Ten Years Later.

[athelind]

This was not our era's Pearl Harbor.

This was our era's Reichstag Fire.

After reading the responses, and being asked privately, "Does that mean you're a 'truther'?", I feel the need to restate this more clearly:

The events of 11 September 2011 more closely resemble the Reichstag Fire than Pearl Harbor, most significantly in our response to them as a nation.

Certainly, it is not a one-to-one congruence -- but the "Pearl Harbor" comparison is bandied about far more often, with few objections, and the correspondence is no more exact.

The sticking point for most respondents seems to be the identity of the perpetrators of the Fire. That's a niggling detail, irrelevant to the thesis. I find the nature of our national response to be a matter of far greater importance, because we, lashing out in terror for a decade, have done far more damage to ourselves, to our freedoms, and to the world than the people in those planes ever could have.

The Most Significant Point of Similarity is not whether or not it was an "inside job", but in the fact that it allowed the ugly strain of authoritarianism that had been seeping into into our national political culture for years to finally consolidate its power and win the hearts and minds of the public.

If you want more discussion of "the nature of our national response", feel free to consult Mr. Hicks for his opinion thereon.

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Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

As my expanded, revised, rewritten and slightly cranky post should indicate, I only meant to draw parallels, not assert a perfect one-to-one correspondence. There are more parallels to one than to the other.

As I've stated in my other responses, the degree of complicity of the respective Administrations in any of the three events is at this stage the least important factor.

But yeah, it would totally have been in character for him.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure I agree.

Reichstag: Internal threat. The other two, external.

Reichstag: Immediate banning and arrest of political opposition. PH: More or less political truce. 911: Business as usual- a continuing drift toward sound bite politics (or is it sound byte now?) and doctrinaire idiocy on all sides. Government by Bloviation.

All three led to the establishment of oppressive security regimes.

All three led to concentration camps and secret police, 'tho I have to say Reichstag led to the most, PH second, 911 least. As far as I know. Remember that after PH we threw tens of thousands of good Americans into concentration camps for looking Japanese, not to mention of course

Crap. Boring.

I think they're all different. I also think we have no idea how to fight a Wah on Terrah. This business that some yahoo from Bananastan can fly around the world getting training and resources, then halfway around the world again to perform an attack on another continent, would seem to be "something new under the sun." A product of a speed of communication and international travel that has never existed before. We have no laws to handle it, no experience, we don't know what to do with it-- or the worldwide pandemic disease that "instant" air travel is going to hit us with, sooner or later, either. THAT's the one that really worries ME, by the way.