Letter from Slim Wolfe
War on terrorism – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
No discussion of war would be complete without some mention of market forces. First of all, violence itself is under the sway of psychology: the way to avoid a violent confrontation is not to drive through the barrio in a flashy vehicle with a loaded gun on the passenger seat under a newspaper, but that’s more or less the attitude of American global policy. Second, people are hard-up for horror, there’s no nice way to put it. Huge sums of money turn on the horror-market: Jurassic Park, Towering Inferno, all the TV episodes, wrestling, video games, and the Son of God Himself whose message of peace had to be reinforced with the memento of a bloody crucifix, lest only the few take notice. Enough money to bail out a destitute population somewhere.
And no fantasy-horror gives quite the rush as the real thing, an event you can’t avoid by sealing it in plastic or changing the channel. Our real-life horrors give more impact to our canned fantasies. Thus Hollywood and the Pentagon enhance each other. The more people’s lives are controlled by little pre-programmed voices telling them to “check…oil: the more they will need the escape of out-of-control horror. And how many westerners got a thrill when they heard that horses were called in to back up a key-pad operation in Afghanistan. This was prime entertainment and vindication of the self-reliant Marlboro-man legacy. Yeah, there’s a whole battalion of public relations geeks in Washington who know how to market a war. Like a splash of Tabasco here and there, it whets the economic appetite when club-cards and Martha Stewart schemes begin to lose their zing. Factual information courtesy of Time-Warner, and yippee, it’s on the internet for free, and you can have an East
One last point, Martha. It’s commendable that you cited your sources of information at the end of your last editorial — not one in a hundred would do that — but your list might indicate an Anglo-American bias. Did you consider taking advantage of this global age and checking out a website say from the University of Karachi, Bombay, or Tashkent? What about passing on to the readers the address and website of that New York group headed by Ramsey Clark, more of a bona-fide anti-war organization perhaps than your physicians and amnesty groups.
During the course of our lifetimes (since the McCarthy scares of the 1950’s and the supposed Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s) this nation has pawned our balanced budget and any hope of health-and-education parity in the name of dubious defense and security schemes which made a few contractors wealthy but appear to have been largely misdirected. Since the first names on your source list are Time Magazine and CBS, which have been in the pocket of the, ah, military industrial complex since their inception, it might be reasonable to guess that some of your conclusions are based on slanted information.
So, thanks again for raising the level of discussion above soap-opera level and not cashing in on the general trend to make a buck selling 9-11 charm bracelets. I just unearthed issue #10 of Colorado Central in which Hal Walter suggests carpet-bombing fishing-tourists. Comes the revolution, we’ll make him minister of defense. One fact seems certain: all that armorplate didn’t save the stegasaurus from extinction.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
Dear Slim,
In this case, I really think I’m innocent of the charge of only using Anglo-centric sources. I read all of the bin Laden speeches and quotes I could find, and spent equal time comparing translations offered by newspapers, colleges and libraries to certify accuracy. Although the internet was illegal under the Taliban, I also found some writings by Taliban members.
The reason for the Anglo-centric list is because various libraries, colleges and news agencies provide the most usable indexes and best links into sites that offer transcripts of Al-Jazeera satellite television programs, bin Laden speeches, and Pakistani reports. My list was not a complete bibliography of all of the sources I consulted, merely a list of sites which made it easy to find news stories, official papers, personal accounts, historical documents, translations, and the like.
I left off sites that were difficult to use. Although some colleges had a lot of information regarding Afghanistan and/or wars, treaties and negotiations which showed up on searches, it was nearly impossible to access some of that material from the main page of their websites.
But you’ll be pleased to know that I did check out Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center website (www.iacenter.org), along with the websites of various defamation leagues and partisan organizations. But I left most of them off of my list because their archives and links are not extensive.
But by all means run some searches of your own; the amount of information on this topic seems almost infinite. And I highly recommend reading bin Laden’s speeches. His harangues against America are frightening but fascinating, and they were not really what I expected. The man is ponderously religious, zealously opposed to negotiation or compromise, and immensely fond of citing scripture.
…He who claims there will be a lasting peace between us and the Jews is an infidel. He’ll be denouncing the book and what’s in it. Begin, the leader of the massacre of Kfar Yassin, and the traitor, Anwar Sadat, who sold the land and the blood of the mujahedeen, both were given the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Osama bin Laden
In an interview by Tayseer Alouni
on Al-Jazeera television Oct. 2001
