Maybe, probably but I seriously doubt it could ever reach the level that most people who watched the episode I watched might have thought. African coffee farmers are never going to form a terrorsit group to attack the West and there will never be a war about the Lebonese water 'theft'. I accept the point about treating people with a bit more respect, which would prevent any possible conflict but I thought it was an unbalanced depiction.
African coffee farmers as opposed to Saudi Oil producers or CIvil Engineers you mean? In any event I think you've got things slightly the wrong way round. It's not that African coffee farmers are necessarily going to form a terrorist group, (although if there are floods or droughts, crop failures and then people have to watch their kids die it tends to put something of a crimp in our relationship with them, particularly if they feel we've screwed them on prices over the years), but that their unfair treatment confirms to those people so inclined just what a crock our statements about caring for the worlds poor are. In other words they present a perfect opportunity for those people who ARE inclined to terrorism to argue that we have declared war on the worlds poor, particularly the Muslim bit of it.
Another documentary that methodically hammers away at the daily drumbeat of post-9/11 mainstream groupthink is The Media Education Foundation's Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire, featuring Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.), Tariq Ali, Benjamin Barber, Medea Benjamin, the hated and despised Noam Chomsky, Kevin Danaher, Mark Danner, Shadia Drury, Michael Dyson, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Franti, Stan Goff, William Hartung, Robert Jensen, Chalmers Johnson, Jackson Katz, Michael T. Klare, Norman Mailer, Zia Mian, Mark Crispin Miller, Scott Ritter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Greg Speeter, Fernando Suarez del Solar, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jody Williams and Max Wolff.
Funny you use the word "risk." So few on the left really understand the word. Or the whole idea of "risk management." In one sense, the war in Iraq can be understood as an exercise in risk managment. OK, here's the rub. How small IS the risk really? In retrospect, if nothing REALLY bad happens, is it because the risks were small to begin with, or because there was heightened vigilance that prevented the inherent risks from flowering into full blown castastrophe? Because with fanatical Islamic jihadists, they may be clumsy, unsophisticated, and few in number, but they don't need to be facile, sophisticated, and widespread. They just need to engage in one horrific act of terrorism that makes 9-11 or the the Bali bombings look like a warmup. Once. One time. One really bad time. That's it. Because the fact is, that if they had the chance to be successful to that degree, and the means with which to do it, they most certainly will take that chance and employ those means. You know, it's just so wonderfully ironic this whole pooh-poohing that is now becoming so fashionable on the left now, this chic wave of the hand dismissal, this "Gee, it's just not that big of a deal." Of course, of course. It isn't that big of a deal to YOU until it IS a big deal. And then, it is too late. For you Europeans out there, this just in. My country was attacked by an enemy that won't have a second's compunction about doing it again, and next time with something bigger and more deadly. I don't give a rat's a$$ what you think of the USA and whether you think we're all bunch of dumb hicks. Enjoy your putuative "moral superiority" and "I know better" naivete. Meanwhile, we're gonna get 'em whether you like it or not.
Yes, it's amazing. The left doesn't credit George Bush's anti-terror strategy for making al-Queida inoperable (lately), they instead are now propagandizing that they were a bunch of unsophisticated misfits, few in number, and oh, not really even called al Queida.
So the 9/11 families advocating approaches that vary significantly from BushCorp. are, what, exactly? "Pooh-poohers" of their loved one's horrific death? The soldiers IN Iraq that are writing Michael Moore, and the NYTimes, and TIME and Newsweek are what, exactly? "Pooh-poohers" of their compatriots' unecessary deaths in a far-off desert land? This type of sham patriotism must be murdered, it must die, and I won't allow you to come here and sh!t with your language on the folks who ARE giving what needs to be given, who mourn and rage and rail for the ********ing truth of the matter, the whole truth of the matter, and nothing but the truth of the matter with your limp, facile efforts at fool-toughness and psychotic Americanism. I want your thinking to die...it won't but understand that it's one of my ********ing GOALS in life to act out my admittedly pathetic serial killer fantasies UPON these ideas, not by suppressing them, but by getting them fully and totally out front, where the so-called thinking can be clearly discredited, and the PEOPLE behind this type of thinking can be known and understood for who and what they are. Grow up. Hell, just grow to the equivalent of my five year old son, who watched the horror of 9/11 happen four miles (as the crow flies) from his home and offers more than you do in terms of reasoned discourse that springs from the best traditions of the nation. Your demand that we stop trying to understand and just get on with whatever we've been told is the way forward by these so-called leaders would be laughable, if it weren't so reflective of current murderous efforts at empire, and the proportional marginalisation of positive uses of America's current, and deteriorating, real power, influence and authority. Your approach is perfectly un-American. It gives primacy to the idea that nothing is more important than avoiding death, than saving one's own skin. How did you, Keller, GET the very nation in which you rest replete behind a keyboard typing such defecation? By folks doing the exact opposite of what you advocate; by the fearless, courageous embrace of an idea worth dying over. That's how we got anything WORTH anything in America, tho' I know you and your ilk might feel differently. For me, the suffrage, civil rights, labor, child labor, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, the right for a woman to control her own person, and environmental movements, to name just few, ARE the history of citizens placing an idea (in this case the maximization of the American idea) above their own lives. The perfect refutation of the reasoning you employ. Too bad that, if your ideas and ideation win the day, long-term, America will not be lost to any fearful, frightening boogey man from outside who produces any more or less "terror" than the entire world deals with on a regular basis without becoming terror. It will, in fact, be lost from the inside, from the abandonment, when we needed it most, of the commitment to the idea that we STAND FOR an Idea, one whose resultant franchise has extended and, up until about 1973, had the fullest opportunity to transform what living in a democracy could possibly mean. Just like character can bedescribed as what you do when noone is looking, a nation is only as strong as the Ideals to which the citizenry and leadership cling and exemplify when it is absolutely hardest to do so. What we did, what we allowed to happen, in the months post 9/11; the malignant spread and sad, demonic ascendancy of the Keller Ideal in the subsequent years, is who we are right now, is what "American" MEANS right now; because it is who we are "in the clutch," with everything on the line. What we do when everything is hunky-dory is no test. And if the Keller Ideal wins, we lose the nation. We'll blame it on someone or something else (and we may, god forbid, go out in a nuclear petulance) but the blame will lie with US, and how we bought into the Keller Ideal and turned our backs, with prejudice, upon both the Ideas and the Acts that GOT us the damn nation in the first place.
If you are talking about numbers of people directly killed, perhaps your statement is correct. Of course, poor diet is only a part of early death due to cardiovascular disease, but that debate is for another thread. The real risk from Al Qaeda-sponsored or influenced terrorism is economic, not loss of life. Taking nothing away from the human tragedy of the loss of 3,000 lives on Sept 11, the subsequent real economic costs to the US from that day is measured in the billions. One dirty bomb or one truck-load of anthrax dumped in a major city anywhere in the world would hardly cause any loss of life but the subsequent economic "fall out" would be devastating.
Thom Hartmann intimates here that the series is reaching across the Atlantic... What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats? What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair? And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today? It happened. The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares." If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later...
22% for moral values, 29% for Economy+Jobs+Taxes, 34% for Iraq+Terrorism, 12% for healthcare and education.
25% for Economy+Jobs+Taxes, but fair enough in terms of the point, yet I might group them differently (maybe education+healthcare+taxes), and those various combinations leave us back where we started, with how folks chose to answer the question in front of them.
For those with BBC2, each of the three parts of this informative work is on at 11:20 PM, on the 18th 19th and 20th respectively. Or, you can watch it all right now, here.
Watched part 3 again last night Mel. To be honest I think some of the films tricks and techniques detracted, (or more appropriately, diverted attention away from), what was said. Something I hadn't quite followed the first time around was that he precisely DIDN'T say that there was no danger from terrorists. He was saying that Bush was looking in the wrong place for them. He was saying that the disaffection of young, usually male, muslim youth was the real danger, not any organised threat in the old sense like the mafia or the communist block, which was Bush was looking for. I'd sort of realised he'd said that the first time around, you understand, but I thought he hadn't really made it clear enough. To argue that there was NO danger after the embassy bombs in Africa, 9/11, Madrid, Bali, etc, didn't seem to be a tenable argument and I felt he was making light of the situation. One thing this does make absolutely imperative is that the Arab/Israeli conflict is resolved, and resolved pretty damn quick, in a manner that leaves the Palestinians, if not happy, then at least happier than they are now. It provides a focal point around which other ideas of disaffection and disillusion can coalesce and places us ALL in danger.
This is essentially the position of all kinds of pro-"engagement" center-left liberals like Friedman of the New York Times, and aspects of their position have merit, such as acknowledging the truth about the possibility of coming to harm regardless of the organizational structure (or lack thereof) of that intent. Where they fail is twofold: in positing as a given an inten inbued with ideal springing from neocon activity disguised as leadership today, and - and this is the far more difficult one to deal with, imv - not talking about what, in terms of waht the nation stands for, we should ALL - not just young poor men and women disproportionately black and brown in the military, but all adult/aware citizens - be ready to die for; IOW in clarifying what we should wake up everyday ready to stand for in terms of national raison d'etre. When we know the latter, no fear - real or drummed up - of the former can takethe most important part of our nations away from us.
The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel calls for the documentary to be shown by PBS or HBO in the USA: Or, you can have your cyberspatially-capable friends to click on this link.
That should definitely happen. I don't know if I've mentioned it but Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 is being shown tonight on UK TV Channel 4 which is one of the terrestrial channels so is available to everyone.
It'll be interesting to se how it does. Actually, I watched the version on the web again and there's a phrase that it brought to mind, taught to me by my father many years ago. He was describing the attitudes of a certain kind of right winger. It was used, particularly by old, British, public school boys, many of whom had nurses as children rather than their patents bringing them up. 'Hold onto nurse... for fear of something worse'. As we've discussed before, I tend to think the ideas in the series that there is no, or very little, danger is not necesarily accurate but it's a concept worthy of discussion. Personally I think the more important point is, even if there IS great danger, how do we respond? Should we, in fact, HELP the people against us by creating more martyrs and reasons to hate us like Quantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, or should we react more intelligently?
An update! This important series is now available on Zudeo torrent at www.zudeo.com. Just download the torrent handler and then search for BBC and it's at the top of the list as at todays date. Worth watching again or seeing for a first time.