The date was not September 11, 2001. It was July 4, 2000. And I was in lower Manhattan dragging around a video camera to chronicle Operation Sail 2000 - a big party where big boats circled the tip of Manhattan and big drunks from all over the Big Apple drank a lot of big beers. I was there from early morning to late evening and, after the big fireworks display, I proceeded to follow the masses to the nearest subway stop to get on the train home. Unfortunately, the subways were packed with people. Festering with humanity. And I had to pee. Bad.
It seemed like I oscillated from east to west as I walked up the island in search of a new subway station. I didn't know this part of Manhattan that well as I was pretty lost. Finally I found a large building that was still open. It was next to another very large building and everything in the vicinity seemed tremendously huge. I did my business in the bathroom there and came out. It was then that I looked up. And looked up some more. In fact, I couldn't really see the sky here. It was like being in one of those large fictional cities of the future you see in movies. "So this is the World Trade Center" I thought - feeling like an explorer catching his first glimpse of the Sphynx. "Wow."
***
I spent the summer of 2001 commuting between Manhattan, where I had an internship at a magazine, and Long Island, where I held a job in construction. I was in New York three days a week until August 1, when my internship abruptly ended and the department I was serving was downsized (ie. everyone I was working with got fired). I then waited for a few weeks before I was scheduled to begin my study abroad program in Copenhagen, Denmark.
At that point, I expected some things out of Denmark. I anticipated drinking a lot of beer, for example, and perhaps the ability to have relations with several nice looking Danish women. And ... I think that's about all I expected. Actually I was very happy to get away from sterile Washington, DC and out of the new George W. Bush-ruled United States. I really didn't like George W. Bush. Despised him in fact. Some people, during the Clinton years, seemed to have an irrational hatred of Clinton. I had something like that for Bush. We have a habit of electing southerners president - because southern states are even more provincial than northern states and refuse to even vote for a northerner for higher office. But Bush's Texas drawl just annoyed the ever loving shit out of me. I couldn't watch a minute of one of his speeches. I didn't need to anyway, as he rarely said anything worthy of discussion and still hadn't mastered the art of reading from a teleprompter.
So I had high hopes for Denmark, but they were shattered within a week or two. I found myself sandwiched in between preppy American students, whose conversations seemed so boring I couldn't really take part, and then when I did, I was ignored because whatever I said did not register with them, and Danish students, who looked like they worked for hours on their hair, listened to the worst music ever made, and seethed discomfort with the loud, rude American students - those students whose country sold weaponry to the Israeli Defense Forces to use on helpless Palestinian children. The immense amount of social pressure I felt weighing down on me, along with the reality that I had signed myself up for three months in a quiet Scandinavian city, brought me to go to the independent city of Christiania and buy some really good hash cookies.
I had never done a drug like that before. It was truly a psychedelic experience. A new plateau of consciousness. Not necessarily a good one - more like a rocking boat on a stormy sea. But when the ride was over I found myself content to be alone more often and not worry about those social pressures. So I sat in the computer lounge a lot. And I was sitting there in the computer lounge on September 11, 2001, when someone said ...
You know what they said. They said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Like everyone on planet Earth, I shrugged my shoulders. We all thought it was a little plane. Not a big plane. But there were two big ones. And both buildings collapsed. The immense sickness I felt in my gut was nearly too much to bear. I went next store to the bar and drank three or four shots of vodka, hoping to numb to uneasy pile of disgustingness at the bottom of my stomach.
My brother worked in Manhattan. Not in the trade center. But who was I to know where he was at that particular moment. An image of him, lying in a pile of rubble with his chest blown open and his guts spilled out everywhere came to me. I tried to keep it away, but it was there. He was there, his eyes glassy and fish-like, gasping for air and dying. I couldn't be around people. I even walked to the administrative building at our "campus" (really just a few buildings in Central Copenhagen) and hid in the toilet there - there where I could get some peace.
I called my father. He seemed sad but calm. He kept said that "a lot of people were in the towers" and "thousands of people are probably dead." I asked about my brother and he said that he didn't know where he was. How could he not know! The event had just happened. He called me back pretty soon afterwards and told me that all of our family was safe. And in a way, that was all I needed to hear. I could live with the deaths of the faceless, but I couldn't live with the deaths of my flesh and blood. It was selfish but true.
That evening I went to my dormitory and settled down to watch Paula Zahn on CNN quote FDR and watch the towers fall over and over again. I kept waiting to find out who did it. But that wouldn't come for at least two more days. The fellow Danish students were generally concerned for us. The image that remained in my head was the people jumping from the buildings. Everything about their deaths seemed so cold and forbidding. Here they were in a cold, gray, steel high rise of a building, surrounded by gnashing metal, and jumping in the still September air to their deaths in the wreckage below. There was something so dark ... so clinical about it. That's all there was. Just a leap and a death. And it was over for them. It was over for so many people. It was - for me - a passionless death. It was someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to commit suicide.
On the wall of the train station the next day was written a new word. A word I came to know quite well. It was "jihad" written in black magic marker. It meant "holy war." I was scared. There were people that sympathized with this act in my community. People that could look at me and see right through me. Who saw my death as justifiable, just because of the country on my passport. I couldn't fathom this mentality and it frightened me. I usually thought myself open minded. I wasn't, for example, shocked that people out there hated the US. But I couldn't understand how you could just mercilessly and purposefully kill random individuals and call it acceptable.
And because I couldn't understand that, I was frightened by it. And the thing is, I never thought of my people as "Americans." To me we were - and are - just people that happen to live in the US. What did all these people really know about our policies in Israel, for example. In what way did they actually contribute to whatever it was that fueled the hatred that led to widespread massacres of innocent lives? The whole thing just didn't make sense. When I found out it was teams of young men that carried out the strikes against us - two words came to mind "useful idiots."
I wiped the word "jihad" off the wall with my hand and later boarded a bus to the north of Denmark. In a town called Aalborg my friends were busy seducing some local girl but I just couldn't put on my party face. All I could talk about was the death. Maybe it was less real for the Californians and Georgians and Tennesseans on my trip. But for me, for that week, I couldn't really do anything. I couldn't even listen to music. All I could think about was the death. Up until that time, I was on a messageboard for leftwing activists from Washington. They were busy preparing to protest the forthcoming war on Afghanistan. I was so disgusted. 9/11 had hurt so many, but it hadn't damaged the academic left's desire to organize a protest to something - whatever that was.
One of my friends, a guy who also was active in activist circles sent me a letter sympathizing with me. "Those kids are idiots," he said. "We need to find whoever did this and blow them to pieces." And I even managed to listen to all of George W. Bush's speech on September 12, or was it 13th? I can't put it all together in my head now, it's all a bit blurry.
I'll never forget the face of my friend standing on the shore near Skagen though, in Denmark. He looked up at me and said simply "I'm scared." I had images of being drafted into service and being sent to fight some Biblical war. I even thought of staying in Denmark should someone try to force me to do anything. Whatever the case was, the idea of the government taking possession of my life didn't suit me. I was an American, this much was true. But I would always be myself first, without a nationality or a loyalty. My very heartbeat and breath seemed more important that anything at that moment. It could be seen as cowardice. Sure. But that's how I felt.
****
On the Saturday after the event, I put on music again. It was a sunny day. I opened the windows in my room and, for the first time in a week, the grayness of death had escaped my mind. I could go on. Some people in my dorm avoided the topic altogether. They refused to even discuss it. It was too much for them. For example, a new TIME magazine sat on the table in the communal kitchen and one fellow student, and American, refused to to even look at it. "Look, I just can't deal with it," he said.
Others, the Europeans, played with ideas. A German student reminded me of all the people that had died in Vietnam, felled by US bullets. "No country has a clean past, not even Germany" I mustered. "What has Germany done in the past 50 years," he responded. "Nothing," I said. "But what about the past 60 years." He was silent.
The Somali in our dorm was usually friendly to me. One day he and the German both toyed with the word "jihad" again, playing on my American paranoia. I don't recall exactly what they said, but I think it has something to do with the Somali conspiring to kill me. I couldn't find it funny.
And there were lots of Muslims - or people from Muslim countries - in Denmark. You could see them down at any nightclub on a Friday night. The guys would be slick in black clothing, and they almost always had blonde Danish girlfriends. I almost never saw a Muslim woman though dancing with a Danish guy. This, to me, always seemed strange. They seemed invisible. But maybe I don't know what I am talking about. If they were there, I didn't notice them.
These kids seemed integrated. But at every falafel hut there would be men with beards reading newspapers in Arabic. Their world seemed so different. They came to live here in Denmark, but they probably only spoke enough Danish to sell you your falafel sandwich. They didn't seem like the kinds of guys who would share a beer with you. They didn't even seem to look into your eyes. I remember one guy was reading a newspaper in Arabic with the photos of the hijackers. "What did it say?" I wondered. "What is he thinking." It seemed like there was a wall between us. Something that could not be bridged. I remember cooking sausage in the communal kitchen and the Somali student covered his plate so that the smoke from my sausage wouldn't taint his food.
On a lighter note I remember sharing some food with Pakistanis at the kitchen table. They were of this subpopulation - conservative and cut off. I was a sore thumb to them, an American with bad manners who hadn't shaved that weekend. But we did share some some good food. And nobody got their head chopped off.
****
As the month rolled on we attacked Afghanistan. It took a whole month to assemble a nice coalition. And in the end we had no Osama bin Ladin. It was he I wanted. He I wanted to be taken alive, put on trial, locked in a cell with Manuel Noriega and forced to eat pork sandwiches everyday. But they couldn't find him. Later, when I returned to the US in December, the drum roll for the war in Iraq had already started. The focus went elsewhere. Public enemy number one took a backburner to Saddam Hussein. It was all quite surreal.
Back in the US, things seemed to be actually the same. I was expecting something different, but other than a lot of funerals and a lot of American flags displayed I was glad to see the whole place hadn't gone to hell. I went to visit the trade center site with my parents - to see where this big thing had actually happened. On the blocks around the trade center site there were gentlemen selling souvenirs - commemorative books and flyers and anything you can imagine that would capture that special "moment" for you and your coffee table.
A huge crowd of people were gathered around the gaping wound in the earth, and I distinctly remember a small kid asking his father if there were any "dead people in there." But being there, actually looking at the ground, reminded me even more that it was something that happened. It was something in the past. A past event. All we could do now was look at this hole in the ground and think about it. And where could our thoughts lead to? Anywhere.
***
Today, nearly five years later, Osama bin Ladin is still at large. We never caught him - can you believe that? Can you believe the most powerful country on earth lacks the political or moral or actual will to reach into the caves of Pakistan and pull that squirming, self-appointed prophet out by his beard?
The US hasn't been attacked for five years, but it doesn't mean it won't be attacked again. All we New Yorkers can do is sit and wait. Will the authorities protect us? They can't even decide on a building design for the new trade center site. I'd personally prefer that no World Trade Center-like building goes in there. But who am I? Just a little peon on the Internet.
Because of the surreal turns that have taken place since 9/11 it's hard to figure out exactly what has happened since and what has to do with 9/11 and what doesn't. Is the Iraq War part of the response? Bush says "yes" but Bush's advisors had been planning the military removal of Hussein even prior to his presidency.
There have been other attacks too - in Bali, in Madrid, and last year in London. Each time the same images come back to haunt me. The grayness of death. The finality of mortality. The purposelessness of slaughtering innocents. In December 2001 I attended a rooftop party in lower Manhattan. Standing there looking at the absence of those two buildings, I couldn't help but think of how stupid those men who killed themselves and 2,900 others were on that day.
They thought they could change the world in an action. They thought that they could provide a cause and provoke an anticipated effect. But they didn't. They didn't accomplish anything. Their efforts were worthless. Their lives, useless. And in the end nearly 3,000 people were irrationally murdered for the selfish purposes of confused and sick individuals. There was no logic. There was only chaos and then more chaos.
How could anybody be so foolish?
30 kommentaari:
If wish some Germans would read your post.
I remember, when I first saw the 9/11 clips on TV on the same day, it was so imcomprehensable and unreal that my first reaction was "Woow, this is better than Hollywood." What an awful thing to think... it took some weeks to actually gasp what it really meant and what in fact had happened.
andry says
remeber I couldnt believe my eyes. watched the towres, the playn again and again and again. No, it cant be possible.
After short time, two hours or so, I thought: Thanks God, its somewhere over the ocean, not hear, in my small hometopwn.
After some hours I recognized - we all live in the small village.
It was truly one of the most beautiful days of the year.
It was clear,warm and not a cloud in the bluest sky I think I have ever seen.
I will never again look at a day that perfect, that beautiful in quite the same way.
You were in Europe and your brother in the city (NYC).
I was on my way to a meeting in a town about 45 minutes west of here.
In the car me and my friend of 20 years, just talking about our families and some work related issues.
With no radio on we had no idea what had taken place just 40 miles from where we were.
Up ahead to my left a long wandering plume of smoke made it way across the clear blue sky.
"Wow, that must be some huge fire" we remarked.
Arriving at our conference there
were somber looks on the faces of all who passed us as we entered the room. Getting a cup of coffee
we caught part of a conversation about a plane ..the Trade Center.
Then and only then did we begin to get bits and pieces of what was unfolding a mere 35 miles away.
When the first Tower came down everyone took their car keys and ran from the business center.
The crowded parking lot was filled with people, mostly women (I work in a female dominated business)
trying to get home.
Some had more then one family member who worked in the WTC.
A husband, a daughter,a son a father.
I tried to call my son, Ian. No answer on his cell.
He along with his girl friend would park at the Federal Building parking garage at 8:45 on most mornings.
# 1 Fed Plaza is next to the Towers.
She a FBI agent had gone to Virginia to take a course at the FBI head quarters.
I assumed that without her car and ID he would have no reason to be in the WTC area. No answer, I called my husband any word from Ian...No word,
My son Justin, so far away is this some world wide event? Is he safe?
Where is he? It's getting more difficult to call out on my cell.
My sister calls me. Where is Ian..."I don't know, I replied. She is screaming as she watches the people jumping from the buildings on the television.
My friend is silent in the car .
We return to out office and everyone is coming back trying to locate their family members.
One womans son had an interview
at the WTC for that morning.By now the cell service was poor at best and she was unable to reach her son.
He as it turned out had an appointment for late that morning and was fine.
My phone rings at my desk it my husband he has heard from Justin. I am so relieved. Now where is my son Ian? I am frantic.
Both towers are down and it is 2pm and I have not heard a word.
My desk phone rings ..."Mom...(quiet voice)
Mom...oh my god, Mom it's a nightmare in here." It's Ian ...he's okay.
In the days that followed we waited for him to get back home.
All the bridges were closed.
When you finally can reach out and hug your child after 3 days of this nightmare it is almost like a rebirth.
It would be days before we would hear that my cousin made it out of
Tower 2. My good friend who worked only one day a week downtown.
One day, just on Tuesdays, 9/11 was a Tuesday.
I hope she will post her story.
Justin remained in Europe until the end of the semester. I sent him a small American flag never thinking that it would not be something he should have. Blending in was most important, not looking
like an American....
He returned to a country that was changed forever on that very beautiful September morning.
every couple of months, as I try to sort out my miscellaneous drawer, I come across a credit card receipt from Windows of the World. It's dated 9/8/01 and I simply cannot bring myself to throw it away. That Saturday night, we'd taken my mom for a farewell dinner - the restaurant had just made a major revamp of their wine cellar and it was so worth the splurge. Matt and I vowed to come back much more
frequently - little did we know the
place only had two nights left to celebrate.
Matt and I were both leaving for work when we heard about the first
plane hit. This was from a random person on the street in front of or
building - and they made it sound like it was a small commuter plane.
by the time we got to work (god did I come to regret the random little good-bye kiss) we had much more information...
and from the hill that NYPH hospital is on, got to watch the towers collapse. and the transplant surgeons, big, burly men, cry.
half the transplant team packed up to go downtown. I, having just
graduated from internal medicine residency, got recruited to empty out the hospital of anyone who wasn't gravely ill. after all, we expected thousands and thousands injured. We had only 3 admissions that night I think...
next morning, I joined the team to go downtown. We emptied out the
hospital supplies - by now, we had a better idea of what the actual
needs were... eyedrops, bandages for blisters, antibiotics. after
another day or 2, lots of IV fluid - the tireless firefighters and volunteers simply would not take care of themselves and would bring themselves to utter exhaustion before being made to stop. The smells and fumes were overwhelming but almost no one wore masks... now we now
what that meant to a lot of people.
I met the nicest German Shepherd *ever*, Capo.
he bled to death on day 3.
I came from school, turned on the TV and I was just going through the channels when I saw the "breaking news" on CNN. There were WTC and people talking in the background and when I saw the 2nd plane hit WTC my world just stopped, because You don't think these things happen. Or when they do You, they are so...far away from You. But I had friends in America and I had been there just 3-4 years ago and I started to panic, because it felt like a WW III, that's the way both WW-s started, I thought. Next days were filled with sadness and fear. It was just too realistic and it seemed more like a Hollywood thing, but it wasn't.
Horrible, just horrible.
Blending in was most important, not looking like an American....
I told Canadians on the train in Sweden I was a Canadian too, but they didn't believe me. I guess I forget to say "eh."
If wish some Germans would read your post.
When I went to Berlin in October that year the joke I kept hearing was "ich bin laden" - I am not sure what it meant, but it was supposed to be funny.
I stayed in East Berlin and got sucked into a leftwing protest there. This wasn't like a leftwing protest in the US - there were people carrying the hammer and sickle at this rally. In the US the left does have its socialists and communists - but most of the rest of "new left" - the stuff I was involved in school - was plain social democracy - better schools, better environmental standards, better healthcare - like the Democratic party platform on steroids.
I wasn't prepared for the genuine communists. And I wasn't prepared for the Afghani immigrant girls pleading that the US not bomb their country. It was very chaotic, and I felt very confused. Did any of it matter anyway?
In Berlin I met one women, a young mother not much older than me, who was very deep into comparing the US to Rome and Al Qaeda to the Vandals and Goths. That this was the start of the downfall of western civilization. You know, very dark German catastrophic stuff.
I do think that the German press has taken the initiative to dig into the issues surrounding terrorism - and their detachment is valuable. Here in the US we are likely to get hysterical over anything that has to do with it.
9/11 clouds our judgement. And you need to think clearly and logically to deal with these threats.
9/11 clouds our judgement. And you need to think clearly and logically to deal with these threats.
On that crystal clear morning of 9/11.
a wealthy Saudi "street bully" made my thinking quite clear.
If the world continues to subscribe to the "my religion is better then your religion" theme,
and the Zealot clerics,preachers and members of other extreme religious organizations don't return to preaching peace and love then I must admit that I feel very little in the way of hope for our "Mother Earth."
Throughout history poverty has been the breeding ground for the followers of these kind of events people.
People look to these bullies for
a voice.
How do we change that, I have no idea.
Perhaps the people of world need to stand up to their religious leaders, oppressive governments and bullies where ever they find them, and as John Lennon said.
"Give Peace a Chance"...
It might be just that simple.
I am afraid of what it might take to get the world to see the value
in peace.
Basically, my day started when my friend called me, right after the first plane had hit the first tower. I had just moved into my place and I didn’t have my cable hooked up. So I ran downstairs to my neighbors and woke him up and turned on the TV. It was five minutes and BOOM — the second plane hit the tower. Being a former marine I thought the call was coming. And I got reactivated — they were about to draft me. I got a letter saying I had to report to nearest office within 72 hours. For a variety of reasons though, they decided not to take me. Another thing that day was that my mother works in Langley, Virginia. She told me that my father had left Dulles Airport in Washington, DC around the same time as the plane that hit the Pentagon. My mother was confused about the flight number and it was similar to the number of the plane that hit. So for a good hour, until we heard from him, I thought my father had been killed in the Pentagon.
Dorotheas story:
For me, I couldn’t believe what had happened. I had to go back to the site after the attacks just to realize what had happened to me. It was important to go back and face what it was. It was very hard to know what happened that day. I was on the main floor of the center. I couldn’t see upstairs. When I left the building I kind of felt like I didn’t knwo what was happening. I walked downtown and we were waiting for the Staten Island Ferry. When the buildings fell all of the people waiting screamed, ‘It’s a bomb’ and got under their seats. Later once the ferry had gotten past the Statue of Liberty and we looked back at Manhattan it really looked like New York City had sunk. We were really worried that there was no more New York anymore. From our view it looked like the Statue of Liberty was there and nothing else.
Bobs story:
I went to work and I was sitting at my desk and my desk was on the south side of the building looking directly at the trade center. I saw the first plane fly into the building. Someone made a comment that it was a late night for the air traffic controllers and someone else said that the pilot must have had a heart attack.
My wife was nearby and I called her and she said she was near the hotel. I told her she should go in and tell the manager of the hotel so that they can evacuate the people and then meet me over at the South Street Seaport. But she went over to manager of the hotel and told him what had happened and he didn’t believe her. He thought it was like a prank phone call.
Then Dorothea went over to the West Street exit of the hotel just to look outside and at the entrance to the hotel on West Street there were two cars, one on top of the other on fire and there was all the stuff that had been exploded out of the back of the North Tower, furniture, body parts, paper — you name it. It was on West Street.
****
Meanwhile in Bank of New York where I worked had a fire warden and the fire warden said that we couldn’t leave because of the debris falling from the North Tower. So they moved us to the north part of our building to try and keep us safe. There were a couple people that just left. Most everybody else stayed. Everybody was saying how are we going to get out of here and there were managers standing telling us that we couldn’t leave. People weren’t really sure what to do. When the South Tower fell they evacuated us.
****
When I was going through Chinatown, some of the shop keepers and ducttaped TVs onto railings outside of the shops so that people could see what was going on. And business was just going on as usual. Chinatown was unaffected. Everyone was just walking around, going to lunch, doing whatever they were doing. But they had these TVs outside so people could see what was going on.
****
We went back on weekly basis for the two months after it happened. It was kind of like therapy going back each time.
If hmm didn't make his comment, I wouldn't do it either. I am sort of shameful what popped up in my mind just as he is.
I was watching with my wife the scene when the first plane plowed into the tower. I jumped up and loudly declared; this is the gift to Bush from gods! Where the hell did this stuff come from, I haven't got a faintest idea? What I know though is, that it's extremely incorrect to have, but what are you going to do? However, little later on the unfolding drama started to consume me and all those horrible feelings took over.
"this is the gift to Bush from gods!"
I have no idea what country you live in and keep in mind that
I didn't vote for Bush but over 3000 inocent people, women, and children died that day..and some die daily from the effects of living and working on the WTC site.
"God's gift to George Bush?"
Was the Earthquake on the Pakistani border that killed all of those little school children a message to Osama Bin Laden.
Here we go again with "God".
If God exists then he/she is just sitting back watching the world try to learn it's own lessons.
He/she is saying "I sent them rules to live by and like teenagers
they never listened. 'I guess they will have to learn "their" lessons the hard way."
Get rid of the Clerics & Preachers of hate and feed and educate the poor.
Give young people all over the world a future with possibilities
and then they won't sign on with the "street bullies" who brain wash them to give up their lives for "72 brown eyed virgins."
Now there's a concept !!!!
The silent majority all over the world needs to get up off their lazy, procrastinating asses and do something!!!
Rent the Movie Seriana, George Clooney's movie
The bottomline is that the attack on New York produced nothing.
The World Trade Center was an illegitimate target. Al Qaeda killed innocent people that worked at an investment bank (Cantor Fitzgerald lost 660 employees) and an insurance firm (Marsh lost 300 employees) as well as 400 firefighters.
Those people had nothing to do with Palestine, Israel, Iraq or anything.
Here's a good story about the children of people who died in 9/11 - specifically children that never knew their dads or moms ...
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/sept-11-babies-now-ask-about-missing/20060908235409990019?ncid=NWS00010000000001
The World Trade Center was an illegitimate target...
Those people had nothing to do with Palestine, Israel, Iraq or anything
.....................................
groan ... illegitimate? think of the symbolic meaning of the buildings which were attacked and you shall understand why. had nothing to do? oh yes, most of them had: hypocritical, silent and slavish peons for the powers which suck the blood of other countries. sorry, but that's the bitter truth. still, they did not deserve to die like that
groan ... illegitimate? think of the symbolic meaning of the buildings which were attacked and you shall understand why. had nothing to do?
My response to the "gutless" anonymous post.
Truly people like you would have great difficulty signing in with an a name and a bio.
Here it is a again lets kill 3000 men women & children because some
" luni-tune" thinks that where they work, some as waiters, some as insurance sales people, 660 from Cantor who's policy on hiring the friends and family of it's employees resulted in 50 double and in some cases triple deaths within one family.
Yeah, thats the spirit thats going to bring about peace in the world.
Log on to the website of the 911
Widows that in response to their own Husbands deaths at WTC went to Afghanistan to help the women and families there who had their husbands killed in US bombings.
Since these people are so humane
a woman without a husband in many of these countries are deserted and left to beg for food to feed their children.
So "Anonymous" why don't you write back and tell all of us the good you have done for our planet Earth today!!!
I trust that you must reside in some small corner of it.
perhaps not......
think of the symbolic meaning of the buildings which were attacked and you shall understand why. had nothing to do? oh yes, most of them had: hypocritical, silent and slavish peons for the powers which suck the blood of other countries.
You are thinking of the World Bank and IMF, holmes. They are the ones everyone in the third world is in debt to - not some insurance firm in New York.
But you want to see further proof of my point - look around.
America is still here. In fact, we've probably killed more Muslim people SINCE 9/11 than PREVIOUS to 9/11.
There's 300 million of us. There are twice as many Americans as there are Russians. And we are not going anywhere. The World Trade Centers were open for less than 30 years. We've been open for more than 230 years.
And now we went in and smart bombed Afghanistan, and then we turned around and did it in Iraq. How many civilians have died in Iraq? Nearly 50,000.
A lot of good that act did. What were they expecting? We'd all convert and see the wisdom of Allah? They fundamentally misunderstood America.
You can't blow up a building in the US and do anything. They could nuke New York and it wouldn't change shit. Everyone else in the US would just go shopping the next day. If they nuked Washington, they'd move the capital to Des Moines.
We cannot be killed by conventional weapons.
Truly people like you would have great difficulty signing in with an a name and a bio.
Here it is a again lets kill 3000 men women & children because some
" luni-tune" thinks that where they work...
......................................
Firstly, I did write the comment under my own name but somehow it got to be posted as anonymous, I don't know why. My name is Sven,and - unlike you Martasmimi - it's my real name. Unlike you, I do not bother to sign up (and leave no bio!) just I feel ithcy to comment upon some issue.
Secondly, I did not say (nor do I think so) that they should have died; a violent death is always terrible - yes, even in Iraq by an American hand and bullet.
Thirdly, yes, men get killed because of who and what they work for - think of soldiers for example. Insurance people are the soldiers of that insurance company which has the blood of innocent children on their hands; the name of the company cannot be attacked so they attack the building in which the company is situated. Simple. Use your own brains. That is not to say that I approve of that, on the contrary.
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And now we went in and smart bombed Afghanistan, and then we turned around and did it in Iraq. How many civilians have died in Iraq? Nearly 50,000.
A lot of good that act did.
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So this was a smart thing to do. So it's good to kill non-Americans, so the death of a non-believer in the American's right to take and squander other countries' resources is a good thing? Or what was the good you had in mind?
You can't blow up a building in the US and do anything
Oh, and you ca blow up a country after another? And you can do anything? Interesting point ...
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So "Anonymous" why don't you write back and tell all of us the good you have done for our planet Earth today!!!
I wrote this comment in the hope that people like you would long at last start thinking with your own brains instead of being too emotional and living in the past, doing nothing but complain about how you have been wronged.
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Everyone else in the US would just go shopping the next day.
To the very point, forsooth: you'd go shopping instead of trying to figure out what went wrong and why you were attacked. Consume, consume more. That's the fundamental America; there's no misunderstaning this.
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I trust that you must reside in some small corner of it.
I live in the EU with the rest of about 460 million men and women and children. A bit more than 300 million, don't you think?
Thirdly, yes, men get killed because of who and what they work for - think of soldiers for example. Insurance people are the soldiers of that insurance company which has the blood of innocent children on their hands; the name of the company cannot be attacked so they attack the building in which the company is situated. Simple. Use your own brains. That is not to say that I approve of that, on the contrary.
Oh dear, now we are really mired in existential questions. If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one else around, does it make a sound?
If I loan a dollar to a man who uses that dollar to buy a gun and then goes and kills some one, am I an accessory to murder?
If I pee in a stream and somewhere down river a young boy drinks of that stream, did I knowingly pollute his drinking water?
The answer to these questions is that there is no answer.
There is no accountability - and even if you try to hold people accountable, the odds are that the futile and chaotic human-devised system will nevertheless step on someone along the way, creatic more BAD KARMA.
And these things can be blamed on secretaries who work at investment banks on New York, or janitors who muck stalls at the World Trade Center?
Where is an innocent soul to escape to? Academia, where he can apply for some federal grants to fund his research - perhaps the same federal monies that sloshed with dollars spent on weaponry for the Israeli Defense Forces.
And who gets to judge who is most guilty? You? Me? Some morons who think they speak for a God that doesn't exist?
Here are two truths. All laws are man made. And man is inherently irrational.
The attack on the World Trade Center was irrational. The response, thus far, has been as well.
h, and you ca blow up a country after another? And you can do anything? Interesting point ...
I didn't support the invasion of Iraq, but if I fell into the hands of terrorists, they'd cut off my head as well as any other.
My murder to them is justifiable according to their nihilistic logic - that the death of some guy with the US passport means something in this world.
It doesn't matter who I am or what I think or what I believe in. I am just a tool for them to play in their game which goes nowhere.
Ask yourself, how many suicide bombers have splattered themselves in busses and markets across Israel?
What have they accomplished? They accomplish nothing, just as the Al Qaeda that attacked us five years ago accomplished nothing.
They just get more of their people killed. And so on and so on. They think "If I do A, then we will get B" - but what really happens is they set out to do A, but they wind up doing C. And instead of getting D, they get M - or any random letter.
Humanity doesn't work like that - and least in a world responding to terrorism. Terrorism hasn't accomplished squat in 35 years.
Look at the ETA in Spain. They lost. The new IRA in northern Ireland. They lost too. The Chechens in Russia. They lost and keep on losing.
I repeat. They don't accomplish anything. Because the logic of Islamic fundamentalists doesn't make sense in the Western world. It's like trying to plug an American made clock into a European electrical outlet, without an adapter.
It just doesn't work. And if you plug the clock in with an adapter,the clock either runs too fast or too slow because of the differences in voltage.
It's pure masturbation. Just a way to pass the time.
Look at the ETA in Spain. They lost. The new IRA in northern Ireland. They lost too. The Chechens in Russia. They lost and keep on losing.
Irish - a nation and culture older than that of the occuping English; a victim of aggression.
Chechnya - a nation and culture older than that of the occuping Russians; a victim of aggression.
Basques - a nation and culture older than that of the Spanish and French who deny the Basques their chace to have an independant state as well; a victim of aggression (you can continue that list yourself).
Their common denominators are that are smaller than the bullies, and that they will continue fighting until they win because their cause is just.
The problem with you, Americans, is that you do not know history - nowadys you call anyone a terrorist who fights for the same rights you, Americans, take for granted and hold so dear.
Americans as a nation are rahter young. What are you doing? - It's called the same: aggression. And aggression begets aggression, wheteher physical or financial, it does not matter. Let me give you an example: after Lithuania became independent and started looking for investment in the Mazeikiu Nafta oil company, the U.S. pipeline manufacturer Williams International was given a chance to buy stock in the company in the hope they would play fair game(Lithuanians did not want Russians to as partners although the latter made a bid). Did they? Of course not, they sold their share to Yukos, a Russian giant, and made a huge profit, leaving Lithuania only in control of 40% of the shares. It was their plan from day one - they did not care the Lithuanians were only striving to secure their fincanicial independence. Certainly, at the state level you do, you never recognised the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union. The problem is that your words and deeds do not match ...
Do you think the Lithuanians should love you for that of support you in the war against you-know-what?
Are you really so naive as to think that Russia is trying to control terrorists in Chechnya? I suggest you took a closer look at the map then - they are doing the same as you are in Iraq. Should we love Russians and American for what they do?
You know what - I do not know ...
If you a unable to fix something in a peaceful way, to protect your place under the Sun, you might just feel this maddening desire to resort to something you would not normally even dare to think of. Despair. The Slough of Despond. Even death seems better.
Irish - a nation and culture older than that of the occuping English; a victim of aggression.
Chechnya - a nation and culture older than that of the occuping Russians; a victim of aggression.
Basques - a nation and culture older than that of the Spanish and French who deny the Basques their chace to have an independant state as well; a victim of aggression (you can continue that list yourself).
Their common denominators are that are smaller than the bullies, and that they will continue fighting until they win because their cause is just.
Terrorism is a tactic. And those that have adopted it have - so far - failed. Look at Munich in '72. They killed the whole Israeli Olympic Team. And today, 34 years later, the Palestinians are in the same situation. So it accomplished nothing. Just more useless death.
The problem with you, Americans, is that you do not know history - nowadys you call anyone a terrorist who fights for the same rights you, Americans, take for granted and hold so dear.
Before I was an American I was (mostly) and Italian. The area where they came from was ruled at various times by Greeks, Romans, Normans, Hapsburgs, and France. Yet they remained there lodged in the rocky soil. And when Garibaldi unified Italy in the 1860s he didn't sail a ship full of explosives up the Seine and blow up a bunch of French aristocrats to make his point. He took Italy piece by piece with an army.
The Irish Republicans of the first part of the 20th Century were men enough to fight their enemy in the streets.
And even in America, where we have no sense of history, we formed our own army and drove the British empire off our soil.
But look at the cowards in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yes, New York. They can't muster an army because they don't have enough popular support. So they fly planes into buildings and blow up marketplaces in Baghdad. And still they accomplish nothing. It's not because they don't try. It's because they have no genuine goals. They fight for the sake of fighting.
Are you really so naive as to think that Russia is trying to control terrorists in Chechnya? I suggest you took a closer look at the map then - they are doing the same as you are in Iraq. Should we love Russians and American for what they do?
Iraq is a false 19th century colonial construct. It was troubled then and it's troubled now. Believe me, they had enough trouble before we stuck our nose in that mess. That's what earned them Saddam Hussein as a leader. Now, it doesn't make a difference what we do. It's not really in our hands. They have their constitution. They have their government. If they have the will, they can protect it.
As for Chechnya, nobody wants to shake hands with the guys who pulled off the Moscow Theater hostage situation in 2002. And look what that act got them - nothing. Chechnya is still under the thumb of Moscow, Theater crisis or no Theater crisis.
Again it proves that terrorism as a tactic doesn't work.
As for Chechnya, nobody wants to shake hands with the guys who pulled off the Moscow Theater hostage situation in 2002. And look what that act got them - nothing. Chechnya is still under the thumb of Moscow, Theater crisis or no Theater crisis.
Again it proves that terrorism as a tactic doesn't work.
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What should they have done then? Sing as the Estonians did?
What should they have done then? Sing as the Estonians did?
Isn't it funny that Gandhi was able to throw off British colonial rule in India by mostly non-violent means, and Estonia was able to regain its independence by mostly non-violent means, but groups that use what are known as terrorist tactics in the West seem to fail over and over again?
Look, I am not sure I have some, if any answers. But I do think that terrorist tactics don't work to accomplish much, or if they do, they haven't worked yet.
ok. thank you for having withstood my ramblings :)
ok. thank you for having withstood my ramblings :)
ok. thank you for having withstood my ramblings :)
You mean you don't want to keep arguing on the Internet forever? :)
No, not that. I just thought that it would be impolite of me to squander your time like that. btw, your blog about estonia is amazing - what on earth makes you tick? apart from the obvious of course:) you seem to love that country and the people. truly amazing
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