Customer Reviews

The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
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This little book is a masterful creation. It's short, easy to read, and hard-hitting. Parenti explains in plain language why the American government is so despised around the world. He shows that the U.S. kills civilians elsewhere on a regular basis (e.g. 30,000 in Nicaragua during the Reagan years, 2 million in Vietnam), but makes no apology for it. He shows that the U.S. government cares about oil, money, and corporate profits far more than about global problems such as AIDS, hunger, or deforestation. His chapter on Afghanistan is particularly helpful, especially when showing that Afghan women were doing very well before the U.S. supported the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and fueled a war which killed 1.5 million Afghans.

As a college instructor, I will surely assign this to my students, who will enjoy debating Parenti's arguments. Highest recommendation!

I've only recently begun reading the works of Michael Parenti, but I can not recommend them enough to those uninitiated with his analysis of history and contemporarty American culture.

In particular, this work on the tragedies of 9-11 takes a very broad view, looking not only at the acts themselves or their immediate aftermath, but also at decades of preceding policies as well as the propaganda that accompanied them, AND how it relates to the ongoing and newly implemented policies of today.

Mr. Parenti is lesser known than many other social critics, and you won't often see or hear him on the commercial media, but I strongly suggest that you do yourself a favor by embarking on a google search for his writings and lectures. You'll find many of his talks available, in audio and text format (even some video), available free on the web. I've listened to many of them and found them to be entertaining, challenging and very informative.

So, please, if you're not familiar with Michael Parenti, don't take my word for it, listen or read for yourself. But I stronly suggest that you don't pass up the opportunity to hear his thoughts on these events. The book is short, very readable and thorougly enlightening. Do yourself a favor and listen to what he has to say.

Josh

This little booklet does economically what the President cravenly forbids us to do--put the events of Sept. 11 into historical context. In succinct fashion, Parenti shows how US-led elimination of progressives in Afghanistan paved the way for Muslim fundamentalism as the governing ideology and sole remaining resistance to globalization. He also demonstrates how the terror attack facilitates the right-wing agenda here at home, creating conditions ripe for Security State exploitation. I particlarly like his riff on that platitude about "a world changed forever". There is also a refreshing absence of breast-beating over the horrific nature of the attack, since American sponsored atrocities of similar scope are rather common fare in the rest of the world. And though much of the interventionist material is familiar to Parenti readers, reminders of those atrocities are required by context. Still and all, I wish he had deepened Chapter one, the most topical chapter, which could have used more detailed discussion of the immediate aftermath. Nonetheless, Sept. 11 cries out for those perspectives systematically filtered out of the media as too threatening to corporate rule. As always, Parenti's commentary remains an enlightening one, and deserves to be read by all, especially those well-meaning folks blinded by bumper stickers and the blur of red, white and blue.

My father served in the Marine Corps Air Service in China in the 1920's. When I was a child, I asked him what he was doing there. "Making the world safe for Standard Oil", was his reply. Parenti's essay brings focus and clarity to that statement uttered more than 40 years ago. Agree or not with Parenti, his devastating account of the antecedents to the horrible attacks of 9/11 and our response should give pause for careful reflection of what we are and where we are going. One point of disagreement. Parenti presents most Americans as uninformed victims of a careful, calculating government grand plan. My position is that most Americans are too damn fat and happy to care, if unknowlingly complicit as he aserts -- just look at election turnouts.

Michael Parenti's comments on the September 11 catastrophe are to the point: it was a horrendous shock for everybody and certainly for Main Street, chloroformed by the media's rosy picture of the state of the Union.

In a small book like this one, the author could not develop the deeper reasons, which, he beliefs, are behind this horrible attack and why the US is so hated in certain parts of the world: the US military interventions and the military aid to protect the various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors, to destroy reformist movements, labour unions, peasant organizations, democratically elected reformist governments.
In a nutshell: the imperialist goals of the US to create a global hegemony (a world of client states).

Although his analyses are globally right, he should have paid more attention to the fact that the attacks were carried out by Muslim fundamentalists, who were partially (the Taliban) financed by the US.

Like Gore Vidal, he fulminates rightly against the massive US defence budget, the biased media, monopolistic free trade, big money corporate capitalism, religion laced with violence and intolerance and environmental damage.

This is a harsh, but much needed, pamphlet, because it lays bare some undeniable facts, which are crucial for world politics.
Not to be missed.

I have all his books and many of his tapes. His work is well-researched and documented. He and Chomsky and others do a great job providing Americans with information that is not available in the mass media. However, most Americans do not go beyond Time Magazine and Dan Rather for their information and so they will likely be disturbed by the contents of this and other publications. It will indeed shake up your belief system but that's what truth does; it makes one uncomfortable and demands change.

excellent and brilliant, all points are backed by hard fact and proof. For those not knowing what to beleive in this day and age, stop listening to jingoistic corporate-media blitherings and take the time to step back and read this book. Parenti unabashedly and unapologetically deals the truth clearly and concisely. Many oppose him but thats no suprise to me: "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." ~ H.L. Mencken

I'm thankful that there are writers like Mr. Parenti who are willing to tell the truth about why the world works like it does. He's not a conspiracy theorist, as some allege. However, he logically explains that a powerful minority of the Earth's population has similar self-interests, thus creating a system that skews policies, economies, and laws in their favor.

September 11 was an opportunity for the world to wake up and change course toward a cooperative and peaceful future. Instead, the Bush administration, the oil/fossil fuels industry, and the military/weapons industry steered us toward more of the same old mistakes, arrogance, and ignorance. Mr. Parenti clues us in on who benefits from walking down the same road we've been so many times.

Incidentally, Oliver North never mentioned bin Laden in his Iran/Contra testimony, as a previous reviewer asserts, and this bit of right-wing mythology is well-debunked at snopes dot com (http://www.snopes.com/rumors/north.htm).

I'm thankful that there are writers like Mr. Parenti who are willing to tell the truth about why the world works like it does. He's not a conspiracy theorist, as some allege. However, he logically explains that a powerful minority of the Earth's population has similar self-interests, thus creating a system that skews policies, economies, and laws in their favor.

September 11 was an opportunity for the world to wake up and change course toward a cooperative and peaceful future. Instead, the Bush administration, the oil/fossil fuels industry, and the military/weapons industry steered us toward more of the same old mistakes, arrogance, and ignorance. Mr. Parenti clues us in on who benefits from walking down the same road we've been so many times.

Incidentally, Oliver North never mentioned bin Laden in his Iran/Contra testimony, as a previous reviewer asserts, and this bit of right-wing mythology is well-debunked at snopes dot com (http://www.snopes.com/rumors/north.htm).

What are the true motives of the gangsters of the Bush administration and their colleagues in congress as described by the learned Marxist-Leninist author? Well, to exploit 9-11 to strengthen the powerful interests they represent. They attempted to get their "stimulas package" i.e. even more tax cuts and tax refunds for the corporate world, through congress. The gave billions to the airlines with no strings attached, airlines which, as he notes had been in financial difficulties before 9-11. The problem with the airlines, Parenti basically says, is that they couldn't compete once the industry was deregulated. They too much competition so they couldn't make any profits from taking a huge slice of the market share, so their friends in D.C. came in to protect them from the invisible hand of the market. Of course helping the tens of thousands of laid off workers would be against free-market principles.

Mr. Parenti says that tax cuts for corporations is really illogical since these scum have been making more money than they ever have been. ....

And of course after 9-11 we heard from the administration's trade representative that we must confront Bin Laden and the other enemies of freedom by passing "fast track" legislation which legalizes the right of the president to sign trade agreements with scant congressional or any other involvement so now we can get more agreements which further the process whereby governments can no longer place hindrances on corporations plundering labor and resources unless in the extremely unlikely event that unelected representatives from the corporate world on secret tribunals declare them to be OK.

He notes that the United states governent is the greatest terrorist in the modern world. Our government has slaugtered millions of poor people lately in Afghanistan and trained death squads and overthrown governments that obstruct transnational corporations from plundering their countries. You know the list. He surveys the quite bad effects of U.S. intervention in Grenada and Panamma. Our government is the leader in pushing on poor countries neoliberal programs from the World bank and IMF which places countries in virtually permanent debt and forces them to privitize all essential services so that you don't get clean water or decent health care if you need it but rather if you can purchase clean water and health care at market price and if it is profitable for the private sector put such things on the market for you.

Our government provides massive aid which props up terrible dictatorships in the Arab/Moslem worlds, dictatorships which stifle civil society and give rise to hopelessness and despair give rise to Bin Laden type groups. He places Afghanistan under the Soviet backed regime as an example of the U.S. working to destroy a government which provided for the needs of its people. He notes that the regime gave free health care, gender equality, free education, land reform and so on to the deeply poor peasant masses and this provided the basis for the U.S. to support the landowning and Islamic oligarchy as represented by the Mujahadeen "freedom fighters"--barbaric killers significantly representing the Northern Alliance--, as early as six months before the Soviets actually invaded. U.S. support for Afghan Islamic reactionaries produced all sorts of results including powerful organizations created by Afghan war vetrans like Bin Landen full of many other war vetrans who have been responsible for many of the more infamous acts of retail terrorism in the past decade. He is right in alot of things on this issue but he seem to want to idealize the Soviet backed regime which on the whole governed in the matter of Saddam Hussein