"What first came to mind when you realized that the Twin Towers had been deliberately crashed into?
Shock but not surprise. The depth of the horror was initially beyond imagination. But the attack itself was not a surprise. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., said that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” He was right then and is right now. In only the past 20 years, the U.S. government has sent troops to kill or threaten to kill people in Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan again. All are poor nations and mostly people of color.
The U.S. has military bases in more than 100 countries to “protect our vital interests,” which really means to protect our vital privileges. The U.S. is the world’s largest maker and seller of weapons, often to dictators or governments that abuse human rights. Its military budget this year is $343 billion, a sum 23 times larger than the combined military budgets of our seven alleged enemies. Unless you’re an astronomer, $343 billion is too large a number to grasp. It comes down to about $900 million a day—four times more than what the Peace Corps gets in a year—or about $11,000 a second. It means also that an American family of four pays about $8,000 a year in taxes to the military. Half of the federal budget goes to the Pentagon. On any given day that we are spending $900 million for the illusion of security, about 40,000 people are dying around the world from hunger or preventable diseases. That’s a daily death toll. On top of that, while much of the world starves, a major preoccupation in America is how to lose weight.
And after all that, we wonder how come the world doesn’t love us?
... Of late, pacifism has been denounced, even called evil, as on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, or mocked as nonsense in The Wall Street Journal. It brings to mind what Hermann Goering, the Nazi leader, said: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.” "
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Thursday, March 09, 2006
Nah, this can't be it. I have it on good authority they hate us because of our "freedom".
Satya Nov 01: Doves and War Drums: Interview with Colman McCarthy:
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