Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: [OT] Naomi Klein sui "danni collaterali"

LEADING OUR LEADERS
What if our leaders are actually following us, instead of the other way
around? 
What if they are scouring the overnight polls and reinventing themselves
to be the kind of leaders we say we want? What if they wage war not
because they have found an effective response to terrorism, but because
we have told the pollsters we are growing impatient? 
According to a New York Times poll, 58 per cent of Americans support
going to war "even if means many thousands of innocent civilians may be
killed." Can we really live with that? I'm not talking only about
morality but also about strategy: can we sustain the potential fallout
from all this "collateral damage?" 
Collateral damage is the jargon used to describe the "unintended"
consequences of war, the innocent civilians that die when bombs rain
down. But there are many more unintended consequences of war, so many,
in fact, that the CIA invented a phrase to describe what happens when
short-term wartime decisions come back to haunt the people who made
them: "blowback." 
In the reports that have come out about Osama bin Laden's life, it is
clear that he is the product of many such "unintended consequences" of
war. If you have the stomach to try to understand his twisted ideology,
just follow the "collateral damage." 
Bin Laden received his training and taste for war while fighting the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During the Cold War, the U.S. government
didn't consider his fanatical religious views antithetical to
"civilization," the current rhetoric. Back them, the CIA considered them
valuable weapons in the fight against communism, that other threat to
"civilization." Though not directly, CIA funding, training and weapons
made its way to the Islamic rebels in Afghanistan. The whole plan had a
certain logic to it: what better way to beat back an army of atheists
than by quietly nurturing an army that believed itself driven by God's
own fury? 
Only now it turns out that all that money and encouragement did more
than beat the Soviets. It also created a feeling of invincibility among
the rebels: if an Islamic jihad had defeated one superpower, why not
another? Call them delayed collateral damage from the Cold War. 
But this legacy alone didn't create bin Laden -- more collateral damage
was needed for that. Born in Saudi Arabia and a critic of his country's
monarchy, Bin Laden's hate was further hardened when the U.S. army
turned Saudi Arabia into its base of operations during the Gulf War. The
U.S. presence became a symbol of a new imperialism for many Muslims:
here were self-proclaimed freedom fighters making alliances with an
authoritarian monarchy, all on sacred Islamic soil. To the U.S.
military, these armies of new enemies probably seemed inconsequential at
the time, just more unfortunate collateral damage from the Gulf War. 
And what has kept bin Laden's fury at a feverish pitch all these years?
He claims he is avenging yet more collateral damage: the children killed
in Iraq under sanctions, the pharmaceutical factory bombed in Sudan. 
Terrorists, though they often adopt the pose, are nobody's saviors,
nobody's freedom fighters. They are, however, expert at manipulating
real injustice for their ends. If it turns out that bin Laden is
responsible for the attacks, we will have to look at him for what he is:
a figure of diabolical fanaticism, yes. But also, the warped and twisted
progeny of all of these unintended consequences of wars past and present
-- a Frankenstein of collateral damage. 
For terrorists, collateral damage isn't a threat, it is fuel: it creates
terrorists, feeds them, and sustains them. 
It's something to remember as we rush to leave fresh new trails of
collateral damage around the world. In Afghanistan, where an
indiscriminate attack would create yet another country filled with
desperate people who needed help to overthrow a brutal dictatorship and
suffered further misery instead. In Pakistan, where the U.S. presence
would be taken by many as an imperial and religious slight, potentially
ripping the country apart. In the occupied territories, where Israeli
forces are seizing the moment to step up attacks they wouldn't have
attempted two weeks ago. In our own backyards, where the mood of
vengeance, so little informed by fact, is giving license to rampant
racist attacks. 
Are we ready for some more collateral damage, or should we first start
facing up to the damage already done? 
Many of us, myself included, have felt little but rage and sorrow since
last Tuesday. But if our leaders are really following us, we have a
responsibility to no longer act on emotion alone. If our leaders are
following us, we have to lead. 
We have to lead them away from more collateral damage. 
http://www.nologo.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/19/1251216&mode=nested&thresh
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(in italiano su Internazionale di questa settimana)
THE END OF VIDEO GAME WARS
Now is the time in the game of war when we dehumanize our enemies. 
They are utterly incomprehensible, their acts unimaginable, their
motivations senseless. They are "madmen" and their states are "rogue."
Now is not the time for more understanding -- just better intelligence.
These are the rules of the war game. 
Feeling people will no doubt object to this characterization: war is not
a game. It is real lives ripped in half; it is lost sons, daughters,
mothers, and fathers, each with a dignified story. Tuesday's act of
terror was reality of the harshest kind, an act that makes all other
acts seem suddenly frivolous, game-like. 
It's true: war is most emphatically not a game. And perhaps after
Tuesday, it will never again be treated as one. Perhaps September 11,
2001 will mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war. 
Watching the coverage on Tuesday was a stark contrast to the last time I
sat glued to a television set watching a real-time war on CNN. The Space
Invader battlefield of the Gulf War had almost nothing in common with
what we have seen this week. Back then, instead of real buildings
exploding over and over again, we saw only sterile bomb's-eye-views of
concrete targets -- there and then gone. Who was in these abstract
polygons? We never found out. 
Since the Gulf War, American foreign policy has been based on a single
brutal fiction: that the U.S. military can intervene in conflicts around
the world -- in Iraq, Kosovo, Israel -- without suffering any U.S.
casualties. This is a country that has come to believe in the ultimate
oxymoron: a safe war. 
The safe war logic is, of course, based on the technological ability to
wage a war exclusively from the air. But it also relies on the deep
conviction that no one would dare mess with the U.S. =96 the one
remaining superpower -- on its own soil. 
This conviction has, until Tuesday, allowed Americans to remain blithely
unaffected by -- even uninterested in -- international conflicts in
which they are key protagonists. Americans don't get daily coverage on
CNN of the ongoing bombings in Iraq, nor are they treated to
human-interest stories on the devastating effects of economic sanctions
on that country's children. After the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical
factory in Sudan (mistaken for a chemical weapons facility), there
weren't too many follow up reports about what the loss of vaccine
manufacturing did to disease prevention in the region. 
And when NATO bombed civilian targets in Kosovo -- including markets,
hospitals, refugee convoys, passenger trains, and a TV station -- NBC
didn't do "streeter" interviews with survivors about how shocked they
were by the indiscriminate destruction. 
The United States has become expert in the art of sanitizing and
dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere. Domestically, war is no
longer a national obsession, it's a business that is now largely
out-sourced to experts. This is one of the country's many paradoxes:
though the engine of globalization around the world, the nation has
never been more inward looking, less worldly. 
No wonder Tuesday's attack, in addition to being horrifying beyond
description, has the added horror of seeming, to many Americans, to have
arrived entirely out of the blue. Wars rarely come as a complete shock
to the country under attack but it's fair to say that this one did. On
CNN, USA Today reported Mike Walter was asked to sum up the reaction on
the street. What he said was: "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I just
can't believe it." 
The idea that one could ever be prepared for such inhuman terror is
absurd. However, viewed through the U.S. television networks, Tuesday's
attack seemed to come less from another country than another planet. The
events were reported not so much by journalists as by the new breed of
brand-name celebrity anchors who have made countless cameos in
TimeWarner movies about apocalyptic terrorist attacks on the United
States -- now, incongruously reporting on the real thing. And for a
bizarre split second on Tuesday night, CNN's graphic "America Under
Attack" disappeared and in its place flashed another one that said
"Fighting Fat" -- an eerie ghost graphic that yesterday passed as news.
The United States is a country that believed itself not just at peace
but war-proof, a self-perception that would come as quite a surprise to
most Iraqis, Palestinians and Colombians. Like an amnesiac, the U.S. has
woken up in the middle of a war, only to find out it has been going on
for years. 
Did the United States deserve to be attacked? Of course not. That
argument is ugly and dangerous. But here's a different question that
must be asked: did U.S. foreign policy create the conditions in which
such twisted logic could flourish, a war not so much on U.S. imperialism
but on perceived U.S. imperviousness? 
The era of the video game war in which the U.S. is always at the
controls has produced a blinding rage in many parts of the world, a rage
at the persistent asymmetry of suffering. This is the context in which
twisted revenge seekers make no other demand than that American citizens
share their pain. 
Since the attack, U.S. politicians and commentators have repeated the
mantra that the country will go on with business as usual. The American
way of life, they insist, will not be interrupted. It seems an odd claim
to make when all evidence points to the contrary. War, to butcher a
phrase from the old Gulf War days, is the mother of all interruptions.
As well it should be. The illusion of war without casualties has been
forever shattered. 
A blinking message is up on our collective video game console: Game
Over. 
http://www.nologo.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/14/1621248&mode=nested&thresh
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Anche l'intervista a Noam Chomsky (speriamo di averlo scritto bene), sempre
su no-logo, è molto interessante...