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Exactly ten years ago today, University of Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen wrote an essay responding to the terrorist attacks that took place a day earlier. On September 12th 2001 he wrote that the destruction we witnessed on 9/11 was no worse than the destruction our government has wrought countless times on other nations. According to Jensen, “[f]or more than five decades throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism…If that statement seems outrageous, ask the people of Vietnam. Or Cambodia and Laos. Or Indonesia and East Timor. Or Chile. Or Central America. Or Iraq, or Palestine.” The essay was published by the Houston Chronicle two days later and generated a flurry of responses, both positive and negative. Professor Jensen himself received thousands of angry letters. The essay even provoked Larry Faulkner, President of the University of Texas, to denounce Jensen as “a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy,” amid called for his termination. Today, Robert Jensen continues to speak out against destructive US policy. He has written a number of books, his latest being All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and even managed to retain his job as a Professor of Journalism at UT Austin!

GUEST: Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin

Read Jensen’s Sept 12, 2001 article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0912-08.htm

Read Jensen’s latest 9/11 anniversary article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/09-15

Rough Transcript

Kolhatkar: Lets go back ten years ago, you wrote an essay called “Stop the Insanity Here” and I think the title of your piece got lost in all the controversy over asserting that the US had committed acts as terrorists as the 9/11 attacks and ten years later even many of those people who had hungered for war immediately after the terrorist attacks have come around to agreeing with you. But not when it mattered not before the wars began was your “crime” simply that you said what you said too soon for most people to want to hear that you didn’t allow people to revel long enough in thoughts of vengeance?

Jensen: That was exactly what even supporters of an anti-war position often said to me. I was accused of politicizing the tragedy immediately. My response was always quite clear, I and people in the anti war movement didn’t politicize 9/11 that day the people in Washington did who were calling for war literally from a few hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center. I remember sitting in my office on that day watching news that afternoon and Senator after Senator after Congressman after Bush official sat on television and said this means war, we’re going to war. The event was politicized by the nature of that cry for war that came out immediately and so I think those of us in the anti war movement and of course it wasn’t just me there were lots of people around the country articulating this point of view literally from that first day forward. We weren’t politicizing a tragedy, we were responding to an obvious reality which was people in power were going to use that tragedy to pursue war for other means. They were going to use the public bloodlust and call for revenge, but their goals were different. Their goals were to extend and deepen US power in those strategically crucial regions Central Asia, the Middle East the places where the world’s energy resources lie under the ground.

Kolhatkar: I want to quote another part of your essay which sadly has come true, you said let us not forget that the “massive response will kill people and if the pattern of past US actions hold it will kill innocents. Innocent people just like the ones in the towers in New York and the ones on the airplanes that were hijacked.” To borrow from President Bush “mothers and fathers friends and neighbors will surely die in a massive response”. And that has borne out Robert Jensen, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. I know you take no pleasure in seeing that prediction that you made come true.

Jensen: Well it’s a prediction but it’s a prediction like me predicting the sun is going to rise in the East tomorrow. I mean I think that’s about as obvious a statement as one could make and again, there were people all over the country and in fact all over the world, warning that that was in fact what was coming down the pike. I mean we know that warfare in the last two three four decades especially has been essentially about the killing of civilians and that’s no secret. You know I think the important thing to recognize is that those of us who made that argument not just a kind of reflexive anti war argument not just saying that war is bad, everybody, even people who argue for war know that war is bad, but I would say not only an anti war position but an anti empire position that is those of us who were critiquing the US foreign policy from a position of a critique of empire of that large long standing process of trying to build economic and military power around the world which has produced this, what Chalmers Johnson called empire of bases of military presence of the US all around the world. Those of us who were coming out of that analysis were simply observing the pattern and we were right and the piece I wrote for this anniversary really tried to grapple with the fact that we were right and we were ignored ten years ago. I would argue that we are still right and we are still being ignored. As you pointed out, even though a big chunk of the American population now rejects these wars, I don’t think that they embrace the kind of analysis that leads to the most compelling case against those wars.

Kolhatkar: Robert Jensen my guest’s latest piece “Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11” can be found online at commondreams.org and other publications we’ll post it on uprisingradio.org later today. Now it’s interesting to see President Obama try to differentiate himself from President Bush who began the two wars that Obama has continued. Obama’s famous first saying, “I’m not against all wars, I’m against dumb wars” As though there’s a difference between dumb wars and smart wars.

Jensen: Yeah, well I’m not against all war either. I’m not a principal pacifist. I think there are times in history that one can make an argument that violence is necessary to prevent larger evils. Usually that argument is best made when resisting empires like the US. Not on the behalf of empires but I think what’s interesting about that statement by Obama is the use of the word ‘dumb war’ it’s really not a question of dumb or smart. It’s a question about just or unjust, moral or immoral about whether the war in question is really designed to liberate, to free people, to produce a more just distribution of wealth and power around the world. Or whether it’s a war to control which is what the US wars of empire have been about. So within that imperial framework you can have a dumb war or a smart war. I mean you can argue that the invasion of Iraq was dumb because it wasn’t effective at shoring up US power in the Middle East but that’s an equally immoral argument and so I think getting out of the dumb smart and asking a fundamental question which unfortunately in imperial societies is too rarely asked which is, ‘What is the nature of the war? Which means what is the nature of the society?’ And I don’t think people in the US and I’m not just confining this to the neo-cons or the reactionary right or the Tea Party I think people in this country across the board are very reluctant to ask that fundamental question. Not just about the wars but about the nature of the society that has produced this system and these specific wars.

Kolhatkar: So lets look at the coverage of the 9/11 anniversary on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the media has been awash with coverage. But there was quite a difference between for example what people might have heard yesterday on Pacifica Radio and mainstream coverage using the 9/11 attacks and the anniversary of it as a time to reflect. Most mainstream media seemed to focus on those who died at the World Trade Center and on the hijacked planes but not on those who were killed in the name of those who died on 9/11 and the ten years after. Did you notice anything to the contrary in your evaluation of the media coverage?

Jensen: Well I didn’t survey every media outlet of course but I think your observation holds across the mainstream media. You know I always think of Noam Chomsky’s advice that when you want to understand a society like this one don’t go to the most reactionary media I mean you’ll learn something by looking at Fox News but that’s pretty predictable. Noam often says go to the liberal media in that case the New York Times or NPR. And I did listen to a lot of the National Public Radio coverage especially in the morning and it was exactly as you described but it focused on the victims in the United States. Certainly that’s an appropriate subject but when that’s not only the main focus but at some point it seemed like it was the only thing that one could talk about that day then as you point out what gets obscured is the rest of the decade and all of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The incredible displacement of people especially in Iraq. Millions of internally displaced people who had to move through Iraq as well as leave the country. I mean this was a tragedy of just incalculable proportions. But that was absent. Now I think the excuse or the justification to be more polite that the NPR news managers might offer is that we did not want to politicize that day. But of course that day was already politicized. There’s no way you can talk about 9/11 without it being political. That is it’s a question of power and how US power was used and in an imperial society that wants to deny these realities the kind of sentimentality that we saw on display yesterday was pretty predictable and I’m not against sentiment. You know, I’m a person. I have a heart. I grieve when loved ones die. I like to think of myself as a relatively normal human being but that’s not all 9/11 was and when it was reduced to that it was politicized but politicized in favor of the dominant culture and this acceptance of empire.

Kolhatkar: Well finally Robert Jensen, lets reflect on the anti war movement that came out of the 9/11 tragedy. Almost immediately there were responses all around the country with peace and justice groups forming, coalescing, forming coalitions to respond to what they saw like you did that there was a war coming. In your latest piece on the 9/11 anniversary you say we should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day but as responsible citizens we should also face a harsh reality while the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness that is why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti war, anti empire movement. Being right means nothing if we fail to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation. How should anti war activists some of whom have been fighting against wars for the last ten years, evaluate what has happened? Have our movements done nothing to curb the violence that has been unleashed on Iraqis and Afghans?

Jensen: Well here if we’re going to critique the way that much of the dominant culture is in denial of reality. I think we have to you know avoid that ourselves. And the fact is that there were some amazing feats of organizing in the last ten years. We can think back to February 15 2003 where world wide you know somewhere between ten and fifteen million people were in the streets to object. The reality is that they were not going to stop the war. And I think that number one we have to let go of the illusions that because we can put a lot of people in the streets in certain times and places that somehow people in power are therefore going to listen to us. And that’s the first illusion that has to drop. The second is to recognize that at certain moments in history it may not be possible to stop an imperial society that is going to wreak havoc on some other part of the world. And that the task is not to believe that we can stop the war but organize for the long term to try and change the direction of society over time. That’s not as satisfying as believing you can intervene in a moment to stop a war but it may be that that’s the reality. And I think that we had a meeting in Austin last night where a small group of us reflected on this and the conclusions we reached were number one there’s no grand strategy that we can take off the shelf and employ to make a better world that we’re at a period where some of those old strategies clearly aren’t working and I don’t think anybody’s come up with you know the perfect plan and so we’re going to experiment. A lot of that is going to happen at the local level grass roots organizing trying to build networks and institutions that can perhaps someday have a more direct influence on the political system. Maybe it’s a time to remember Mao and let a hundred flowers bloom.and see what seems to be the most effective but I’m not nearly smart enough. I’m just a poor boy from North Dakota who’s trying to make his way in the world I don’t pretend to have an answer

Kolhatkar: Well, Robert Jensen I want to thank you for joining us today. We’ll post your articles on uprisingradio.org

Special thanks to Bipasha Shom for transcribing this interview.