The following article by Raymond O’Connell was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
AS the anniversary of what has become known as 9/11 comes round we are informed as happens each year that it ‘changed the world’. The words ‘and not for the better’ are not added as a rule. State repression masquerading as security, discrimination and xenophobia, the Iraq war, Afghanistan and the daddy of them all, the ‘War on Terror’.
As I have mentioned before some 4.5 million have died in the latter.
Perhaps looking for a ‘new angle’ Fintan O’Toole has come up with a stoater. The main thrust of his article is that Trump and the Jihadists have one thing in common – misogyny. He delves in some length into the thoughts of Sayyid Qutb during his two years in the United States in the late 1940s with quotes from his subsequent book. Much of this is laced with comments and images reminiscent of Benny Hill’s sketches.
In the process however, O’Toole refers to this book as his ‘Communist Manifesto’ for the movement and that he is ‘the Karl Marx and Patrick Pearse of the of the Movement’. He also refers to a ‘male vanguard’ being common to both Trump and the Jihadists.
O’Toole might have mentioned that the subjugation of women has been around for a bit longer. He might have mentioned that the cleric failed to notice the actual reality for women in the US at the time, including misogyny and miscegenation. He might have made passing reference to Engels book on the subject, how the subjugation of women came about and how it can be ended although that would have spoiled the flow of his ‘thesis’ (bias?)
Some three thousand people died in the attack on New York and the Pentagon, mostly civilians and over 300 firefighters were among those killed. It is not an inconsiderable number but frankly it pails to insignificance when set beside the numbers killed by the US before and since.
Yet such considerations are never introduced. Indeed to do so would be considered in very bad taste – but here goes anyway.
While many of the attacks the US has perpetrated are generally known, including their extent, somehow the public perception of them is not one of condemnation. Some months ago I read a letter in the London Review of Books on one of these that has a lower profile than many others. From 1964-1973 the US conducted the largest bombing campaign in history on Laos, a small country with under three million people. During those years more than two million tons of ordnance was dropped. That was 270 million bombs of almost two hundred different types, including cluster bombs, via 580,000 planeloads, an average of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for 9 years. 29 thousand were killed and 21 thousand – to use a euphemism – were injured. Approximately 30% failed to detonate and these have since killed 20 thousand.
This might be a better comparison, Finton, than your rather smug misogynistic angle on 9/11.