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I think we know what happened - the attacks on the WTC. However, the response has been staggeringly perverse; we have had hundreds of thousands of people die (
by mortov 13y ago
I think we know what happened - the attacks on the WTC.
However, the response has been staggeringly perverse; we have had hundreds of thousands of people die (you don't even hear about the daily bombings in food markets in Iraq or Afghanistan now and that's without counting Syria, Lybia, Egypt etc.), we have Orwellian surveillance which only a few years ago would have been dismissed as crazy tin-foil hat nonsense but for the fact Edward Snowden revealed all the theories were true and things were much worse than even the tin foil hat people yelling at secret-spy-trees said. And that does not start to cover the censorship (see elsewhere on HN today for that).
The response has grown a whole industry of fear-mongering and schemes to stop crazy make-believe terrorist plots which simply defy the laws of physics (and common sense) yet no-one will tell The Emperor that he has no clothes on. Well, not anyone he is prepared to listen to. The clothes makers have become insanely rich in the process of making their wares too. What's a few dead people in far off places if you're getting rich, right ?
Meantime, US judges complain about the crazy Catch-22 goalpost moving unfairness and still people languish innocently in Guantanimo and die in what can best be described as "unclear circumstances".
A nation founded on rebellion against unfair and unjust oppression, seeking life and liberty. Indeed, the question is "America, what has happened to you ?"
But also, what has happened to all the other countries who joined in this madness and keep it going ? They have responsibility too.
- n21e 13y agowe have had hundreds of thousands of people die Yes, as compared with around three thousand. Incomparably more innocent people killed by the actions of the USA and other western nations. The arrogance, the lack of understanding that life is similar in other countries, the unquestioned greater value of the life of an American than the life of a ragged brown man we pick up in a far off place that we shouldn't have been in at all. Now more than a decade later all that's clear is that I will spend the rest of my life despising the countries in which I am likely to live.
- sneak 13y ago> Now more than a decade later all that's clear is that I will spend the rest of my life despising the countries in which I am likely to live. It doesn't have to be so. You can take your productive energies elsewhere.
- rdtsc 13y ago> But also, what has happened to all the other countries who joined in this madness and keep it going ? At that high of a level once a "war on X" is created and billions are poured into it, whole branches of industry are opened up, whole new government agencies are created, thousands are send to kill and thousands will be killed. Things just keep going because they already are going. It becomes a self-sustaining reaction.
- sdoering 13y agoWar is a massacre between people not knowing each other in behoof of people knowing, but not massacring each other. (Paul Valery)
- madaxe_again 13y agoSpanish Armada. Never forget. Bomb Spain. The entire premise is staggeringly stupid, and the disease that afflicts America is the same that has eaten every empire built on the premise of never-ending expansion and unending military dominance.