This was written shortly after September 11th, 2001, and, while much of it's been disproved, I still stand by much of the sentiment

The world, obviously, hasn't ended. But it has changed. It's not actually true that this is the first time America has been severely damaged by an attack within its borders (there's a reason why the Whitehouse is white), but it's been a very long time. Many people, whether religious fanatics or scientists, were doomsaying that the world would end around the turn of the century. Well, it's tempting to say they we're only a year and a few months off. For Americans, it certainly seems like a lot has changed. The isolationism which has been central to the American way of life since forever is now seriously damaged. A foreign power has finally caused more damage to the United States than the Russians ever did. This is not the new Pearl Harbour; that was a military target. This is an example of unexcusable loss of civilian life. It's therefore more like the new Hiroshima.

But this all assumes one thing which I believe to be false; that this is the work of a foreign power. It took all of four minutes for the media to start implying that the Middle East was involved. Yet while plenty of Islamic Fundamentalists would like to make this kind of attack, I'm not sure if any of them are capable of it. To me this seems like an inside job. After all, there are more super-rich gunned-up maniacs in America than in the whole of Arabia put together.

Still, the targets which were chosen (the centre of the world economy and the centre of U.S. and Nato's military power) suggest a group which wants to damage both the country and the American dominance of the world. All the targets are symbols of American imperialist power over other nations.

What worries me most is that the Bush administration will use this atrocity as an excuse to become even more isolationist, militarilistic and paranoid. The 1950s all over again is something we don't need to see; the greatest injustices and violations of human rights allowed to be commited simply because the US electorate have a stupid trust in their democratic system. Yet it's blindly obvious there is no nuclear threat whatsoever. Or rather an nuclear threat will without a doubt be borne by a small-scale minature device (like a suitcase bomb) and not by missiles. Simply there is no one on the entire planet with either the capacity or the inclination to destroy humanity. The Cold War showed us that no one is actually that stupid. So the American government will now probably be wasting billions on a useless Star Wars program, rather than spending it where it's obviously needed more; small scale security to prevent the kind of acts of terrorism we saw this week. Not more nukes.

It's the entire American foreign policy which causes it to be the target of these attacks. Islamic Fundamentalists aren't just mental; if they were going to attack nations are random for no reason at all then they'd blow up Canada or Luxembourg instead. The US is a target because it has a paranoid anti-Islamic and anti-Communist stance coupled with cultural commerical imperialism; the effects of which is to quietly force American values on other cultures and to violently retaliate if the culture rejects these values. America expects other countries to automatically become Americanized and an resitance to 'the American way of life' is met with violence. It's true that there a some rare examples of the United States acting for humanitarian reasons, but, almost without exception, throughout the latter half of the previous century America's policy has been one of silent imperialism. This imperialism is now reaching new heights.

The other outcome of this tragedy could be the reverse; instead of giving the apperance of turning in on itself while actually becoming more imperialistic, America might actually stop interfering with other countries. The problem of America is not it's introversion, it's the extroversion. American meddling has almost certainly caused this disaster and perhaps this will be the time for the United States to decide to fuck off and leave the rest of the world alone; or, rather, to take an equal part in governing this planet, rather than behaving like a greedy child which wants the whole pie.

What's obvious is that things surely must change. Most Americans exist in a kind of TV-induced stupor, and maybe this will be enough to shake them out of it. But then, maybe not. Remember who's in the Whitehouse, after all.
 

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