Like a ship pulling away from shore, time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh ten or twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. This is something that the statisticians in Berlin, Moscow, Tehran and Riyadh know quite well when they count up their numbers. But compound death is not a statistic, it is incomprehensible. The banality of the media coverage of September 11 reveals the struggle of grappling with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.
This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.
The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.
The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.
When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet faced smiling boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.
"Where were you when the planes hit," is an attempt to orient us in time. But the question is mostly insignificant, an attempt to make the impossible seem real. The businessman covered in ash and stumbling over the Brooklyn Bridge and the Seattle housewife waking up to see news coverage of it on television are more human fragments of a thing that is more than human. War.
War fragments perspectives, and though we have grown used to formal stories of war which began with a legal declaration of war and end with a surrender, these things have as little to do with war as a coroner's statement has to do with death. The laws of war, the treaties and the formalities are ways that human civilization attempts to make the wild force of human nature into a manageable thing.
Europeans and their colonial descendants may pen laws of war, but only they are constrained by them. In the real world outside the dinner parties of Washington D.C. and Brussels, there are no laws in war. Islamic law which has regulations for which foot to use when entering a bathroom (the left foot) and which side to sleep on (the right) has very few laws of war that cannot be nullified by necessity or even whim. On the battlefield, Islamic jurisprudence is boiled down to, Do what thou wilt in the cause of Allah, that is the whole of the law.
The West has tried to make war into a moral force by governing its means, without regard to its ends. But in the Muslim world, war is moral so long as its ends are Islamic-- the means are a technicality that Islamic scholars may squabble over the way they do over every petty matter, but in practice it's anything goes so long as it serves the Ummah. And even those technical debates over civilians in war and terrorism are governed by the ultimate welfare of the Ummah.
What happens when people who believe that the ends justify the means fight against people who believe that the ends never justify the means? Ten years later we can see that war wrapping up in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the people who believed that the ends justify the means having gained their ends-- while we have lost both the ends and the means, not going far enough for the hawks and going too far for the doves.
This is the broken way of war that we practiced in Vietnam and Korea, constrained by invisible boundaries of our own making that did not prevent us from bombing cities, but did keep us from wiping out entire villages. To our enemies, these morals of ours seem every bit as senseless as their foot washing regulations seem to us. Why do the people who bombed Dresden beat their breasts over Mai Lai, and why was Shock and Awe acceptable, but not Abu Ghraib?
The answers invariably come down not to some externally consistent philosophy or divine law, but our need to feel good about ourselves by setting up a code that makes us seem moral in our own eyes. That makes us feel good about war. And the first law of that code is that killing en masse without really meaning to is more moral than pointing a gun at a man and pulling the trigger. This is the morality of the firing squad which puts enough dummy cartridges out there that no one can be sure who fired the shot. No wonder drone attacks are a favorite of an anti-war administration putting as much automation and distance as possible between the soldier and his target.
Laws tell much about a people. Our need to legislate the use of force, and their need to legislate everything but the use of force. But as much as politicians recite such homilies about our morality, the truth is that we are not so much moral as we are conflicted. We have learned to be afraid of ourselves, of our lurking potential for evil.
It is a fear absent in Islam where a man who serves Allah cannot be a devil no matter what he does, but we know all too well that the devil can come wrapped in a saintly cause. We know it so well that we sometimes forget that while devils do occasionally come wearing halos, mostly they come wearing horns. And that is something we have forgotten to our great pain and woe, that we are not always our own enemies.
A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow, and ten years of a war that was not truly a war. But it is still this conflicted unwar that the tenth anniversary marks. A war that can never end because it never truly began.
But what is war anyway but a framework for violence, which the Muslim world hardly needs. While we search around for an enemy to declare war on, all they need is a Fatwa with a clerical argument dubbing us the enemy, our nation, our soldiers, our civilians and our children. All of us.
We in our war against mancaused extremist explosions have no comfortable framework except nation building, which pretends that war is really the Peace Corps with bombs, habitat for humanity with the homes blown up before they can be rebuilt. And that just adds to the fragmentation and the inability to tell the story.
Are we fighting because they attacked us or because girls in Afghanistan can't go to school or for some figment of regional stability in a country where stability isn't even a word. That lack of clarity is fragmentation. And fragmentation makes all stories seem senseless.
The pain and shock of the attacks gave us a measure of clarity. We were hit hard enough that we felt like justice was on our side and we no longer had to feel guilty for standing up for ourselves. The need to think about everything temporarily went away, we were no longer processing, we were reacting and it felt good. For a brief shining moment the country became aware of external enemies and was united. We stopped being fragments warring with each other over power, influence and race, and we became Americans.
Had that clarity been sustained, the country today would be a dramatically different place. But it diminished and fell apart, and our identity went with it.We were once again our own enemies and the real enemy went unrecognized. Now the anniversary of the attacks has become like the memory of an old war that was fought once, but no longer really matters. The nation is at war, but it doesn't know that it's at war. And those who know that we are at war, often can't even state who the enemy is.
Without that clarity and unity, all we have are fragments, individual stories without the means to wrap them together. Stalin was right, a million deaths is a statistic unless you find a way to bring together what it means to an entire people. For the Holocaust, it was "Never Again." For 9/11 it was a more ambiguous, "United We Stand", but what do we stand for and what do we stand against?
The anniversaries have long since been reduced to a national therapy session, with pain released and healed in the media's own talking cure. But it isn't the pain that matters, it's what we do with it that counts. We have not yet lost the war-- but we are losing it, and unless we decide as a nation what we stand for and what we stand again, then we will lose. It will take time, like our banks we are too big to fail, but given enough appeasement, enough immigration and enough terrorism-- it will come.
Ten years of war have passed, and before that a thousand years of war with lulls and pauses, but the din of the scimitar being sharpened for war never truly stopped. Each year that passes is a chance to learn the lessons of the years that have gone by and to remedy their mistakes. The best way to pay tribute to the dead is to unlearn our mistakes so that what happened to them will not happen again. Everything else is the fragmentation of self-indulgence, the therapy of tears, the sensitivity of grief, that will ease our pain, but not our fate.
Every man and woman must defeat their own doubts before they can defeat the enemy. Only then they can they battle the false reasonableness of the consensus that denies war and the enemy, with a consensus that briefly formed after the attacks and that forms even more briefly after every attack, to see ourselves in relation to the outside enemy. To unite against that enemy and to rebuild our identity around a common conflict with those who want to subjugate and destroy us. It may be ten more years before we are ready to do that, but as long as it takes-- that unity is our only hope.
The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the true one and the more distance we put between ourselves and that reaction also increases our distance from the truth. Ten years of war have added layers of distancing between that first raw reaction when we saw the towers fall. And it is important this day to return not only to the emotion of that moment, but to the clarity that is our greatest weapon. The clarity that will one day end this war.
This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.
The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.
The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.
When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet faced smiling boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.
"Where were you when the planes hit," is an attempt to orient us in time. But the question is mostly insignificant, an attempt to make the impossible seem real. The businessman covered in ash and stumbling over the Brooklyn Bridge and the Seattle housewife waking up to see news coverage of it on television are more human fragments of a thing that is more than human. War.
War fragments perspectives, and though we have grown used to formal stories of war which began with a legal declaration of war and end with a surrender, these things have as little to do with war as a coroner's statement has to do with death. The laws of war, the treaties and the formalities are ways that human civilization attempts to make the wild force of human nature into a manageable thing.
Europeans and their colonial descendants may pen laws of war, but only they are constrained by them. In the real world outside the dinner parties of Washington D.C. and Brussels, there are no laws in war. Islamic law which has regulations for which foot to use when entering a bathroom (the left foot) and which side to sleep on (the right) has very few laws of war that cannot be nullified by necessity or even whim. On the battlefield, Islamic jurisprudence is boiled down to, Do what thou wilt in the cause of Allah, that is the whole of the law.
The West has tried to make war into a moral force by governing its means, without regard to its ends. But in the Muslim world, war is moral so long as its ends are Islamic-- the means are a technicality that Islamic scholars may squabble over the way they do over every petty matter, but in practice it's anything goes so long as it serves the Ummah. And even those technical debates over civilians in war and terrorism are governed by the ultimate welfare of the Ummah.
What happens when people who believe that the ends justify the means fight against people who believe that the ends never justify the means? Ten years later we can see that war wrapping up in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the people who believed that the ends justify the means having gained their ends-- while we have lost both the ends and the means, not going far enough for the hawks and going too far for the doves.
The answers invariably come down not to some externally consistent philosophy or divine law, but our need to feel good about ourselves by setting up a code that makes us seem moral in our own eyes. That makes us feel good about war. And the first law of that code is that killing en masse without really meaning to is more moral than pointing a gun at a man and pulling the trigger. This is the morality of the firing squad which puts enough dummy cartridges out there that no one can be sure who fired the shot. No wonder drone attacks are a favorite of an anti-war administration putting as much automation and distance as possible between the soldier and his target.
Laws tell much about a people. Our need to legislate the use of force, and their need to legislate everything but the use of force. But as much as politicians recite such homilies about our morality, the truth is that we are not so much moral as we are conflicted. We have learned to be afraid of ourselves, of our lurking potential for evil.
It is a fear absent in Islam where a man who serves Allah cannot be a devil no matter what he does, but we know all too well that the devil can come wrapped in a saintly cause. We know it so well that we sometimes forget that while devils do occasionally come wearing halos, mostly they come wearing horns. And that is something we have forgotten to our great pain and woe, that we are not always our own enemies.
A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow, and ten years of a war that was not truly a war. But it is still this conflicted unwar that the tenth anniversary marks. A war that can never end because it never truly began.
But what is war anyway but a framework for violence, which the Muslim world hardly needs. While we search around for an enemy to declare war on, all they need is a Fatwa with a clerical argument dubbing us the enemy, our nation, our soldiers, our civilians and our children. All of us.
We in our war against mancaused extremist explosions have no comfortable framework except nation building, which pretends that war is really the Peace Corps with bombs, habitat for humanity with the homes blown up before they can be rebuilt. And that just adds to the fragmentation and the inability to tell the story.
Are we fighting because they attacked us or because girls in Afghanistan can't go to school or for some figment of regional stability in a country where stability isn't even a word. That lack of clarity is fragmentation. And fragmentation makes all stories seem senseless.
The pain and shock of the attacks gave us a measure of clarity. We were hit hard enough that we felt like justice was on our side and we no longer had to feel guilty for standing up for ourselves. The need to think about everything temporarily went away, we were no longer processing, we were reacting and it felt good. For a brief shining moment the country became aware of external enemies and was united. We stopped being fragments warring with each other over power, influence and race, and we became Americans.
Had that clarity been sustained, the country today would be a dramatically different place. But it diminished and fell apart, and our identity went with it.We were once again our own enemies and the real enemy went unrecognized. Now the anniversary of the attacks has become like the memory of an old war that was fought once, but no longer really matters. The nation is at war, but it doesn't know that it's at war. And those who know that we are at war, often can't even state who the enemy is.
Without that clarity and unity, all we have are fragments, individual stories without the means to wrap them together. Stalin was right, a million deaths is a statistic unless you find a way to bring together what it means to an entire people. For the Holocaust, it was "Never Again." For 9/11 it was a more ambiguous, "United We Stand", but what do we stand for and what do we stand against?
The anniversaries have long since been reduced to a national therapy session, with pain released and healed in the media's own talking cure. But it isn't the pain that matters, it's what we do with it that counts. We have not yet lost the war-- but we are losing it, and unless we decide as a nation what we stand for and what we stand again, then we will lose. It will take time, like our banks we are too big to fail, but given enough appeasement, enough immigration and enough terrorism-- it will come.
Every man and woman must defeat their own doubts before they can defeat the enemy. Only then they can they battle the false reasonableness of the consensus that denies war and the enemy, with a consensus that briefly formed after the attacks and that forms even more briefly after every attack, to see ourselves in relation to the outside enemy. To unite against that enemy and to rebuild our identity around a common conflict with those who want to subjugate and destroy us. It may be ten more years before we are ready to do that, but as long as it takes-- that unity is our only hope.
The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the true one and the more distance we put between ourselves and that reaction also increases our distance from the truth. Ten years of war have added layers of distancing between that first raw reaction when we saw the towers fall. And it is important this day to return not only to the emotion of that moment, but to the clarity that is our greatest weapon. The clarity that will one day end this war.
Comments
In WW2, Pearl Harbor was just as awful but we did something about it, and we won it in 4 years and that was that.
ReplyDeleteToday our memorials show us pining away of a nation that has become emasculated and self pitying rather than strong and decisive. We didn't throw pity parties back then, we did something about it.
We did not pity the Nazis but we pity this political movement and that is what it truly is, a political movement bent on conquest. Yet we have not conquered one nation that is behind this movement, we just linger on there.
Too many are trying to change American culture for us to be united enough to stand for much of anything today.
It's funny how the MSM ignores the fact that muslimes tried to take down the WTC some 7 or 8 years before 9-11. But maybe it's not funny at all...
ReplyDeleteIslamic fundamentalism is the enemy of the free world..
ReplyDeleteYou address destructive constraints on warfare caused by the false choices inspired by false morality.
ReplyDeleteI think that the reality it worse. We have spent our blood and treasure to enforce Sharia law enshrined in the newly created constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The tragic consequences are massacres of indigenous Christian populations without a Western response.
Thus all was lost when those constitutions were written. We have "unwittingly" thrown-in our lot with evil. There can be no separation or evolution in those societies.
As a result, even total war, with the single constraint of Islam within constitutions, cannot lead to victory.
DG wrote: The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the true one and the more distance we put between ourselves and that reaction also increases our distance from the truth.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely correct. All this "conflicting" does no good except to sow the seeds of more "conflicting", then despair, there are no blacks and whites but merely shades of gray, and finally, handing over victory to the enemy.
As I wrote previously
I remember the white hot anger on 9/11, not just Americans, but of all Westerners. In England, the anger was palpable. We have our differences, but we are united when attacked. The nation was waiting to go to war.
It was obvious that 9/11 was a Pearl Harbour event, and Islamic nations would pay a price that would bring them all down. After Pearl Harbour not only did we defeat Japan and Germany, with no quarter given, but went on to crush and obliterate the ideologies that drove them. The result is a decent and democratic Germany and Japan, never again to return to their self-destructive ideologies.
The actual response after 9/11 has been weak and self-defeating. The result is that Islam is empowered worldwide, and more so in America. What else can one expect when the immediate response of Pres Bush after 9/11 was to visit a mosque and proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace?
Lemon said: "We did not pity the Nazis but we pity this political movement and that is what it truly is, a political movement bent on conquest."
ReplyDeleteThe difference between 1941 and 2001 is that today we have a leftist movement that is effectively on the enemies side. In September 2001 it took only two days for the left to start blaming the US for the attack. We have to realize that the left is as much our enemy as the Muslims.
For Irwin Ruff:
ReplyDeleteSome of us recognize that, and will act accordingly during the upcoming civil war. I would also note that the Left's enablers are ALSO the enemy. In spite of their oath of office to "...preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution...", they bow and scrape before their Leftist Masters and then do WHATEVER they are told. They and theirs will be MY first targets, for without THEIR help the Left would NEVER have gotten where it is.
Ken Denninger on too big to fail:
ReplyDeletehttp://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=193872
The invasion of Poland and the attack on Pearl Harbor were acts which produced raw reactions leading to unity of resolve and the implementation of appropriate responses in Britain and the US respectively. 9/11/01 should have produced the same, but was allowed to slip into irresolution caused in large part by the identification of Islam not as an ideology but exclusively as a "religion", thereby granting it special exemptions. (It was not we secularists or atheists who did that, but those for whom belief in the supernatural carries with it near-immunity from designation as evil.) That one fatal hesitation in our response provided the opening into which the Left and other apologists for Islam were able to insert the crowbar that eventually broke apart the effectiveness of our response.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do not entirely agree with Trencherbone's contention that Islam can be brought down by peaceful means in the manner described, it would obviously be preferable to warfare involving nuclear arms. The latter, however, is preferable to submission to sharia-based existence, and may become unavoidable in the event of the rise of a new political Caliphate with military intentions. Destroying Islam via provocation, ridicule, education, immigration reform, banning of sharia in non-muslims countries, restrictions on mosque-building and the like will be effective only if comprehension of the real nature of Islam and need for its containment are recognized by a majority of non-muslims. Anonymous is right to point out that wars fought to defend the institution of sharia are wars lost as surely as if at the end of WWII we had allowed Nazism to remain the ruling party in Germany. That is what we are doing now, and it is slowly killing us.
10 years of war - another 40 to go at the minimum. Pres Bush said that would be a long war - 50 years. In the next 40 years our perceptions of who and what the enemy is, will change.
ReplyDeleteBrits I talked to on 9 11 were busy telling America how much we deserved 9 11. I ended a few friendships that week because of that. They had zero sympathy of the US.
ReplyDelete10 years ago, the response to the 9/11 attacks should have been to empty the silos.
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan, Mecca, and Medina should still be smoldering.
What I found particularly ridiculous right after 9/11/01 was the photos of people with Missing John Smith" with a description of that person and a "Have you seen him call this number"? I thought "If he has not come home he is dead, do you really think he has been hanging out in a bar the past few days?" The American way of mourning is strange.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous... Have you ever seen wounded or injured people in a hospital? They may not be in any condition to contact home. They might not even be conscious.
ReplyDeleteTen years of half measures. As soon as the nationality of the terrorists was known we should have nuked Mecca and the Saudi oil fields. The filth of islam would have just been a bad memory by now.
John
Remember: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYoV-_GlNs and show it to all left-winged liberal appeasers! This is the heart of the enemy.
ReplyDeleteDaniel wrote: "The anniversaries have long since been reduced to a national therapy session, with pain released and healed in the media's own talking cure. But it isn't the pain that matters, it's what we do with it that counts."
ReplyDeleteAnd the therapy session is led by the MSM and the government's propaganda outlet, NPR. Far be it from them to name the enemy – Islam, whether it’s Islam on the rocks or straight up, shaken and not stirred, or the other way around – because that would be to commit the heinous crime of a moral judgment, according to our culture. "Judge not, lest you be judged"? Really? Suppose I'm not afraid of being judged? What then? Try and stop me from judging. I boast of my moral certitude. But that biblical diktat is what governs our culture, and our foreign policy. And we’re paying the price by heeding it, by losing the war against Islam because Islam is a “religion of peace,” and all the Muslim manqués who run 7/11’s or drive taxis are not to be judged because their barbaric creed was “hijacked,” they’re just as “innocent” as the passengers of the three planes who were incinerated or crushed to unidentifiable atoms, as the scores of people who jumped to their deaths to become blobs on pavement, and then buried beneath thousands of tons of collapsing towers.
So, all we’re left to do about it is “grieve.” As Daniel said above, it’s now a national pastime. Being beaten is now a moral virtue. Well, no thank you. I’ll fight on.
Lemon
ReplyDeleteWell I guess they had no sympathy for their fellow Londoners on July 7, 2005.
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