How The Left View September 11th - Third Superpower

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How The Left View September 11th

Authored by Michael Pate on July 30th, 2003 at 9:28 AM

The WTC plane-bombings, for the Bush administration that provoked them in the first place, failed conspicuously to prevent them and then shamelessly exploited this awful human tragedy for the advancement of its own s***ty little agendas, have become the sacred touchstone of this proposed “War without end.” Any previously unthinkable political action can be instantly validated by the magic words 9-11, in much the same way as Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel can make horrific moral and humanitarian issues simply vanish by mentioning the Holocaust. - Alan Moore

If there had been more cooperation and sharing of information, if there had been more creativity and some luck, this plot could have been discovered well before it resulted in September 11. - Bob Graham

Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America the divine has been extended and refined. In December 2001, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of that city, delivered his last mayoral speech in St Paul’s Chapel, close to the site of the shattered twin towers. “All that matters,” he claimed, “is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what it’s all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was … how much you believed in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion.” The chapel in which he spoke had been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact that George Washington had once prayed there. It was, he said, now “sacred ground to people who feel what America is all about”. The United States of America no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood. - George Monbiot

It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York. - Steve Kinzer

If our politics has been about only One Thing since 9/11, I’d say it’s about the fight to rescue a Republic (“of the people, for the people, by the people”) from the temptations of Empire (of the foreign oil, for the corporate class, by the military). - Christopher Lydon

Links in this entry:

After New Hampshire
Alan Moore does, indeed, know the score.
America is a religion
Original Sin in the Modern Middle East
Sen. Graham lashes out at federal agencies

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