Leftist response...

Submitted by vcrs (United States), Apr 12, 2003 at 16:06

You got it half right.

Socialists do think that 9/11 was about poor, wretched, oppresed people striking back at their oppressors.

However, most leftists absolutely do not admire Hussein, bin Laden, or the Taliban. ..

Leftists were sending petitions to Clinton and then Bush about the Taliban for many years (I know I signed at least three in the late '90s). When the whole world was in an uproar about the Taliban destroying Buddhist statues, we tried to point out how one-sided it was to worry about statues and ignore the plight of living breathing women in Afghanistan. Such pleas fell on deaf ears: the US continued to fund the Taliban (to the tune of $43 million in the summer of 2001).

Furthermore, it's very common to hear leftists argue that if we want to stop terrorism against the US, it would be smarter not to attack Iraq or further destabilize the Middle East. The satirical newspaper "The Onion" recently ran a headline "New US bomb capable of creating 1500 new terrorists in a single blow." Noam Chomsky couldn't have said it better.

Any real leftist with a solid intellectual basis in history and a good understanding of international relations would simultaneously condemn 9/11 and the US response to it (as did Chomsky and most other prominent left commentators).

We do believe that the US world domination cannot endure forever, but our struggle is to create a vision for an alternative that embodies leftist principles of democracy, equality, human rights, and cooperation.

We see ourselves as locked in struggle against the radical fundamentalists of every religion (including the religion of free market capitalism) to convince the oppressors AND the oppressed that war and destruction will not create a better world--but rather that if we want to survive as a human species, we need to work together to create a new and broader vision that will bring true liberation (rather than the "opportunity" to be dominated by the US in new and different ways).

Keep searching...

yours truly,
a hardcore socialist

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