Endgame Vol.1 Read Free Page B

interview, I sent it to him with a new question inserted, attempting once again to pin him down. What did he do this time? He deleted my question.
    Too often this is the response of all of us when faced with this most difficult of questions: when is violence an appropriate means to stop injustice? But with the world dying—or rather being killed—we no longer have the luxury to change the subject or delete the question. It’s a question that won’t go away.

    I had two reasons for telling the four versions of the World Trade Center bombing. 11 The first was to point out that all writers are propagandists. Writers who claim differently, or who otherwise do not understand this, have succumbed to the extremely dangerous propaganda that narrative can be divorced from value. This is not true. All descriptions carry with them weighty presumptions of value. This is as true for wordless descriptions such as mathematical formulae—which
value the quantifiable and ignore everything else—as it is for the descriptions I gave above. The first version, by giving only current actions—“the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing hundreds of people”—devalues (by their absence) cause and context. Why did the towers collapse? What were the events surrounding the collapse? This neat excision of both cause and context is the standard now in journalism, where, for example, we often hear of devastating mudslides in the colonies killing thousands of people who, seemingly unaccountably, were foolish enough to build villages beneath unstable slopes; toward the end of these articles we sometimes see sidelong references to “illegal logging,” but nowhere do we see mention of Weyerhaeuser, Hyundai, Daishowa, or other transnational timber companies, which cut the steep slopes over the objections—and sometimes dead bodies—of the villagers. Or we may read of the rebel group UNITA slaughtering civilians in Angola, with no mention of two decades of U.S. financial and moral support for this group. So far as the bombing of the World Trade Center, despite yard after column yard of ink and paper devoted to the attacks, analyses of potential reasons for hatred of the United States rarely venture beyond, “They’re fanatics,” or “They’re jealous of our lifestyle,” or even, and I’m not making this up, “They want our resources.”
    The second, patriotic version carries with it the inherent presumption that the United States did nothing to deserve or even lead to the attack: if the United States kills citizens of other countries, and survivors of that violence respond by killing United States citizens—even if the casualty counts of the counter-strikes are by any realistic assessment much smaller—the United States is then justified in killing yet more citizens of those other countries. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” 12 Another presumption of the patriotic version is that the lives of people killed by foreign terrorists are more worthy of notice, vengeance, and future protection than those killed, for example, by unsafe working conditions, or by the turning of our total environment into a carcinogenic stew. Let’s say that three thousand people died in those attacks. In no way do I mean to demean these lives once presumably full of love, friendship, drama, sorrow, and so on, but more Americans die each month from toxins and other workplace hazards, and more Americans die each week from preventable cancers that are for the most part direct results of the activities of large corporations, and certainly the results of the industrial economy. 13 The lack of outrage over these deaths commensurate to the outrage expressed over the deaths in the 9/11 bombings reveals much—if we care to reflect on it—about the values and presumptions of our culture.

    The third version, from the perspective of the bombers or their supporters, presumes that there are