A bit uncomfortable this, but like a previous piece I wrote about the recent Cambridgeshire child murders, I feel this needs something to be said.
Today is obviously a year on from some of the most terrible scenes that many people have ever witnessed. Thousands of people lost their life in the various attacks in North America last year. Nothing should trivialise their memories.
And yet…
We are faced with a deluge of programmes “remembering 9/11”. Am I being heartless in thinking somewhat cynically about this? I really don’t believe so.
In America’s history, probably since the end their Civil War, they have not had to face direct hostilities on their mainland. Certainly there was Pearl Harbor in the second world war, but they never had the occupation that most of Europe endured, the forcible eviction of their citizens from their homes into prison and concentration camps. They never had bombers pass over their heads in the night sky, knowing that at any minute their house could be next.
Most of the tragic events that the US has had to endure in the last century have been away from their homeland.
Undoubtedly, the destruction of pair of buildings as symbolic as the World Trade Centre has never happened before, but I really think it’s the sudden realisation of their insecurity that has taken ahold of the American public. It’s the tragic fact that America is now involved, like it or not.
Where am I going with this (and I will admit this is a train of thought argument rather than a carefully considered essay)? Well the US now holds a massive sway over not only the British people but the Western World. They are the only superpower. We just pay more attention to their way of thinking.
Instead of “September the 11th”, it’s “9/11” because that’s the (illogical) way that Americans write it. What the US president does in the next few months could determination relations in the Middle East for another fifty years.
Add the American dimension to the fact that the “drama” played itself out live on TV with thousands of hours of footage available, and the significance becomes even bigger.
Let me reiterate that I’m NOT downplaying the enormity of it all. Devastation has not happened on that scale due to “terrorist” acts in human history. There are, and have been similarly monstrous acts dictated by individuals however, and we don’t have to leave Europe to find them, even in very recent times.
Nonetheles, the scale and import of it all leaves me feeling frankly uncomfortable.
On the plus side, I believe that many Americans are beginning to realise that they’re not hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, by quirk of geography if not more. They’re asking the important questions such as why anyone would want to do this. The work of a singular madman is one thing, but a large group of individuals, who find support numbering in their tens of thousands (and maybe more) must be understood. But the cowboys and indians depiction of right and wrong still holds too much sway it seems. Bush says we must do it, so we must do it. It’s black and white. There are no degrees. Is Saddam Hussein the logical next step on, or are we really witnessing a general writing of percieved wrongs including the “unfinished business” of Desert Storm?
In the last week or so, Newsnight on BBC2 has had a couple of wonderful reports by Charles Wheeler looking at how the young are seeing events in the year since September 11th. Some of what he showed is promising, while others were worrying. I fail to understand why the US Presidency bestows some kind of Papal Infaliability upon the holder in the eyes of the public. I could understand it during wartime, but in peacetime?
In the end, yes I will be watching “9/11” on BBC1 tonight. The stories of heroes and heroic failure. The tragedies. Coping with life afterwards. For many thousands these are the personal horrors that they must go on living with.
But do we really understand the aftermath of the war between the Hutus and Tutsi which left 800,000 dead, or what is left after the horrors of warfare throughout the former Yugoslavia? And right now 13 million are facing starvation in the countries of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. They won’t be live on TV, and there’ll be no footage to rival Independence Day coming out of there.