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Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

by Mary L. Dudziak

We are beginning a week of reflection on the events of September 11, 2001.  Some 10th anniversary events will be memorials, remembering those who perished that day.  Other events will seek to make sense of what 9/11 did – to New York, to the United States, to the world.  So often remembered as a day that “changed everything,” academic panels will be held and op-eds written about just what 9/11 changed, and what it didn’t.But what does it mean to say that 9/11 changed something?  There is often a slipperiness in the causality.  It is sometimes assumed that the terrorist attacks set certain historical events into motion.  But if we see 9/11 as causing the politics, culture and military actions that followed, then we are giving the airplanes that slammed into buildings a powerful determinism.  We are assuming that al Qaeda did not just slaughter thousands, but drove American politics for the next decade.

How Big Government Enables Big Religion

by Benjamin E. Zeller

Science and religion do have something in common: they’re both getter bigger. I don’t mean that there are more scientists or more priests, but that Big Science—the corporate and government-financed scientific establishment that emerged during the mid-twentieth century—has provided a template for the growth and development of Big Religion. Most tellingly, both Big Science and Big Religion have become deeply intertwined with state and national governments.Rather than exist as an actual institutions, Big Science and Big Religion are a composite number of such institutions, movements, and individuals.  The essential nature of Big Religion was, and is, personified by Billy Graham, who called hundreds of thousands to Christ but left particular decisions of which churches to attend to the newly committed Christians.  This was one of the hallmarks and strengths of Big Religion during its early days in the 1950s: it permitted diversity within certain limits.

America Isn't an Innocent Abroad

by Ron Briley

While the beaches of Hawaii provide rest and relaxation for many tourists, others visiting the Hawaiian Islands stand in long lines to observe the submerged battleship Arizona as a monument to December 7, 1941, a day which President Franklin D. Roosevelt assured Americans would live in infamy.  Thus, Pearl Harbor, almost seventy years after the Japanese attack on the American naval base, remains hallowed ground to many Americans who equate Pearl Harbor with the 9/11 plane hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.  In both cases, the conventional wisdom dictates that the United States was the victim of unprovoked aggression.  American innocence was shattered by those who attacked without warning and inflicted death and destruction upon a people and society serving as a beacon of freedom in a hostile world.

Herman Cain: The Man from Pizza

by Alexander Heffner

Former vice president and presidential candidate Henry Wallace mastered Midwestern agriculture and seed genetics for growing food.  Ike and his brothers manned a creamery in Kansas.  President Richard Nixon labored in his dad's orange grove and then at his gas station where they sold groceries.  And let’s not forget the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, who made a career on the plantation.But not until this election cycle has either major party boasted a candidate with three decades in the food industry:  that's Republican Herman Cain, the unlikely presidential hopeful from Atlanta who has surprised the GOP political establishment with decent poll numbers.  A bona fide foodie (at least in corporate terms), Cain was most recently CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.But Cain was not born to be a food magnate—he became one. Cain admitted in a recent interview that, in his first food industry job as an analyst at Coca-Cola, “I was attracted to Cola because I wanted to make an entry into the business sector.  In all honesty, I wasn’t drawn to Coke because it was food or beverage sector but because it has a great reputation.”

Stetson Kennedy's Decades-Long Pursuit of Truth and Justice

by Paul Ortiz

Stetson Kennedy passed away August 27.  He was ninety-four years old.  Stetson died peacefully, in the presence of his beloved wife Sandra Parks, at Baptist Medical Center South in St. Augustine, Florida.Stetson Kennedy spent the better part of the twentieth century doing battle with racism, class oppression, corporate domination, and environmental degradation in the American South.  By mid-century Stetson had become our country’s fiercest tribune of hard truths; vilified by the powerful, Stetson did not have the capacity to look away from injustice.  His belief in the dignity of the South’s battered sharecroppers, migrant laborers, and turpentine workers made him the region’s most sensitive and effective folklorist.

When Else Have Poor People Been So Disenfranchised?

by Jerome Braun

Now that we are about a half year away from the “official” start of the next presidential campaign, it is as good a time as any to take stock.  The unemployment rate still hangs around 9 percent.  No doubt the real unemployment rate, which includes people who have dropped out of the work force together with involuntary part-timers, is close to double that.  We’re also still stuck in wars declared and undeclared with no real end in sight.  And what can be called working-class interests, and a working-class presence in political discussion, is still maudlin, timid, unassertive, and way off the radar screen for most of the mass media.Did we face similar eras of lachrymose whining in the past?  Not by the poor themselves, since they’ve never been given much of a voice, nor from our talking heads, for whom the problems of the poor are as real as the problems of some foreign tribe.The wealthier classes are now, in fact, prepared to spread the word about the benefits of trickle-down economics ad infinitum now that the Supreme Court has decided in the Citizens United case that corporations can add their opinions to political campaigns to their heart’s consent.  The poor can too, if they can figure out how to pay for it.

School Reform Grudge Match: Diane Ravitch vs. Steven Brill

by David Austin Walsh

Few would claim that the tone of civic discourse in America is amiable.  Bitterness and invective are now hard-wired into our political life, with conservatives castigating Obama as an irresponsible, dangerous Marxist and liberals returning fire with the “craziness” of Michelle Bachmann (whose husband, they whisper, is a closeted homosexual).

Kansas City Here It Comes: A New Nuclear Weapons Plant!

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Should the U.S. government be building more nuclear weapons?  Residents of Kansas City, Missouri don’t appear to think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.The massive plant, 1.5 million square feet in size, is designed to replace an earlier version, also located in the city and run by the same contractor:  Honeywell.  The cost of building the new plant—which, like its predecessor, will provide 85 percent of the components of America’s nuclear weapons—is estimated to run $673 million. 

Nevermind the Bullocks—The UK-U.S. Special Relationship is Here to Stay

by Alanna O’Malley

In 1979, Henry Kissinger that the Anglo-American special relationship was “an extraordinary relationship because it rested on no legal claim; it was formalized by no legal document; it was carried forward by succeeding British governments as if no alternative were conceivable.  Britain’s influence was great precisely because it never insisted on it; the ‘special relationship’ demonstrated the valuable of intangibles.”  Not only have successive British governments championed the close and intimate connection with the United States, but the “special relationship” provides a means by which Britain can bolster perceptions of her international prestige, belying what may be termed her status anxiety, through intense and fruitful cooperation with the U.S. in key areas such as nuclear, defense and intelligence sharing. For their part, the State Department has, in Britain, a solid and dependable ally with whom there is a shared language, diplomatic culture, history and tradition. However, what may have begun as an alliance of equality during WWII, has now become very much a partnership of polarity in terms of relative power as the disparities in economic, military and international prowess have deepened the divide between the two nations.  Yet the rhetoric and mysticism of a ‘special relationship’ said to exist between the two nations prevails.

Is Walmart the Cure for Homesickness?

by Susan J. Matt

Europe and America: Hissing or Kissing Cousins?

by Peter Baldwin

One presidential administration is a long time in trans-Atlantic relations.  Four years ago, the chasm between Europe and the U.S. seemed unbridgeable.  Bush was the anti-Christ in European eyes, the swaggering Texan who had invaded Iraq while blithely presiding at home over a sharp-elbowed, inegalitarian society.  Europeans in return were viewed by conservative Americans as under-worked, over-taxed, molly-coddled spongers, oblivious if not skeptical of the dangers American soldiers and tax payers were protecting them from.  To punish them we stripped our favorite food—French fries—of any association with the perfidious continentals, just as during the First World War frankfurters were Americanized as hot dogs, lest the Krauts fondly imagine we still thought of them while ordering lunch.

Turkey Has Big Plans for the Middle East—But It Needs to Reckon with Its Genocidal Past First

by Taner Akçam

It looks like the countdown to regime change has begun in Syria, and Turkey may end up having the final say regarding the international intervention that’s increasingly likely to occur.  It will pay for Turkey, however, to engage in some sober deliberation before getting involved.  For most in the Middle East, any action taken with Turkey’s participation will not be perceived as one in which Turkey is fighting to create free and democratic regimes in the region.  One should never forget that the peoples in the region view themselves through a window that’s been framed by Turkey’s imperial history. 

Daniel Pipes: Uncertain Times in the Middle East

Ali Moore, presenter: American writer and often controversial commentator Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and is visiting fellow of the Hoover institution of Stanford University. He's currently in Australia as a guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. He joined me from our Brisbane studio a short time ago. Daniel Pipes, welcome to Lateline.Daniel Pipes: Thank you.Ali Moore: If we can go straight to those overnight attacks in Israel. Hamas denies involvement but Israel has already carried out airstrikes over the Gaza strip, Hamas has vowed revenge. Are we now looking at a potential major military escalation between Hamas and Israel?Daniel Pipes: Indeed. And it has further complications because for the first time in many years the Sinai Peninsula, which is next to Israel, seems to be anarchic. And it appears the Egyptian government is not fully controlling it. And so this could be the first of many attacks, perhaps from Gaza, perhaps from Sinai itself, perhaps from Hamas, perhaps from other groups. So there is potential for much more trouble here.

A Stimulus Isn't Enough to Fix this Economy, But Here are Three Ideas that Might

by Judith Stein

The political oxygen in the United States today is consumed by issues that have nothing to do with reducing the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.  Everyone talks about the priority of creating jobs, and President Obama promises another speech on jobs after Labor Day.  But through most of the year, Republicans fixated on cutting spending, while Obama and many Democrats accepted the notion that the deficit was the main issue facing the nation.  Jobs are an afterthought, a political obligation, not a central ingredient of recovery.  Well-meaning pundits offer work sharing (where companies, instead of laying off employees, reduce hours and pay, with government making up the difference), infrastructure banks, public works, and many other good ideas.  Any one of these policies will become a lot more possible if attached to a larger narrative about what went wrong and what’s to be done.

The Flight from Justice: Historian Gerald Steinacher on How Nazis Fled Europe after World War II

by Robin Lindley

At the end of the Second World War, thousands of Nazi Party members, war criminals and collaborators fled Europe and escaped arrest and prosecution for their role in war crimes including genocide.  Perpetrators such as leading Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann and Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele were on the run after the defeat of Germany in 1945.  They eluded justice with the assistance of sympathizers as well as the knowing or inadvertent aid of overwhelmed and imperfect humanitarian, religious and political institutions.

The Delicious Irony of the Federal Government Memorializing MLK

by Jo Freedman

In all the celebrations going on this week over the (now-delayed) dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, few have noted the irony that Dr. King was often at odds with the federal government, as well as a lot of state governments.  Only fifteen months after Dr. King’s famous speech at the August 28, 1963 march and rally, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a group of women reporters that Dr. King was "the most notorious liar in the country."  This came in reaction to newspaper reports of a mild criticism by Dr. King of the FBI’s handling of civil rights complaints in the South.Indeed it was that very march that convinced Hoover that Dr. King and the civil rights movement were serious threats to his America.  He shifted the Bureau’s policy from observing the movement, while providing information on it to local law enforcement in the South, into actively undermining it.  Dr. King was his primary target.  At Hoover’s direction, the FBI not only harassed Dr. King, but did not even warn him when it knew of threats on his life.

MLK Would Be Against the Wars Today

by William Loren Katz

It has taken a hurricane to postpone the dedication of the long-awaited monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington over the weekend—the first time a man who is not a president, not awhite man and not a war leader has been so honored on the Mall.   But how will Dr. King be presented to the American public and remembered by children?  One clear viewpoint was offered this January 13 when the Pentagon commemorated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with an address by Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel.In the final year of his life King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson frankly told a packed auditorium of Defense Department officials.  However, Johnson hastily added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.  “I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.”Really?

Is an Apology Enough for Genocide?

by Edwin Black

Everyone knows that Nazi Germany designated Jews and others for mass murder. Some know that Hitler's racial ideas were inspired by the early twentieth-century pseudo-scientific American eugenic concepts he studied and adopted.  But few are aware that long before Jews and blacks were targeted by eugenicists, white Virginian Appalachians with dark hair were chosen for extinction.  They were not only targeted by academics, but by Virginia's own state government.  The state perniciously traced their ancestry and, periodically, agents rounded them up and dispatched them to sterilization mills.More than twenty-seven states joined the shameful decades-long campaign.  Virginia led in developing the legal concepts and merciless enforcement that propelled eugenics into the annals of genocide.

Three Lessons in Emergency Management from Someone Who Did It Well

by Utpal Sandesara and Thomas Wooten

One of the most famous images from Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath lacks any of the visual tropes typically associated with the disaster.  No roofs protrude from a sea of water, and no lines of beleaguered survivors wait in vain for help to arrive.  Yet in its own way, the photograph conveys one of the tragedy’s strongest truths.  A commander-in-chief, bathed in warm sunlight and swaddled in the luxury of his leather-upholstered cabin, peers out the window as his jet takes a low pass over the City that Care Forgot.

The American Family Association Says that the Nazis were Gay—The GOP Needs to Distance Itself from that Craziness

by Jonathan Zimmerman

All of the Republican presidential candidates say that gay people should be prohibited from getting married.  But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says that gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany.