Re: Best wishes to all Americans:

["Sven-S. Porst" <ssp@earthling.net>]

>There is no one in Germany who doesn't consider this assault concerning
>the whole civilized world.

I didn't want to get into this, but I can't stand hearing this nonsense
anymore that everybody has been repeating since Bush and Blair first said
it. Why is it an assault on the _civilised_ word or even _democracies_.
The situation would be equally bad if it happened to uncivilised people
(whatever that means - I guess we assume ourselves to be civilised
then...) or in a dictatorship.

Even if you believe that killing people is a good thing to do in
retaliation (as Mr. Bush certainly does, for example), killing thousands
is definitely wrong, be it in New York, Bagdhad or Kabul. Stating this as
an assault against the whole world or humanity would make much more sense
(but in all the interviews and press conferences I've seen so far, this
terminology has only been used once).

Unfortunately - even in a situation of great misery as this one - the
'leaders' of the Western world cannot stop being righteous about
'civilisation' or democracy. Instead they have nasty rhethorics à la
'hunting down' and 'war' in order to justify whatever actions they are
going to take. (And Israel seems to want to jump the bandwagon making
their Palastinial terrorists an international terrorism problem - which
it most likely isn't these days).

Also, as the people who have done this were clearly well organised,
skilled and intelligent, none of the officials seems to waste a thought
on the fact that if people kill themselves to do this means at least that
they must feel very strongly about something, most probably the USA and
(judging from thee targets) the behaviour of its businesses and military
in the world. The fact that their action of killing thousands of people
is wrong doesn't imply that there is no issue. I can very well imagine
that further failure to notice this on the side of the governments will
give rise to further frustration and possibly violence.

In the end, whatever the terrorists wanted to achieve (I can't really
imagine any goal that you could reach by doing this...), they for sure
managed to make this world a worse place once again, by allowing the
politicians to be a bit more bastard than usual. It will mean tighter
security (although from reports on TV, security on US domestic flights
seems to be extremely poor right now) and increased paranoia leading to
less personal freedom. It may very well lead to less tolerance towards
muslims and Palestinians because they are demonised by the media and
possibly the politicians - although most of them don't even think about
shooting or bombing anybody, let alone do it.

In the end, it is a great _personal_ tragedy for everybody involved and
it is causing a great deal of agony to relatives and friends. Sadly, once
we leave the personal frame, even the horrifying death toll of this
attack is dwarfed by those deaths occuring regularly in other parts of
the world. I am not very optimistic on this (partly because of the
rhethoric on 'civilised' and 'democratic' countries) but let's hope that
this attack reminds people of the vulnerability of human beings and
raises the esteem of human life, wherever.

Sorry for this longish off-topic rant. But watching all this on TV
yesterday and today accumulated quite a few thoughts that were triggered.

        Sven

P.S. I couldn't agree more on the 'this can't be real'-factor mentioned
in the e-mail Jost forwarded. At first I yawned thinking it was another
Hollywood catastrophy film, until the bad lightning and the 'BBC News
Live' Logos caught my attention... sad but true.

--
Sven-S. Porst . PGP: 0x0085ABA3 . http://homepage.mac.com/ssp
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