Paul Krugman wasn’t the only old soul at The New York Times who refused any urge to be patriotic on September 11. Former Times reporter Chris Hedges unleashed a tirade on Truthdig on Saturday. It was titled: “A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe.” He began by suggesting coverage of 9/11 was sanitized by the Bush "lap dogs" of the press because the occasion “demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.”
Hedges lamented that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks wasn't turning everything over to the diplomats to negotiate and apologize profusely for our support of Israel. He charged the 9/11 dead were exploited to "sanctify the state's lust for war," and the "plague of nationalism" took effect immediately, which is "anti-thought" and racist to boot. He really hates the people with big American flags:
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
<<Help us take on leftists in the media like Krugman and Hedges by donating to NewsBusters (there's also a PayPal option on that page). Without the support of our readers, NewsBusters would not be possible.>>
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state's lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, "for suicide bombers."
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran-although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children-was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
Hedges concluded:
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
(HT: Dan Gainor)
