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Magazine
The day that did not change the world
C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY
GRIEF is an intensely private affair. When tragedy strikes, families mourn with relatives, friends and the community, but they do so privately and in inner silence. When a tragedy befalls the entire nation, mature societies do likewise — they mourn and remember collectively, but they do so in private and in quiet. What then does one make of the events world-wide that marked the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States last year? The fault was perhaps more that of the media which converted the occasion into a global event. A day of remembrance became a public reminder to the whole world that there had not been a bigger human tragedy than the murder by terror of nearly 4,000 people on September 11, 2001. During the first fortnight of this month, for the print and electronic media, not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the world, the only thing that seemed to matter was the first anniversary of that tragedy. Day or night, you could not escape the overflowing coverage of the run-up to the event and then the anniversary itself. India was no exception. Everyone who thought he/she was anyone was ready to offer an analysis or memories of that day. Our own TV personalities once again served up inanities from a year ago about the "day that changed the world". Just one example of the excess: On a day the previous week, I stumbled across a TV channel that was apparently re-broadcasting a long programme on the animal pets which survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I should not have been shocked. Some months ago I was forwarded an e-mail questionnaire prepared by a psychologist who was doing a study of pets which may have experienced trauma after September 11, 2001. A friend, baffled by the hours of live coverage on most of the channels asked: "Would BBC have such continuous live coverage if Israel invaded Palestine?" Of course not.
It was an immense tragedy — for the U.S. and the rest of the world. But horrors of that scale are, unfortunately, part of our world. And if they do not happen in powerful societies, they quickly fade from human memory. You cannot compare one tragedy with another in terms of numbers, but we can think of our silence and the world's, about a larger horror and an even bigger event of terror: the Bhopal Gas tragedy of December 2, 1984, which took more than 15,000 lives and where we have stopped counting, leave alone remembering, the continuing stream of death. You need not buy the cynical explanation of Union Carbide that it was an act perpetrated by a disgruntled employee. But Bhopal too was an act of terror. It was a terrorist act against humanity because it was caused by criminally negligent use of technology. December 2, 1984 should have changed the world because it showed us how we were capable of destroying ourselves. But that day of infamy does not figure anywhere on the global list of days of remembrance because it destroyed lives in the wrong country and people of the wrong economic status.
There are two other days of mass terror that are fortunately still remembered, even if increasingly faintly and certainly not by the governments and the thinkers of South Asia: August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945. The decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism which changed the world for the worse for ever. Unfortunately, we have not been humbled either by those two days of infamy. There is another connection between nuclear bombs and September 11, 2002. We have been inundated with descriptions of "Ground Zero" where the WTC towers stood.
Most of us would not know that this term has a longer history. "Zero" was a point on the maps of the desert of New Mexico where, in 1945, the first nuclear test was conducted. Ground Zero subsequently became a term to describe the point directly below a nuclear explosion — where destruction is total and annihilation of all life is complete. The continuous invocation of memories of the WTC towers will eventually obliterate this longer, and more appropriate, description of destruction caused by human invention of technology. It is interesting and instructive how dominant the language of the 2001 day of terror has become.
Perhaps history will demonstrate that September 11, 2001 did change the world, but not in the sense that the popular media and the shallow thinkers of the world will have it. The British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, recently drew parallels between June 28, 1914, when the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo became the spark for World War I. The imperial powers were looking for a cause to go to war and the assassination provided it. According to Hobsbawm, the U.S. has been preparing since the early 1990s to establish military and political dominance over the world.
Last year's terrorist attacks in the U.S. provided the excuse, if not the rationale for subsequent events. It was first Afghanistan. Iraq will be next. Which country will come after that?
E-mail the writer at crr100@india.com
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