Dear Ron,
I've just finished reading your essay "Terrorism of War." You begin by
claiming that although we've heard plenty about the war against terrorism in
recent months, "What the media doesn't tell us ... are the stories of the
thousands of civillians rendered homeless at the onset of the Afghani winter
... and the near certain starvation thousands of Afghanis face."
This puzzled me a little bit, since there was a story in today's New York
Times about the plight of Afghan refugees. So just for fun, I did a
Lexis-Nexus search for all the articles in major newspapers since September
11th that contain the words "Afghanistan and refugees" in either the headline
or the lead paragraph. The result? A window appeared that read "This search
has been interrupted because it will return more than 1000 documents."
Another search, using the keywords "Afghanistan and winter" brought over 200
articles. "Afghanistan and starvation" called up 194.
I bring this up because I found the rest of your article so exasperating.
If your lead paragraph can't withstand even the barest amount of critical
scrutiny, how can you expect us to take your piece seriously?
There's plenty of evidence to go around for U.S. militarism and imperialism,
but are you sure you want to defend the claim that "This war has very little
to do with defeating terrorism and much to do with attempting to establish
permanent U.S. domination of the world and its resources?" Do you really
think that your facile comparison between Marxism and Islamic
fundamentalism offers any useful insight? Can anyone take seriously
your claim that "Before the occurences [nice euphamism] of September 11, 2001
... the US corporate plan for economic hegemony was under attack," and
that this led US "authoritarians" to seize on the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to
combat "a threat to the rule of the capitalist world"?
These are difficult times, and - as your essay suggests - there don't seem
to be any easy answers. But it seems to me that the least we can do is
hold ourselves to the same analytically rigorous standards that we demand
from the Right. To simply impose an automatic leftwing template onto all
of the world's problems, and to indulge in tiresome cliches about the US war
machine, Vietnam, COINTELPRO, McCarthyism, HUAC, George Orwell and
"The US empire's need to dominate the world" isn't useful to anyone.
Yours,
John McMillian
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Dec 11 2001 - 21:12:31 EST