, it is We the People who are responsible for it. We supposedly select those people who are doing it, they are our "representatives".
And when US officials use those weapons, or any other weapons, or acts as a terrorist state by threatening or intentionally endangering the lives and well-being of the citizens of other countries, you and I are responsible for it, as Americans.
We could start with our representatives' cowardly "modern" method of fighting "police action" wars, as in Kosovo. It turns out, now, that the month of intensive dropping of millions of tons of bombs did not destroy thousands of tanks, not even hundreds...it destroyed about twenty tanks. A bunch of drunken college students with molotov cocktails could have done better, and probably have in the past.
What the brutal bombing did accomplish was the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, including (or perhaps mainly, since they were 75% of the people in the line of fire) the very children, women, and men the US was pretending to "save" through this violence.
This was an "accomplishment", you see, because the terror of death on the part of civilians was supposed to force the government of Serbia to surrender its sovereignty to NATO, out of fear of backlash from its own people.
Hey, do you know what the method and point of terrorism is?
It's to cause fear of death among the civilian population of a country, so that the government backs gives in to some demand out of fear of backlash from its own people.
Threatening to kill innocent civilians with random bombs in Israel or Northern Ireland, for example. Or in Kosovo. By the PLO or IRA. Or US.
Destroying or cutting off innocent civilians' life needs, like wiping out a power plant or hospital as Islamic terrorists have apparently considered doing to people in the US...or as we did in Kosovo. You and me.
When a power like when American officials cut off the life needs of the people of another country through embargo, it is called "economic warfare".
But a better name for it is economic terrorism.
It is not the rulers and military who suffer from such brutality. They have the power to simply take more of whatever is left to keep themselves comfortable. That's the whole excuse the US uses for its economic terrorism in the first place. "The rulers are really mean to their people", essentially.
But whom does their economic violence harm?
ONLY the very people we claim are being oppressed. Well, and US workers whose goods would be sold to the people being starved out by our representatives, but that's not really the same scale of badness.
The best estimates say that a million innocent civilians have died in Iraq, including 400,000 children, because of the US/UN's "sanctions". Those aren't the high estimates, by the way, some say it has been much worse.
Nobody even claims that any Iraqi government officials have died from the sanctions, of course. Just regular people who are like you, me, and our children.
Is that what you would choose to do, if you had the power?
If you didn't approve of some oppressive military dictatorship, would you choose to kill hundreds of thousands of children to "punish" that government, not actually harming the government officials themselves?
What do you mean, "no"? That's what's being done in your name, right now.
And don't even get me started on Cuba. Fewer people dead, but the sanctions have actually kept Castro in power, since he can blame them for any economic problem, instead of the inherently useless Communist system.
Oh, remember Haiti? When the president of Haiti called for the lynching and burning alive of the elected members of the Haitian government, and the Haitian military responded by ousting him from power, the US set massive sanctions upon the entire country, causing an astounding amount of suffering and death. Did this get that violent, self-described Marxist president back into power like the US President intended?
Of course not.
The US had to eventually land troops on that sovereign country, forcing them to take back their violent, anti-democratic president.
So what good was the suffering of the Haitian people?
Well, it kept the people of other countries terrified of the people claiming to represent us in the US government.
Placing people in terror. Also known as terrorism
My Country is a Terrorist State:
I am an American
That's a shocking title, isn't it.
The problem is that, as much as I want to say otherwise, it's true.
"But how dare you say that of your own country! Have you no patriotism?", someone shouts from the back of the room.
Ah, but it's the most patriotic thing I can say, actually.
Why?
Because I am responsible for all actions taken in my name, and therefore for the actions taken by the government which claims to represent me. When officials holding office in that government take actions which violate the very spirit of that country, I am only unpatriotic if I ignore them.
Or, to put it in the words of one of those government officials:
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.
-- Theodore Roosevelt.
When someone says "You shouldn't say that about your own country", they mean either "You should refuse to believe it even if it's true", or "You should deny it, even if it's true". Otherwise patriotism would not be a factor, because you'd simply be speaking an untruth.
But does anyone really believe that we should be either lie to others or ourselves, about something so important? Is it really patriotic to ignore the truth?
In other words:
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
-- G. K. Chesterton
Is it unpatriotic for Chinese citizens to complain about their brutal, oppressive government? Of course not.
Oh, it may be suicidal, but it's not unpatriotic.
What is unpatriotic is standing by and ignoring the abuses of people in charge of one's own government, especially in a "democracy", where those abuses are done in your name.
When Saddam Hussein threatens to build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the people of that country have no say in it. Their attempts to overthrow him have all resulted in their own wholeesale slaoughter.
But when officials in the US government build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, it is We the People who are responsible for it. We supposedly select those people who are doing it, they are our "representatives".
And when US officials use those weapons, or any other weapons, or acts as a terrorist state by threatening or intentionally endangering the lives and well-being of the citizens of other countries, you and I are responsible for it, as Americans.
We could start with our representatives' cowardly "modern" method of fighting "police action" wars, as in Kosovo. It turns out, now, that the month of intensive dropping of millions of tons of bombs did not destroy thousands of tanks, not even hundreds...it destroyed about twenty tanks. A bunch of drunken college students with molotov cocktails could have done better, and probably have in the past.
What the brutal bombing did accomplish was the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, including (or perhaps mainly, since they were 75% of the people in the line of fire) the very children, women, and men the US was pretending to "save" through this violence.
This was an "accomplishment", you see, because the terror of death on the part of civilians was supposed to force the government of Serbia to surrender its sovereignty to NATO, out of fear of backlash from its own people.
Hey, do you know what the method and point of terrorism is?
It's to cause fear of death among the civilian population of a country, so that the government backs gives in to some demand out of fear of backlash from its own people.
Threatening to kill innocent civilians with random bombs in Israel or Northern Ireland, for example. Or in Kosovo. By the PLO or IRA. Or US.
Destroying or cutting off innocent civilians' life needs, like wiping out a power plant or hospital as Islamic terrorists have apparently considered doing to people in the US...or as we did in Kosovo. You and me.
When a power like when American officials cut off the life needs of the people of another country through embargo, it is called "economic warfare".
But a better name for it is economic terrorism.
It is not the rulers and military who suffer from such brutality. They have the power to simply take more of whatever is left to keep themselves comfortable. That's the whole excuse the US uses for its economic terrorism in the first place. "The rulers are really mean to their people", essentially.
But whom does their economic violence harm?
ONLY the very people we claim are being oppressed. Well, and US workers whose goods would be sold to the people being starved out by our representatives, but that's not really the same scale of badness.
The best estimates say that a million innocent civilians have died in Iraq, including 400,000 children, because of the US/UN's "sanctions". Those aren't the high estimates, by the way, some say it has been much worse.
Nobody even claims that any Iraqi government officials have died from the sanctions, of course. Just regular people who are like you, me, and our children.
Is that what you would choose to do, if you had the power?
If you didn't approve of some oppressive military dictatorship, would you choose to kill hundreds of thousands of children to "punish" that government, not actually harming the government officials themselves?
What do you mean, "no"? That's what's being done in your name, right now.
And don't even get me started on Cuba. Fewer people dead, but the sanctions have actually kept Castro in power, since he can blame them for any economic problem, instead of the inherently useless Communist system.
Oh, remember Haiti? When the president of Haiti called for the lynching and burning alive of the elected members of the Haitian government, and the Haitian military responded by ousting him from power, the US set massive sanctions upon the entire country, causing an astounding amount of suffering and death. Did this get that violent, self-described Marxist president back into power like the US President intended?
Of course not.
The US had to eventually land troops on that sovereign country, forcing them to take back their violent, anti-democratic president.
So what good was the suffering of the Haitian people?
Well, it kept the people of other countries terrified of the people claiming to represent us in the US government.
Placing people in terror. Also known as terrorism