American Racism, Ignorance, Brainwashing, Isolationism, Greed, Hatred ... (Attacks on America)

Member Name: Pamsy

Product:	Attacks on America
Date:	18/09/01 (330 review reads)
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"In the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. There are two things about those countries -- all are poor countries, and the majority are people of dark colored skin." -- Colman McCarthy

"Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth...my government is the world's leading purveyor of violence." -- Martin Luther King, 1964.

In our eyes, these events were sick. But how many of us have stopped to think what other countries think, about how we killed 200,000 (probably far more) innocent civilians during the Gulf War and sacked the man who found these figures, how the US funded 6 billion dollars over 12 years to the killers of over 70,000 civilians in El Salvador in the 1980s, how economic sanctions against Iraq have killed over a million people since the war and 5,000 children under 5 die there every month due to restrictions on medicine and water. Or what about the dubious American relationship with the Saudi Royal Family, who it seems are funding the very people we criticize. What about the American training of a columbian military unit which gains its money from drugs, to fight drugs. What do these countries think about the fact that Israel, whose population is 0.1% of the total world population gets roughly 1/3 of all US foreign aid. If I wanted to I could probably find a lot more examples, that aren't so commonly shown on the likes of CNN or BBC.

America must look at WHY this occurred. You can't simply bomb a belief out of people. America must analyse the flaw in its foreign policy which has left millions worldwide screaming for their blood. Clearly, waging a war against nations harbouring terrorists (which might I add includes America itself), will only further the crisis.

If people hate you, for bombing their parents, their friends, their brother, or at least, funding those events, then to release yet more
bombs on their homeland will only enfuriate them further. One must also consider, that thousands of people, including many slaves, work every hour god sends, colecting the likes of cocoa beans in Africa, living in mud-huts, doing back-breaking work, for a few pence an hour, so that we in the prosperous world can have cheap chocolate. THAT is a very big part of the reason capitalism is so successful.

And yet I hear Americans saying 'I don't want civilians to die, but I do believe it is unfortunately necessary, so that we may bring the perpetrators to justice'. Well I bet if I was given the chance to ask one of Mr Bin Laden's men his stance, he would say EXACTLY the same thing. I don't believe whoever did these attacks on America particularly wanted to hurt lots of people. For all the propaganda we get, these people aren't stupid, they know the common American citizen doesn't decide the foreign policy. I believe what these people wanted to create, was not a mass of human suffering, but chaos, because their quarrel is not with the average American citizen, but with the American government. These terrorists don't despise America as a people, but as a country, and that is why they targetted the symbols of the success of their country.
I suspect those terrorists involved were thinking what many of us are thinking now 'I don't believe lots of Americans should die in this attack, but it is unfortunately necessary, to ensure the powers that be listen'.

The hypocricy on the part of many, possibly most Americans, is extremely sickening. After the attacks, I heard one boy, in his late teens, say "I don't understand why anybody would want to attack America". This boy has obviously been brainwashed. He is an example of a nation plagued by not just ignorance, but brainwashing and downright lies. Our own nation is guilty of this too, though to a lesser extent, becaudse we're not patriotic about a h
istory we don't have. If the evidence I have given you so far doesn't persuade you of their ignorance, then perhaps you should consider the following.

The Geneva Land War Convention calls for "legitimate targets" and "illegitimate targets". The American nuclear bombs which were dropped onto CIVILIAN areas, wiping out Nagasaki and Hiroshima, these were legitimate targets? The 600,000 German CIVILIANS killed during that war by American bombs? KILLING CIVILIANS CONSTITUTES A WAR CRIME - WHOEVER YOU ARE. Pick any month in the last 40 years, and you can be almost certain that the amount of suffering deliberately caused by America makes the number killed in New York look pitifully small.

Hate crimes are not a new thing in America. "After Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 enabled the U.S. government to extract Japanese Americans from their homes and confine them to internment camps of grim barracks surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. The War Relocation Authority had 120,313 Japanese Americans under its control. During the Civil Rights movement, churches were burned down, activists murdered." (www.commondreams.org)

Many in the first world that we all live in are under the belief that democracy=success, and Communism=evil regime doomed to failure. I don't advocate communism, though I am aware that communism never really happened. The corporate bullies of democracy already established in this world would hate such a system, and they killed any form of socialism before it was born. Capitalism is pretty much how all of the economic world operates now. You go into Africa, you will see men from Marlborough, giving children cigarettes. Do our leaders care about this? No. In some areas you will see children, working 12 hours a day, some working 20, as slaves. They are working 6 hours just to earn enough for a loaf of bread. There are more people living lifestyles like this, or not much better than this,
than there are people living a lifestyle such as ours. What I'm getting at, is that the current system, employed all over the globe, DOESN'T WORK. It works for us, thus we think it's great. And many would like to ignore the masses, for whom this system is the reason for their miserable life.

But this is not the end. If ourselves, and America, were the causes of their misery, they'd be pretty unsatisfied. However, what we're doing to them is far worse. We are encouraging social divides among these already desperate groups. America's biased funding of the Israelies enfuriates people who have nothing to live for anyway.

What happened on September 11 was a result of democracy, and an example of how capitalism cannot work forever.

Moving on...

BIN LADEN DIDN'T MASTERMIND THIS AT ALL. He may not even be connected. If he was, the most he'll have done was FUND terrorism. But then, Bin Laden's funding of terrorism could be put down to the example he was set earlier in his life, by the AMERICANS, who funded and trained his army, to fight the Russians, who would have done a lot more good for Afghanistan than the Americans, who helped the taliban. Because, you see, America has funded, and even during their 'war on terrorism', still continue to fund, any terrorists who don't use it against them. Of course, in Bin Laden, they made a mistake.

The Americans claim to have evidence against Bin Laden, but noone seems to have any HARD evidence against this man. The British and US legal system works on the innocent until proven guilty approach. The burden of proof lies on those who believe he is guilty, not those who believe he is innocent of this attack. We condemn countries which practice sentence without a trial. We insist on due process in other countries and condemn those that don't practice this. But when it suits us we junk it and go back to the old lynch mob. DO AMERICANS INTEND TO
DEFEND THEIR PRINCIPLES AND VALUES BY ABANDONING THEM?

WHAT EVIDENCE HAS THE FBI GOT? Who trusts the FBI? Not me, they have a litany of mistakes. As do the CIA (link provided later, for evidence). Also, after the OKLAHOMA BOMBING, many thought they had identified the enemy, hence why more than 200 muslims were victims of harrassment across America. The same is being repeated, but noone learns.

THE FBI ARE ONE OF THE MOST INCOMPETENT ORGANISATIONS ON EARTH. Don't forget Waco and the subsequent investigations. Or the FBI lab's mistakes in the OJ and other cases. Or the Richard Jewell fiasco. Or James Riady and Johnny Chung and the Red Chinese illegally sneaking campaign cash into American campaigns. Or the Wen Ho Lee Los Alamos case. Or the Robert Hanssen spy scandal. Or the recent loss of top secret laptop computers and assault guns from supposedly secure FBI centres.

Yet more evidence of hypocricy emerges when one considers that the Taliban are indeed a former American business partner. In the 11 years following from 1979, the United States subsidised Afghan rebels to the tune of $3 billion. According to an article from the following address (http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/ Courses/so191/SouthAsReadings/Af ghanistan.html) these are the words of a prominent Afghan leader:

"After pouring in three billion dollars' worth of weapons, America could have helped us find our way back to civilization and rebuild our nation," says a prominent Afghan leader who, in light of recent anti-Americanism in the area, asked not to be named. "For more than a decade, we knew only one thing, to settle arguments through the barrels of our guns."

And the following I quote from this address (http://homepage.mac.com/hjens/afghanistan.html)

"Ostensibly, our government's only interest in Afghanistan these days is to promote peace, get the Afghans to stop harboring terrorists and
recover Stinger missiles that were given to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviets and may now be turned against Americans.

But that is not entirely true. There are commercial interests, with heavy American involvement in a consortium called CentGas, which wants to build a $2 billion oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and into Pakistan. Its chief partners are the U.S. oil firm Unocal, Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, Hyundai of South Korea, two Japanese companies, a Pakistani conglomerate and the Turkmen government."

I suspect Bush may be walking into a trap in considering retaliation. Just 9 months into the job he is faced with one of the toughest decisions an American President has been confronted with since the second world war. To wage war against the taliban won't defeat the problem. That in itself is a hell of a otugh task, and Bush's words of "some of our victories won't be heard about" simply gives him a license to kill who the hell he wants! The CIA have killed many leaders of nations. The CIA makes millions upon millions by trafficking drugs into America, to sell onto the Mafia. Visit the following link (http://serendipity.magnet.ch/cia.html) for more information on that.

The increased enlisting into the US Army is a concern too. Standards of US Special Forces such as SEALs and Delta Force reduced dramatically due to this during the Vietnam War, in a matter of a few years they went from accepting around 10% of recruits to over half, and from recruiting only from hardened airborne soldiers, to recruiting from the street. This is something many say even their elite forces still have not recovered from, and a surge in quantity could compromise quality. The US Marines is already bigger than the entire British Army, with more aircraft than the Royal Air Force.

I forget who said it (please tell me), but:

'Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.
'

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