I say face that reality and act accordingly, or become a part of it. That's the choice.
The logic that defends the War on Terror is no different than the logic that defends the War on Drugs--because in its essence the War on Terror is a war to defend and spread empire. What the U.S. is doing overseas, what it does here at home is about that--nothing else, nothing less. Empire is just a grandiose word to describe the exploitation of people and the planet.
On the face of it, isn't it a peculiar brand of INSANITY to argue that to protect "our beautiful" freedom and way of life we have to spy on EVERYONE? Just who is going to carry out this benign surveillance for our own good? The FBI, which spied on Martin Luther King--hounding him, attempting to blackmail him, or to drive him to suicide? The FBI that set up and murdered members of the Black Panther Party and others in the '60s and which never stopped disrupting all kinds of social justice movements through '80s and '90s down to today? Trust the CIA/NSA? The blood of people from Guatemala, to Indonesia, to Yemen and Somalia runs deep and wide and is ignored at the price of complicity here and unspeakable horror in countries the world over.
Friedman's logic is nothing more than brocade on what Obama argues. Obama seeks to rope in progressive "rational" people to empathize with "his" dilemma as the way to convince them to identify with the imperial death machine that is this country. Enough already of Obama's Hamlet act of agonizing over kill lists every Tuesday , of making the difficult choices between privacy and security. The punch-in-the-gut line of Obama's fairy tale deception, which people said they would never accept from Bush, is: "Trust Me."
Trust who? The Democratic Party is a party of war criminals no less than the Republicans. Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, answered point blank that the sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of a half million children during the 1990s was, she said: "WORTH IT." If any other leader said this in any other country--people would recognize this for the advocacy of genocide that it is. Such war crimes are not incidental or exceptional in the history and the workings of this system, capitalism-imperialism, which requires ever wider and more competitive exploitation of people and the planet. From the founding genocide against the native people here, to the enslavement of Africans, to the support for the genocide against the Palestinian people, to the one million killed in Indonesia in the 1960s with active CIA involvement, this is the essential nature of what the U.S. is and does. No oversight can or will regulate that. The driving force of competitive global capitalism is what regulates what any government that enforces this system does and will do.
The heart of the argument [made by the rulers of the U.S. in the wake] of 9/11 is that the only choice we have is between Islamic fundamentalism or worldwide capitalism. This is the America first logic of the War on Terror that has resulted, in just Iraq, in more than 100,000 killed outright, the hundreds of thousands maimed and sickened; and the millions that have been displaced from their homes. This is the logic, this is the morality, of empire.
There is a deadly dynamic in the world today that we can and must break out of. Bob Avakian, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has described it:
"What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these "outmodeds,' you end up strengthening both."
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