Wright's "Blowback"
Submitted by pmcarpenter on Sat, 03/15/2008 - 6:40am. P.M. Carpenter
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
Here's what the New York Times had to say about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's causal assessment of 9/11: "A useful and timely alert."
Newsday had this to say: "
is on to something." And from the Nation came this: "A straight-talking analysis."
Barack Obama, on the other hand, called it "inflammatory and appalling."
What gives?
Hold on. I got my notes mixed up.
Yes, Obama's fire was indeed centered on Wright's words, but what the New York Times, Newsday and the Nation were addressing was the first installment of Professor Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback" trilogy, which nevertheless said precisely the same as Wright:
What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" ... often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.
... And what U.S. officials denounce as unprovoked terrorist attacks on its innocent citizens are often meant as retaliation for previous American imperial actions. Terrorists attack innocent and undefended American targets precisely because American soldiers and sailors firing cruise missiles from ships at sea or sitting in B-52 bombers at extremely high altitudes or supporting brutal and repressive regimes from Washington seem invulnerable. As members of the Defense Science Board wrote in a 1997 report to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States."
Useful, timely, insightful and straight-talking. Bravo.
Now let's put Johnson in the vernacular, and without mongrelizing his message. We'll permit Wright a whack at it: "We are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Perhaps a trifle academically indelicate, but that's also the stuff the multitudes can comprehend with dispatch. Yet rather than being evaluated as useful, timely, insightful and straight-talking, it gets trashed as inflammatory and appalling, and by far more observers than just Sen. Obama.
Again, what gives?
It seems the Rev. Wright is being asked to head to the back of some Straight-Talking Express bus. Quiet, boy, only distinguished white professors are permitted, with impunity, to gussy up the patently obvious in books that the great unwashed will never read, nor should they. That might crimp our imperial style.
more...
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/carpenter/013
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