Re(2): perspectives: (was tragedy in New York)

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 10:49:15 PDT


xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>Diane:
>
>I am thankful for your reply because it exactly illustrates the point.
>What
>Journal do you recommend? It has documents, not propaganda, right?

it's called _Foreign Policy_ and represents the essays and writings of
international communities of policy analysts, people involved in policy
drafts, negotiations, and so on. in the year or so that i have been
reading it, i have not found it to be propaganda, but efforts to explain
global situations from a variety of perspectives.

>It may
>also supply us with definitions (but the way, about your definitions --
>Tim
>was legally trained in the US army, unless you consider this organization
>illegal, and purchased fertilizers legally also. So he is not a terrorist,
>and simply a famous Oklahoma killer. And Miloshevich is very legal.

i isn't that he participated in the US army, or bought fertilizer, but
what he did with the experience, how he used the legally purchased
fertilizer.
Miloshevich's legality is currently being investigated, isn't it?
war-crimes and so on?

>There
>is no terrorist taste of bombing of pharmaceutical companies because it is
>done by the US army).

is it random? or designed to focus on sites where biochemical weapons are
researched and developed?

>Canadian document you liked more than others. You
>learned that Russian arms end up in terrorists' hands, but US made arms,
>#1
>arms exporter, are magically secure. You may believe that the four
>unfortunate planes were sold to the US by Russian Mafia but I thought that
>Boeing is an American company.

i have no delusions about the innocence of the US military here, nor the
intelligence communities' failures to act on information gleaned over the
past years... and as one CIA rep has noted, new technologies have enabled
the CIA to become complacent and reluctant to work in the field, thus
making their information remote and inefficient.

the hijacked planes do not account for the other aircraft that have been
privately purchased during the past few years, and used to fly weapons to
the Sudan, or Afghanistan.

phillip graham is correct, i think, in saying that the sale of arms must
end. but the excess of weapons available makes it difficult to control.
russian defense contractors do manufacture weapons, and russian mafia
activities do constitute a global concern, which is not to say russians
are criminals, but that organized crime is illegal.

i do prefer canadian information because the propaganda level is
different, and the history with international relations is different.
Canadians have less to defend, internationally, because our military
history is one of non-aggression and our capital wealth is differently
distributed.
>
>
>What you are talking about is exactly the problem. All these journals,
>documents, reports, legality, valuing of knowledge, etc. are artifacts of
>our sub-sub-sub culture. They make us feel good and smart.

it doesn't make me feel good and smart, it helps me try and understand
multiple perspectives.

>In other
>cultures there may be no documents, no respect for human life. They may
>naively believe that this world is not filled with friends but with
>enemies, and who is on top - wins. They may stupidly think that power
>decide everything. There may be also cultures that believe that universal
>health care is more important than nuclear weapons, even if they were
>legitimately voted for. I know you may think that such cultures do not
>exist unless you find their descriptions in a good, propaganda-free
>journal
>(provided validity and reliability of that particular research is ok).

i don't read research journals, so i can't respond to ideas about validity
- there is no ideological innocence, so of course propaganda is
omnipresent, everywhere and nowhere, part of the cultural consciousness.
i believe that more exists than i can hope to assume to know, and that
there is always more i don't know than what i do know; i believe as an
intelligent woman, i have a responsibility to make the effort to
understand there are no simple answers, nor simple positions to assume...
what i am asking for here is a greater effort to learn about what we might
not yet understand,
instead of assuming a position based on what we already know and believe.
>
>
>Diane, it is your right to escape back into the world of dreams, journals
>and Canadian reports on Russian Mafia. And we all can discuss with passion
>how non-violence works. How poverty of Bin Laden made him a desperate
>terrorist.

bin Laden inherited some 8-billion from his father in Sudan, ... he is not
a desperate terrorist, but an ideologue,
a millionaire with an idea and the funds to finance the implementation of
radical religious terrorism.

>How marginalisation and oppression of the US lead to Hiroshima
>and Nagasaki. How to parent well and improve schools (to grow up perfect
>McDonalds consumers, -- sorry, a real world remark).

of course what constitutes the real world will always be a site for
contradiction or counter-examples.
trans-national corporations are indeed responsible for inciting
aggressions against capitalism and western arrogance.
 nothing justifies the US A-bombs, and nothing i've said was intended to
indicate as much.
how to parent well? today this may matter more than ever before, ...
>
>
>What journal is about real world, Diane?

well actually it is Noam Chomsky who advocates reading as many different
publications as possible, newspapers, magazines, non-academic journals
from around the world, because no single source can represent a truth, and
critical media literacy is perhaps the only way, currently, to gain an
understanding of how complicated seemingly simple issues can be.

>It may say that the best way to
>fight terrorism is, like with drugs, to make it legitimate. There is no
>Australia left to exile criminals, so may be the only way to survive is to
>ban cultures? Make Afghanistan the 51 state and make everyone believe in
>Bush's advisors, "intelligence, security, military, and other agencies, as
>well as NATO."
>
>What do you think is real?

death is real - the WTC centre's explosions and collapse is real. the
coordination of such a sophisticated attack is real - understanding how
all this reflects a world situation is real, to me.
for me, reality has changed. there is no going back to whatever i believed
about reality on monday, because the shock of tuesday's events
reverberates around the world,
forces me to re-draw connections between the bombing of american embassies
in East Africa,
and the broader relations of religion, terrorism, and hatred. that's
today. tomorrow i'll be wondering more,
because i don't know, right now, enough to feel certain about anything.
>
>
diane
>
>Matvey Sokolovsky
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************************************************************************************
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
                                                                          
     (...life clings to me...)
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2



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