2008 Woodie Awards
Posing questions I'm not supposed to ask
Daniel Black
Issue date: 2/1/07 Section: Opinion
The strategies this president has undertaken in addressing the problem of terrorism has, as detailed in scholarly literature, dramatically increased the probability of future terrorist activity in our homeland. His reasoning is kept secret, allegedly in our interest, though it may be observed that his friends and the friends of one Dick Cheney grow exceedingly wealthy from those strategies. If there is any point at which their friends' appetites for wealth might become satisfied, they haven't found it yet, and it appears unencumbered by any sense of conscience or decency.
These words are probably harsher than many of us are prepared to hear, further testifying to the public dialogue's narrow scope. We may believe that Bush & Company are trying to make the world a safer place; we may even believe that they care about the suffering and death of thousands of American soldiers and close to a million Iraqi dead, but there isn't any hard evidence to support this belief.
Iraqis' unimaginable plight (the requisite suffering, apparently, that goes with being liberated) is of extraordinary interest because it is completely absent from nearly all media coverage on the war. Sympathizing with the indigenous Arabs is not something that should distract us from the "moral calling of our time", to borrow the president's words, to cleanse the world of ideological filth -a process called 'genocide' when non-Americans do it.
As American citizens, we may choose to ignore these discomforting truths, but that decision will ultimately be inconsequential as increasingly larger numbers of the world's population -outside the United States- fail to choose parallel ignorance. The likelihood of widespread Third World rejection of U.S. hegemony, especially as our stranglehold over foreign economies tightens, will steadily grow until, at the appropriate hour, popular movements will topple the most powerful and tyrannical global power: the United States Government. Does such an initiative from outside our borders constitute terrorism? Ought we not launch preemptive strikes against perceived threats to our global domination, in accordance with the Bush Doctrine? No, not so long as those initiatives are grounded in foreign nations' right to self-determination and protecting their citizens' economic freedom from global terror.
My question then, simple and apolitical, is when does the people's intervention become obligatory? Where is the threshold of corruption and deceit that, once crossed, forces the people to act against it else be counted among it? Can individuals entrusted with the people's representation abuse their power past a point that is realistically tolerable and, once so crossing, force the common people they represent to disobey? Surely we all agree that if living in Germany during the late thirties/early forties entailed any kind of social responsibility, then respectable citizens were the ones that questioned the legitimacy of the Third Reich's power, effortlessly arrived at shocking conclusions, and then acted in defiance of the government whose goal was to exterminate Jews and commit other acts of genocide. Considering our cultural parallels, do we have a comparable obligation, ourselves?
These words are probably harsher than many of us are prepared to hear, further testifying to the public dialogue's narrow scope. We may believe that Bush & Company are trying to make the world a safer place; we may even believe that they care about the suffering and death of thousands of American soldiers and close to a million Iraqi dead, but there isn't any hard evidence to support this belief.
Iraqis' unimaginable plight (the requisite suffering, apparently, that goes with being liberated) is of extraordinary interest because it is completely absent from nearly all media coverage on the war. Sympathizing with the indigenous Arabs is not something that should distract us from the "moral calling of our time", to borrow the president's words, to cleanse the world of ideological filth -a process called 'genocide' when non-Americans do it.
As American citizens, we may choose to ignore these discomforting truths, but that decision will ultimately be inconsequential as increasingly larger numbers of the world's population -outside the United States- fail to choose parallel ignorance. The likelihood of widespread Third World rejection of U.S. hegemony, especially as our stranglehold over foreign economies tightens, will steadily grow until, at the appropriate hour, popular movements will topple the most powerful and tyrannical global power: the United States Government. Does such an initiative from outside our borders constitute terrorism? Ought we not launch preemptive strikes against perceived threats to our global domination, in accordance with the Bush Doctrine? No, not so long as those initiatives are grounded in foreign nations' right to self-determination and protecting their citizens' economic freedom from global terror.
My question then, simple and apolitical, is when does the people's intervention become obligatory? Where is the threshold of corruption and deceit that, once crossed, forces the people to act against it else be counted among it? Can individuals entrusted with the people's representation abuse their power past a point that is realistically tolerable and, once so crossing, force the common people they represent to disobey? Surely we all agree that if living in Germany during the late thirties/early forties entailed any kind of social responsibility, then respectable citizens were the ones that questioned the legitimacy of the Third Reich's power, effortlessly arrived at shocking conclusions, and then acted in defiance of the government whose goal was to exterminate Jews and commit other acts of genocide. Considering our cultural parallels, do we have a comparable obligation, ourselves?
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