The following comment may seem like a non sequitur of sorts, and callous, but I assure you I feel neither apathy nor any kind of smug satisfaction in the terrifying disregard for life I'm about to discuss.
At the nadir of its terror, 6000 people a day were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau - a mixed-use camp that likely killed fewer a day than did the four designated extermination camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, and Sobibór.
Allied forces had aerial photographs of Birkenau, and they were almost certainly aware of what was going on.
They took no immediate action - a seeming policy of non-interference, of studied indifference and inaction that continues to this day.
Jumping ahead decades, between April 6 and July 16, 1994 - a period of 100 days - a maddened crowd comprised largely of Hutus killed their Tutsi neighbours along with alleged Hutu sympathisers and even unaligned groups at a rate of about 8000 persons a day (800 000 ÷ 100).
In his first book, Shaking Hands with the Devil (2003), retired Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire details how bureaucracy prevented him and the peacekeepers under his command from protecting the victims in any meaningful way. (He now suffers from PTSD, and probably always will.)
On September 11, 2001, a small group of hijackers - men who knew they lacked the military might to assault the United states head on - chosd to use terror instead. Their actions killed 2996 people.
Once.
And yet the terror they created is still doing its work.
The murders kicked off the "War on Terror" (as if something so nebulous as terror could be fought) - a folly that, to date, has cost an absolutely staggering $4.79 [i]TRILLION[/i].
...but that is nothing compared to the lives lost: The US and Coalition forces have killed approximately 1.3 million civilians since this cluster fuck.
Don't kid yourself, John Roberts: The West in general and the US in particular treated a relatively small and arguably isolated (or, at least, insulated) event as reason to go on a bat-shit insane killing spree while at the same time attempting to afflict average people with the paradoxical belief that 'America has this under coontrol' while at the same time subtly suggesting that people fear aliens; Muslims all want to kill you.'
My point is this: Thousands of people were and are butchered every day in protracted conflucts.
16 years ago, the United States got a taste of that one day and suddenly, 'The world is a different place' - as if daily mass murder were somehow new.
I could muddle this with platitudes about how sad it was not only for the people who had to endure such violent deaths but also for their families...but I refuse to be part of the revenge-based death cult that has sprung up around 9/11.
It was a tragedy, and doubly so because the attack was (as the word imples) entirely deliberate. (This is as good a time as any to point out, despite manufactured panic over illegal immigration, that the hijackers all had visas- tourist visas, business visas, and - in one case - student visas. None were in the US illegally as far as I know; and, unless suicide bombing has suddenly become a lucrative field, none of those men came to steal yer jerbs.)
The point: Countless thousands of men, women, and children are butchered every month - cut apart with chainsaws by cartals who learned terror is an effective weapon, killed in North Korean gulags, hanged or beheaded by stated allied with the United States, subject to honour killing in India and gendercide in China.
But America gets what I hope you'll understand why I call 9/11 a bloody nose.
And the result - too many Americans cast off or derided the very Constitutional protections that serve them and in exchange for a noticeably flimsy kind of 'protection' that cost nearly 500 trillion bucks and over a million innocent lives (if not significantly more in both lives and money).
The following is NOT sarcasm: The United States Constitution - the First Ammendment especially - is, in my opinion, perhaps the best such effort at preserving minority right in the face of majority that our species has ever produced.
The First Ammendment is inspired; a work of political art written in such a way that virtually anyone can understand it and thus plead its protection.
There are too many people willing to trade a lot of that because nearly 3000 people died on one day 16 years ago.
