Activists from the progressive side may mark this anniversary with a very mixed progress report. Their activism was intense - and predictably ignored - under the Bush junta.
The US government flouted international law, silenced dissent, imprisoned hundreds of unnamed people in secret and not-so-secret prisons from so-called "battlefields", extraordinarily rendered countless more to their torturers in our client regimes, like Mubarak's Egypt - in short, our government was a war criminal.
But for the duration of Obama's first term, the progressive left has been silent and made myriad excuses for Obama, this tool of Wall Street and the right-wing. The Bush crimes are still fully in force, and the current administration has added a war in Libya.
It must seem hypocritical to lament so publicly the needless deaths of 3,000 souls and yet be so mute to the slaughter of 300,000 lives.
Ten years is not a long time, but it is too long to be bombed and menaced by a Super Power. Reagan stupidly imagined the revolutionary government of Sandinistas marching across the border from Nicaragua to invade the US. But imagine if that poor nation had done so, and persisted in its assault for 10 full years of meddling in our politics, bombing soft targets like neighborhoods and hospitals, and imprisoning civil-rights activists in the name of Nicaraguan socialism.
Would you be so complacent?
Just Cause? So since many a Bostonian Irish-American funded the Irish Republican Army in the 70's, I guess Her Majesty's Government would have been justified to send the royal navy to bomb Boston harbor.
9/11 also marks the US-sponsored coups d'etat in Chile. 1973, when it toppled the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende and installed a dictator/general, Augusto Pinochet. Would a free Chile be justified now in hunting down Henry Kissinger and airing his execution on prime time TV?
But if we can't imagine such things as: the villainy we teach being executed right back on us, how can we see the greater crimes that persist right under our noses?
Our collective responses to the crimes of our times has also been a mixed one.
Here are a few notable examples:
[1] The Hundred Year's war against workers, which roughly began during the Industrial Revolution.
Rural laborers and sharecroppers were driven from the land in the 1800's and into urban ghettos to work in factories. The so-called captains of Industry made wage-slaves out of rural laborers and newly arrived foreign immigrants, with poor working conditions, low wages, and even employing children.
The overseer contingent from the plantation era became the management class, from literal whip to write-ups and reprimands, to watch the workers and punish those who do not perform.
Sure, activists have made gains in labor rights since then - eight-hour work days and minimum-wage rights, for example - but these hard-won gains have always been within the confines of the master's industrial design, within those urban ghettos. Can a Nazi credibly reform a death camp, or must that death camp be abolished?
In other words, we have been content to carve out from within this prison camp a small measure of humanity, not content to destroy it.
This small measure of humanity is minute because it must never impede on the purported rights of corporations to reap profits wherever and however it can.
[2] A 500 Year's War against the global South, also known as the Third World, the colonies.
Many books have been written and careers made on justifying this war.
I remember in college being handed a paper by the late UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, which argued the poor of Central America were not culturally averse to being brutalized by US-backed dictators, because their very lives were already utterly miserable. This shit passed for scholarship at Washington University, my alma mater.
This war on the global South is based on one fact, and one unmentioned fact alone: most of the global North is not fit for human life. To make it fit for human life and to create a palatial estate of golf courses and industrial wealth, the global North needs to pirate the resources and labor of the global South. It's that simple. You won't likely survive a Norwegian winter without oil.
For civilization to thrive, Europe has had to underdevelop the global South, and if certain people of the global South don't like it, they will have to face a dictator armed by the US, France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium ... the usual suspects. If they dare try to organize a union, they will have their heads blown off with rifles made in the USA.
But, as the infomercials say, there's more:
[3] The Ten Thousand year's War on the land base has, as one activist called it, been a wound on the planet.
It was 10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution changed the shape of so much of humanity. We are told this has been for the better, but the ecosystems might say otherwise, if they could speak.
This revolt against nature - demonstrated by Nature's defiance to fight back with every weed - not only began the destruction of the habitat, the destruction of old-growth forests, decimation of rainforests, and millions of exterminated species; it has also poisoned the water and air and threatened humanity.
Land settlement and agriculture meant a dramatic change in human interactions unknown until that time. Archeological excavations show the contrast from before the agri-revolution, where our nomadic communities distributed its resources equitably and lived for tens of thousands of years without menacing the land base.
I repeat: in North America, we had communities living and thriving for tens of thousands of years and did nothing to harm the environment like "civilization" has in just a few hundred.
This is in sharp contrast with post-agriculture, when the implications of land ownership for sustenance changed forever relations between sexes, beginning that wedge between men's wealth [land] and women, who either became subjects of men or turned to abject prostitution, which are the same things.
Class war was born between those who controlled the land and those who came to work the land. Activists have seemed to cede the argument by demanding those who own be taxed more rather than that they should own nothing.
Slave religions were born, to justify the lot of the poor - slaves will always be with us! - the pirating of the rich, and our obedience to hierarchies.
These slave religions obviously metamorphasized into top-down power structures, like mega-Churches, like the Roman Catholics, divine-rights of kings, and the cultural celebration of the titans of industry - the billionaires.
These atrocities have become fixtures on the cultural landscape as accepted as the old redwoods used to be, with some resistance to reform them, make them less pungent to the smell.
So there you have it, a sea of complacency from beginning to end.
If the current US war is no longer talked about but an elephant in the room, our wars on workers, resource-rich regions in the global South, and on Nature has become as much a fixture as wallpaper and not even discussed.
How different are those who are silent different than the Germans during the blight of Naziism? Those Germans followed orders or claimed not to know about the heinous crimes against humanity being committed. How many times have my sheepish coworkers shrugged their shoulders and said, "that's the way it is"?
We have lived so long away from the land, in our urban work prisons, within an artificially designed system that benefits only the Master, that we have mistaken this urban wage-slavery for Nature itself, and - dangerously - our local markets as the source of our food.
Our lifestyles, particularly the last hundred years and less, have been dominated by an increasing power of the state for the obvious purpose to defend the power base. That power base could be the king, a nobility, and old order, the corporation/multinational. But this power base must be protected from us, which is why it is critical that not only we impose failed states on the conquered but endure them our own selves.
Name one democratic institution in the United States of America. I dare you.
If that is not history in a nutshell, I do not know what is. Because, both the corporation and its evil offspring, civilization, have been a menace to society and would not thrive without armies and navies and secret police and court systems to ensure we do not get out of line.
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