Dateline: Facebook. A friend posts an ink portrait of Salvador Allende with the caption, NEVER FORGET 9/11/73. A friend of his comments, "I already forgot. What happened?" I contribute a comment with a link to the Wikipedia entry on the Chilean coup d'état engineered in part by our own CIA in 1973. Another friend asks if that's really more important to me or us. I reply: Not MORE important. Just one of many examples of how the US has sabotaged or suppressed democracy worldwide in the name of corporate profits. The second friend posts, complete with misspellings and jumbled syntax, exactly what he believes is the reason for remembering 9/11. He concludes, "We morn the loss of those we lost and remeber those who gave thier life trying to save them." Unfortunately, I cannot resist pissing on his parade. I mourn for the thousands killed 9/11/2001, but I also mourn for the million-plus killed by the US invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq, the 3 million killed in the Vietnam conflict, the countless millions killed by US interventions all over the world. The friend thanks me. There have been a few replies on the thread since then, but I have bowed out of the discussion.
In The Earthworm That Blows No Trumpet, history professor Stephanie Zeleny makes a nationwide splash with two books on how important and effective it is to teach history as cause and effect, working backward in time from the present (or from any important event) to find the root causes. If you want to know why 9/11/2001 happened, ask why al Qaeda came to be. People didn't just wake up one day and say, "I think I'll become a terrorist!" The chronology below is not in reverse order. However, it shows how CIA meddling in Iran in the 1950s led to a group of mostly Saudi men highjacking jetliners and flying them into symbols of American imperialism in 2001. Of course, that meddling has its causes, too, mostly having to do with the US capitalist class's pathological fear of socialism (or anything else that interferes with maximizing profit).
I think you know the rest. If you don't, do some research. Comments are closed.
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Blogging Sporadically since 2014Here you will find political campaign-related entries, as well as some about my literature, Houston underground arts, peace & justice, urban cycling, soccer, alt-religion, and other topics. Categories
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