The Urban Grind

In response to the hoopla over his essay "Some People Push Back:
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" Churchill has issued a press release. Here are some excerps:

In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.

Nice try, but you've done a pretty darn good job of defaming your own character, and blaming the victims for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"I am not a 'defender'of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people 'should' engage in armed attacks on the United States , but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy." As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."

You certainly are, as you made plain in your original essay, and you hate your country as well:

Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.

Were this the intent of those who've entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they'd already done. Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans).

In sum one can discern a certain optimism it might even be called humanitarianism imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.

Dunghill continues to try and backpedal in his press release:

In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that 'we' had decided it was 'worth the cost.' I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

It's time for Churchill to be seriously whacked with some logic, which I'll be happy to do.

First off, why is it America's fault when the rogue state of Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, then was pushed back by a broad coalition of countries, and after that, refused to abide by the terms of the cease-fire agreement, thus bringing on the sanctions.

And why is it America's fault that Saddam, France, Russia and the U.N. were making billions off the oil for food scandal, when that money could have gone to help the Iraqi people?

Finally Dunghill does NOT mourn the victims of the 9/11 attacks. That much is clear by reading his original screed:

More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Rather, he criticizes them for their capitalist work ethic. In the typical leftist/statist/collectivist fashion, he equates the financial success of one group with the victimization of another. The idea of wealth being produced by man's rational thinking and creative ability never crosses this man's mind. It's no wonder then that he also criticizes the US for its actions in Grenada and other places.

Finally, regarding "collateral damage" or "innocent civilians," if you will, I will quote Ayn Rand's intellectual and legal heir Leonard Peikoff:

These innocents suffer and die because of the action of their own government in sponsoring the initiation of force against America. Their fate, therefore, is their government's moral responsibility.

In other words, American soldiers don't purposefully blow up innocent civilians going about their daily lives. If there are exceptions, like in Abu Ghraib, then they get punished. On the other hand, the Islamo-fanatics that Churchill describes as "humane" deliberately hide amongst women and children in order to perpetrate their terrorist acts.

So what I would like to understand is what the story is, if anything with our sedition laws. Because it certainly sounds like sedition to me.