Perhaps today, six years after, it is somewhat more clear why a bunch of Saudis saw it necesary to take Pax Americana out of America’s living rooms and bring it to its doorstep.
Jon Stewart on US policy in the Middle East
Although I recognise the historical inevitability, I just hate it when people die in the name of peace…
I knew I’ll find a post regarding 11/09. I could bet on it. 🙂
I remember that day and all that came after… such a bad feeling knowing people can be so evil.
I guess it’s me and a zilion other people out there 🙂
And I totally know what you mean…. 😕
Yeah, but hey, there are some great people too in this bloody world:)
p.s. I’ve borrowed sth. from your Firm for a post. Hope it’s okay… at least for some publicity 🙂
Of course I don’t mind 🙂
Publicity is good 🙂
I will never forget that day either. First thing I did was call my friend in south Georgia. Such a feeing of disbelief followed by an emptiness greater than life. When the first shock subsided, my first thought was… oh no, this means Bush is going to start wars in the Middle East and I put a great big sign on the first page of my cattery website that read “Say No to War”. And received hate mail on account of it. I do wonder how many of those people who were so resentful of my calls for peace then would back their vitriolic posts today.
Peace and love to all. Always.
It’s the flocking effect. On 9/11 everyone was so shocked that even French and German papers carried headlines saying “We’re all American”, but when the shock has subsided and given way to anger the whole thing became just one huge chip on the global poker-table.
It’s just that some people refuse to accept the fact that 9/11 was a result rather then a beginning of a foreign policy going terribly wrong.
I fully agree with that last assessment. I remember saying to my then- flatmates that the Americans shouldn’t have been surprised that this happened and why it did. Besides my ramblings, you could hear a lot of ‘they had it coming’ rhetoric in public places in those days…
Exactly… The only problem is, that from the perspective of Middle East, “they” includes Europe as well 😀
they had it coming
To quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven: “We’ve all got it comin’.”
My first feeling, though, after a wave of numbness and shock was that, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “this is the way the world ends.”
As I said: I would imagine that from a perspective of a disilusioned terrorist (the fact that currently Arabs are in vouge is of little importance) “they” includes pretty much everyone who is not “us”.
So even in the short run the European “they-had-it-coming” attitude was (although understandable) totally misplaced, as witnessed by people of Madrid and London some years later.
It was, however, the scale of the attack which left everyone breathless. But I would argue that a lot could have been done to prevent it in the first place.
In Spain the attacks percipetated a change in power. In the US, the attacks percipetated a creation of a nearly-perpetual state of war.
In Britain, however, the attacks only percipetated a delay in that day’s five o’clock tea 😀
On that note, I would like to quote Benjamin Franklin (just as I did over at dr. filomena:
“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
“…a result rather then a beginning …”
jep, it was pretty much a result. Absolutely. And not the first attempt. Didn’t they already try to blow up the WTC with a bomb years ago? Not regarding which of the thousands of versions what really happened is right: in my opinion it showed that the times where superior firepower was enough are definitely over. Maybe this is why it was such a shock for the “last remaining superpower”.
However I doubt that any of the people who died that day was responsible for anything that pissed off the extremists. Killing infidels in the name of god was something we practiced several hundred years ago. So I think this attitude is quite dated. The right attitude would be something like this:
I really don’t care, in fact I wish him well,
‘Cause I’ll be laughing my head off
When he’s burning in hell.
But as long as somebody forces (or tries to do so) others to adhere to a certain political system or religious belief there will never be peace here.
According to one philosophic question in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy I’m quite sure it was false to come out of the water 😉