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 oining
the "we-had-it-coming" school of post-terror thought,
Joel Rogers of The
Nation makes the usual noises about "the inexcusable
terror of what has just been done to us," and then gets down
to the business of pointing out that "our own government, through
much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading 'rogue
state.'" Indeed, he goes on, "merely listing the plainly
illegal or unauthorized uses of force the US was responsible for
... would literally take volumes." Which is convenient, since
it enables him to avoid naming a single such instance in his essay.
Instead, Rogers approvingly cites an Amnesty International report
from the mid-1990s, which declared that the U.S.A. "shares
the blame" for the fact that "throughout the world, on
any given day, a man, woman, or child is likely to be displaced,
tortured, killed ... at the hands of governments or armed political
groups."
Given this supposed reality — and given the supposed existence
of "the bodies of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of innocents, most of them children, whose lives we have taken without
any pretense to justice" — Rogers can only wonder why
people are so surprised at last week's attack. Quoting W. H. Auden
("Those to whom evil are done / Do evil in return"), he
writes that if "the immediate relatives and descendants of
our own terror now comprise or tolerate a group of maniacs intent
upon a similar destruction of innocents in the United States ...
[it] should be mourned, and must enrage, but it cannot shock."
Sure, they're terrorists — but then, he implies, so are we,
and the events of September 11 are just a taste of our own medicine.
"Now I'm not saying he should have killed her," Chris
Rock used to joke about O. J. Simpson, "but I understand."
Apparently, Joel Rogers feels the same way about Osama bin Laden.
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