Politics Plus

On September 11, 2001 I left for work right after the first airliner hit.  My job that day was to contact executives in Fortune 500 companies in New York to arrange site visits from a team of researchers for a major software development company.  I did not think it was an appropriate time to call New York, and said so, but the Account Executive had not yet arrived, and his assistant, a Republican airhead, insisted that we could not allow terrorists to stop us from doing business.  I called several companies with no answer at the switchboard or my contact unavailable, for obvious reasons.  I dialed a contact whose direct line I already had.  Someone else answered the phone.  He was in one of the twin towers, above the fire.  He asked me to call his wife and tell her he loved her, because the phones there were not working to dial out.  I did.  She cried.  I cried.  I was done.  I refused to call New York any more that day.  The airhead fumed, but a few minutes later, the Account Executive arrived, agreed with me, and called her on her insensitivity.  A few of us gathered around the TV in the lunch room.  Someone asked what it all meant.  I said that I expected Bush to use the attack as an excuse to blame and invade Iraq and as an excuse to curtail our civil liberties.  As horrific as that day was, and with respect for the victims’ families, I wish to focus today on the other 9/11, 9/11/1973, because Americans are not the only ones to have been victims of terror.

On September 11, 1973, Salvatore Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile was overthrown and murdered in a coup orchestrated by Republicans, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, installing Agosto Pinochet as dictator.  Allende was a Marxist, but he was a Social Democrat, not a totalitarian.  In the terror that followed, thousands died.  The following is part of the 2002 reflections of Tito Tricot, who experienced these events:

Our dreams were shattered one cloudy morning when the military overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Twenty-nine years later, at midday, Chile’s’s firemen sounded their sirens paying tribute to thousands of men and women who lost their lives without really understanding what was happening.

It was a moment of remembrance, not for the victims of the military coup, but for those killed at the World Trade Centre in New York. Sad as that might have been, it is even sadder that Chilean firemen have never sounded their sirens to remember our own dead. And there are thousands of them, including many children, who were murdered by the military.

It is not a matter of comparing sorrow and pain, but for the past year the US media has tried to convince us that north American lives are worth more than other people’s lives. After all, we are from the third world, citizens of underdeveloped countries who deserve to be arrested, tortured and killed. How else are we interpret the fact that the military coup in our country was planned in the United States?

The truth is that no US president ever shed a tear for our dead; no US politician ever sent a flower to our widows. The US government and media use different standards to measure suffering. It is precisely this hypocrisy and these double standards that make us sick, especially when on such a symbolic day for Chileans, the president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, attended a memorial service at the United States embassy where the ambassador, William Brownfield, stated that "people who hate the United States must be controlled, arrested or eliminated".

In what kind of a world are we living? Can we stand idly by while in the name of the fight against terrorism countries are bombed or invaded by the US war machine? I think not, especially because, irrespective of the horror of the World Trade Centre attacks, the US has no moral right to impose its will on our continent. After all, we in Latin America have ample experience with US terrorist tactics. In our continent alone 90,000 people disappeared as a direct result of the operation of the School of the Americas and US "counterinsurgency" policies – 30 times more than the victims of the World Trade Centre… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Guardian>

Terrorism should be opposed, but in order to have the moral standing to oppose it, the United States must stay out of the terrorism business ourselves.  If the rest of the world seems less than supportive of our war on terrorism, its because they rightly see us as the architect of more state sponsored terror than any other nation.  Republicans may accuse me of hating America for saying this, but that’s a lie.  Because I love this nation, I want us to do right, be honorable in our dealings with the rest of the world, and benefit from the standing that honor will bring.

A good start would be to keep Republicans out of power.  I readily admit that the Democrats’ track record in this area is not pure, but compared to the Republicans, we are babes in the woods.  Just since Eisenhower took office, Republican administrations have covertly overthrown, attempted to overthrow, or participated in the overthrow if the following nations: Guatemala, the Congo, Chile, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia, Angola, the Philippines, Venezuela, Haiti, the Palestinian Authority, and Iran.

In memory of this day and all the victims of terror everywhere, let peace without terror be our common goal.