Two Minutes of Silence for Them

I have found it very surprising and disturbing that much of the privileged world, including the depraved Brutuses and Judases of the Muslim World, haven't spared two minutes of their existence on planet earth for the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. No flags for these people. No funerals for these people. We don't do body counts of those we kill. And just when the morgues can't take no more, the president of the United States has warned of attacks throughout the world: "The only way to protect our citizens at home is to go on the offense against the enemy across the world. When terrorists spend their days working to avoid capture, they are less able to plot, plan, and execute new attacks on our people. So we will remain on the offense until the terrorists are defeated and this fight is won." Such apolcalyptic language deserves nothing but disdain. Everyone knows that it is exactly this sort of blunder by powers that breeds terrorists.

When we do it, it isn't terrorism. When they do it, it is a barbaric atrocity against humanity. Correction. It is a barbaric atrocity against "our" humanity. When we kill, it isn't that because those we kill aren't human beings. They don't have families, children, careers and loves. They may lie down and tremble under our bombs, chemicals and other inventions of our civilization, but we can never tell if they're human beings. We can bomb pharmaceutical companies in Sudan and kill 30, 000 people but how dare Chomsky compare that to 9/11. We in Washington, the neocolonialists, are evil racists but we want to save Africans from Arabs and Kurds from Arabs and Arabs from Arabs and Americans from everyone because we are the "lords of good behaviour", and in doing that if we wipe off half the world's population we don't care. It was never in our interest to declare: "God bless the whole world."