Just a Bloody Nose

Charlotte Raven wrote the following article entitled “A Bully with a Bloody Nose is Still a Bully” on September 18, 2001, not more than a week after the attacks in New York City and Washington. At the time firemen and civilian workers were still trying to work out the logistics of sorting through seven stories of debris to find the remains of three thousand innocent civilians. The fallen towers were still smoldering.

Aside from obviously trivializing the ferocity and scale of the attack (equating the mass murder of thousands of civilians to a bloody nose is repugnant), Ms. Raven asserts that Americans had it coming.

"America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn't like it then, there's no reason why you should have to pretend to now. All those who see its suffering as a kind of absolution should remember how little we've seen that would support this reading. A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully and, weeping apart, everything the US body politic has done in the week since the attacks has confirmed its essential character."

You can read the full article here.

Sidebar:

Pulizer prize winner Anne Applebaum writes about this and other such articles appearing in British left-wing mainstream press immediately after the attacks. Some openly pined for the return of the Soviet Union and imply that the attacks were the result of George Bush’s election. (Begging the question as to why there were attacks on the World Trade Center eight years earlier?)

Ms. Applebaum writes:

"I'll leave aside the fact that these statements are almost blindingly stupid. Anyone who thinks American values do not inspire the Third World has clearly never been to the Third World, and anyone who feels nostalgia for the "alternative" offered by the Soviet Union must also favor the totalitarian terror, the ignorance, and the poverty that the Soviet Union imposed on its own people and exported around the world. I won't even lower myself to discuss the notion that Americans are to blame for last week's tragedy because they voted for George Bush."

Her article is a good starting point in understanding that the rise in anti-Americanism in Europe predates the attacks on September 11th.

[Posted by bob at The Breakdown Lane]