Mandy Zabohne

I want to say something, not because you probably haven't heard it before, but because over the blather of propaganda I need to be hearing it said loud and clear: If the US government and the corporate media were corrupt and dangerous before September 11th, they're even worse now. They do not deserve loyalty nor faith, and the lines in the dirt that define America do not mark the end of the people we should care about, and the beginning of the people whose lives are worth less. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. But I'd say it's more than just that: it's a blindfold that the scoundrels in charge are trying to superglue over all our eyes.

The US government's short-sighted, greedy, and outright evil foreign policy has been sowing the seeds for years to get millions of people desperate, impoverished, and bent on revenge, and the backlash against US military atrocities finally resulted in the worst attack on American civilians in the history of our country. Being a political economy student, I was devastated, but not shocked, by the hijackings and destruction.

After all, I knew that the US has a military bigger than the rest of the worlds' combined. I had seen plenty of pictures of American planes destroying residential neighborhoods in Iraq. I had seen people screaming in pain, blown to shreds, engulfed in fire, and shot to death in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and I knew that the US had trained the paramilitaries in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia that killed tens of thousands of civilians. I knew that the Japanese government had been trying to surrender when the US dropped two atomic bombs on populous Japanese cities, killing hundreds of times more people than were killed in New York, and killing them mostly to intimidate Russia. I knew that as recently as 1987, the US bombed a factory in Cuba and killed 400 workers. I knew that they had bombed major cities in Panama in 1989, and had taken pains to cover up the fact that they killed almost as many Panamanians as the terrorists just killed Americans. On September 11th of 1973, in fact, the US used an air strike to overthrow the elected government of Chile.

I knew that this was coming sure as I knew that what comes up must come down, and those two quotes from Malcolm X went through my mind as I watched the trade towers collapse over and over again: "A man with nothing to lose is a very dangerous man," and, "This is a case of the chickens coming home to roost."

We are in danger, undoubtedly. But I agree with Einstien on this one, when he said that "the problems of this world will not be solved by the minds that created them." This is not a time for loyalty, because everyone is lying to us.

On September 20, I saw "President" Bush tell the nation that this attack, a horrific crime against humanity, was an "act of war", when the attack had not come from any government.

I watched him explain that terrorists hate us because of our freedoms, and, most laughably in his case, our "democratically elected government." No, it has nothing to do with the legacy of colonialism, theft, violence, and utter disrespect for their well-being for the sake of oil, which is what policy towards the Middle East is about. It's because they're pissed about unveiled women voting and attending school. (Somehow the unveiled, voting female students in Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, Latin America, and China just don't bother them.)

And this bullshit -- "The United States respects the people of Afghanistan -- after all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid." Yes, we were. Until the US ordered the roads into Pakistan sealed off, which does nothing to stop pedestrian travelers, but totally stops food and medical aid from reaching the 7.5 million people in danger of starving. Bush's daddy said he respected the people of Iraq, too, and over a million of them are dead now.

How hilarious to demand that the Taliban "protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers" in Afghanistan - hilarious in the sickest way, since the US has since "accidentally" bombed, bombed, and rebombed Red Cross warehouses. We demand that you protect aid workers! And if you don't, we'll kill them!

And you better not question it! "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Resistance is futile. You will be reassimilated...

The insane claims just kept pouring out of his mouth. "The terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children." Oh, really. I wonder where they learned that. Except, of course, that US military's directive commands them to kill Muslims and Buddhists as well as Christians, Jews, Atheists, and anyone else who happens to be located under a falling bomb.

No sharp-tongued, well informed analyst ripped this speech apart afterwards. Noam Chomsky was not consulted on network news to provide historical perspective, Arundhati Roy was not interviewed as to how the citizens of poor nations saw these claims, the global peace vigils and marches and protests and sit-ins were not played and replayed the way the images of collapsing buildings and surly men in turbans were. There are no ghosts of dead Iraqi children hovering around newscasters these days. We are going to war, the media said, for justice and peace. And now a word from our sponsors.

This is what Americans are being served on the big, authoritative media buffet. "We are good. We have always been good. They are bad, because they are. They are bad, crazy people. They want to hurt you. We'll protect you. We'll go get them. Trust us, that's all you need to know." And indeed, that's all many Americans do know. The tradition of asking probing questions is not being nurtured in our society.

I have stopped watching TV, stopped surfing the CNN site, stopped glancing over the New York Times, because I am so sick of being told to go shopping, wave my flag, and trust the government to blow up all the bad people and make me safe, and that if I feel apprehensive about the morality of fighting a roving band of terrorists by bombing a nation, then there's something wrong with me, because 90% of Americans are lovin' it. Oh, and by the way, the PATRIOT bill made disagreement illegal anyway.

Someone famous once said not to believe anything you hear during a war. I agree. And in the case of the corporate media, I wouldn't recommend believing it the rest of the time, either. Even without a war, about 40% of what passes for news is actually produced by public relations firms, spin doctors hired to make their clients look good, not to search out -- or even care about -- the truth. And now the Pentagon has hired a PR firm, the Rendon Group, to represent it. A correspondent for CNN, Jamie McIntyre, said that "what Pentagon sources have been telling me [is] that as these secret war plans have been drawn up, they don't include any provision for taking reporters along, allowing them to cover any of the action. They plan to fight the war and then tell the press and the public how it turned out afterwards.? And they're hired PR superstars to make the war look good and just and vaguely reminiscent of the movie Top Gun. Make it look like something other than the same old shit, which will only, inevitably, lead to more attacks on Americans.

So this is me screaming into the clutter of cyberspace at the psychopaths in uniform out there: you don't fool me. I don't know exactly what you're doing, but what you did to hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and wherever the hell else you did what you do, has proven to me that you cannot be trusted. And to the media: parroting the press releases of the Pentagon is not news, nor is turning Osama bin Laden into a bogeyman, cheering for the Northern Alliance when it's just as bad as the Taliban, calling the sham of dropping snacks on minefields "humanitarian food drops," and not mentioning the huge natural gas deposits in the Caspian Sea region of which Afghanistan is so coincidentally in the way.

"By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder," Bush declared, and the media nodded without a peep. But let us have no double standards in this justice-loving nation. Blowing up villagers in Afghanistan: that is murder. Making it sound acceptable, media folks, is aiding and abetting.

Bush's speech writer had him pull no punches: "We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety," he read, eyes darting sternly from one teleprompter to the next. "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

I could laugh or cry, but I think, for now, I'll laugh. I'll laugh at how easy you make it. Take the whole paragraph above, brush it off, and put it in my mouth. I am not deceived by your pretenses to piety. I have seen your kind before, heirs to murderous ideologies, sacrificing life to your radical visions, visions of oil and profit and dominance dancing like sugarplums in your head. I know what path you're on and I know I don't have to follow you, because my people are all around me shaking their heads, and when I scream into cyberspace, the voices of a million dissidents all over the world scream back, screaming that they think it's crazy too, it's all crazy, don't worry, here too, everybody says it's dangerously crazy, they say it in public, they say it frequently. It's crazy and it's wrong and the hypocrisy is foul and obvious. It's not you that's insane. It's them. It's ok. You're not alone. History's unmarked grave of discarded lies does not have to be a mass grave for humanity. If you think something's not right, you're not alone.