September 11, 2006
I was going to pass on making any comments on this 5th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001 but the constant barrage of bombastic Imperial propaganda is just making my skin crawl and my fingers itch to type something. So here I am.
I do not begrudge the victims of the attack, those who were injured or who lost loved ones to the terrorist atrocity, the right to grieve over their losses. This is a natural and very human thing to do, especially on the anniversary of the event.
What I do object to is the use of this day as a justification for the empire. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the damaging of the Pentagon were shocking, no doubt about that. But in reality the attack was pretty minor. We, the American Empire and our "allies", have done far more damage to dozens of cities around the world both shortly before this attack and since then. Yet somehow the destruction of a couple of American buildings is far worse than the leveling of entire cities elsewhere.
If you want to know why "they" hate us you have only to look at our reaction to the destruction of a couple of buildings in New York and the loss of less than 3,000 lives and then multiply that a hundred fold. Far more people in Iraq for example know someone who has been killed by Americans than Americans know people who were killed on 9/11. The anger of Americans toward those who committed these heinous crimes is understandable to me. The lack of understanding of the anger of our so-called enemies in Iraq is not. To me it is crystal clear why there is such rage against us, and it has the same source as our rage toward them.
I pray for peace every day, even while knowing that sinful man refuses peace and
deluded Christians pray the War Prayer thinking that God takes sides in these matters.
I still cannot get my head around Christians being willing to fight and kill for governments. I know that we are commanded to obey the governing authorities unless to do so goes against the word of God. But when I look at actually killing for them I come up to a problem I cannot get around. There are two types of people on this planet, Christians and those who are not. If the "enemy" is a Christian then he is my brother and to kill him would be unthinkable. If the "enemy" is not a Christian then by my killing him I am denying him the chance to ever come to the knowledge of grace and thereby damning him to hell. Better to accept death and defeat than to kill. Not a very Lutheran attitude but I don't see a way out of it.
Finally,
here is a great speech by Ron Paul, Republican from Texas, that talks about our fight against "Islamic Fascism" in a way that actually makes some sense, unlike the demented babblings of the Bush crowd.