"The World Changed on 9/11."
The world did not change on 9/11/2001. Everything that was part of the geopolitical landscape on 9/12/2001 had been there on 9/10/2001. What happened on 9/11/2001 was that America's ignorance about the forces and factions at work in the world was exposed.
However, the answer to ignorance is understanding and the neoconservatives didn't want to learn anything that might deter them from their dream of reshaping the world. So they sold the lie that everything had changed so that what was already known could be disregarded.
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What was unusual about 9/11 was the identity of the victims. Mostly rich white Americans. That's a big event.
ReplyDeleteWhat's not a big event is when poor victims undergo similar or much worse acts of violence perpetuated against them. On Dec 20, 2009 Panama declared a day of mourning to remember the thousands killed by the extremely brutal US invasion 20 years earlier. Ostensibly it was to remove a drug trafficker that the US had installed. The real reason was basically Noriega was getting a little too independent and not following orders from Washington perfectly. Drug flows increased following his ouster. That was 3 or 4 thousand dead according to the best estimates we have in a country much smaller than ours. It's not noticed of course. The victims are weak.
"Mostly rich white Americans"? Are the rich white Americans doing their own secretarial work? Are they manning the mail rooms and the catering services? Are they sitting at their own reception desks welcoming other rich white Americans? "Mostly rich white Americans"? That's really an incredibly stupid thing to say. What's worse is to think that the wealth of the victims makes any possible freakin' difference. What kind of sad, pathetic figure even thinks this way?
ReplyDeleteI think Jon has made a poor choice of expression here, exactly because it allows one to construe him as Marshall has done.
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly many understandings of the word "rich" that most WTC victims would not fit. The majority of them however, do not fit any common understanding of the category "poor".
I think Jon meant "rich" to cover those who aren't the first to be laid off, those who have more than one month's earnings in savings, those who do not worry when their next meal will be.
The attribution "white" to the WTC victims is perhaps less appropriate, but the distinction drawn is still fairly clear: The US has a long history of being willing to bomb places filled with brown people, but not places filled with white.