“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”
There is a very real, very human context to the struggle, a context of the people who have come before, and who will come after. After viewing the “Weather Underground” it was quite shocking to see just how eerily similar the current situation in Iraq is to the situation in Vietnam.
Where there is oppression, there will be resistance. When the oppression is by force, there will be resistance by force. We may very well be fighting ourselves, but this is such simple context to nearly every violent action we see today, and it is a context that we must be able to understand if we are to prevent the next 9-11.
There is a very real, very human context to the struggle, a context of the people who have come before, and who will come after. After viewing the “Weather Underground” it was quite shocking to see just how eerily similar the current situation in Iraq is to the situation in Vietnam.
Where there is oppression, there will be resistance. When the oppression is by force, there will be resistance by force. We may very well be fighting ourselves, but this is such simple context to nearly every violent action we see today, and it is a context that we must be able to understand if we are to prevent the next 9-11.
There is no innocent government on the face of this planet today, but there is one that is particularly guilty, if for no other reason but because of the crimes against humanity it has been able to commit over the years due its pure sheer power. That government is that of my own country, and as citizens of this country, whether we like it or not, we will be held accountable for the actions of the government that we support through our tax dollars.
On September 11th, 2001 the American people were for the first time held accountable for the actions of our government. The simple reality is that if one pays taxes and remain silent, they are implicitly approving all actions of the government they fund. This is painfully simple logic that we absolutely must understand – to fail to do so is to only guarantee future attacks and more senseless deaths on all sides.
To say that one action caused another is not, however, the same as justifying either action. There may very well be good reason to equally condemn both the terrorist action of 9-11 as well as the past 50 or so years of terrorist actions by the US Government throughout the world, but that is truly a whole separate discussion from simply realizing that 9-11 did not occur in a void.
Terrorism grows not out of a void, but in ground made fertile by some form of injustice or oppression. That is absolutely crucial to understand if one wants to truly prevent another attack, and one would have to be living in a real dark cave to not understand that the next attack is likely to be far deadlier. Terrorism is not a phenomenon upon which one can call a war – it is not something that can be simply put down by force.
To prevent and stop terrorism, one needs to truly look very carefully at the soil from which it stems. And it is not enough to merely claim the terrorists to be evil, insane or any other cliché, as more than likely they are not. You want to solve terrorism, you need to think in terms of angry people, in terms of injustices committed, and what one needs to do to undo the damage of those injustices.
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