left biblioblography: Never Forget, Never Forgive: The Day The Towers Toppled

Sunday, September 09, 2012

Never Forget, Never Forgive: The Day The Towers Toppled

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
We are nearing the 11th anniversary of that attack on domestic 9-11_Islam_jobUS soil, September 11, 2001.

Within the last 100 years, there have been two major atrocities that are closest to indisputable proof that religion is anachronistic madness. One was the Holocaust, where Jehovah’s own ‘chosen people’ were led, driven, or herded to slaughter in the millions. No divine hand parted the clouds to save a single life: no booming voice sundered the heavens to declare “let my people go!”, no ethereal avatar swam in from the sunlit horizon to save anyone.

And then, there was that infamous day, 9/11. Where thousands plummeted to their deaths, bodies rained from the skies, as two large towers belched the smoke of their demise as they crumbled. And again, no winged figures descended from the skies to save people, no bellow of divine anger to shake the foundations of the world, no angels shed a single tear, for there are no such things. Only death and dust and the screaming of the fallen suddenly halted on impact, the wailing and the funereal dirge.

Never forget: never forgive. Remember, remember, the 11th of September.

Till the next post, then.

.

Stumble Upon Toolbar

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just a quick question, if I may: is the arab world supposed to "never forget, never forgive" the fact that western interference directly and admittedly turned Iran into a bloodthirsty dictatorship which then devolved into a bloodthirsty theocracy, that we turned Afghanistan from a fairly progressive emerging country into a backwards and hugely violent would-be theocracy, and that we started a war in Iraq which killed or displaced several million people? And that's not mentioning the way we waltzed in after WWII and took a big parcel of land away from the locals -- who had been our allies! -- and gave it to a bunch of belligerents who have started a war with their neighbors on average every decade and a half since then, and treat the original natives whose land got stolen like prisoners of war (which in a sense they are). Are they allowed to remember all that, or is the remembering something that's only supposed to happen on our side? There's a word for the latter attitude: hypocrisy.

If we're going to "never forget", Islamic countries have a lot more cause for grievance than the nominally-secular west does. We'd be much better off trying to get everyone to bury the hatchet instead -- but of course in order to do that we'd have to stop killing innocent people with unmanned drones, funneling money to the aforementioned belligerents, and in general pretending that anyone whose ancestors lived east of the Mediterranean is sub-human.

Oh, but don't let me get in the way of a deliberate attempt to turn a tragedy into an incitement to continued pointless and extremely expensive war. Sorry, I forgot who I was speaking to for a moment.