A Day on Which the World Changed ?

Six questions :

These questions were there to be asked before the terrorist attacks on buildings and people in NY and Washington on 11 September. While many innocent persons lost their lives, and the lives of many more have been affected, often dreadfully, I am no longer sure that it will have been a ''day on which the world changed'' (The Economist) -- most of the world is kept at a distance from NY and Washington, and takes a distant view of those places, and many people in the world are only too familiar with that kind of almost random large-scale violence.

•  "Yasser Arafat ... ordered a ceasefire and Israel's prime minister ... gave the order to stop offensive military operations against Palestinians after intense pressure from America. Mr Bush wants relative peace in the Middle East to ease America's efforts to build a coalition against terrorism" (The Economist) -- why did America not apply that pressure one year ago?

•  Why do we react so much more strongly to an action that killed some 7000 people than we do to omissions that kill 70,000 people? -- omissions which may in turn lead to more violent actions in future, if only we could see the connections? [An omission is when we fail to act.] Is it just that the 7000 died in the US and not in some Third World country?

•  How does the suffering when 7000 have died compare to the suffering of 50 years of most of a nation being displaced, people being kept in unfreedom, families being separated, many individuals getting killed for putting up a resistance? [This question is about understanding feelings, not about justifying actions: I don't think terrorism can be justified.]

•  What did the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represent for the terrorists when they decided to attack these particular buildings, these particular institutions? -- what do they continue to represent for a large part of the world's population, who find themselves affected by policies decided in these places and others like them?

•  Why is the injustice of an action by a person or a few people so much easier to recognise than the injustice of a system, especially a system from which you yourself are benefiting? -- are we as human beings just not bright enough, or is society not yet advanced enough, to understand and deal with the more complicated underlying issues?

Perhaps it is now up to us, to make 11 September 2001 a day on which, in a different sense from the one above, the world did indeed change.

More personal thoughts:

Some of my close friends live in NY City. How different would my reaction have been, I have been wondering, if a friend of mine had been killed, or seriously injured, in the attack? Certainly I would have felt a more personal grief than the general sadness that I feel now for the sake of others. But what other feelings would I have had?

The first time I was spending some weeks teaching at Waterford Kamhlaba, I talked quite a lot with one South African student from Soweto, less about maths than about what it was like where he came from. He told me about things like 'necklacing', a way of burning a person to death, which was used in the townships when someone was suspected of having collaborated with the authorities. Like every young person in the community, he had had to attend such burnings, because those carrying forward the struggle wanted to prevent a future situation where some people would later, after the apartheid regime had been defeated, be able to point the finger at others, and claim that they themselves had not been involved in any violence. Especially as a devout Christian he had found these experiences deeply disturbing, but as we talked about it, it became clear that his feelings about certain things were very different from mine.

For me, a murder would be much more upsetting to witness or learn about than an accident, because a murder involves a deliberate evil action on the part of some person, whereas accidents happen by chance, without reason: in fact, when an accident is not completely by chance, such as when the driver of a car has been drinking, it in my eyes is a kind of murder. What became clear as we were talking was that this student saw things very differently: a murder for him was less upsetting, because at least he could see who was guilty, whereas with an accident there seemed to be no reason.

If a friend of mine had been killed or injured in the attack, for me it would have been more like an accident than like murder, because of the randomness of the attack and the lack of selfish interest; whereas the lack of action of America in the Middle East to help arrive at a just peace -- when it has been obvious, and has become clearer, that they could have done so much more -- is closer to murder, or in fact by now many murders.

America did not 'deserve' those terrorist attacks, any more than the UK deserved the major railway disasters that have at times happened over the last few years. But just as we have to understand why those accidents happened in order to make the appropriate improvements in the infrastructure, to be able to avoid further disasters in future, so America has to try to understand why those attacks happened. Unfortunately America, it seems to me, is such that that is not easy for Americans.

That makes the present situation potentially very difficult for Americans at the College. While they are at the College, many students learn to view themselves more clearly in terms of their national identity, they may even become more proud to be of that nationality. But at the same time many of them have to learn not to automatically identify with the history and politics of their country. Somebody can be German without approving of the holocaust, or Russian without being in favour of re-establishing a Soviet style system, or Zimbabwean without agreeing with Mr Mugabe's politically motivated racism. Because of the way they have been brought up, Americans find it harder to make this kind of distinction.

Another nationality that often finds this difficult are Israelis, many of whom seem to feel that if someone criticises the politics of the Israeli government, then they must be denying the country of Israel the right to exist -- whereas for more than a decade even the PLO has not spoken like that. (Certainly last year's Israeli students were capable of being critical of their government, without being any less Israeli.) We always have a certain responsibility to be sensitive, up to a point, to the sensitivities of people from other countries. At the College it should be more than that: isn't learning to understand where other people are coming from part of why we are here?

Some months later:

One of the good things -- in almost everyone's view -- that has happened is that the death toll of the attacks, which early on had been put at around 7000, has turned out to be less than half of that. But not only do the six questions that had been there to be asked before remain, there are more of them:

•  The Taliban were an evil regime, (where by "evil" I mean something like: using one's power to knowingly inflict horrendous consequences on others purely in order to gain more or remain in power oneself. In this sense, the State of Israel and Robert Mugabe seem to me to be evil.) Why did it require an attack in the US for the world to get its act together, had people just not noticed or did they not care?

•  When it comes to terrorism, what is the difference between a suicide bomber killing 5 people in a town in Israel and wounding 50 more, and Israeli shells hitting a town on the Westbank killing 5 people and wounding 50 more? -- other than that the former we see in gory detail on CNN, while about the latter there is only a brief report of the attack.

•  Why do people keep being fooled, century after century, war after war, that the fighting is about their religion or their race? Since the peace accord in Northern Ireland hardly anyone seems to be talking about Protestants and Catholics: why had people not been able to see that the fighting had not been about religion in the first place? In the Middle East, the Israelis want this to be a Jewish fight, just as people like Osama-bin-Laden want it to be a fight for Islam. (And just as Robert Mugabe has started a fight of black against white, in a country in which race was not an issue, although ownership of land was, and is.)

Some more points involving numbers, other than that 3000 dead is less bad than 7000 dead.

The situation in the Middle East is of course worse, for the Palestians, than having 5 dead and 50 injured on both sides -- the number of Palestinian dead since the start of the intifada in September 2001 is about three times that of Israeli dead. (Does it say: three eyes for an eye ...? Or is it that Palestinians don't 'count' so much?)

Could it be that the number of dead, all told, is less with the September 11 attack than it would have been without it -- because many more Afghanis made it through the winter, with foreign aid, than would have done if the Taliban had still been in power? -- Perhaps the reason that this is a difficult ("tasteless"?) question to contemplate, as I find it myself, is that it equates deaths by violence with deaths by starvation. But it also equates American deaths with Afghani deaths.

When I was driving in the US in the winter, in one of those areas where the only radio stations you can get are on AM, and are all either evangelical or country music, I was amazed to hear this song, about the September 11 attack, which was Number 1 in the country chart for the fifth week:

Alan Jackson: "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)"

Verse:
Where were you when the world stop turning on that September day
Were you ...

Chorus:
I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I could
Tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us
And the greatest is love