NINE ELEVEN HAS COME AND GONE:

The sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 has come and gone. The necessary memorials have been held. the subject will soon fade into the memory hole. Last year Molly blogged on this subject under the general heading of "missed opportunities" (see the September, 2006 archives of this blog). I see little reason to modify my opinion at this time from what I said at that time. More than one political force lost an opportunity that was presented by these attacks. The American government lost an opportunity because it was dominated by totally unrealistic radical ideologues who proceeded to lose the almost universal sympathy that the attacks had generated by using them as a justification for an imperial war in Iraq that obviously had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, a war for control of oil supplies and little else. The American people lost by allowing these radicals to launch an unwinable and immoral war in their name. The left, Muslim people, the rest of the world lost as well. Anarchists lost because they held back from condemning in no uncertain terms the Moaoid rhetoric that has infiltrated their ranks. No... the people who died in the attacks of 9/11 were not "Little Eichmanns". They were innocent victims. From the Philipina cleaning staff on up. No... the so called "opponents of USD imperialism" who were their allies a few years ago and may yet be their allies again in a future contest against other powers have no moral justification for what they did.

Molly is very much "anti-American", but she is hardly "anti-Americans". As I have expressed repeatedly on this blog the USA is a great country that has many good points. I may not want to visit the USA in the near future as I believe that many other countries are better, but still... I may mock the US government and even US culture repeatedly, but I would never sink to the level of hating the US population, a level that, unfortunately too much of the US left itself has sunk to. And that includes too much of the American anarchist movement that, like the Bourbons, has forgotten nothing and learned nothing. The self destruction of the US left as it went the way of childish Maoism should have been instructive, but some hope for nothing more but to repeat such mistakes. An American anarchism, just like an American left in general, has to start from a simple liking of its own people. If it doesn't have this everything it produces will be a gross lie.

So...if us "damned foreigners" don't try and educate our comrades in the USA to not just realize that the attacks by the Islamo-fascists of Al Queda were morally wrong but, more importantly, that we should denounce any sympathy for them in our own ranks in no uncertain terms then we will have failed our duty. One of the great failings of American culture is its trend to conformity. This is mitigated by the fact that it is a pluralistic society, but within the little subgroups of American society they have far less freedom to dissent than we do outside of the USA. It's a failing of the American character. Their left needs the support of those of us outside of the country to find its proper way or it rapidly descends into cultism and "circling the wagons". Conformity in radical politics ala "political correctness" is one of the industrial wastes that the USA exports to the rest of us. Our American comrades suffer much more from this repressive mindset than the rest of us do. But we still suffer from it. If the centre of the Empire farts, the rest of us hold our noses...or claim that we smell roses.

NO...innocent victims of fascist attacks are no more "little Eichmanns" than innocent victims of Israeli bombs aimed at Hamas are "terrorists". It's incumbent on us to purge ourselves of those who wish to justify murder by ideology. If we don't do it the most likely result will be permanent irrelevancy. If a miracle occurs and such a left gains power...then welcome to the death camps.

9/11 CONSPIRACY NUTS:

POPULAR MECHANICS STRIKES BACK:

In her ceaseless prowling of the internet, looking for mice to pounce upon, Molly came on a real gem recently. In March 2005 the venerable magazine 'Popular Mechanics' published an article on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon explaining the rather simple physics and engineering behind how the attacks were so destructive. To that point the editors of that magazine, fascinated as they were with wiring and widgets, were rather naive children is the forest of fringe politics. The naivety didn't last. Their article was greeted with a massive internet flurry of abuse, none of it answering their article of course.

On October 13th, 2006 they published a rejoiner which can be found at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4199607.html . The flavour of the attacks on them can be gauged with the sentence that the author uses to introduce this article. It says,

"On February 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Haliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for global domination."

Yup, Popular Mechanics actually took a look at the conspiracy nuts who generated much of the hate mail, and I guess they were actually surprised to turn over this rock and find the maggots of nostalgic admirers of Hitler crawling beneath. It hardly surprises Molly. Bizarre conspiracy theories were a staple of ultra reactionaries long before old Adolph's great, great, great grandfather was a wiggling little sperm. They bequeathed this inheritance to their fascist descendants, and they, in turn, bequeathed it to their admirers today. No real surprise there, and the editors of Popular Mechanics should count themselves lucky that they had no previous contact with this underworld. Wiring and widgets may be sterile, but sterile beats putrid any day of the week. Molly has had her own little encounters with another "underworld" in her decades as an anarchist. Sympathy for acts of mindless violence amongst a few anarchists in modern decades, a small minority I assure you, has usually gone hand in glove with an absolutely uncritical admiration for other terrorists who wear an ill-fitting leftist disguise. The whole idea that anarchism should be utterly and completely opposed to Leninist tyranny and those who seek to impose it by acts of mindless violence seems a non-starter to those people. The last century and a half of anarchist history is actually a non-starter. Their world view is fueled by rather childish emotions, and the obvious futility of such tactics penetrates as deeply as the facts do for their right wing brothers. At its worst such people make common cause not just with the pathetic remains of Maoism but with neo-nazis. The attraction of using brutality is far greater than any political ideology in these cases.

But anyways have a look at the above essay for an amusing and interesting tour through the logical fallacies of "conspiratorism". The tour is instructive because the errors in thought pop up over and over in much other political discourse- just not in such concentrated and massive form.

If you are interested here are a couple of other references from critics of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts:

The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/cockburn

and a longer version at Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09092006.html

Of course you shouldn't miss George Monbiot's piece in The Guardian entitled '9/11 Fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns' . Molly love the way he describes the 9/11 conspiracy nuts as engaging in "displacement behavior" similar to that of a squirrel that sees a larger squirrel taking a nut and rather than attack it opponent turns on the tree and gnaws it to shreds. Hence the graphic above, and also Molly's recommendation to visit Scary Squirrel World, a subject too long neglected on this blog. Go over to SSW for the only conspiracy theory worth taking seriously (and funny too).

Other Losers of 9/11
To continue this thread, another of the losers who lost via 9/11 was the 'American Left'. By this I mean not the "liberal left" of neo-conservative "horror dreams" but rather the left in the USA extending from what would be called "social-democrats" in civilized countries, through more dogmatic socialists and into the eerie netherworld of Leninist sects and "left-over new leftists" ensconced in various parts of academia. I deliberately leave the anarchists for later, even though the rise of the modern American anarchist movement is intimately connected to the lost opportunity that the American left was a victim of.
Remember the time. It was a time when the events of Seattle 1999 were fresh in memory. Intelligent leftists such as Barbara Ehrenreich and many others were reaching out to this new generation of radicalism. Meanwhile the Stalinist and Trotskyist sects were pretty well moribund. Their potential for lasting another decade was remote.
Here's the astonishing fact. The American left "lost" by winning. The fact that what they had been saying to a diminishing audience for decades was getting further and further from reality was gradually dawning on them. many "protestants" had arisen to proclaim that the left should recover its connection with ordinary people. The birthing pains of American anarchism were only !! a part of this. The left stood poised to recover the commitment to such things as participatory democracy and a genuine populism that decades of identity politics had obscured. The Leninist left looked poised to finally fall into the trash-bin of history, a fall very much predestined with the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989.
This didn't mean that the American left would likely become "anarchists", though it did mean that they would be more than willing to "steal from the anarchist kit of ideas", often giving a version more sensible than that of the originators. It meant that they could have reformed and abandoned so many of their practices that made them a running joke amongst those who had the misfortune of coming in contact with them.
What happened ? An out-of-control imperial crusade on the part of the American government suddenly breathed new life into the terminal patient of American leftism. The Leninists began to recruit again. The academics found a cause to escape the growing knowledge of their futility. The inevitable reckoning was put off- perhaps for decades.
The gift that the Bush presidency gave to a tiny minority of their opponents was a gift of inestimable value. "War" tends to focus the mind just as almost dying does. This focus,however, pushes other matters way into the periphery. The left will now coat-tail the more "loyal" liberal opposition and imagine that it is gaining success after success. The success will be entirely illusionary.
The left would have had a very important role to play in "remaking America". Now they have put all their eggs in the one basket and continued on with business as usual in other matters that are more important in the long term. They will ignore pressing matters just as much as the conservatives that they hate do.
The left has failed because it has missed an opportunity for reformation, for abandoning a lot of its very bad habits. The opportunity will come again, but at a less opportune time. Perhaps when the American public is mindlessly casting around for villains to blame for its defeat, a defeat for which hubris is far more responsible than so-called traitors.
Next installment: We finally go overseas in examination of the losers.
Molly

Losers of 9/11 Part 2:
Many other actors lost opportunities due to the events of 9/11. The lost opportunities of the American ruling class were discussed in Part 1. The ordinary American people also lost as well. Their interests are not the same as those of their rulers. Certainly not the same as all factions of that ruling class, for the ruling class has factions that have different interests. This may seem a truism, and most of the American left will make ritual genuflections in this direction just like a good Catholic will before the host contained in the tabernacle whether they really believe that that piece of bread is the body and blood of Christ or if it is just a verbal formula. The more radical and academic sections of the American left adopt a general attitude towards their fellow countrymen that is, in fact, the precise opposite of seeking to aid the aspirations of ordinary people.
The Leninist theory of imperialism- factually wrong in terms of modern economics, assuming it ever was right- that explained the ability of some sections of the western working class to better their condition by imagining that they participated in some "looting" of the imperial colonies is a mere newly hatched chick to the dinosaur sized Great Rock of modern American leftist "guilt spinning". This web of feelings and rhetoric assigns an "ist" and an "ism" to so many conditions of life that presumably (whether they do in reality of not) "give benefit" to some imaginary oppressing group that it pretty well excludes 100% of Americans and 99.9999% of the world's population from the ranks of the "totally oppressed". The end result is psychological one-up-man-ship, not politics.
What follows is not anarchist propaganda. It merely assumes that the American people are mostly decent and that they deserve benefits which they lost due to a misguided reaction on the part of the American government to the events of 9/11. None of the opportunities that they lost really have much to do with anarchism except in a peripheral sense in the loss of their liberties and potential for security through greater self sufficiency and conservation. What they lost presumes basically the same general political economy that they have had in the past, but one managed a bit more intelligently than it has been in recent years.
Some of the losses of the American people are obvious. They have far fewer civil liberties today than they had six years ago. It is doubtful that this has increased their security any more than a focused effort on Al Queda, without the distraction of the Iraq invasion, would have done. The likelihood is precisely the opposite. The Americans are losing "the war of ideas" because of the domestic actions of their government, just as they are losing it because of its foreign adventures.
But there are other losers that they have suffered that are much more in the way of lost opportunities. Before 9/11 America was in a much better fiscal position that it is now. Not that their position was perfect, but matters such as the deficit and the negative balance of payments were at least possibly fixable. Add a trillion dollars via the undertaking of a hopeless war and the problems become insoluble. similarly, other pressing matters such a an infrastructure deficit, a poorly performing educational system, loss of innovative capacity, growing social inequality that threatens the implied "social contract" of America's myth of equality, etc. get swept away from consideration by the breeze generated by so many waving flags. These problems don't disappear. They fester and become worse the longer they are ignored. In a climate of war hysteria generated by a government determined to widen an inevitable war into a series of optional wars they will continue to grow in magnitude.
As America wastes its resources trying to achieve the impossible other, more sensible, countries become much better at competition because they use their resources wisely. In the end the living conditions of the American population stagnate at best and, more likely, begin to decline. The Americans are presently paying the price for allowing themselves to be swept up in the ideological myth generated by the present government. They have begun to wake up, but precious time has been lost. An hopeless crusade to try and monopolize Middle Eastern oil has put the necessary development of energy conservation and alternative sources of energy in the USA back at least a decade. Ignoring this necessity is treason to the American people because it perpetuates the dependence of the USA on vulnerable foreign supplies. The Republicans end up giving Al Queda greater assistance than the most "liberal" of American politicians ever could.
All the above is written from an "in their shoes" point of view. It assumes the general perspective of a rational citizen of the USA with all their general beliefs about politics and economics. It doesn't contradict any major system of American belief. When I examine the other "losers" I will indeed go beyond these beliefs. But for now...
More later
Molly

Lost Opportunities of 9/11
Many countries, peoples and movements lost opportunities due to the events of 9/11. Either that or they left opportunities untouched. The losers come from all points of the geographic and political spectrum. As I said I'd like to explore what was lost. This will be in no particular order, and what is said below doesn't mean that I approve of the ultimate goals of any of the collection of losers that I will present. When I do I'll try and make it as plain as possible.
So, beginning in the refrain of "I could do it better", let's look at the self interests of the American Empire. This whole matter is actually quite well hashed out in the popular and intellectual press of many different countries, and I don't expect that I'll say anything new here.
The American government was presented with an unprecedented "gift" by the events of 9/11. This was perhaps the ONLY time since the second world war that the USA received pretty well universal sympathy, at least from other governments-both "friends" and "competitors". Even Cuba. More determined and ideological opponents such as Iran maintained a polite silence. The sympathy was actually pretty reflective of public as opposed to government opinion in most countries as well. Even in the Middle East those who "celebrated" the attacks were a distinct minority, and the general population rejected them for at least "tactical" reasons.
It's perhaps symptomatic of the decline of politics in a worldwide sense that the American government had a George Bush at the helm in this moment rather than a person who could act as a "statesman". The era of the "statesman" has really been over for some decades. To my knowledge there is only one such item in power today. I imply no sympathy for the decaying dictatorship which he tends when I nominate Castro for this accolade. His junior partner, Chavez of Venezuela, is more of a clown and megalomaniac than old Fidel, and he hardly inspires the "vision" that old Fidel's revolutionary model did when it was still vital. the only other living statesman that I can think of is the retired Nelson Mandela.
Talent simply doesn't come to the halls of power anymore. A truly statesman-like American president could have parlayed the sympathy the USA received because of the events into a much more refined project for the "second American century" that American ideologues dream of. The configuration of events might have been rather different than what we see today. There was no reason why Saddam Hussein could not have once more become the American puppet he once was, and why he could not have become the regional counterweight to the ideologues of Iran that is so lacking today. The history of the American imperium has been marked for decades by alliances of convenience. Deadly communist foes such as China or the Kymer Rouge have ended up receiving American support just as surely as Saddam once did.
No doubt the imperium would still be an empire, with all that implies, but you can be assured that its machinations would be better covered with the cloak of "ethics" and "multilateralism" than the shredded image that America projects today. Those in control of the US government at the time were blinded by their ideology. From a simple real-politic point of view they can be seen as the intellectual pygmies they are when placed beside a truly intelligent advocate of the American Empire such as Henry Kissinger. Even more they were blinded by hubris, by an almost total overestimation of their power and even popularity. It would be hard to imagine Kissinger making such a mistake. Detente with China occurred because the US government of the time realized in a totally realistic way that it could not afford to wage a cold war against BOTH the Soviet Union and the PRC. There was a realistic understanding of the limits of American power that is lacking in the present American rulers.
Middle Eastern oil could have been much more securely in the American pocket with BOTH Iraq and Saudi Arabia as client states. The crusade against Islamic fundamentalism would be far more effective with Saddam's coterie of murderers on the American side. With the diversion of American forces and interests from the latter to the former objective BOTH objectives have now become exceedingly precarious. The reaction of the "Arab street" that the USA's actions constitute a crusade against "all" of Islam has been echoed by a loss of sympathy amongst non-Islamic countries. They can plainly see that the ultimate targets of America's wars in the Middle East is actually their own economies. Very few world government leaders express this bluntly, but it is an unstated reality behind growing scepticism elsewhere, whether in Europe, China or Russia.
Once more, the USA could have gained from the opportunity presented by the events of 9/11, but they foolishly frittered away their advantage by overstepping sensible limits on the reality of their power. They were one loser. The conservative movement in the USA mirrored this debacle on a domestic scale. The invasion of Iraq destroyed an opportunity that they had to become hegemonic in domestic politics- perhaps for decades to come. The liberal opposition has made a comeback because the conservatives were too foolish and arrogant.
These opportunities that were lost will never come again short of the success of Al Queda in actually deploying a real weapon of mass destruction- less likely than some Americans imagine- or a total loss of realism on the part of a future Iran armed with nuclear weapons. this is also unlikely for a number of reasons. Given the probable course of events in the near future the lost will never be recovered.
More on other losers later.

9/11 Five Years and 2 Days Later:
A World of Lost Opportunities:
The fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington has come and gone, and the commemorations have begun to fade. The myth making has added another brick to the mental monuments that both sides, the USA and fundamentalist Islam, have constructed to justify their actions. On the one side the toll of innocent victims is being used to continue to cover the far from innocent role of American foreign policy and American business in fostering the sort of mindset that sees the USA as "the Great Satan". The idea is now being mooted by, not just the American government, but even the present Canadian one that outfits like Al Queda carry out their attacks because "they hate the way of life and the freedoms of the West". I'm sure that they do indeed have such hatred, but it is hardly the reason why they have declared war on the USA. That sort of propaganda falls pretty flat outside of the USA and a minority of Canadians.
On the other side the death toll and the spectacular nature of the events has undoubtedly fed the delusion that a world spanning empire such as the USA can be defeated by a handful of terrorists carrying out such actions. No matter if the toll rises to 100 or 1,000 times the present toll an empire can never be defeated by such actions. Asymmetric war is, after all, asymmetric, and in the end the USA can outlast its present opponents until the time that its competitors overtake it on the economic front. At such a time Islamic fundamentalism may find itself pining for the "good old days" of fighting the Americans rather than a less constrained opponent.
Be that as it may the next few posts will look at the missed opportunities that the 9/11 events led to- for all sorts of different parties.
Til then- Molly