On September 11 th my friend was watching television in a hospital in Albuquerque where she works as a nurse. As the truth of what was happening became clear, and the images from that sunny New York morning came into the room, someone whispered, "Oh God, maybe it's an inside job!" My friend, always alert for the big picture, answered, "Of course it's an inside job. Don't you know, it's always an inside job."

The U.S. responded to those awful events by bombing a country, half a world away, whose oppressive government it had openly supported. That decision to attack a country already decimated by drought and twenty years of civil war was not seriously questioned in the mainstream U.S. media. Barbara Lee, the lone Congressional Representative who did question the wisdom of giving unlimited war powers to the President, received numerous anonymous death threats.

Several months later we learned from the Washington Post that memos had been sent by U.S. television networks to their correspondents in Afghanistan asking them not to report on the civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing.

The dubious slogan 'war on terrorism' and the mind-numbing rhetoric that accompanies it has been overused to the point that legislation was passed without serious opposition which threatens to undermine the Constitution more thoroughly than anything the country has faced in the last two and a quarter centuries. (The Patriot Act) Never has Noam Chomsky's phrase 'manufactured consent' been more appropriate.

U.S. citizens and legal residents have been arrested without charge, representation, or trial, while those who speak for the government insist that such measures are justified. Some of my friends are saying, "I'm feeling like a good German," referring to those years in Germany when people were aware of Nazi atrocities but didn't dare-or didn't
know how to-resist them . Then there are those who say, "The world is beyond help. All I can do now is concentrate on my 'spiritual practice'." Perhaps they hope for a miracle, or perhaps they are simply overwhelmed by despair, isolation and powerlessness.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government releases a list of the nations it considers to constitute the evil axis and announces that it has targeted them with nuclear weapons; continues to support oppressive military regimes around the world to further its economic aims; and suggests that actions running counter to U.S. interests in places as far a field as Colombia and North Korea, are being supported from the Middle East-without actually specifying exactly where or how.

History 101

The events of September did not take place in a vacuum. Nothing of that sort ever does. Though to say as much publicly is to risk being called a traitor and a fool. The attribution of singular causal relationships is used in the political realm as a rallying cry that leads to singular unquestioned action-"You're either with us or you're against us." Decisive and expedient as such rhetoric may seem at the time it invariably deepens divisions.

Singular causal attributions, and the revisionism that derives from a one-sided view of history, dumbs us down and disconnects us from the human dimension of our collective circumstances. Such over-simplification ultimately confirms George Santayana's comment that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Singular action, based on an over-simplified understanding of circumstances, is invariably violent. A polarized view derived from a polarized identity is violent by nature. We objectify the other to validate our not-other selves. We must keep the other at bay, and we must spare no expense in doing so. The other is not of our tribe. We do not understand or know the other . We cannot fathom its thinking, and we are sure that it cannot know the depths of ours. The other is of a different religion, race, language, and sexuality. The other does not hold to our values. The other is debased, lazy, dirty, and stupid. The other has powers we do not understand. The other may not even be truly human. It is unpredictable, a wild animal to be feared and kept at bay. The other is the cause of all that is bad in society. We must destroy it. If we can't destroy it absolutely perhaps we can make it invisible by forcing it to become like ourselves. We can even claim to have acted out of kindness-putting a piccaninny in a pink frock! The other is everywhere we look. There's so much other we become afraid of the very ground we stand on. Our own bodies, our imagination become other . Nature is other and the Earth becomes an alien place. Then it is easy enough to look to violence as an appropriate way to express ourselves. The stockpiling of nuclear weapons might even start to make sense, even to those who consider themselves responsible and compassionate.

Throughout history groups that have exercised power over other groups have used the designation of other to subjugate them and to justify exploiting them. Subjugated people internalize oppression in a cycle of abnegation and shame, violence, fear, sectarianism, racism, and division within their own community. Psychologically, oppressor and oppressed become intertwined and the disembodied dance of oppression plays itself out inside everyone.

If this dance is to the advantage of anyone at all in these times it is to the advantage of the tiny corporate elite that preside over the increasingly globalized industrial-growth society, and which, in the name of Progress and Profit, facilitates the privatization of resources, and the unraveling of planetary life support systems. Indigenous cultures, with all the wisdom embodied in them, have disappeared by the thousand. Each day, another hundred animal and plant species become extinct. Fellow travelers for whom it has taken four-and-a-quarter billion years to arrive with us at this moment in time disappear forever. Now the international-corporate-military-industrial-petrochemical-addicted-growth-addicted society presumes to intervene in the cellular basis of life itself and is duly patenting the DNA of humans, plants and animals. Everything is to be privatized, owned, and marketed; and if you question or obstruct this path of 'inevitable' progress you are identified with the ridiculed and marginalized Left.

Structural Violence, Cultural Violence,

and Direct Violence

My friend was right: violence is always an inside job. We're all implicated. The economic, political, and cultural circumstances that led to the horror of September 11 th are rooted in conditions that go back for years, decades, and centuries. The same can be said of the U.S. reaction to the events of that day. If you are part of a tiny elite, hugely privileged by world standards, and think that you are an innocent victim, you are probably not looking carefully at the situation. If you react to violence by blindly striking back you're definitely not looking carefully, because violence almost always perpetuates itself.

Structural Violence. Twelve million children die for lack of food and clean water every year in a world that produces a food surplus. As the 'terrorist' pariah Fidel Castro commented so articulately at a WHO conference in 1998, "Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet. Know that those children die in a world where there is still a surplus of food but where market forces and governmental and corporate interests control its distribution."

Cultural Violence. Discrimination based on race, gender, cultural affiliation, class and sexual orientation supports the status quo and perpetuates inequity. The dominant culture promotes the view that it alone embodies the norm, and that its own cultural and social expression is superior to any other. It despises, oppresses, and humiliates those who are not seen as belonging to it. Consciously and unconsciously, on every scale, the dominant culture, which is also the culture of mass media, co-opts, ignores, undermines, and tyrannizes anything that it sees as different, or that does not fit its current agenda, or that it perceives as a threat. It does so systematically, randomly, accidentally, and is also usually so absorbed in its own sense of entitlement that it is blind to its own actions. Examples proliferate:

* After Chinese-American Michelle Kwan failed to win a gold medal at the recent Winter Olympics a newspaper headline announced, "American Beats Michelle Kwan." We are reminded that, for some, 'American' means white American.

* Non-western countries, hurrying to adopt western standards, may be even more overt in expressing their prejudices. During the 1980s in Sarawak, forest dwelling Dayaks had no civil or legal rights until they left their forest long houses and moved into shacks on the outskirts of town. In the non-Western world indigenous people are seen as an embarrassment and an obstacle in securing loans. Post colonial governments, mimicking their colonial predecessors, systematically marginalize and massacre indigenous peoples.

* In Mauritania and Sudan black Africans are still enslaved by the Arab minority.

* In the U.S. 72% of drug users are white, yet 80% of those in prison on drug charges are people of color. The incarceration rates for most major western European countries are around 1 per 1000 or lower. In the US the average rate is seven times higher, except that, for African-American males, the rate is 1 in 20-that is, fifty times higher.

* In parts of Africa and Asia it is not uncommon for a sister or daughter who is suspected of having engaged in pre-marital sex to be murdered to protect family honor, while her murderer goes unpunished.

* Economic justice is continually denied to indigenous and non-white men, women, and children as the industrialized base of the 'developed' world moves south where labor is plentiful and labor rights minimal. In the process a new global class of working poor is forced to abandon cultural identity and traditional ways.

* The trivializing power of Coca-Cola and McDonalds proliferates through the mass media, promoting an oversimplified view of history and of cultures. Those identified with anything other than the dominant culture become invisible, while ethnic chic is marketed to the masses.

* Education is increasingly used to serve nationalistic and corporate interest. Revisionist history systematically ignores the narratives of centuries of labor struggle and economic exploitation in the U.S. and elsewhere

* Christian missionaries, similar to the Taliban perhaps, often with tacit government approval, systematically dispossess indigenous people of their heritage with bribes of medicine, food, and trinkets.

Direct Violence: After the First World War, hoping to increase military zeal in new generations of soldiers, the governments of the U.S. and Great Britain strongly encouraged corporations to market more war toys. These toys, which were intended to inure children to violence, have transmuted into the estimated 200,000 violent acts the average person will have already seen on TV by the time he or she is eighteen. In the face of what appears a deliberate plan to program generations of children we can hardly be surprised at the ensuing violence.

* Wars that would now include civilians to a degree rarely seen before. From Spain and Abyssinia in the 1930s to East Timor and Bosnia in the 1990's. Brutal post-colonial liberation struggles-Congo, Algeria, Vietnam, Central America. . . .

* The struggles for cultural, political and economic autonomy that continue today, misrepresented or unreported in the western press-Colombia, Chechnya, Burma, the Philippines.

* The daily victims of homophobia and racism, of domestic violence, and of violence against women and children.

* Mathew Sheppard beaten and left to die beside a Wyoming highway.

* Palestinian and Israeli women, children and men, bystanders murdered in the realization of George Santayana's caution, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In a macabre reversal, a manifestation perhaps of collective post-traumatic shock, militant right-wing Israelis, systematically harass, torture and murder civilians in a manner that is uncannily reminiscent of events in Europe during the 1930s and 40s.

* Those who died on September 11 th , 2002. and . . . those who died, or who subsequently disappeared, after September 11 th 1972 in the U.S. sponsored coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile. The Afghan victims of military violence from 1979 until now. The estimated three-quarters of a million dead children of Iraq, victims of ten years of sanctions. . .

* The young men in the U.S. military who, it is said, are becoming increasingly disaffected. They are victims of both the violence they perpetrate, which is inexorably internalized, and the violence of the propagandistic deceptions that are perpetrated on them so that their loyalties might remain unquestioned.

* The estimated eighty million people in slavery worldwide, in every part of the world.

* The continuing denial of the holocausts of the past: slavery, the massacres of indigenous people in the Americas, the massacre of Jews, Armenians, Kurds.

From a longer article on non-violence and social justice 'Against All Odds' published in Paths Of Learning, July 2002. www.PathsOfLearning.net