"Why of course the people don’t want war...But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann Goering, Nuremberg, 1946
Enough is enough! It's now past time to move beyond the meme that reinforces national victimhood, future penury and a permanent victory by a dead Terrorist freak - by saying "No MORE!" We have had ten years of it: "remembrances", vigils, services, speeches, memorials and whatnot...now it's time to stop. The more we enable and feed this self-serving, maudlin pool of pseudo-national sanctity the poorer we become as a people, as a valid power for good in the world, and as worthy benefactors for our future generations. The longer we remain trapped in this mindset, the more power the dead bin Laden holds over our thought processes and worse, the more we become his hostages by continuing to do exactly what he wanted us to all along!
A good example of this meme was on display today in a piece by Tom Brokaw in PARADE magazine in which he wrote:
"In the years since 9/11 we've been beset by our economic excesses and failure to honor the fundamental laws of financial risk"
Observe first he resorts to false composition in his use of the pronoun "we've" (trying to impugn ALL Americans, citizens ....from poor, to middle class and others) when the actual culprits represented a small cabal of greedy bastards on Wall Street that devised horrific financial instruments - called "credit default swaps" - and sent the nation careening into a financial meltdown and tailspin in 2008, with over 8 million jobs lost and we're still not out of the woods. He then makes the inextricable link to supporting the War State as evident in most displays of the meme:
"We've gone about our lives with too little connection to the sacrifices of those fighting for us far away and the sacrifices of of their families.."
But he glosses over the fact Americans were prepared to sacrifice but the leader at the time (Bush Jr.) demanded nothing but they "go out and shop". He then invaded two Muslim nations, one which had nada to do with 9/11 - ramped up over a trillion in costs, and asked NO ONE to pay any higher taxes! The first ever so-called "war" conducted on credit! And then he wonders why average citizens don't take them seriously or have any connections? Is he nuts, or just stupid?
Think I'm alone in expressing such reservations and complaints? Think again! They are all over the freaking net if one looks. Cripes, even our local right wing-libertarian rag has recognized what's gone down the past ten years and how we've allowed the rubble of 9/11 to continue long past the actual physical devastation - by devastating our lives, and economy as well!
In today's editorial ('We Hav e Imploded Since 9-11"), of my 'Libbie-wingnut' oriented paper (http://www.gazette.com/), I actually found these words:
"We take this opportunity to mourn what has become of our country since Sept. 11, 2001. We survived, but we have not recovered successfully. It is not the editorial board’s mission to sugarcoat reality in order to appear patriotic. Our goal is to publish truth, to the best of our ability, and today the truth is unpleasant.
Since the day of history’s worst attack on American civilians, our country has squandered liberty, hemorrhaged wealth and imprisoned individualism, with a government that has doubled its cost on an economy that produces less. Government has indebted Americans so severely that we find ourselves at the mercy of developing countries. We have embroiled ourselves in costly foreign wars that have cost the lives nearly 5,000 Americans so far —
As Americans struggle to find jobs and to feed their families, our behemoth government nation-builds in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention in Libya, Pakistan and Yemen. Financially, our Sept. 11-inspired wars have cost Americans $1.36 trillion in direct-war allocations for Iraq and Afghanistan alone — and Iraq had no legitimate nexus to the Sept. 11 attacks. Add that to the cost of Homeland Security and related expenditures and our country has spent a whopping $8 trillion on national security over the past decade. None of those figures includes the ongoing costs of dead and severely injured service personnel. Dead people no longer provide for their families or produce wealth for our country or provide tax payments for government."
What caught my attention were the words: "Since the day of history’s worst attack on American civilians, our country has squandered liberty, hemorrhaged wealth and imprisoned individualism", which the daydreamers and memory-meme purveyors would like to sweep under the rug.
In my last blog on why I'm a 9/11 cynic:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-i-remain-cynic-re-wars-on-terror.html
I noted:
"So long as the War state collects blank checks at the expense of our real (or feigned) sorrow and victimhood, we are the real victims of this whole sordid process. Year after year we are coughing up more of our domestic blood and treasure for "wars" that can never be won, even as millions of our own languish without enough food, or shelter"
Which is the core of the issue! Because in our 9/11 fetish and obsession, which is obviously what it is, we are unconsciously feeding an entrenched and growing War state that won't be satisfied until it gobbles up all available domestic resources for its own use! I mean look how the War state's defenders and protectors squeal like stuck pigs anytime anyone even broaches cutting their ghastly, overblown budget beyond the measly planned $350b over TEN years (or a piddling $35b a year relative to $800b/yr received!) This despite, as reported on ABC News today, over $6 TRILLION has been squandered on military budgets and bullshit since 9/11! Then many wonder why we have such monstrous deficits, and people are soon to be sucked down an austerity spending drain? People who even now can't get their food stamps to last to the end of a month and stand to have them cut in half if the war-mongering Reeps get their way.
But this is exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted! Back to today's Gazette editorial:
"parasites like bin Laden despise liberty. When they attacked our institutions and killed our loved ones in 2001, they must have known we would spare no expense to protect ourselves from future attacks. They must have known we would go to war. They must have known we would tie ourselves in pretzels trying to stay safe. That was their biggest reward."
This is exactly the crux of the matter! Bin Laden knew us better than we knew ourselves! (No doubt because he was our hireling after the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and we armed him to help drive the Russkies out). He knew that he could parlay about $500,000 of investment (in box cutters, flight trainings, plans, hijacker air fares etc.) into getting a mighty superpower to react like a scalded mother bear and lash out aimlessly in every direction. And in the process spare no expense, even if that meant bankrupting itself, having its future credit rating down graded and sending over 40 million citizens into destitution. He knew we would pay that foolish price, and in so doing, he could be the ultimate victor - because he believed we'd set up an endless perma-war meme based on the day's destruction and spend ourselves into oblivion!
All of this was highlighted in detail in my earlier May 4 blog, to do with Rachel Maddow's mind-bending report on Osama bin Laden's true intent:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/05/rachel-maddows-analysis-terrifying.html
As noted therein, Bin Laden's bragging didn't center over the number of deaths in Washington or New York or the physical damage inflicted but the financial costs to the country. As Maddow pointed out, this was where his head and major purpose inhered, though Americans have always ben led to believe (by the 9-11 meme) it was about death, destruction. Which, on the face of it is not terribly surprising, since Americans struck by a sneak attack on the proportions of 9-11 would inevitably be monopolized by death tolls and devastation rather than any economic undercurrents or objectives - which most don't grasp that well anyway. But Bin Laden's own words in a 2004 video were the dead giveaway on his true intentions, and what constituted victory for him:
"We are continuing the ploy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy"
And he's still doing it! With every year's extension to remain in Afghanistan, and with every new "supplemental" war budget or Pentagon budget! We are giving him victory after victory though he's buried at sea. We are weakening our domestic security - financial, political and social - at the behest of a fucking dead man! We seem unable to say 'NO!' to the War -Security state! Again, from The Washington Post's Ezra Klein (May 3) who wrote:
"For Bin Laden, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments not made in our country's domestic economic strength."
So, in other words, so long as deficits keep piling up with these occupations, interventions....including pissing $20b a year to Pakistan, we are doing Bin Laden's bidding. How long before we realize or grasp that the "9-11" meme confers validity on this destruction of financial and domestic security? That in the end, all the trillions we're pissing overseas in brain addled "nation building" amount to more rubble in our own nation, already reeling from cracking water mains, sewer lines and highways - to the tune of $2.2 trillion needed in repairs. But where is our stupid attention? On the fucking DOW's movements, and on the 9-11 meme! (No surprise then that the organ of finance capital, The Wall Street Journal, has played both themes to the hilt this past week. They know that capital and war are tied at the hip like a domme whore and her john!)
How powerful has this meme become? To the extent that every time 9-11 rolls around many Americans crawl under their beds, fearful of some new attack. But just how great are those odds? Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, as I noted in a previous May 4 blog,
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/05/gideon-gets-it-exactly-right.html
Puts them at slim and about none. Citing security expert John Mueller, Rachman notes that the number of Americans killed by terrorists since 1960 is "about the same as the number killed over the same period in deer accidents". For example, cars careening into a deer and being driven into a ditch. Rachman then cites a report for the Rand Corporation by Brian Jenkens who makes a similar point:
"The average American has about a 1 in 9,000 chance of dying in an automobile accident and about a one in 18,000 chance of being murdered.".
Meanwhile, in the five years after 9/11 (including the people killed there) "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack".
By way of comparison, the chance of dying in an airline crash is 1 in 346,000 and the chance of being annihilated by a monster asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) in a collision with Earth, is the same, according to Sir Martin Rees ('Our Final Hour'). So in other words, the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is much much less than the chance of being wiped out in an asteroid collision. So why the fuck are people so obsessed over this essentially negligible fear? More obsessed than we (of the 60s) were when JFK erected the naval blockade to stop Soviet ships from entering port in Cuba, while 93 intermediate nuclear missiles were aimed at the U.S.!
Well, because fear spreads as well as sells, and also, as author Michael Sherry has noted (In the Shadow of War) serves to disable the rational or objective thought processes of a population, making it more amenable to the power and security mongers' bidding. People will then be more likely not only to capitulate in yielding their constitutional rights ("We must be safe!") but also to support the expense and burden of invasions, occupations that drain our Treasury. After all, as Sherry points out, who wants to be that citizen that's against defense of the country or homeland? This is what the War state is betting on, and Hermann Goering's words remain a reminder.
And how extensive and entrenched has the security state alone become? The Washington Post's expose ('Top Secret America') pointed out that:
"In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September, 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons.. "
Adding :
"that is just the organizations created since 9/11, whle the CIA and NSA were hardly modest or under-resourced operations before the war on terror. Indeed, now - at least five counties within 150 miles of D.C. are the richest in the country, in terms of median income, and all are beneficiaries of this monstrous security state".
One in which I used to live, Howard County, Maryland, is the 5th wealthiest and features the NSA headquarters, the subject of an extensive investigative piece when I lived in Columbia, MD ('No Such Agency: America's Fortress of Spies', by Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, The Baltimore Sun Special Section (Dec. 3-15, 1995)). Of course, NSA has vastly grown since then, with its budget more than quadrupled. No wonder they can now afford to peer on every Facebook page and "wall" as well as sort through 5 billion emails a day looking for signs of terrorists.
But the expense is one which is burdening us, as well as the expense of supporting a cancerous Military-Industrial complex.
What this shows is that one of the primary casualties of the 9-11 meme has been the sense of national priorities and perspective, now badly eviscerated. It is this that gives rise to ridiculous reactions such as Sen John Kyl's the other day, who warned that if proposed defense budget cuts exceed the $350b for ten years planned, he will leave the super committee. It's also reflected in placing massive Medicare benefits cuts vs. defense spending cuts (with enormous preferences among the power elites for the former) and the Repukes' continued refusal to cut defense spending in any significant way, though they refuse to pay for it with new taxes (though the fuckers are happy to demand extension of unemployment benefits be "paid" with more deficit - ramping tax cuts, and that additional FEMA aid to Hurricane Irene stricken Vermont, New Jersey and Virginia be paid with "offsets" or cuts to benefits elsewhere, including Medicaid.) Is it any wonder the 9-11 meme is driving us off a fucking cliff?
And is it any wonder that Osama bin Laden is laughing from his grave fifty fathoms below the sea level as we continue to do his bidding? When will we wake the fuck up and see the nation we have to save is right before us, right here and now - bleeding from every pore of every unemployed, hopeless person who must get food stamps, and every one of the current 24 million undernourished kids? Our attention and energy must be to focus on righting our ship of state NOW, not being hostage to an event ten years in the past, which - no matter how dastardly- is being exploited to drive us further into perdition and becoming a Third World Banana Republic.
I leave readers with the words of one letter writer, in today's Denver Post. Ponder them, and then hopefully, re-read this blog and consider the need to leave 9-11 behind, and finally rip off that old, moldy bandaid to expose the wound to fresh air!
"I'm tired of 9/11 and would like to move on. 9/11 was a tragic event for those who perished and their loved ones. While those most affected by it won't put it aside anytime soon, the nation should. Yet we don't. Why do we keep picking and scratching at the scab?
For one, I believe 9/11 along with the "hallowed ground at ground zero" is a political candy store. Politicians associate themselves with it, and the aftermath of it, as much and as often as possible.
Hyping 9/11 also keeps hundreds of millions of dollars rolling into the coffers of Homeland Security without a whimper from taxpayers....
Keeping 9/11 alive helps to justify our present wars, and the terrible cost to the finest of our young who serve in them.
Some try to equate 9/11 with Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor cast us into a global conflict that put the very existence of our country at stake.It cost millions of wounded and dead. 9/11 is not this. Not anywhere near.
Let's place 9/11 in perspective along with other great challenges our country has faced in the past, and honor it accordingly."
- Bob Benham
I could not agree more!
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