Patriotism, Death and Human Suffering in the Wake of 911

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959

Saturday marked the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by individuals belonging to the group we have come to know as al Qaeda, although most of us would be hard pressed explaining exactly who or what that is. We do know, or should, that leading figures in it are former friends of US government officials and businessmen, many of them apparently members of the Taliban: As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a- gallon gas.” (1)

The destruction was massive and the death toll tragic, 2,996, including the 19 hijackers. It was one of the worst disasters inflicted by foreigners on US soil. Following the attacks, the US launched its “War on Terror”, a rather unusual war as terror is a tactic not an organization or a nation. They also rushed through the Patriot Act, using their media to whip up patriotism and nationalism as people were justifiably angry. The US then invaded Iraq and Afghanistan although there were no Iraqi’s on the planes and Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. The attackers were mostly Saudis.

It was not an easy time for those of us that urged our co-workers and friends to not fall prey to nationalism and think about why this happened. I remember saying to a guy at work that the first thing we should do is ask ourselves what on earth our government was doing abroad that would make people, not so much take such action, but support it. My comments were not received well. US flags were hanging on every car. People were sticking them on work trucks. United We Stand and God Bless America bumper stickers were everywhere. This is the mood the ruling class in the US wanted. It stifles debate, makes people wary of asking questions or daring to question the role of our government in other countries and on the global stage.

All normal human beings are saddened by the suffering of others which is why the US military strictly controls and limits media coverage in its ventures abroad; they learned from Vietnam when the death and destruction was brought in to the living room as they say. But what patriotism and nationalism does is prevent us from investigation and critical thought. Patriotism, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”

Eugene Debs, the great American socialist said, “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.” and Albert Einstein said of nationalism that it is, “is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind”

The World Trade Center and the Pentagon are seen by many people around the world as legitimate targets; as the centers of US military operations and world finance that play an extremely destructive and violent role in their lives. If we accept that, there were still many innocents, workers who were not traders in currencies or military generals plotting their conquest of the world and its resources. But these can be justified as “collateral damage” they all do it; the US government does it when it kills 30 or 40 guests at weddings as it has done in Afghanistan recently. Collateral damage is not murder you see.

Nationalism and patriotism are whipped up to obscure the truth and to overcome ordinary human beings’ aversion to violence. Working people would not respond well to a call to arms to defend the interests of US corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel or Exxon, to send our youth to kill and be killed so that a few billionaires can get richer while we get poorer. We must not question the role of the US corporations abroad and rally round the flag. We were attacked, we were told, because people hate the fact that we’re “free”. In other words, people use themselves as weapons of war because of jealousy----what nonsense. Herman Goering said that it’s easy to overcome people’s natural aversion to war: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." That’s what patriotism is really about, loving the community we grew up in and the earth and parks we played in as children has nothing in common with patriotism.

The US government’s invasion of Vietnam, a country, like Iraq, that never threatened or harmed us, cost five million Vietnamese lives, one million combatants and 4 million civilians according to most estimates. (2). They still lose people to unexploded armaments and babies are still born deformed due to the Dioxin, the US sprayed on them, their food, and US troops. American’s lost over 58,000 of our youth in that war, young people that never saw their children again and left thousands of unmarried mothers to raise them through no fault of their own. The effect on families in these ventures is horrific.

The estimates of dead from the US invasion of Iraq are difficult to ascertain as we are told they don’t do a body count on the enemy. In 2007, Opinion Research Business estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed violently since the US-led invasion. And prior to the recent invasion, the UN sanctions, pushed by the US, killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Madeline Albright, former Ambassador to the UN made the now infamous comment on ABC when asked about these deaths that “ the price worth it”

If we have feelings of anger or even revenge about 911, what must the Vietnamese feel like? How do Iraqi’s feel or the relatives of the thousands of Afghani civilians that have been killed, victims of “collateral damage”? We are not the only people to face tragedy. Our grief is no more valid than the grief of the people in other nations. And the destruction inflicted on the US by the attackers on 911 if we are to be honest, pales when compared to what the US invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have done.

The amount of energy the US capitalist class directs at getting us to think about 911 and honor the dead has nothing to do with their feelings for the victims and fear we’ll forget it or their concern over the loss of life, it is to drum it in to our heads that our only enemy is outside our borders while they are our main enemy and the policies they espouse have devastating effects on our lives. Nearly 45,000 annual deaths in the US are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a 2009 study published by the American Journal of Public Health. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”. Says one doctor. (3) Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease, the study claims.

Not much media time is dedicated to this shocking disaster. No monuments to the victims of capitalism, people who are allowed to die because an investor in the sickness industry can’t make a buck. There is no “War on Insurance Companies.”. Just the opposite; the Obama administration has just guaranteed the insurance companies millions of new customers, sick or not. Public Option! What’s that?

The economic crisis is taking a terrible toll on American workers and poor. Food stamp caseloads rose 10% between 2008 to 2009 with “one in every five children and one in every ten adults relying on food stamps to eat” (4) says one study. “As the recession has deepened, so has the general level of despair. Patient volume in psychiatric and public hospital emergency departments has been much higher than normal. People are drinking more and returning to addictive behaviors---including alcohol tobacco and drug use among those who had been successfully controlling their addiction.” (5)

It’s no wonder then that suicides are up. California’s Kern county, with an unemployment rate of 18.3 percent in March this year, had 98 suicides in 2009, that is a 44% jump from the first seven years of the decade. And according to a report by the US Labor Department, 251 people committed suicide at the workplace in 2008, as cuts and layoffs mounted. That's the highest figure ever recorded in the United States for suicide attempts at the workplace. More than 30 thousand people end their own lives each year in the United States where suicide is the second highest cause of death for men aged 25 to 34; they don’t throw trillions of dollars at this problem. (6)

President Obama said the other day that the threatened burning of the Quoran by the nutcase preacher in Florida is a recruitment tool for al Qaeda. Maybe so, but the more effective recruitment tool is US foreign policy and the devastation that this means for the people’s of the world. If we want to save lives at home and abroad; we have to challenge those at the top for power, for control over the resources and direction of society. We have to present a different face to the rest of the world. That’s the best tribute we could pay to the workers that died on September 11th 2001.

(1) It’s About Oil, Ted Rall: San Francisco Chronicle 11-2-01
(2) http://www.vietnam-war.info/casualties/
(3) David Cecere, Cambridge Health Alliance
http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-lack-health-coverage
(4) Holes in the Net: Surveying the impact of the current recession on the health care safety net. American Public Health Association April 2009
(5) Ibid
(6) http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/104169.html