This line of rhetoric is getting really old really quick. Everyone from the president on down has said that these attacks were attacks on “freedom and democracy.” I disagree. Had the hijackers wanted to target symbols of democracy and freedom, they could have picked more symbolic targets. The Statue of Liberty. Independence Hall. The Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial. The targets were not symbols of freedom and democracy. They were symbols of capitalism and militarism.
Which does not in any way excuse the attacks. They are bad enough without spinning them.
To their credit, many in the news media aren’t taking the spin.
I made more or less the same point in a thread about Bush’s speech … where he said that we were attacked because we were a “beacon for freedom”. No, we weren’t. In all likelihood we were attacked because of our support for Israel. No matter how you spin it, that’s not the same thing. And it does no one any good to pretend it is.
Is democracy not an inherent condition of most plutocracies(i.e. the US) in this day and age? The military(i.e. Pentagon) is just another means of supporting and maintaining the plutocratic nature of our nation.
An attack on freedom? By all means yes. How many of the people in those buildings or airplanes chose to die yesterday?
I don’t think the terrorists were interested in symbolism. I think they actually did want to kill a lot of people. And they actually wanted to establish fear in our hearts, a feeling which I consider the opposite of freedom. And when I think of democracy I don’t think of the Washington monument, I think of being able to organize with fellow workers, own some of the means of production (amen Karl Marx), and free speech, free association, etc. These are all characteristics of the capitalist system, of which the WTC was a nerve center.
Well clearly they wanted to kill the maximum number of people. They could have just as easily (perhaps more easily) have hijacked a redeye and done their damage when the respective buildings were empty.
But the World Trade center isn’t just a big building with a lot of people in it. It’s also the largest, most visible symbol of capitalism on the planet. The stock exchange would have been an even better symbol, but far more difficult to hit from the air.
I don’t think the number of people to kill was their target. They clearly wanted to hit those targets because they are symbols. They would have hit them even if they were empty.
Regarding “attack against democracy and freedom”, IMHO, not true. Following is from an article by Joseph Sobran titled “The Unkown Enemy”, from http://www.lewrockwell.com:
Just because this guy writes in on a website makes it true?
And if they weren’t concerned with number of people killed, then why do it in the morning when the building was full?
I agree that the buildings are a symbol, they are a symbol not only of capitalism but of the great wealth and power of our country. And by striking hard our home, they are definitely attacking our way of life - democracy and freedom - for it will never be the same.
Think about it - our right to live in peace and safety has changed now, and not for the better. Hitting the statue of liberty, though perhaps a greater symbol, would not have the terribly affect that killing so many does. Our greatest freedoms and the basis for our society, our democracy - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - has being threatened by the worst sort of coward.
Let’s not lessen this horror and the loss to so many by whining about “spin”.
This was more an attack on capitalism, free markets, and the American military, than anything else. Yeah, any attack on the US is also an attack on freedom and a republic (it’s not a democracy…at LEAST say “representative democracy”), but if we want to be specific, it’s an attack on our economy, economic freedom, and our military actions of the past, it seems.
And yes, the phrase is getting worn out…but I don’t care much.
IMHO, the attack was not timed according to their will, but was more dictated by flight schedules. They had to find two planes heading towards the West coast at the same time…
I can’t believe you’re getting worked up about the word “democracy”. Very lame.
And the point is, our FREEDOMS are being attacked. If they had hit the White House (as it appears they were planning), then would you expand your very narrow (and very ignorant) supposition?
From a busy airport like Boston or National, it’s easy to find two flights headed for the west coast within 20 min of each other. This would likely happen several times a day.
Particularly around 6 AM and 4 PM.
I used to fly Seattle to Boston regularly, and there was a flight just about once an hour until around 8 pm.
If they restricted themselves to 757 and 767’s, then maybe the choices were fewer. Then again, they may have ended up with those type of aircraft by accident rather than by design. There aren’t that many types of passenger craft that can make the trip on a single fuel load.
On the other hand, none of the flights they took were anywhere near full to capacity. They might have been depending on that, though I doubt it. More likely, they were willing to give up a few plane casualties in order to get max casualties in the buildings, and prime time press coverage.
I wondered the same thing, too. When I think of the WTC or the pentagon, I don’t automatically think of democracy and freedom. I think of New York, commerce and military command. Useful to democracy and freedom? Perhaps. But hardly symbolic of.
Which fits my belief that this may not be a terroristic symbolic attack. I believe that what we saw was not just terrorism, but a full scale and very practical attempt to incite a coup in America.
Man! I swear I posted a thread in GD about it, but I can’t find it anywhere!
My theory in a nutshell is that if the White House and Air Force one were really targeted, and they attacks had all hit, it would have taken out the obvious sucession of power and the economy at once. Weak (or diputed) leadership, when paired with economic instability, is a prime environment for coups, military juntas and dictatorships. It doesn’t take much to throw a nation into chaos, and history shows many strong nations sucumbing to less.
I speculate that this attack may not have been a symbolic act of terrorism, but rather a very practical (albeit a longshot) attempt to topple the US government.
I’d have to go with Otto on this one; the WTC was a target not because of some abstraction, it was a target because it is a symbol of America, not capitalism, freedom, deomocracy or any of those things.
If you think about it, the people who (probably) did this did it as a reaction to our policy in the Middle East and the power we have to support that policy. There are plenty of other free, democratic, capitalists countries in the world to aim for, but none so closely involved in the Middle East. The WTC is the biggest, easiest-to-hit, most visual symbol out there, and there is nothing else that comes even close to the shock and loss of life that destroying the WTC does. That the Pentagon, the symbol of America’s power to follow through on its will, was also a target underlines that.
Whoa whoa, hold up. Don’t assume things. I’m not worked up over that at all. I have to imagine you made that up.
Ignorant? I’ll not respond in kind (no matter how tempted I am to), thank you very much. I will say, however, that I said very clearly that yes, any attack on us is an attack on freedom and democracy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more specific reasons for this. I’m repeating things here.
They were not just attacking freedom and democracy. They were also attacking our economic principles. Why you don’t want to admit this is beyond me – it doesn’t take anything awya from the situation or the sympathy involved. All it does is points out that they hate the way our economy is structured, and, I believe (it seems obvious), they wanted to demonstrate that hatred, among others.
Yeah, they did, but don’t you think it’s important to understand what specific things they were attacking? I do. I think this attack was meant to attack both our government (military included), and our way of life (capitalism, our economy). I imagine the WTC was too perfect for their evil plans, seeing as how it’s in a major media market, houses many people, and has been a long-standing symbol of our economy and the way we live.
The succession of the presidency is spelled out in statute. The attacks would have had to kill the pres, VP, speaker of the House, pres pro tem of the Senate and all of the Cabinet. Granted, the loss of one or several of those in the line of succession would have led to temporary instability, but eventually there would be a president and presumably the nation would unite in its grief behind that person, whomever she or he might have been.