9-11 Again

I'm reminded of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's observation that sentimentality is the compassion of the cruel, something like that, that he wrote in Gulag Archipelago - even the title a reminder that the US has been busy metastasizing its own Gulag all over the world for some time, but especially since that day 10 years ago.

Now if all the remembrances and memorials of those 3000 dead people had anything clean about it, wouldn't there be some concern about doing away with cruelty and murder generally? Wouldn't there be some interest in remembering other innocent victims - say, the 3000 people murdered in Chorillo by the US Marines in 1989? After all, what was really wrong with all those people being killed in September 2001, if not that innocent people were killed? But I've noticed for 10 years that if there's one thing these remembrances are all about, it's to forget about anybody else's death and torment, especially at the hands of Americans. That's if they ever notice in the first place. And they don't like it too well when I or anyone else draw their attention to these very many dead and tortured people, innocent victims of US imperial power.

One event Americans can't seem to remember, no matter how often reminded, is September 11, 1973. That's the date the US brought to fruition the overthrow of Chile's democratic government and put in power the especially brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which promptly set out to murder and torture thousands of people with the hearty approval of the American government.

The lesson here for us as individuals is to consider carefully when we want to nurse grievances and take emotional baths in our hurts. It's not about remembering. It's about forgetting. What we want to forget at such times is exactly what we need to remember in order to be sane, generally our own injustice and cruelty.

For a little trip down memory lane.


And another, since we're doing remembrance.