We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

The Other 9/11: Unremembered and Unatoned

Click here to access article by Steve Brown from CounterPunch. (Modified at 4:30 PM Seattle time.)

Ruling classes always write their own self-serving histories, and our present capitalist ruling class is no different. Lest we forget about our ruling class's overthrow of an elected president of Chile, which you won't be exposed to in schools and corporate media, I thoroughly recommend this article:
On Monday, we saw the usual yearly outpouring of articles and editorials from mainstream media commemorating the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed 2,996 people and wounded 6,000 more. [my link]

Not that such memorials aren’t appropriate. They are simply insufficient. They fail to commemorate another 9/11 tragedy, one that took place 28 years earlier, in 1973 — not in America, but in Chile — and which caused the death – not of thousands, but of tens of thousands — while torturing and exiling 200,000 more.

I refer to the brutal coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende....