Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction.
Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians.
So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror. We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us. “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards. We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought. It matters little here that, from wedding parties to funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly.
Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.
Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 16"On October 27, 1962, the world almost descended into a full blown nuclear war, a war that could have wiped out major chunks of mankind. That day, the world came closest to the initiation of a third world war. This happened at the height of the US-Soviet cold war in the final stages of the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet Union had deployed nuclear warhead missiles in Cuba just a few hundred miles away from the US coast. It was proving to be a matter of grave concern as negotiations went underway with a looming threat of US invasion of Cuba and an eventual US-Soviet war. On October 27, a Soviet submarine had been docked in the Cuban waters for some days. The US navy had already formed a blockade to stop any armed Soviet ships. Even though, the crisis was getting close to be resolved through diplomatic dialogue, the Soviet submarine was not in contact with their government and were thus still under the impression that a war was looming large. The US navy soon registered the presence of the submarine and fired, without warning, depth grenades to force it to surface. But the US navy was unaware that the Soviet submarine was equipped with nuclear torpedoes. The submarine captains were still operating under the old orders of their government, which were to launch the nuclear torpedoes if they are attacked by Americans. The submarine commanders were now in a position to launch nuclear strikes, which would have started a nuclear war between the two heavyweights. The fate of the world was hanging by a thread. There were three officers on the submarine and any strike required the approval of all of them. Two officers were quickly in favor of the nuclear strike, but commander Vasili Arkhipov was in opposition. In those precarious moments, he was able to hold his own and convince the other two to avert the strikes and surface. As a result, the submarine surfaced and eventually returned home. Those few minutes were probably the deadliest minutes in modern history, havin
