http://www.damnedidiots.com/default.asp?Category=7

Our complicity is deeper and more complex than we think….not just in the violence of the these wars, but in the evils of the whole society.

I grew up in a town whose only really decent jobs were at the local army ammunition plant. Both of my parents worked for this facility–which assured me of a secure and happy childhood.

For the people who worked for these contractors, the endless succession of wars meant job security. Local support for wars of aggression was a foregone conclusion. This is a (somewhat) extreme example of complicitous support for the war machine based on simple local economics–but how many of the jobs in this country depend on the machinery of aggression and oppression? All the good ones, I suspect.

It’s tough to live innocently in this country. If you take into account our lifestyles–with all the necessities of life produced by slave labor and transported vast distances–you can see that we can hardly make a purchase at the grocery store or turn on the A/C without complicity.

From adolescence on, I vowed I would never go to work for the army ammunition plant–or at any other job that would clearly violate my beliefs and values. But where does that leave you, in this society? Where are the options for living a truly innocent life? There are a few jobs where such complicity with corporate America and its crimes is minimal. But “minimal” is about the best you can do, without joining an IC or turning Amish. Even if you were to work for a grocery store, you would be supporting the corporate machinery. To choose minimal complicity means living poorly and precariously–and making a choice in which our children will be living poorly and precariously.

If most of the people in this country were both informed and people of principle, we could not have a war machine, the machinery of corporate oppression, or our abominable judicial system and economic system. People would politely decline careers as doctors and lawyers and military men and CEOs, because they couldn’t square it with their consciences. They would decline to go to work in a gas station or grocery store or for government.

Maybe more to the point, people would both demand and create an economic basis for life that would enable them to live innocently. They would be actively considering how this was to be done.

Complicity has its roots in the consciousness that has been invaded and occupied–that feels hatred and resentment against other people and other groups, that feels itself in competition (and, hence, enmity) with all our neighbors–even our nearest ones–that feels a drive for all the tokens of status and prestige that symbolize our victory over others, that demands more and more of these tokens in the form of excessive consumption.

“The deepest problem is corporate capitalism and the increasingly dangerous behavior of its U.S. leading branch.”

We are still apart on the depth of the problem with US policies. Terrorism is a tactic the the US employs in our name.

I’ll put my anti-imperialist efforts up against yours or anybody else’s.

And Zionism is hardly the deepest problem. The deepest problem is corporate capitalism and the increasingly dangerous behavior of its U.S. leading branch.

Meanwhile, if saying children are not legitimate military targets is demagoguery, so be it. I’d rather be a demagogue than a terrorist.

I appreciate your frustration. It is truly painful to see on the one hand a sunfilled day, knowing that our government is committing crimes against humanity – in our name! But let’s avoid the ad hominems. It’s not Churhill who sucks, its the cold reality he’s presenting. I won’t quibble with “hair splitting”. We can argue we didn’t vote for the maniac in power and so we’re not “responsible”. But while we’re arguing that the killing continues. And most of it has little to do with Al-Qaeda. Churchill is not the problem.

Where are the impeachment proceedings our constitution calls for? Yes, it’s tough but imagine how tough it is on those we slaughter.

If the US had stayed in Afganistan with its military – more or less as it has today – it would still be the completely wrong approach to 911; but it didn’t even do that. Instead it engaged in a massive attack of a non-threatening sovereign nation with millions of innocents. But even before thatk, over a million were killed in Iraq due to US policies.

Ok, so you now all that. This is an entrenched problem. None (Kucinich excepted) of the candidates are about to change the course of our policies – though one or two might mollify its intensity. Getting behind a candidate who is against empire, who addresses, head on the entrenched ills. That would mean a third party – assuming Kucinich doesn’t survive the primaries. But more importantly, this kind of activism will take time, years, and will be grass-roots based. We can’t throw up our hands and let this go on. We have to feel – as best we can the bullets tearing throw the bodies of families, of children by America’s war machine. The more sensitized we become, the more of us who are sensitized, the greater the demand to stop this behavior.

Given the depletion of oil, our massive debt, our overextension, we more than likely will have no choice. But I still believe we should do everything we can until that choice is taken away by utter collapse.

To Dawson:

Did you speak out against the sanction against Iraq during the 1990’s that led to the deaths of 500,000 innocent Iraqi children. NO! Clinton didn’t have to lob BOMBS (although he did). He just starved a population. Don’t need no AK47!

The issue Dawson is I’m not feigning some false outrage and ignorance by rhetorical HIDING the crimes of the EMPIRE behind CHILDREN LIKE YOU! That’s demagogic and hypocritical.

And I have read Churchill’s hair-splitting non-retraction. The main point he makes is that people are targets unless and until they “compel their government” to change 180 degress. How does one do that, Max? By voting? For whom? Obama? Hillary?

And P.S.: Because the U.S. uses criminal methods of selecting military targets, does that excuse Al Qaeda? Is the second wrong a right? Personally, I oppose all forces who use terrorist definitions of military targets, as do the vast majority of ordinary Americans, if you ask them the question. Legitimate military targets are military forces invading one’s homeland. Nothing else. That’s international law, and it’s a very good thing. Ward Churchill sucks.

Arguing someone else’s case (for or against) is always dicey because the interlocutor is not present to make his own comments. So, see the link below for his global response.

If we isolate 911 then I think we miss the true context of Churchill’s remarks since his wrtings in general provide a full view of American diplomacy from its inception on, not just the 21st Century.

Michael says: “Churchill does exactly that, by defining the WTC as a legitimate military target.”
As I noted, the US legitimized WTC as a target, because it housed a CIA agency. We can argue that legitimacy – and I would. But it is THE USA who established the rules of military engagement, not Al-Qaeda. One can despise the tactic and the results, but it is dishonest not to acknowledge who’s the RULE MAKER. To see what the US military considers target for missle or air attacks, simply look at Vietnam and its massacres, recently Afganistan and Iraq, were buildings are filled with civilians (including children) and blown apart. This is not unique to “wars”, the US has been doing this in Somalia and in any number of other locations directly or through proxies.

Again, I think you’re walking around the issue of complicity. Like it or not, the USA is the aggressor, and it is this government (and a string of many administrations) who have forcefully intervened in our name. That makes us – collectively – complicit. If we don’t like that, than DAMN IT let’s do something about IT!

Churchill’s response:
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0201-05.htm

Meanwhile, why are people so obtuse about what Churchill plainly says? Max says “no one argues killing of civilians is a just or right thing.” In fact, Ward Churchill does exactly that, by defining the WTC as a legitimate military target. Sheesh.

I must say, I think it is you who just don’t concur with the analysis presented. You seem to be “stuck” on the idea of some American child being victim of a terrorist attack.

Here’s the disconnect (and it is all yours, friend): It is the US who regularly murders (through its global interventionism) children and civilians of all sorts. You’ve followed the reports, no doubt. The point being made, rather consistently is that there is a connection between those killings and the hit on 9/11. The terrorist attack hit a building housing among other things, CIA agency. In US military parlance that’s a “reasonable” target.

But no one argues killing of civilians is a just or right thing. What is being argued is the understanding that there is a responsibilility which connects the American people and its governments policies, policies which have been publicly aired – in one form or another. And since these policies and the actions taken are part and parcel of the empire we live in, we have ownership and complicity with those policies and thus should not be surprised when there is “blow back”. That’s the connection. It has been well documentated with no attachment to ideology.

Until we completely understand our deep connection with the killing done in our name and until we actually demand, in no uncertain terms change, we will continue in endless war.

As former CIAer, Chalmbers Johnson quotes from Arundhati Roy (The Guardian) in his Nemesis:
“Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by Ameria’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of ‘full-spectrum dominance’, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts…Now that family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.”

P.P.S. to Deadbeat: You’ve heard the word “empire.” Congratulations. How “radical.” Meanwhile, what else do you know? Do you really believe 11-year-old Americans are legitimate targets for Al Qaeda or anybody else? If so, where’s your AK47 blazing tonight? Targets abound!

As long as most of us continue to believe that the killing is something Bush owns we will forever dig and dig and dig. He, ugly truth though it be, is simply the cruel reality of our quiet deal with the devil; and crying about blowback does not make you a victim.

To think that one is an “anti-war”/Iraq occupation proponant and don’t fully appreciate and understand that paradigm is to be deeply delusional. The truth can be a hard thing to swallow when thinking oneself a victim is some damn comforting.

is no excuse.

Perhaps you want to read the piece again, assuming you actually read it the first time. What Mr. Gaylor is saying, in my reading, is that every single person who benefits from the existence of an empire and who does nothing to speak truth to that empire is, in some sense, guilty. That includes me and my wife (arguably not our five-year old daughter—as she is a minor, it seems we are complicit for her.) Does that mean that we are “asking to be shot and bombed”? No. What it does mean is that we should be a little less quick to wear sackcloth and ashes in the face of predictable blowback, wondering (without really wondering, of course) why they would do this to poor innocent us. Instead maybe we should recognize that our government has done a good deal of horrible shit to millions of people around the world, and that because ours is a government of, for, and by the people (according to our 16th President) our unwillingness to take it to task leaves a lot of blood on all of our hands.

All this was never Churchill’s point, though, as you would know if you actually read his original article. His original point was a question. Why is it that we Americans so casually dismiss the killing and maiming of equally innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Panama, and Vietnam, etc. ) as “collateral damage” while expecting the entire world to stop when some of our innocent men, women, and children are killed in a similar fashion. Does the fact that our planes drop bombs onto civilians, rather than flying them into skyscrapers, make their deaths any less real, any less unnecessary. Churchill’s point, if I may be so bold as to put words in his mouth, is that ALL these innocent deaths are unnecessary, and that the one’s we are responsible for are those committed by OUR government. If we can’t be bothered to care enough about innocent people “over there,” then why on earth should they be expected to give a flying fuck about us.

Somebody here is operating with criminal logic, but it ain’t Mr. Gaylor.