PEOPLE AGAINST RACIST TERROR/ANTI-RACIST ACTION
P.O. Box 1055
Culver City, CA 90232
Tel: 310-495-0299
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Web: http://www.geocities.com/ara_losangeles
- Sunday, 16 June 2002 -
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BUSH KNEW... żY QUE?
What Are We Going to Do About It?
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>From the latest issue of "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist
Action..."
PART'S Perspective
by Michael Novick,
People Against Racist Terror/Anti-Racist Action
A flood of information has begun to rise over the dam walls of the
mainstream media to the effect that the U.S. government, at the level of
both intelligence agencies and policy makers, had plenty of advance warning
of the September 11 attacks. From a few lonely voices crying in the
wilderness and trying to impede the drive towards war and repression, the
claim that "Bush knew" has become a crescendo of competing conspiracy
theories and demands for answers.
On this, as on many social and political issues facing U.S. society, the
loudest voices are coming from the right. Elements of the hard right are
convinced that George II's plans to bring about his dad's New World Order
are indistinguishable from the now-defunct "Communist conspiracy" or the
fabled "Illuminati." They are seizing on every scrap of evidence, every gap
in the "official story," to spin a wild array of often self- or
mutually-contradictory theories. The airplanes were secretly controlled
from the ground; the Pentagon was hit by a missile and Flight 77 simply
vanished; the flight that went down in Pennsylvania was taken out by a U.S.
fighter plane; there were bombs planted inside the World Trade Center; the
attacks, along with the earlier bombing of the Oklahoma City federal
building, were masterminded by Iraq (perhaps with the connivance of U.S.
intelligence agencies), etc. etc. How much of this is a smokescreen of
distraction to prevent the more fundamental truths from being seen we may
never know.
What is true? How can we determine the truth and what can we do about it?
Armed with the truth about September 11 and an understanding of the true
nature of U.S. society, how can we organize to make a difference, and
replace this oppressive and murderous system once and for all? How can we
avoid getting sucked into the agendas of forces who are using this crisis
to justify "sealing the borders," or "taking the gloves off the CIA," or
"finishing off Saddam Hussein"?
First of all, it is better to stay with facts than speculation. It is
factually true that Bush called off intelligence gathering on the Al-Qaeda
network's Saudi Arabian funding. It is factually true that normal
"scrambling" of air escorts, called for in government operations manuals,
did not take place on 9-11. It is factually true that the government
received repeated warnings, increasing in urgency and tempo, of plans to
use aircraft as flying bombs to attack symbols of US economic and military
might. It is factually true that regulatory and investigative alarm bells
should have gone and actually did go off on insider trading which bet that
United and American Airlines stock would plummet. It's factually true that
the corporate media have not pursued any of these issues, let alone the
long term planning that preceded September 11 for a war in Afghanistan and
a massive U.S. military presence throughout Central Asia. It's factually
true that all the elements of the USA PATRIOT act were written and ready to
go before the first plane struck the WTC, and that Congress passed this
most repressive measure into law without debate and almost no dissent. It
is factually true that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were, to a great extent,
creatures of the CIA and US foreign policy.
It is clear that more than incompetence was involved in the failure to act
to stop 9-11.
It is legitimate to conclude from these facts that Bush knew roughly what
was coming and let it happen for his own partisan political purposes as
well as his strategic formulation of U.S. imperial interests and its
continued and expanded hegemony.
We would shrink from such a conclusion only if we accept the myth of
American democracy. A government capable of committing the most heinous
crimes and genocide against the people of this continent and the globe, as
this government has been and still is, would not hesitate to allow a bloody
"demonstration" to take place if it felt it essential to lay the political
basis for war and repression.
Some on the left however, even those who see perfectly clearly that the
1845 border incident in Texas, the battleship Maine, the Lusitania, the
Tonkin Gulf incident, or even Pearl Harbor, were pretexts created or
permitted by US statecraft to justify imperial wars, yet seem to hold on to
a scrap of illusory faith in the system and to deny the possibility or
probability that a similar dynamic operated here and now.
Yet it is exactly this faith and acquiescence in the system that we must
attack most sharply and directly, because it, rather than any nefarious
secret conspiracy, is the strongest bulwark of the imperial system of
oppression and exploitation.
And this simultaneously poses a challenge to the conspiracy theorists, who
also are wedded to a belief that the problem is due simply to a latter-day
deviation from the ideals of the founding fathers, or to a problem of
corruption and criminality at the top. There is a clear and unbroken
historical line from the genocide of the conquest and decimation of the
indigenous people and their land, from the highly profitable genocide of
the slave trade and slave-based production system, to the heinous crimes of
the imperialist system today.
The Constitution was designed as an instrument not to protect rights but to
suppress dissent and resistance. George II, the unelected pResident
installed in office by the Supreme Court and Electoral College is the
fitting inheritor of that system of settler colonialism and class rule.
There is no layer of the onion of US empire that we can peel away to reveal
an unsullied pre-existing state of democracy and justice. The only way out
of this is forward -- to a process of decolonization that will create a
world that has never been before. The power to do this lies in our hands
because it is our own power which the system wields against us!
The reason it is vital to understand this, is that it gives us hope for the
future and a way forward. This system has always extracted a pivotal base
of consent based on white supremacy, imperial and settler privileges, and
neo-colonialism, through which a mass base have identified with and
participated in the crimes of the empire.
On the other hand the recent ENRON debacle has clearly demonstrated that
the wealth and power of this system must be constantly extracted and
reproduced, or it vanishes overnight. The same is true of the consent of
the governed. Bush understands how vulnerable this system is. His problem
is that the very measures he takes to propagate it in power serve to expose
it and to diminish its legitimacy. We must exploit this contradiction to
our advantage, by intensifying resistance and exposure in the face of
atrocity and repression. But we can only do so by challenging people's
stakes and ties to the system, our complicity in our own and others'
oppression.
Why were Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. such powerful spokespeople of
resistance, so widely responded to? Because, at the same time that they
challenged racism, militarism and empire, each in their own way, they also
issued a moral and political challenge to their own people and to all who
thirsted for justice -- a challenge to stand up, to cease acquiescing in
and internalizing their own oppression.
When masses of people once again take that message to heart, and begin to
extract ourselves from the system while extracting the system from
ourselves, no power or repression on the face of the earth will be capable
of sustaining this rotten empire. The disillusionment of realizing that
neither white skin nor imperial privilege is any barrier to death or
exploitation, that 'our' rulers are capable of the most heinous crimes as
they always have been is a vital step towards waking up and taking back our
power to make history.
Whether you are galvanized by the struggle for peace, by the battle for the
survival of the planet against a ruler who has said, "global warming is
real -- live with it!" or by the effort to defend your own human rights,
now is the time to redouble your efforts, embracing allies in conscious
solidarity, and engaging in the self-critical effort to widen our field of
vision and compassion, which has been severely curtailed by the blinders of
privilege and identification with the oppressor.
Note from MN: There are numerous sources on-line for masses of information
indicating the complicity or criminal negligence of the US Imperial State
in the crimes of 9-11. Some of it is on the mark, some of it is rank
fantasy, some of it combines both elements. Little of it is based on a
critique of imperialism. Three places to start looking at the evidence as
well as the speculation are: http://www.copvcia.com (Mike Ruppert's
website); http://newsinsider.cjb.net (for a summary article on Bush's
"Smoking Gun"); and , http://www.unansweredquestions.org (which
incorporates efforts of some family members of those killed to dig out the
truth). But be forewarned that all of these sites contain the mishmash of
wheat and chaff and the fundamental political problems outlined above.
A free sample copy of Turning the Tide is available for the asking from
ARA, PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232. Subscriptions are $15 payable to
Michael Novick at that address.
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