Saturday, 22nd of September, 2001

I've been reading a heap of hard science-fiction lately (as I always do, yes yes I know), and one author who's come up a few times with brilliant stories is Charles Stross. He's worked with another of my favourite authors, Simon Ings, on some short stories some time ago, and is now writing mid-near-future satire (I suppose) about the information age (with fabulously inventive technological and social extrapolations), and alternate worlds stuff (satire also).

I mention him right now because his website has a an essay about the WTC thingummy. Entitled Needed: a new age of enlightenment, it gives a pretty good history of why we're in the mess we're in… Go read.

Just logging in briefly to blogger to link to a couple of places… Not much time, down in Wollongong with Ange.

I posted a link to Robert Fisk's very penetrating article on the WTC Disaster a few entries ago. Today in the Sydney Morning Herald (and no doubt various other papers around the world) is a new article – in the SMH it's titled Bush is marching straight into bin Laden's trap. Once again very much worth a read. It says at the bottom it comes from The Independent, without a doubt the UK's best newspaper. Congratulations to the SMH for publishing the article – anything critical of the whole fucking US thing at the moment in the mainstream media is to be very much welcomed.

Tuesday, 18th of September, 2001

Whilst The Onion has, sadly, flaked out (bad pun there) on the WTC Crisis, Australia's own The Chaser released an absolute classic this week. Of course many people will be deeply offended by it, but SUCKED IN!
"RIGHTEOUSNESS UNDER ATTACK" is the headline… Some utter classics there…

CANBERRA, Thursday: Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said his US trip was a complete success, if slightly upstaged towards the middle. Mr Howard said his visit had been the subject of intense media interest, until a "small incident in New York" distracted the local press.

The Prime Minister understood the incident involved planeloads of foreigners attempting to gain illegal entry into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He supported US President George Bush's determination to retaliate against these "queue jumpers" with the full force of the country's military.

And this story contains some very clever commentary on the Tampa crisis.
Good on 'em! Go subscribe today.

More from Grant:

Did we bomb Boston to stop the Boston Strangler? Did we level New York City to get at Son of Sam? No we did not. So why the fuck should we flatten Afghanistan just to get at a bunch of murderous bastards who have the country's people in a repressive death grip?

You know, it seems to me, someone who thinks conspiracy theories are as much toss as religions are (you're lookin' at a well dedicated atheist here), that it's almost believeable that this whole thing was if not engineered then at least taken advantage of cynically by the highly conservative US government. I mean, they've wanted a war for ages… since Big Daddy Bush bombed the fuck out of innocent civilians last time in the Gulf. This is the perfect excuse now – they've got some obscenely high proportion of Americans (not to mention the rest of the world!) fully behind them as regards carpet bombing the whole region – and this is without proof that whoever was responsible even came from there!
Sick sick sick sick sick.

As I read further into Grant's column, I can only reiterate… he's totally on the ball that guy, about a lot of things… Bombing the fuck out of Afghanistan, as many have been pointing out, would be a terrible terrible tragedy. Those people have been oppressed by successive regimes for a long time now, the Taliban just being the latest. The civilians are by no means responsible for anything that's happened in the US (and do you think maybe the Tampa refugees are terrorists too? For fuck's sake…), and a war will really not affect those responsible…

The more I read into this all, the more I feel like everything's buggered. But we have to keep a perspective – everything's been buggered for, well, decades, and we keep going on don't we? Yeah. For sure.

More interesting people commenting on that American situation… One of UK's greats of the comics world, Grant Morrison, writes about it in his current column.
You can safely skip over the first bit, the "Magical Perspective" (or read it for amusement value)… there's a heap of extremely astute political commentary there.

Monday, 17th of September, 2001

Moore presents a TV show called The Awful Truth, a very provocative, very anti-establishment program. He takes on causes like gay rights and anti-capitalism in very interesting ways – for instance he led a chorus of smokers who had lost their larynxes in christmas carols through their voice machines in the lobby of Philip Morris on one of his shows… His letter here serves as a passionate and articulate counterpart to Robert Fisk's article, which I posted a link to earlier.
In Moore's latest letter on his website, he has this to say at the end:

PS. Three days ago, I learned from someone at ABC News that ABC had videotape — an angle of the second plane crashing into the tower — that showed an F-16 fighter jet trailing the plane at a distance.

I have not shared this with you as I had not personally witnessed that tape myself and did not want to contribute to all the unsubstantiated rumors. It just came across on the TV that the government admitted they did dispatch fighter jets when they knew the planes were off course.

From this point, I will pass on any censored information to those of you in the mainstream media who are being blocked from reporting.

Is it becoming more clear now that the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was shot down to prevent it from attacking its destination?

The truth is harrowing, unbearable — but it must be told to us. A free people cannot make an informed decision if they are kept in the dark. Let's hear ALL the truth NOW.

If this is true, it really is chilling – what does it imply about the reported phone calls from various heroic plane passengers? What does it say about what the US government could have done?
The pompous crap about this being an attack on Freedom itself is quite nauseating really. "We're the center of the free world, and to prove it, we'll now limit civil liberties even more!" "Oh and while we're at it, we'll keep hiding information about our foreign policy and its repercussions on the world…"

By the way, Chomsky's short letter On the Bombings is worth a read too. He quotes that Robert Fisk article.

I've put up links to some very intelligent commentary on the World Trade Center terrorist attack lately. Various people are interested in the Michael Moore letter – the first can be found here, at his own website. I have to follow acb in quoting this, because it's so utterly correct:

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

Here's an amazing cartoon by Rex Babin – if you don't get it, I don't know what to say… A riff on an old Life magazine Vietnam photo and the recent WTC attack…

From Adbusters (awesome culture jammers, always worth checking out):

"Like it ever went away" reads the caption.

Sunday, 16th of September, 2001

In Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Zvi Bar'el writes a considered, if slightly patronising article debunking the idea of a "war of civilisations" (Islam vs America). He argues strongly that the West should not lump all Arab nations and peoples together, that the Arabs have in fact similar lifestyles and problems to the West, and they should be enlisted in helping to fight terrorism.
Of course, the first step that's needed to help that along is a major change in US foreign policy…

Despite being a Jewish Israeli paper, printed in Hebrew with an English edition, Ha'aretz is not that right-wing, and contains reports that are critical of the Israeli government and supportive of Palestine. Here's one from today, detailing how the IDF ("Israel Defence Force") have been entering Gaza. Here's an example of Israeli vs Palestinian interpretations:

"Earlier, the Palestinians reported that a 17-year-old boy who was throwing stones at IDF troops, was shot dead. The IDF said the teenager had aimed a Kalachnikov assault rifle at the soldiers."

So what's really going on? It's just too complicated.
In case you think that compared to Sharon, Barak was some sort of visionary peace crusader, here's a realistic look at "Barak's Generous Offers" from Gush Shalom, which describes itself as "the hard core of the Israeli peace movement. This document responds directly to the "widespread propaganda assertion that 'We gave them everything and they gave us war'".