September 11th & The Politics of Memory September 10 2002 By Jennifer Loewenstein
(PC) - I just want to buy groceries. I don’t want to be whipped into a patriotic frenzy in which the dead of September 11th, 2001 are used to generate hatred towards entire peoples and to prepare the nation for another bloody war.
But it’s not possible. There are flags and “God Bless America” signs everywhere; patriotic cookies and cakes; books and newspapers stacked at the entrance of the store announcing 9/11 memorials, the Iraqi nuclear threat, and the sponsors of world terror; there are American flag-pins on the aprons of the check-out counter workers and bouquets of red-white-and-blue carnations for sale and reminders in the windows that We’re American and Proud. And this is just a local midwestern grocery store.
Remember the heroes, remember the widows, remember the widowers, remember the sons and the daughters and the brothers and sisters; let’s visit the 63 babies who will never know their fathers and listen to Diane Sawyer recall each mother’s unspeakable grief; let’s replay the tapes, replay the awful videos, blare the 9/11 Requiem on Public Radio, listen to the TV pundits, read the mournful editorials, remind everyone again and again that the United States was Attacked and We Won’t Ever Forget It. Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists, Terrorize: The lessons of September 11th have already been lost.
Nearly 3000 people died in a crime against humanity in New York and Washington D.C. in the late summer of 2001, a terrible crime that demanded justice based in international law. Before the day was up, however, our politicians were screaming for revenge, disregarding international institutions, naming the alleged killers, denying cause and context, and gearing up the military machine for the first possible strike all to the accompaniment of the Congressional and media choruses singing their “God Bless America” Hosannas.
If other people in the world have suffered unutterable crimes and cried out for justice again and again this fact has been buried even more deeply for Americans in the self-righteous indignation and hypocritical memorializing that our nation’s leaders have orchestrated for us for their own self-serving, narrow and ugly ideological purposes. Side by side in every major national newspaper today are articles “remembering” 9/11 and articles about the coming war on Iraq. One might think the two were dependent on each other…
Let us forget that between three and four thousand innocent Afghanis died as a result of the US need for revenge more than one person for every victim of 9/11. Let us deny the devastation, the poverty and desperate hunger our War on Terror in Afghanistan has left in its wake. We must forget that the most repressive, tyrannical, sadistic government in the Middle East is our key oil ally; that of the nineteen killers aboard the four hijacked US airplanes most came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, currently our friends and the recipients of massive amounts of US-made weapons. We must forget the terror we sponsor in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of deaths our sanctions policy has caused over the last eleven years. Let’s forget that the US’ military presence throughout the Middle East and Southwestern Asia has created an unprecedented degree of anti-Americanism. Let’s not talk about the tactics of intimidation we sponsor vis a vis Iran and half the rest of the globe. Forget that most Europeans oppose our bullying, aggressive stance toward Iraq. Forget about Arab and Muslim public opinion altogether. Terrorists don’t count.
Ignore the fact that Israel receives $5 billion in US foreign and military aid to maintain its occupation of Palestine; to carry out a deliberate policy of murder, intimidation, dehumanization, and dispossession. Raise your self-righteous fist in anger to remind us that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” at least if you’re Jewish. Tell me again that killing more than 400 children and 1300 adults, besieging entire cities and towns for months on end, wrecking the economic and social infrastructures, terrorizing a population where more than 60% live beneath the poverty line, preventing travel to and from work, school, and hospital is self-defense.
I want to hear the excuses again. I need to be reminded that obliterating a refugee camp and rendering 13,000 civilians homeless is a just tactic in a just war. I need to remember why dropping a 2000-pound bomb on a crowded apartment building at night is a legitimate way to tackle your enemies. I have to refresh my memory as to why imprisoning an entire population and suffocating it to death merits massive US aid; why the tears and grief of one victim should get front-page billing, while the tears and grief of another are not even recorded.
Why should we remember the victims of 9/11 with such fervency and forget the victims of so many other crimes against humanity? Can we learn nothing more positive from such a catastrophe than how to unite a people in shallow, vengeful indignation? Why should our own suffering teach us less how to reach out and understand the afflictions of others than how to withdraw into a shell of victimization that engenders and legitimizes cruelty?
Where are our memorials to the genocide of the Native Americans? To the devastation of American slavery? To the victims of US imperial wars overseas and at home? To the peasants and workers murdered by corporate economies? To the victims of terror wrought by our own hands?
Remembering so selectively is to abuse both Memory and History. And it is such a small step to understand the greater truth spelled out so simply by the 17th century poet John Donne.
-Every man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankinde; and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
--*-- Marc Rodrigues Voicemail: 866.206.9067 x4217 Students for a Free Society: http://qcsfs.tripod.com
"I cock back tha sling to stone a settler And breaks him off clean, call me the upsetter" -Zack de la Rocha