Well ...where to start...
In the long days in September 11th; I, like many people, have struggled to find something adequate to say about the events in the the world around me.
My inability to contribute anything meaningful has distressed me somewhat. Distressed me because I feel that sometimes people look to me to find the words to describe their own feelings.
Piaget says "Word's are the hooks on which we hang our ideas"; without them we may formulate ideas but we cannot hold onto them. There are, however, so many conflicting ideas that surround such a gigantic tragedy. To search for any central one is daunting to say the least.
Quite bluntly the trouble for me, as for many of us, was that all my initial responses were rage-filled; and the trouble with history is that it is often initial outrage that inadvisedly shapes it's responses. Rage against the terrorists began to give way slowly over the days following the attacks to be replaced by similar emotions towards those who brought about the conditions that gave rise to such murderous and despicable acts of desperation.
The ongoing refusal by the American based media (and, by extension, most Western media) to recognize any part that U.S. foreign policy may have had in the passage of events also enraged me.
As the U.S. response became more martial; as the drums of war swelled in volume; and as the Bush Administration made it clear that to fail to support their position was to be in league with their enemies, my anger turned on the manufacturers of the weapons of violence who were soon to profit so greatly from all of this.
The first song that overflowed out of me onto the stage was "Money To Be Made" a somewhat brutal piece about that.
It's a hard song, brutally frank. It said some of what I was feeling about the culture of the dollar; but in the end I think it was probably faulted. Faulted, because it did not offer anything but criticism. There was nothing in it that provided any hope or liberation. Not that there is anything wrong with criticism; but like all things, I suppose, it's a matter of timing.
The funeral of a friend is hardly the time to raise the matter of his infidelities, (unless affectionately.) That's not some sort doublespeak for 'avoiding the truth' when you are out of step with public sentiment. But it is a recognition that if you want to have a meaningful dialogue, you first must engage. And to engage means to recognize and share the grief, the trauma, the anger, the deep sense of loss and fear.
By the second week I decided to largely cease playing the song but this decision brought a new sense of unease for me. I was not sure how much it was my own decision based on charity and how much I was bowing to public sentiment. ( "Money to be Made" NB. If you sensitive about this issue or likely to be easily offended ..give it a miss. )
Increasingly the media was demanding that public people take sides. It was an extension of the outrageous Bush initiated 'if you're not with us you're against us' mindset.
Anthony Mundine was stripped of his world boxing ranking for expressing Anti-American sentiments when unexpectedly questioned by Australian reporter Richard Wilkins and with that incident, it was clear that 'freedom of speech' supposedly so highly prized by the US was now to become the first casualty of the new war. In Australia, with the added polarization of an election campaign I was increasingly asked in the light of the song, if I sided with the Taliban or the U.S.
For over three years, and I might add, long before many Americans and Australians even thought much about where Kabul was, I had been condemning the Taliban regime from the stage in my preamble to "Flicker of an Eye" Their destruction of the ancient Buddahs, their institution of a system of marks on clothing to identify religious belief (something the world had not seen since Hitler) and their oppression of women were not only an appalling distortion of Islam but had ensconced them at the top of the 'hit list' for most human rights organisations such as Amnesty.
To characterize them as other than a brutal, misogynist, repressive and even criminal regime would be a huge distortion of facts. Equally to claim that U.S. support for the two brutally murderous and expansionist regimes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon and that the long history of U.S. covert interference and destabilization in Middle Eastern countries; including the supply of military weaponry to subversives did not contribute to the events of September the 11th, is also a huge distortion of facts.
It is after all the systematic abrogation of the terms of the hard won Peace Process from the Oslo Agreement, courageous initiatives that cost Yhitzac Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister) (You Must Be Online to Access this link) his life, which remains at the heart of the current Middle East impasse and thus all Jewish/Arab conflict world wide.
But beware the dangers of a balanced viewpoint and the perilous assumption that democracy allows one to hold and express it..Suddenly I found that the social milieu in which I move was increasingly demanding that I take a definitive side in the conflict. I am sure I am not the only one who felt that pressure.
Initially it would seem a fairly easy choice. The hard-line brutally repressive Taliban enforcing their view of religious righteousness on everyone around them; as against the U.S., ostensibly, and actually, one of the world's great democracies, with freedom of speech and the value of the individual central to their constitution. Most Australians had no trouble coming to the conclusion that, put like that, our sympathies must lay with the U.S.
Upon reflection however I have come to the conclusion that such a choice is both spurious and ill conceived. The real choice is not between America's 'good' military machine and the Taliban's 'evil' one; between dictatorship or democracy. The choice is, as always, between the violent and the innocent.
I am on the side of the innocent. The chef in the Trade Tower's top floor restaurant as he fell those long, long seconds to his death; the children in the residential areas of Kabul slaughtered by the US military blundering in the first weeks of the campaign; the passengers on the respective airliners as they rang their loved ones and contemplated their last minutes; the fire fighters and rescue workers entering those doomed towers only moments before their eventual collapse; the 200 pro American Villagers slaughtered in their sleep in Khel D'har by appalingly poor US intelligence; the UN workers killed by the patently not so 'smart' missiles unleashed by the US Navy and the aid workers imprisoned for their faith during those long and terrible months. I am on the side of all of these. See 10,000 Miles Away (The Bombing Of Bagdad)
I am not, however, on the side of those whose economic wealth has been founded on the manufacture of such appalling weaponry. (In the conference to mark the 5oth anniversary of the signing of the International Convention on Refugees held ironically in Australia the week after the Tampa Crisis,, the Keynote speaker Fatmata Levina Se Shea identified, not poverty, not natural calamity, not famine ....but the trade by international Arms dealers in third world countries as the biggest single cause of refugee movements in the world today.)
I am not on the side of those like the Taliban, the current Israeli Administration or the Palestinian extremists groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, whose religious zealotry leads them to believe that innocent lives are acceptable losses in their earthly pursuit of a heavenly Utopia.
And as I stated in the Editorial "McVeigh and The Military mindset" (written somewhat prophetically it seems, six months before the New York and Washington tragedies) I am not and will never be on the side of those who stubbornly insist that civilized human beings can ever accommodate the revolting euphemisms of 'acceptable loss' or 'collateral damage' into their mindsets in the way that the cowardly exponents of the strategies of remote high altitude, 'high ordinance' bombing demand. Civilians deaths are not excusable accidents of history; they the predictable result of deliberate acts. I absolutely refuse to accept the proposition that they are some sort of regrettable but less significant side effects of the pursuit of more important and more legitimate military objectives by the armed services.
They are real, illegal and unjustifiable homicides for which the human beings who perpetrated them stand accountable.
That accountability remains the same whether they were committed by servicemen under orders (Hiroshima, Auswitch), militia under supervision (East Timor, Bosnia); terrorists under command (New York, Belfast) or individuals acting on their own volition (Oklahoma City)
No one has the right to the defence that they have subjugated their own conscience to another man in the attempt to transfer culpability for their own murderous actions to a superior officer.
In the end it is one man who pulls the trigger, who releases the bomb, who launches the missile. That one man is personally and eternally accountable for the outcomes of that action.
It would be considered reprehensible to suggest that the thousands of people who lost their lives on September 11th were merely 'collateral damage' and it is equally disgusting and unacceptable to suggest that the children of Nagasaki or any of the other innocent civilians slaughtered in the wars of the last century were such.... although it may well be said that it is only in the wake of September 11th that we in the Western world may be coming to clearly see the comparison.
Is it a time for us choose sides?
Yes, perhaps it is; but we are remiss in allowing the rampaging media to frame those choices in the biased and rhetorical manner that they have.
If it is time to choose then the choice is between the innocent and the violent.
It is a choice made all the more profound by the fact that it is one that is immediately relevant to us all; whether our governments are directly involved in the present conflicts or not; because it is essentially a choice of the heart; not one of political alliance.
All The Best
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