Wednesday 11 September 2002

Everybody knows. It's on the collective consciousness. In every online journal and community, every television and copy of print media, today is about 11 September 2001, the World Trade Centre Tragedy. So I am putting my two cents in, too, because yes it is important to mark the occasion, but I have some questions and opinions that I need to vent.

Yes, it was a terrible, unthinkably awful tragedy. I remember watching the news, and reading articles, and crying and crying. But, a year later, I wonder.

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Those fire-fighters and emergency services people who gave their jobs and lives are heroes, no doubt about it. Those who took down the Pennsylvania plane are heroes, no doubt about it. Those who lost their lives in the Towers and Pentagon attacks are innocent victims of a horrible terrorist attack. It was a terrible thing and I'm sad about it. Don't get me wrong.

But I also have another view, that will make me exceedingly unpopular with every USAn out there, and probably every Westerner, but I have to say it. I cannot think of any good way to say this, this will be a shockingly inarticulate and rambling explanation, not to mention simplistic in the extreme - I'm not a brilliant essayist like Barbara Kingsolver - but I honestly cannot blame those who planned and made those attacks, in fact I wonder why the hell there hasn't been more of that activity.

The USA is not my favourite country, and as for the current President ... well, don't get me started. But how, tell me how, in all honesty can Americans beat their chests and wail and tear out their hair over this attack when the USA has been committing terrorist acts, interfering in other countries' business, destroying democracies, supporting terrorist organisations with arms and funds, using up 95% of the world's resources on 5% of its fat, ugly population, and always with the fundamental belief that it is the USA's god-given right to do so.

The USA has refused to be included in the UN's war crimes investigations. Well, naturally. All the murders and killings and massacres and raping of a smaller nation's culture and wealth, whether in the Congo, El Salvador, Libya, Nicaragua, Iraq, Iran, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland et al were obviously done for the greater good of mankind. Truth, justice, liberty and the American Way, what a bloody  contradiction in terms (the use of "bloody" being both expletive and adjective).

And now the US is gearing up for another "justice" war (and if anyone really believes it's about anything other than greed and testicular-posturing and lust for power, please let me know), and they wonder why and how such a terrible, despicable thing could have been done to them, when three planes were flown into buildings symbolising the very worst of all the US has done - symbols of military and financial destruction.

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Listen here; I'm not supporting in any way, shape or form, what happened last year. For the record, I loathe and despise and am greatly afeared of fundamental Islam and the burning desire for jihad and revenge. I am, however, viewing certain aspects from those countries' point of view, seeing the USA as the aggressor, the destroyer, the taker of lives and culture and democracy, the haves to the have-nots. And I goddamn sympathise.

It's true that right now I'm biased. I look at the escalating Iraq crisis and I feel sick, too sick for words. I look at the leader of my "adopted country", with his warmongering and talk of blood debts, and the posturing peanut of a leader of my birth country, ditto, and I feel sick and ashamed. And I look around at what is happening in the city in which I now live, and the situation that has been created and encouraged and supported by the US and the British, and I feel sick.

Right now, the paramilitaries here in Belfast are re-arming (so much for the "unprecedented" decommissioning, back in October, that brought so much hope and joy) in anticipation of the fall of the Northern Irish political institutions. The Chief of Police has put reserves on full time alert - an act that has often been proposed or threatened, but now enacted. Fire-fighters and emergency services and ambulances will no longer go near riots and areas of violence, for fear of their own lives. The current terrorist threat and activity is being compared to 1998, and the time of the Omagh bombing.

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Such good times ... I'm living in a terrorist zone, surrounded by acts of meaningless violence that have nothing to do with any "cause" because "the cause" no longer exists. There is only hatred, bigotry and a community and culture built on that hatred and bigotry, desensitised and dehumanised by years and years of terrorism supported - in arms and funds - by the US and Canada, with Britain in the mix, just for fun.

So on this day, I really find it difficult to care about the USA and 11 September 2001. Compared to what has been done to so many countries, and the country in which I now live, three buildings going up in clouds of vapour is nothing. I had hoped that 11 September 2001 would awaken America's conscience as to what they have done to other countries and people; that they had committed worse acts of terrorism and atrocities because of hate and fear and bigotry and lust for power, and realise that it had to end.

As the US and the UK and Australia psyche up for air strikes and land war against Iraq, as Belfast, Northern Ireland, begins to re-arm and re-commence the fight for whatever-the-hell it is, I have no hope for the human race at all.

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In closing then:  I join others in grieving for those heroes and innocent civilians who lost their lives on 11 September 2001, but I also contemplate the devastation that America has wrought upon other nations and their heroes and innocent civilians, in the name of truth/justice/freedom, and I can't help thinking that it is hardly surprising, and not to be wondered at, or melodramatically wallowed in, that the US got a taste of its own brand of foreign policy.

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