Political thoughts

[Gelgoog Pilot]

Alright, in response to what I started in the [I]Where were you?[/I] thread, here is a discussion in continuance.

Apparently, what I had said didn't come out as I had intended. I in no way think that those poor souls should have died. I myself had a third cousin who was a fireman in NY die in the tower collapse, I am not without some personal connection to 9/11.

The question though, did we Americans as a whole share some of the blame? Yes.

[QUOTE] Originally Posted by [B]Korey[/B]
It's ignorant and is almost a blatant slap in the face to Americans who didn't deserve to die because of actions our government takes. [/QUOTE]

As an American myself and one might I add that takes what we as a nation do quite seriously, to say that we have no hand in what our government does is ignorance. Our system is for a large part dependent on its people. Look the other way too many times and things like this occur, then we wonder how it could have gotten this far. This IS the government that America voted for this IS the administration that we approved of. Perhaps people did not take the responsibility of voting or understanding that we share the responsibility of our government. We elected them, we gave them our consent to lead us.

I felt terribly for those people, and I also feel bad that I can't 'honor' them like others. They were unknowing and unwilling martyrs for their countrymen, yet we ignored one of the many messages their deaths sent. Instead of realizing that we are responsible for our countries actions' so long as we are a free people. After those attacks we let people be pigeon holed and persecuted for their religion and ethnicity. We pushed the blame on others instead of who it belongs to.

Well, I may not have expressed my thoughts or opinions as perfectly as I like. What are your thoughts on this? I'm not saying those people should have died. I'm just saying Americans can't just keep ignoring their own role in America. Every year this terrible event seems to be propped up as a banner of American perseverance, and truly it is, but as we mourn for those departed we are blind to how the actions that caused that attack are being repeated over and over.

[ChibiHorsewoman]

[color=#9933ff]Okay so we're going to start this now? Fun.

Before I start: Gelgoog Pilot- I'm sorry for your loss. I've a second cousin who is a first responder with his local fire department and if he'd lived down in Manhattan at the time he would have died too.

That said, I don't think I can agree with the fact that we've voted for the government we have. We voted for a government that we thought we would get but what we received is a far cry from what we deserve. In 2000 when Bush was elected there was and still is a lot of questioning about how he'd managed to win and the problem with the voting machines in Florida- I still refuse to believe that was a coincidence. In 2004 the reason Bush was re-elected was a combination of a poor democratic nominee and the fact that in many southern 'Bible Belt' states there was a law to vote on at the polls that would define marriage as only between a man and a woman- that brought out a lot of conservatives and therefore a lot of votes for Bush.

All we have in Washington right now is a bunch of people who don't seem to realize that they're running this country into the ground and the few who do realize it don't have enough power to stop everyone else. The American people are pretty much screwed over until we can elect a better government.

That said I don't believe that the American people as a whole are responsible for the autrocities that happened on 9/11. In my humble opinion that's almost like saying that the American people are responsible for Pearl Harbor because the War Department refused to accept Japan's declaration of war because it wasn't in English.

Ugh- I'll type more when I'm not ticked off.[/color]

[The13thMan]

[FONT="Trebuchet MS"]If i understand you correctly, Gelgoog, then you're saying that we should at least feel a little responsible for the actions of 9/11 due to the role each individual citizen of america plays in his or her government? To that i have to almost completely disagree. I say almost, because perhaps we should feel a little bit responsible. But really, not a lot.

Why do i say this? Because the terrorists that attacked us on that day were extremists attacking extremely. There was no way a person could have known that this was going to happen. By person i mean a typical individual not directly involved in intelligence gathering that might have actually received this sort of information pre-9/11.

The persons we should place any sort of blame on are the ones that had the intel and took it less seriously than what protocal dictated. Keep in mind that the government or intelligence or whatever receives threats on a daily basis. You have to go on the information provided. Doing anything other than that would be irresponsible and foolhardy.

That said, my heart goes out to the victims of 9/11 and anybody involved. I don't think, at this point, placing blame will do any real good. But that doesn't mean we can't discuss it on an open forum like this.
[/FONT]

[ChibiHorsewoman]

[color=#9933ff]If you really have it in your head to blame someone how about blaming the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) They had years to find a way to prevent people being able to bring on guns, knives and oh yeah, box cutters but they didn't.

After one failed inspection they reportedly told the inspector that the 'perception of security was an adaquate enough deterant for domestic traffic.'

Sorry but adaquate doesn't fly well with me- especially after this. It's ironic, but in some ways we have the terrorists to thank for us being able to fly safer in the skies.[/color]

[Gelgoog Pilot]

This isn't about me wanting to point blame really. What I mean it to be is that we as a country are finding it easier to blame something or someone else each time something happens. Instead of standing up and realizing that something very strange went on with Bush's election we generally let it slide. I say generally because only a minority of the population questioned the recount or protested it. Even more so we began to see how Bush and his friends ran our country and again in general we simply changed the channel and went on living.

I just want Americans to take responsibility in America, even if I know that will take something even more tragic or earthshaking than 9/11. The huge failure that FEMA produced in the Gulf was just as tragic in my eyes, it was another instance that we should have opened our eyes and seen what we were allowing to happen. The mismanagement of our lives and the lives of our countrymen.

[Sara]

[quote name='Gelgoog Pilot']The question though, did we Americans as a whole share some of the blame? Yes.

This IS the government that America voted for this IS the administration that we approved of. Perhaps people did not take the responsibility of voting or understanding that we share the responsibility of our government. We elected them, we gave them our consent to lead us.

I felt terribly for those people, and I also feel bad that I can't 'honor' them like others. [/QUOTE]You feel like you can't 'honor' civilians who died in a terrorist attack because they, like the rest of their countrymen, were citizens of a country whose government was to blame for the attacks?

I agree that Americans as a whole should take much greater interest in the way their county is run, and that they should do what they can to change what can be changed. Even so, your argument comes off as being unnecessarily inflammatory.

I also think you'll find that most members will disagree with you on this point:

[quote]"This IS the government that America voted for this IS the administration that we approved of."[/quote]Political leanings (and country citizenship) aside, I think the majority of OtakuBoards members were under the legal voting age in 2004, nevermind the year 2000.

[Gelgoog Pilot]

Actually I'm using 'we' to encase all Americans of voting age, why would I include those that can't vote? I'm sorry but when governments do things that the people allow, it is a responsibility of the people to rectify it. We may have been cheated out of an election, but we also allowed it to continue.

[ChibiHorsewoman]

[quote name='Gelgoog Pilot']Actually I'm using 'we' to encase all Americans of voting age, why would I include those that can't vote? I'm sorry but when governments do things that the people allow, it is a responsibility of the people to rectify it. We may have been cheated out of an election, but we also allowed it to continue.[/QUOTE]


[color=#9933ff] This CHW was of legal voting age in 1999

Technically we're not allowing Bush to do anything, everything he's done he's done reguardless of the thoughts or feelings of others. There have been countless protests which prove that we don't approve of what our government is doing right now. Hell right now Bush has an approval rating at about 38% so that should tell you right now that not very many people really want what's happening to happen.

So you can't really blame an entire country- including the voting population- for what's happening in our government. What you can do though is get your happy butt up out the door in November and vote to make a difference.[/color]

[Gelgoog Pilot]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by [B]ChibiHorsewoman[/B]
What you can do though is get your happy butt up out the door in November and vote to make a difference.[/QUOTE]

Exactly what everyone needs to do, and not just 30% of the population either.

I know protests are still ongoing, but, they don't go anywhere, there is more that we should be doing, bigger protests that give a far more clear sign that we will not take it anymore. Like I've said, I don't expect something like that to happen, not without some serious stimuli.

[James]

[font=franklin gothic medium]In terms of September 11th and how we remember it, I definitely don't think that American civilians should feel responsible in any sense for those attacks.

First of all, you have to look at the motivations of those who attacked the World Trade Center. Most of the terrorists involved in the attack did not even know that they were sacrificing their lives; they had been lied to by their superiors. The evidence suggests that most of the attackers actually thought that the hijackings were "routine" in the sense that some sort of demand may come from it.

Secondly, the motivations of their superiors are based largely on American involvement in Saudi Arabia during Gulf War I. Saudi Arabia (where Osama bin Laden originates), is seen by many within Al Qaeda as a sacred place. It holds significant religious importance and there is a strong sense of ideology attached to it.

Saudi Arabia allowed America to use the Prince Sultan Air Base as a staging ground to attack Iraq during Gulf War I.

Osama bin Laden's chief objection to the United States is based on this fact. It's also why he has threatened the Saudi royal family on several occasions (and has been banned from entering Saudi Arabia completely). It's also why most of his family have completely separated themselves from him.

bin Laden tries to incorporate other issues and vaguaries into his overall anti-US philosophy, but these elements are designed principally to attract support from other extremists in the region who have their own unrelated grievances. In fact, bin Laden cares little about these issues.

So if you go back to the original root cause, you have to then look at the first Gulf War and what caused it.

At the time Iraq had invaded Kuwait, which triggered UN action (including a number of measures that culiminated in global military action). There were a number of middle eastern countries that supported this action at the time, including Saudi Arabia.

So, without going into too much further detail, this is the principle cause that led to the September 11 attacks.

Under such circumstances, I'm not really sure how anyone can honestly blame American citizens in any sense. People who take this position often use really vague justifications for it, like "we elected our government so we are responsible for what they do overseas". Yet nobody can point to any overseas action that could possibly justify this kind of retaliation.

Regularly the 2003 Iraq war is mentioned, yet this happened well [i]after[/i] September 11th, 2001. So it obviously isn't even relevant to the causes of those attacks.

There have been a number of distortions related to this whole situation, many of which come from so-called "anti-war" groups. I'm not entirely sure what the underlying motivations are, but I don't think it's just a pure anti-war issue. I think that there is also an element of ignorance and/or denial related to the historical factors here.

Having said that, if you read George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, you will come across an essay he writes about the "intelligencia" of the time. Many of their motivations and actions are strikingly similar to what we see now (except that back then, they were primarily talking about Soviet Russia and, earlier, Nazi Germany). In recent times they've been talking about Hussein's Iraq.

My feeling is that so many of these debates are underscored by a misunderstanding of history. I was so frustrated with this that I actually wrote an essay in University about media distortions of the precursors to the Iraq war. I was the only person to write from that perspective, naturally.

I was actually quite surprised about many fellow students, who often presented projects with Iraq war themes (usually relating to "war for oil" and other quasi-intellectual arguments). Some of these projects were quite extreme.

Yet, by their own admission, none of these students knew a thing about politics. None knew a thing about the history of Iraq, or 20th century war history. And nobody had bothered to read Resolution 1441 (which my essay was based on).

So we were having these very fierce political statements that were being made in an ideological vaccuum - basically, none of these students actually knew a thing about the subject itself. None appreciated its complexity or how many historical factors played a role.

Sorry for being longwinded, but this was something I was very passionate about in 2003, because I was tired of the intellectual disonesty of many who were "in the know". The whole situation turned into a weird hype train and just about everyone had gladly jumped aboard with the kind of zeal that Falwell would admire.[/font]

[Rachmaninoff]

[quote name='James'][font=franklin gothic medium]Under such circumstances, I'm not really sure how anyone can honestly blame American citizens in any sense. People who take this position often use really vague justifications for it, like "we elected our government so we are responsible for what they do overseas". Yet nobody can point to any overseas action that could possibly justify this kind of retaliation.

Regularly the 2003 Iraq war is mentioned, yet this happened well [i]after[/i] September 11th, 2001. So it obviously isn't even relevant to the causes of those attacks.[/font][/QUOTE]I agree completely. It's too easy to look at our faults (every nation has them) and say[I] this [/I]is why. I ran into a comment on a video of a girl who was upset that the car her father gave her was the wrong color. The person who left the comment was declaring that she and others like her was why it happened. That kind of reasoning just reeks of total ignorance. It's always a good idea to know or at the very least look into the cause before you open your mouth and essentially insert your foot. But sadly a lot of people do that, instead of [I]thinking[/I].

It's part of what gets me and my friends so angry when people bash 9/11. They open their mouths and the ignorance is just irritating as hell. You know they're just bashing to bash instead of objectively looking at what happened. What's really sad, is many of them actually believe the tripe they're passing along.

[Esther]

[SIZE="1"][I]Wow, it's been a while.[/I][/SIZE]

[quote name='Gelgoog Pilot'] After those attacks we let people be pigeon holed and persecuted for their religion and ethnicity. We pushed the blame on others instead of who it belongs to.[/QUOTE]

[FONT="Book Antiqua"]That statement right there sort of confuses me. Are you implying that people who've discriminated against Muslim Americans post-9/11 should instead focus their negativity on the terrorists? Or are you saying that we, the American people, are to blame for the attacks? The latter is the vibe I got from your post, Geloog.

No one is to be blamed for the 9/11 attacks besides the terrorists themselves and the organization they operate under.

Not Muslims as a whole.
Not the American people.
Not the Bush administration (I'm sorry, I'm a firm believer that 9/11 was an [U][B]outside[/B][/U] job).

However, I do agree with you that we must take some responsibility for what our government does. Like you said, we did elect the President. But not EVERYONE voted for Bush, so not EVERYONE should be blamed for what the government does or doesn't do.

Like Chibi said, if you don't like the way the government is being run, it's your job to go out in November and vote. :][/FONT]

[ChibiHorsewoman]

[quote name='Gelgoog Pilot']Exactly what everyone needs to do, and not just 30% of the population either.

I know protests are still ongoing, but, they don't go anywhere, there is more that we should be doing, bigger protests that give a far more clear sign that we will not take it anymore. Like I've said, I don't expect something like that to happen, not without some serious stimuli.[/QUOTE]

[color=#9933ff]Actually the 2004 election had one of the highest turn outs ever- the only issue with that was that they were mostly conservative republicans who were brought out to vote on an issue that the government has no business being in.

I think that if you continuously try to make changes- maybe start small like in your own community as Obama did then continue to move on to a national level and get more and more people involved in what you want to do and make your issues known that you can indeed make progress.[/color]