Let Us Remember

As we remember the horror of the falling Twin Towers, the caved in Pentagon and the self sacrifice of those who crashed their plane headed for the White House as well as the self sacrifice of public employees who died trying to rescue others and are still severely affected by the debris of the crashing buildings, let us also remember and ponder some things that led up to and followed from this event.

Let us remember a Middle East carved up to their desires by the winning allies of World War One regardless of racial, ethnic or cultural differences.

Let us remember a democratic Iran whose government was overthrown by the United States and the dictatorial Shah installed in place of their socialist government to insure that their oil would go to us and our corporations. The invasion of Iraq was, in many respects, a replay of this consummate arrogance.

Let us remember our bargain with the autocratic Saud family to protect them against all enemies in return for access to their oil.

In all these and other precursors to 9/11 let us remember the term blowback and seek cooperation rather than domination when dealing with other countries. Let us cease letting corporations drive our foreign policy. Let us remember, contrary to Donald Rumsfeld, that it does matter that they hate us even if they also fear us.

Let us remember the thousands of Iraqi children who died as a result of the embargo we were instrumental in imposing and enforcing following the Gulf War.

As for 9\11 and all that flowed from it:

Let us remember the monumental extent to which we were lied to. Let us remember that "war" was immediately declared against a then unknown, but perhaps suspected, enemy which had no country, no army and no geographic borders.

Let us remember that no alternative, such as a cooperative global Interpol effort, was sought by the Bush administration despite widespread support for the United States. Obviously a large, concerted and cooperative police action by the many countries sympathetic to the United States was called for. The term "war" tapped into the military might we had been accumulating for over 50 years and into an American mind set of almost continuous war or preparation for war that characterized the 20^th century.

Let us remember the deer-in-the-headlights look on G.W. Bush's face when he was informed of the attack while reading stories to children. Let us ask did he know the scenario?

Let us remember the Project for the New American Century plan hatched by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al to insure American dominance of the world and that 9/11 was used to put it into play. Let us remember the massive death and suffering, not to mention wasted resources this arrogant ego trip cost. Let us pursue their accountability.

Let us remember the rapid restructuring of our government to let military concerns override all else. Remember the hyped fear of colored warnings of likely terrorist activity. Remember the Patriot Act that threatens any domestic dissent.

Let us remember that by attacking Afghanistan we were able to supply the geographic boundaries and other prerequisites for war, albeit against one of the world's poorest nations. We were also able to expand the enemy from a few al Qaeda members to the ruling Taliban. In all this let us remember how we were manipulated into war.

Let us remember that in responding as we did we supplied all the manpower Osama bin Laden could wish for and converted his attack into a broad contest between religions and cultures.

Let us remember the lies by the Bush administration that led to our murderous attack on an absolutely innocent Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people we have killed or maimed. Let us reflect on the trashing of the cultural artifacts, the barbarism of Abu Ghraib, the laying waste of Fallujah and the vast destruction of Iraq's infrastructure, which despite our promises to repair, remains to this date 10 years later.

Let us remember the flag waving patriotic jingoism that preceded our "piece of cake" invasion of Iraq. Let us remember the coordinated media hype, the Pentagon-appointed experts, as one more Madison Avenue advertising campaign and that we Americans were so vulnerable to it.

Let us remember the perfidy of being told our soldiers would leave Iraq only to see them transferred to Afghanistan and greatly added to as well.

Finally, and most importantly, let us remember that the mindset of the American people has been radically and thoroughly shifted from the euphemisms of economic dominance to the stark awareness of the brutality of imperialism and the fear and folly it engenders. Unlike our erstwhile naiveté, we can no longer ask why they hate us. The fear and shame that our actions have induced have prompted us to blindly provide billions of dollars to the military presumably to keep the terrorists busy in foreign lands, as we are mentally whipsawed by the media, body scanned at airports, detained without court order, put on "no fly" lists because we peacefully demonstrate against government policies. We must now protest behind chain link fences far removed from the elected offices we protest against. We have, like despots, rendered people for torture, imprisoned them indefinitely without formal charges and deprived them of trial by a jury of their peers. Such are the consequences of fear. We are a substantially different people than we were prior to 9/11. We should acknowledge that and work to remedy it. The courage that the Norwegian people and their leaders demonstrated when faced with terrorist slaughter of their children, the courage to reemphasize democratic values and their open society, warrants considerable thought and emulation by the American people.

As Paul Krugman so simply and eloquently says in the New York Times of 9-11-11 under the title of The Years of Shame

The Years of Shame

Paul Krugman blogs today:

"Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued? Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd. What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Let us remember how easily we have been led by lies into the massive killings of Vietnam and Iraq. Let us heed the pleas of the recently deceased Chalmers Johnson in his last book Dismantling the Empire: American's Last Best Hope that we demolish the American Empire before it demolishes us. Let us value our common humanity higher than our historical and cultural differences.

Bob Newhard

Needed, a Global Moral System

On the one hand we have unprecedented global pressures on the human species, e.g. over population, global warming, food and water shortages, ecological destruction. On the other hand we have developing global social chaos that some, e.g. Samuel Huntington, believe will lead to a massive conflict of civilizations in a world of nuclear armaments. I suggest there is a dire need for a global moral system, which can be used to ameliorate the human condition before we destroy ourselves in the all too familiar manner our history evidences.

Being as moral systems are cultural artifacts, it would seem the best way to begin such an effort is to consider how human cultures have accommodated themselves to each other in the past. The last two centuries have produced two major models of cultural accommodation in the United States. One is the "melting pot" in which people of many cultures agree to substantially surrender their native culture in order to participate in a new culture. The mass migrations to the United States in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were certainly not without conflict, e.g. attacks on Chinese, the denigration of the "shanty Irish," but they willingly kept coming anyway. Many avidly sought to integrate into the melting pot, changing or anglicizing their name in order to better fit in. The melting pot converted all cultures to an American culture, which by historical dictate was substantially English.

In the 1960s dissatisfaction with loss of cultural identity prompted a rebellion against the melting pot and a substitution of multiculturalism, sometimes metaphorically called the salad bowl. It has become the dominant form of cultural acculturalization. I believe I am correct in asserting that multiculturalism is now believed to be the best way to accommodate the cultural fragmentation of our species. While I can understand the push to multiculturalism, I think in the long run for the purpose of a global culture and a moral system derived from it, that the melting pot metaphor will be found more serviceable. The melting pot had the advantage of establishing a common identity, which is what humanity will need if it is to create a global moral system. In lieu of subordinating all existing cultures to one existing culture, as happened in the United States, it will be necessary to fashion a new culture. I suggest that system will have to recognize the de facto imperatives increasingly imposed on mankind by the limitations of the natural world, not, as currently, the fictions of religion as has been the case so often up to this point. In this regard it will not do to create one more myth, e.g. Gaia. Our understanding of our world and its processes and of ourselves must be the focus of any value system that would sustain us and the planet we inhabit. Thus creating a sustainable environment as quickly and thoroughly as possible must become a moral imperative of a global moral system.

Therefore, at bottom, nature will dictate the terms of any system of human behavior that aspires to preserve humanity and the planet. This places a premium on science, the one institution with the background, integrity and self-correcting processes necessary for this endeavor.

One sign that the need for such a global moral system is being increasingly recognized is the increasing need of nations to seek United Nations sanctions before engaging in conflict. This is far from perfect and is unduly subject to the will of the more powerful nations, but it is a process fairly new in international relations.

A global moral system will have to be rooted in our species, not race, culture, language, religion or any other traditional nexus of cultural grouping. To create this, it will be necessary to repeatedly demonstrate in a wide variety of dimensions that we will survive, if we do, only as a species.

If the primary objective of a global moral system is to assure the continued existence of the human species, then the first order of business should be identification of the basic needs of sustainable human survival. We then need a path for human development. I suggest something analogous to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Within the context of assuring species survival, optimum opportunity for human development must be perused if humans are to remain human and realize their full potential. Humans have to see the value of a limited sustainable population. There is a need to clearly elucidate the interdependence of all life and, perhaps, extend our moral system to what microphysicist Sam Harris calls sentient beings in order to assure that our excessively powerful species will not unwittingly destroy that with which we share so much of our DNA and millions of years of co-evolution.

In sum, we humans have the capacity to do this. It is imperative that we do it if we are not to perish. There is evidence that we can change our value system. China has taken a hard step toward population reduction. The United Nations is playing an ever larger role in international relations. And today Al Jazeera reports that the Libyan rebel government is pushing an end to tribalism in that country. Once again a progressive perspective on the human future needs to be developed and deployed.

Bob Newhard