Remembering September 11

This year's the first year since the 9/11 attacks that remembrances have fallen on a Tuesday. Today's recollections of the terror will be more intimate.

Where were you when you heard the news?

I was at the office, and my colleague told me that the WTC had been hit. I first saw images of the horror at the Washington Post online (the only newspaper I could find whose server wasn't overloaded). I went home at lunch to take in the grisly scenes. My jaw dropped at the cold, clear images of the planes penetrating the buildings. My God, the humanity...

It took days for things to sink in completely. I read the papers voraciously to learn how something like this could happen.

I took my son to Ground Zero this summer on our vacation to New York City. It's the first time I've been to the World Trade Center site. Being there gives one an immediacy to the scale of loss. The sky is empty there in Lower Manhattan - the destruction of the towers has left a hole in that space, but it continues to be filled by the goodness of Americans in their mourning of the losses.

My blessings go out to all of those who lost loved ones that day.

My thanks go out to all of those now taking the war to the terrorists around the world. It will be a long campaign, but I've never once questioned whether our efforts were noble and worthwhile.

Update: In her essay today, Debra Burlingame frowns on the use of "lost" in describing the victims of the attacks:

Our fellow human beings were not "lost" in 1993 or on 9/11. They were torn to pieces. We must not give the enemy any quarter. We must confront the reality of their acts.

I'll keep this point in mind for future remembrances.

A Guilty British Liberal Loses His Innocence

In his weekend article, Andrew Anthony, a writer at London's Sunday Observer, tells how after September 11 he was torn between his longstanding progressive beliefs and the nagging clarity of evil that unpinned the murder of thousands of innocents in America that day. He was facing an ideological reckoning.

His awakening came slowly, and was prompted by stream of leftist commentary he was reading following the attacks, which held the United States to be the source of the world's evils, and held up a standard of moral relativism justifying the terrorist barbarity:

What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?

In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself.

In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.

Read the whole thing. Anthony's got a kind of interesting high-brow demeanor to his writing. Perhaps it's just a bit of British intellectualism (although I don't get the same feeling when reading Tony Blair's pieces).

In any case, Anthony's story is welcomed and good (check his new book, here). It's reminiscent of many stories of moderate Americans who became 9/11 conservatives amid their disgust at the rekindling of hard-left anti-Americanism that followed the terrorist attacks.