Gość: Bert
IP: *.214.120.53.Dial1.Boston1.Level3.net
14.09.01, 06:09
Artykul z brytyjskiego The Guardian z 13 wrzesnia.
Warto przeczytac w wersji oryginalnej.
They can''t see why they are
hated
Americans cannot ignore what their government does
abroad
Special report: Terrorism in the US
Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian
workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully
clear that most Americans simply don''t get it. From the
president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to
be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and
democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force -
just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of
who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer
of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out
such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why
the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab
and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems
almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as
rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any
but a small minority might make the connection between what
has been visited upon them and what their government has
visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not
to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating
consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no
favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential
rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose
determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy
ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel
anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of
"civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington''s
poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the
west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and
hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion
of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George
Bush''s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the
US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a
colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of
global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial
and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of
treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the
globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without
troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous
embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown
its weight behind Israel''s 34-year illegal military occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday''s Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast
carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration''s Munich-like
appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what
US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance
that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world''s
population, for whom there is little democracy in the current
distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that
Tuesday''s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden''s
supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again
reaping a dragons'' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be
overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the
1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time
when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden
and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6,
as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist
leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his
genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American
sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had
spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish
its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced
through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the
brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while
Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately
searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever
massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more
Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m
estimated to have died in Congo''s wars since the overthrow of
the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing
have to do with blowing up office buildings during working
hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international
coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such
counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate
from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every
"terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the
injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
Rzeczywiscie, sledzilem pilnie wiesci za posrednictwem ABC, NBC, CBS, FNN, CNN.
Nikt nigdy nie postawil pytania dlaczego. Powiem wiecej- przecietny amerykanin
nie ma pojecia, i, co gorzej, wcale nie jest tym zainteresowany.
Do boju nawoluja natomiast wszyscy.
