[Nettime-bold] Open Letter on Terror and War

[Michael Novick <part2001@usa.net>]

An Open Letter
 From One Person in the U.S. to the Others
by
Michael Novick,
People Against Racist Terror/Anti-Racist Action


How do we respond to the ferocious and unjustifiable acts of terror on 
September 11? Some people -- starting with the pResident and the media -- 
are whooping and hollering for "war," but I don't buy the polls that claim 
virtual unanimity for seeking military revenge and retribution. What the 
pollsters are really asking is, "Do you think the people who did this 
should get away with murder?" and of course 99.9 percent of people say 
"No!" But look into your own heart. In addition to anger, we are 
experiencing pain, grief, loss, bewilderment, denial -- all the stages of 
contradictory emotions that you go through when somebody you care for dies, 
written 10,000 times larger.

It's only natural that we want to pull together for support and comfort, to 
deal with strong and disturbing feelings of powerlessness that came out in 
response to the shocking attacks, death and destruction. But George Bush 
and his plans for war are a slim reed on which to hang our desire for unity 
and security. It is up to us, the people ourselves, to put forward a 
positive, humane, and effective vision, at a moment of anguish and danger. 
Military force will feed terror, not defeat it, and in the process it will 
grind up and destroy the last of the freedom, creativity and hope for a 
better world that we rightly value.

The politicians and pundits want to hype up our anger, frustration and 
feelings of vulnerability into a war fever and a police state. I am just 
one person, a teacher and union member, a parent, who cannot command the 
attention of the media or the battalions of the largest military machine on 
the planet. But I know the average person has a much more complicated and 
really more profound set of reactions to what has happened. I know that, as 
I and others have gone out in these days since the attack with a message of 
peace, justice and solidarity, against war and racism, we have drawn a 
great deal of support and interest.

For each of us, in dealing with our feelings, with our ideas, or with 
questions about how to combat terror, there is a lot of sorting out to do. 
If we are each divided within ourselves, what part of ourselves should we 
unite with? What should we reconsider? The contradictory feelings and ideas 
we are experiencing are manifestations of deeper contradictions within our 
society and our selves, contradictions between privilege and oppression, 
between aspirations and reality. We must begin to resolve these 
contradictions to deal with the situation that we now find ourselves in, 
and we must begin by abandoning the illusions and self-deceptions that died 
with the thousands on September 11. We have refused to confront the 
terrorism that we have harbored in our own midst; we have depended on the 
trappings of imperial might for security, and they have failed us. We can 
no longer refuse to face the contradictions in our history and society.


It is these contradictions which account for the warring emotions we have 
experienced in the wake of the attacks. For example, we felt an enormous, 
heartfelt upwelling of identification with those who died, of pride in 
those who sought heroically to deal with the catastrophe. We want to 
support the victims, the families, to mend what was torn. This grief, the 
sense that "it could have been me," is the basis for a positive and human 
feeling of solidarity and identification with those who are suffering more 
directly.

This is not a trait of just the American character, but of the human 
personality. We need to extend that feeling, to open our hearts not just 
around the city of New York or across the United States, but really to 
people everywhere on this small planet. We are one human family. We 
understand the suffering of the people blown out of or jumping off those 
flaming towers, of the parents and spouses who exchanged a last word by 
cell phone with loved ones about to die. Can we then be less sensitive to 
the devastation experienced by the victims of death squads, "collateral 
damage," US military hardware or direct intervention in Iraq or Colombia, 
Palestine or Puerto Rico?

There's a disconnect between our feelings of solidarity and the desire to 
strike back or lash out. Take a moment to reflect, and we must see that we 
can't lament the deaths of innocents and in the next breath propose that we 
bomb whole societies "back to the Stone Age." We would be doing exactly 
what we condemn, giving others another taste of what we just experienced. 
The grievances, hurt and rage of the hijackers -- whoever they may have 
been -- could never justify the attacks they carried out on innocent 
civilians, and neither would our feelings justify the same kinds of attacks 
by the U.S. To attack in kind would really concede to the perpetrators the 
'right' to do what they did, and to escalate in return. What would be next? 
Germ warfare, or nuclear weapons? Cheney and Bush have already talked about 
using the "totality of our resources," about a "long war." They are chasing 
the perpetrators into the briar patch, and they are taking us with them 
unless we resist.

In response to the September 11 attack, many of us feel very unsettled and 
powerless. This is psychologically disturbing on a very deep level, and we 
sometimes want quick fixes. But we have to acknowledge that powerlessness 
before we can assert a more positive kind of power. Bush's war will deepen 
such feelings, not resolve them.

I ask myself, did that sense of futility and helplessness come only from 
the acts of terror? Or are we powerless because the impersonal forces of 
economic and political domination within our own country and society have 
eaten away at our rights and civic participation? Could our sense of 
futility have as much to do with the outcome of the last election, which 
put Bush in power through racist dis-enfranchisement, intimidation and 
legal and electoral manipulation, as it does with the attacks? Is our 
powerlessness due perhaps to the dawning realization that in the world of 
NAFTA and the WTO we have to dance to the tune of global corporations? We 
need to gain the liberating power to shape our own lives. Power to destroy 
or dominate others is no substitute.

In our grief, our frustration and even in our anger, what is really 
happening is a painful breakdown in our identification with the oppressor, 
and a growing if unnamed recognition of what it means to be oppressed. The 
September 11 attacks drove home clearly that we live in an empire, and in 
an empire, colonizers and colonized alike, no matter how privileged, are 
all subjects, not citizens. The attacks were a manifestation of the growing 
inter-penetration and seamless integration of the global and the 
continental empire. This blurring between the imperial center and the 
colonized people is a process which is irreversible, short of dismantling 
the empire entirely.

Did Bush's proposal for a cabinet secretary for "Homeland Security" really 
make you feel more secure, or did it raise the hairs on the back of your 
neck with its fascist scent of the "Fatherland"? Bringing the dictatorial 
methods of rule of colonialism into the colonizing society is the true 
definition of fascism. Bush's long war and his militarization of life 
within the U.S. will only deepen and hasten this process.

Who will be made more 'powerful' if the U.S. military and 
counter-insurgency machine wages war and buys 'security' by means of 
invading and subjugating other nations while infiltrating and regimenting 
U.S. society itself? Nobody except the politicians and corporations that 
have too much power already.

We are all looking for answers amid the confusion. This, too, can be a good 
thing, a recognition that we have left ourselves in the dark about what's 
going on in the world. Some of us have been glued to the tube or the PC 
monitor for days, afraid we will "miss something." Of course, we have 
already "missed something;" we let the dangling fruit and distractions of 
material striving and temptation blind us to the darkening forest of thorns 
growing in the soil of America. The failure of "intelligence" was not only 
on the intelligence agencies. Our media have screened out information and 
opinions that might make people uneasy. As more and more power and wealth 
has accumulated in fewer and fewer hands in this country, the acceptable 
spectrum of opinion or dissent has narrowed as well. We the people have 
been closed out of the political process along with any ideas and 
challenges that are considered subversive of the established order.

So to find answers, we must examine the facts and ideas that have been 
forbidden, or hidden by self-imposed blinders. History did not begin on 
September 11 any more than it had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. 
The U.S. was involved in wars to build and maintain an empire long before 
the Cold War. It has remained involved in such wars for the decade-plus 
since the Cold War ended and the communist bloc vanished.

In fact, the U.S. has been at war, with Iraq, over that entire latter 
period. Few of us took any notice as our government went about destroying 
Iraq's potable water system, bombing that country regularly. The U.S. 
maintains an area of military over-flights over Iraqi territory while 
simultaneously enforcing that as a zone in which the Iraqis cannot fly over 
their own territory, and or course enforcing an embargo which has cost 
hundreds of thousands of lives. We could ignore or deny that war (as Bush 
did in calling his declaration the "first war of the 21st Century"); but we 
cannot deny this one.

Yet we must oppose it and refuse to allow George W. Bush to wage it in our 
name. We must recognize that the U.S. government has other fish to fry 
beyond the war against terror it has proclaimed. From the moment the old 
Soviet Russian empire collapsed, the U.S., as the world's only super-power, 
has had its eyes set on filling the power vacuum and advancing its military 
power to control the oil wealth of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. This 
is the same script we followed as a rising imperial power 100 years ago, 
supplanting the decaying Spanish Empire.

Then, we fomented a war with Spain over a mysterious explosion on a US 
warship in Havana harbor. We proceeded to colonize Puerto Rico, Cuba and 
the Philippines and simultaneously annexed Hawaii. Then, the U.S. 
Anti-Imperialist League, led by notables like Mark Twain, failed to stop 
the war because they could not face the reality that we were already an 
empire within the continent. This time we must do better about facing, and 
reshaping, reality.

Otherwise the prospects are strong that Bush will lead down a path towards 
further acts of terror by and against the U.S. that will make September 11 
pale in comparison. Think what you or I might have done had we known about 
the attacks in advance. Without knowing the particulars, we are facing that 
situation today. The responsibility is in our hands to forestall still 
greater calamities.

People ask "why?" about September 11, and the honest explanation is one 
that Bush can never provide. The answer really is simple -- the 
perpetrators have learned the ugly lesson of "might makes right" that the 
US and other imperial powers have used as a guide to their behavior in the 
world. The wars of the last century were wars on civilians, from 
Kristallnacht, Stalingrad and the German V-2, through Hiroshima, No Gun Ri 
and My Lai.

Long before that, the wars of settlement in this country decimated and 
uprooted the indigenous people and took an enormous toll in Native 
non-combatant casualties. What happened on September 11 is ultimately no 
more complicated than a network of people willing to give their own lives 
in order to dish out that same type of treatment to the U.S., in pursuit of 
their "policy objectives." Their relative powerlessness does not justify 
it, any more than the relative power of the U.S. justifies its acts of 
terror in Iraq or Yugoslavia. There has been wild speculation in response 
to Bush's undocumented insistence that Bin Laden is responsible -- maybe it 
was really militias, Israelis, rogue elements in our own military or 
intelligence -- but ultimately, it doesn't matter who did it. The 
motivation and the potential outcome is clear -- to strike fear into our 
hearts, to cloud our thinking and to draw the U.S. into a protracted war. 
This is true whether it was carried out by Bin Laden's followers to provoke 
a war with Islam, or by some secret cabal in this country determined to use 
a war to salvage the global economy and squelch dissent.

I've heard a lot of claptrap both from the right and left about this. The 
right wants to look for scapegoats. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed 
the disaster on gays, feminists and the ACLU for bringing down the wrath of 
god on the U.S. A lot of other people immediately took it into their heads 
to find an Arab or a Muslim to threaten, harass or even kill. In their 
ignorance, they have gone after Egyptian Christians, Sikhs from India. I 
have no doubt that some will begin attacking Jews, just like during the 
Gulf War.

Freedom and solidarity are indivisible. If we want to protect civilians 
from indiscriminate attack or communities from racial or religious 
prejudice, we have to extend it to everyone. The "golden rule" used to be 
"love your neighbor as yourself" -- until it became "he who has the gold 
makes the rules."

Some on the left offer half-baked explanations of their own. I've heard a 
lot of people saying, "terrorism is the war of the poor and weak against 
the rich and powerful." When you think about it for a second, that's the 
same b.s. Bush is putting out. If it was Bin Laden, he had no interest in 
the downtrodden and no program for liberation. Terror is terror, whether by 
the state, the racists or whoever carried out the September 11 atrocity. I 
have been involved with "People Against Racist Terror" for 15 years, 
because I know that the strong use terror against the weak all the time. 
That's the bully mentality. The Ku Klux Klan is historically a terrorist 
organization. The US waged a war of terror in Vietnam. Slave overseers and 
slave patrols terrorized slaves to control them and the fruits of their 
labor. Anti-abortion groups use terror to try to deny women their 
reproductive rights. Andrew Jackson terrorized the Cherokee Nation and 
other indigenous people out of the East Coast. Germany used terror against 
England, against the Jews, against the Slavs and against its own people 
during World War II.

The dividing line on terror is not between governments and groups that 
don't have state power. It's not between Christians, Muslims or Jews; nor 
between so-called civilized nations and alleged barbarians. The dividing 
line is whether or not deadly force gets used against civilians for the 
purpose of amassing and imposing power over them. George Bush wants to draw 
a line between Bin Laden and himself. If the dividing line is terror, in 
fact they both end up on the same, wrong side of the line.

Who taught all these "demonic, terroristic" opponents of ours how to wage 
their campaigns?

Manuel Noriega, creature of the CIA, part of the Iran-Contra drugs for guns 
deal;

the Ayatollah Khomeini, ushered in to Iran to replace the Shah who had 
become too weak to suppress the Iranian revolution;

Saddam Hussein, worked with the CIA, armed by the U.S. to use poison gas on 
his own people;

Slobodan Milosevic, useful to the CIA plan to break up the old Yugoslavia 
through ethnic rivalries;

Osama bin Laden, part of the CIA plan to tie down the Soviets in 
Afghanistan, on the US backed side in Bosnia and Kosovo;

Timothy McVeigh, trained to kill in the Gulf War;

  the Taliban, recipients of a massive aid package from George W. Bush for 
"drug interdiction" even while 'harboring' Bin Laden and terrorizing the 
Afghani population, particularly women.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Saddam Hussein, 
Milosevic or Bin Laden are no friends of oppressed people, and their 
program and tactics, like those of Bush, are shaped by their desire to 
consolidate power and impose their will.

Another contradictory set of feelings many people are gripped by is the 
sense that "everything has changed" and the opposite desire to get "back to 
normal." The latter is a deadly tendency within us to slip back into denial 
and complacent arrogance. Normal is what got us into this situation. It 
will take an extraordinary effort -- far greater than that of the rescuers 
- to get us out.

Simply turning away from war, repudiating terror, is not enough. We need 
more fundamental change. The world did not change on September 11, but our 
view of the world and our place in it did. The acts of September 11 were 
spectacular, perhaps designed particularly for a nation numbed by Hollywood 
depictions of terror. But US policies in Iraq alone have taken more lives, 
month after month for a decade -- just one of many forms of terror carried 
out by our government to protect "the American way of life." Even more than 
U.S. policy in the Middle East or Central Asia, it is the contradictions 
within that way of life that fuel the crisis facing us.

Our way of life is going to change; the only question is, how? Bush intends 
to make this a garrison state. Do we have other plans, and how can we 
implement them under the current circumstances? How can we transform this 
society so it is more sustainable and less vulnerable? We could make a 
start by turning the site of the now destroyed twin towers into an 
international peace park dedicated to the memories of the people who lost 
their lives. Our spirits could soar higher than the tallest building under 
a few trees and the open sky amid the concrete canyons. It wouldn't be a 
bad idea to do the same with the Pentagon.

Yet to talk of turning the Pentagon into a monument to peace is to 
demonstrate how basic militarism is in the U.S. Endless war and terror are 
the inevitable byproducts of a system based on empire. Many of us have 
woken up from a fantasy of invulnerability and the illusion that one can 
wage a one-sided war, and have begun to see the consequences of empire. 
Remember that Pentagon war-fighting doctrine is still predicated on 
fighting 2.5 wars at a time. Congress may have put medical insurance 
reform; on the back burner, but U.S. involvement in the war in Colombia 
continues to escalate on a daily basis even while fleets and fighter planes 
steam to the Gulf.

We cannot allow terror to drive us into uniting with our rulers.

There was nothing revolutionary about the September 11 attacks, but 
ultimately we need a revolution if we are to avoid an endless vicious cycle 
of attack and counter-attack. We need to de-colonize our own society and 
economy. Consider the repeated comments about "acts of terror on U.S. 
soil." Prior to this attack, the U.S. had reserved to itself the "right" to 
carry out terror in these territories -- terror against African slaves, 
against Native people, against Mexicans, against immigrants, against 
organized labor, against women.

If we want to build unity, dismantling that continental empire is a place 
to start. We need to oppose the militarization of police, prisons, schools 
and the border. They do not secure us, only the wealth and power of our 
exploiters.

Simultaneously, we need to think about non-state solutions to our problems. 
We need to develop civilian-based defense against terror or invasion. It 
was civilians, for example, who stopped one of the hijacked planes from 
carrying out the terrorist mission while the Pentagon was stymied, itself 
under attack. Prevention, security measures at airports are all well and 
good, but the surest guarantee that no such attacks can take place again is 
the knowledge that every passenger on every plane in the sky understands 
quite clearly the fatal consequences of the next attempt, and will act 
accordingly. What threat could hijackers possibly make now that would deter 
the passengers and crew, who know that death is inevitable in any case, 
from overwhelming them at any cost?

The globalization movement provides a model for the kind of direct, 
person-to-person and movement-to-movement international relations we need 
to build, in place of the imperial war machine. We need to develop 
interconnected communities of resistance that can sustain themselves 
through war and repression. If people are panicky about terrorist attacks 
on nuclear power plants, perhaps it is past time to think about renewable, 
sustainable, non-toxic forms of energy, about reducing energy consumption 
and dependency on fossil fuels, not just foreign ones.

Every nuclear plant in the U.S. should be shut down, immediately and 
permanently. Transforming the economic system of the U.S. from one based on 
expansion and penetration of other societies into one based on cooperative, 
environmentally sound enterprise is vital. Eliminating U.S. strategic 
interests in the Middle East (read, 'oil') would allow Arab societies to 
slip off the stifling yoke of reactionary regimes and colonialism.

We need to take this same approach of non-state action to the issue of 
terror. Counter-terrorism that uses terror will only increase the amount 
and level of terror in the world and in this country. If guns and bombs 
will only feed terror, if our own government has been guilty of terror at 
Wounded Knee and Hiroshima, then how do we defeat terror? By the same 
weapons we must use against the impulse to terror that we ourselves have 
just experienced. Terror is fought in a battle for hearts and minds, in a 
struggle against oppressive power.

Terror is fought by building solidarity. Terror must be dried out from 
below. Israel and the U.S. actually promoted the Muslim fundamentalist 
groups that turned to terror, as part of an imperialist strategy to divide 
oppressed people and to blunt the dynamic of social revolutionary forces. 
Only by building such forces in our own society, opposing the terror of our 
own government, struggling for economic justice and equality, can we 
develop the capacity to unite with similar movements in other countries 
that could eliminate the sources of terror within their people as we must 
within ours.

I shared these thoughts with a Canadian friend, Sunday Harrison with 
Anti-Racist Action in Toronto, and she replied, "I've been thinking about 
the solidarity you mention, and I think you put it well as far as what we 
should be encouraging people to do at home. But what about internationally? 
My idea (and I hope others might be thinking along these lines) is to 
support a broad-based fundraising campaign for an activist group of Afghan 
women, such as RAWA. Why not support the Afghani victims of the Taliban and 
Jehadis, who after all have the most interest in rebuilding their country 
as a secular democracy?"

"The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan is operating clinics 
and schools, going into Afghanistan and documenting Taliban atrocities 
(with men who also risk their lives providing escort), at the same time as 
feeding their families and surviving assassination attempts. If RAWA had 
even a fraction of the U.S. money that will be spent on armaments, money 
extracted from the U.S. people whether they want it or not, the Taliban and 
bin Laden would be in for serious trouble. In any case, if the US goes in 
shooting, RAWA will still need all the help they can get. Solidarity is the 
antithesis of U.S. interventionism: the U.S. people (and other 
progressives) can take active measures to counter clerical fascism beyond 
our own borders, by providing such material aid."

She is right. It is only by rebuilding the solidarity and revolutionary 
capacity and unity of oppressed people that terror can be uprooted. Such a 
process of rebuilding must be self-critical. Oppressed people are not 
saints. Experiencing Hitler's genocide, for example, did not prevent many 
Jews from embracing Zionism and colonialism. Within the imperialist system, 
everyone experiences a mix of oppression and privilege, whether in the form 
of white skin privilege or neo-colonialism.

The system offers us options to surrender and incorporate ourselves into 
the imperialist structure by stepping on somebody else's neck. The great 
strength of this system, the reason it is now a global superpower, has been 
its capacity to capture our consent. It uses the privileges of 
participation in empire and settler colonialism to generate within us an 
identification with our own oppressors and an internalization of our own 
oppression. But those privileges in the form of white supremacy or 
neo-colonialism blind us and bind us to our own exploitation and 
oppression, along with that of others. The wealth and power we see around 
us is extracted from us and from millions around the globe.

To counter the tendencies toward either collaboration or terror, we need to 
emphasize the creative power of resistance. We need to develop the 
understanding that all the power and wealth of the oppressor's system is 
derived from the oppressed and exploited, used against us by virtue of our 
own participation in that system.

Yet the days of this system are numbered. War may defer but cannot 
eliminate its insoluble economic contradictions. Every globalized factory, 
every worker bled and sweated, every acre of stolen land, generates a 
productive capacity whose output can never be profitably accommodated or 
marketed.

Every empire in history has crumbled into dust, and this empire is no 
exception. That understanding, coupled with the realization that we have 
the capacity to create something much better in its place, will give people 
the hope and courage to persevere. The working, oppressed and colonized 
people of the world can and will unite.

No condescending saviors, no unity with our rulers! We are our own liberators!

This appears in the current issue of "Turning the Tide: Journal of 
Anti-Racist Action..." Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2001; available from PART, 
Po Box 1055 Culver City CA 90232.
310-495-0299; part2001@usa.net; www.antiracist.org/issues.html  Send your 
mailing address for a free sample.


     In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material 
is  distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a 
prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit 
research and 				  educational purposes only.

Join the "stop police abuse" list at 
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stop-polabuse>

       People Against Racist Terror (PART), PO Box 1055, Culver City, CA 90232
                     Tel.: 310-495-0299   E-mail: <part2001@usa.net>
              		URL: <http://www.antiracist.org/issues.html>
                     Send for a sample of our quarterly print publication:
     "Turning The Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education"

       		  Mumia Must Live! End the racist death penalty!
  	  		Clemency for Leonard Peltier now!
		 Free Marilyn Buck, Mutulu Shakur, Oscar Lopez
                  and all political prisoners and P.O.W.'s in U.S. prisons!





_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold