While Laurent Zecchini has an article on a visit aboard a French nuclear submarine, Frédéric Bobin writes about the Chinese threat. Meanwhile, a typical week at Le Monde is filled with scorn towards America and (hand-wringing) apologies for France…
Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Thursday, September 15, 2005
A Typical Week at Le Monde
While Laurent Zecchini has an article on a visit aboard a French nuclear submarine, Frédéric Bobin writes about the Chinese threat. Meanwhile, a typical week at Le Monde is filled with scorn towards America and (hand-wringing) apologies for France…
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Kobe, 1995
Todd Crowell: the Kobe earthquake is a better example for comparative analysis to the New Orleans floods than anything else. «Yet the authorities were caught completely flat-footed when a 7.2 scale earthquake struck. The quake killed 6,433 people, injured about 40,000 and made 300,000 people homeless, some of them for years. Economic losses exceeded $100 billion, or fully two percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.
The government’s response was sluggish and confused. It took Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama nearly 24 hours to decide whether to dispatch troops to Kobe (though looting was fairly low). No clear lines of authority for disaster relief had been established that would permit an effective response.
Nobody complained about the performance of Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for the simple reason that Japan had no equivalent of FEMA – still doesn’t to the best of my knowledge. The government couldn’t even declare a state of emergency.»
Maybe Ken needs a hug and some new windchimes.
«KEN LIVINGSTONE provoked outrage yesterday when he compared an outspoken Muslim scholar who backs suicide bombings to the reforming Pope John XXIII.
I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think what John the 23rd had in mind by engaging other religions was to engage them with weapons fire, improvised explosive devises, and killing commuters.
The Mayor of London said that the position of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi was similar to that of the late Pope because he was the most senior Islamic scholar saying that Islam must engage with the world.
“Sheik Qaradawi is I think very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist,” Mr Livingstone said. »
What’s missing here (beside Livingstone’s lack of contextual grounding in religion) is good judgment. He has to decide if he’ll be duped by Jihad’s sideshow of using lesser proponents of violence to run a disinformation operation with the soft target of the minds of Britain’s leftists.
To oppose Jihadist Terror, one need not feel any sort of need to make a show of publicly engaging Britain’s Muslim political types, unless you are so convinced that they are the enemy of your own ideological enemies that you have to be their friend. It’s absurd. It even undermines leftism.
Plastic Exploding Inevitable
German society on the Fritz. 5,000 suicide bombers in Krautland. The soft underbelly of Zeropean appeasement and capitulation is the good-for-nothing Franco-German couple-from-hell.
Eurabia
Americans know first-hand the menace of radical Islam. And now they have to deal with the real menace of a resigned and fatalistic Europe that is allowing itself to become an active base for radical Islam.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Stop PC before it kills again
To it’s oddly peevish and phobic proponents it’s some kind of virtue. By virtue, they mean anything you can use to hector people.
When they face the harm it does, they blame someone else. I, for one, have no idea what problem Political Correctness has ever solved.
«A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity.[ … ]
PC made Hazel O'Leary prohibit color-coded security badges at the Energy Department during the Clinton years, because NOBODY should ever have a better color badge than anybody else. The Energy Department is in charge of our nuclear weapons labs, like Los Alamos, where security became a bad joke when PC took over. Hazel O'Leary should have become a laughing stock, but she is probably thriving somewhere, spreading the virus.
[ … ]
PC made the Clinton Administration treat Osama Bin Laden with great regard for his civil rights. So in spite of multiple offers from the Sudan, the Clintonites could never decide what to do with Osama on a platter.»To quote Dalrymple:
«Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.»Pouah!!!
Clearly, they have work to do.
American Enterprise Magazine distills some conclusions about the elitist European hatred of Americans and the unremarkable history of it. It is definitely rooted in a contempt not of some world view, but of the stubbornness of their emotive views requiring some sort of reason and action.
«Unlike some forms of bigotry, anti-Americanism is most virulent among Europe's elites. Everyday Germans and Brits and Italians tend to be more appreciative of American culture, economic achievement, and government than their political lords. But ordinary Europeans have relatively little influence on the direction of their societies. The thing about European governance most striking to American eyes today is its comparatively undemocratic nature. In much of the continent, elections mean little, unaccountable bureaucracies and elites commandeer the most important decisions, the same people hang onto power endlessly, and policies that would not survive the test of popular opinion are simply instituted by administrative fiat. To cite just one example, direct election of mayors has been blocked in many localities, with national authorities insisting on appointing local leaders themselves.So as far as bad soap opera and histrionics are concerned, the continent offers the best in one-stop shopping.
Because of this unrepresentative politics, lots of ideas supported by a majority of the European public--like the death penalty--have no chance of becoming law. The tradition of a peasantry ruled by its "betters" endures in numerous ways.»
«For evidence that obstruction of the U.S. is more important to many European elites than making progress in the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, look no farther than Afghanistan. The Afghan war was not controversial in Old Europe. It was universally agreed that the Taliban was a blight on central Asia, and that the al-Qaeda cells incubating in Afghanistan were a menace to the entire globe. Europeans accepted the urgent necessity of rooting out both entities militarily, and then rebuilding the Afghan government and civil society.[ … ]
But once U.S. forces had done the dirty work of eliminating Afghanistan’s fanatical ruling cliques, did our European allies live up to their promises to help update that nation’s infrastructure, train its police, build up its courts, revive its social sector and economy? Scandalously, no.
...the Europeans immediately fell way behind on their financial pledges. Their troop commitments were not met. The German promise to train the Afghan police became a joke. European offers to reconstruct the justice system went nowhere. In all of these areas, America had to step into the breach to help suffering Afghans, and stave off disorder and a re-emergence of terror cells.
Having for years refused to fund their militaries, and lacking sufficient numbers of young men with patriotic martial spirit, the continental European nations could not project much righteous military power today even if they did have the will. You will often hear gassy rhetoric at European conclaves about how, as Spanish prime minister Zapatero recently put it, “Europe must believe that it can be in 20 years the most important world power.” But the stark reality is that only 3 to 5 percent of the 2.5 million personnel under arms in Europe today can be deployed, even for a short time. Due to its military weakness and diplomatic vacillation, “Europe is nearly irrelevant to the great issues of the future” in today’s conflict zones, notes my colleague Tom Donnelly in a new book.»The question is, how much of the actions of European society and government are NOT driven by propping up prior failures? Is this an extended period of soul-searching on their part, or is it an unbreakable pattern?
«This kind of bilious grandstanding now dominates European diplomacy. Indeed, Europe no longer even attempts a serious and constructive foreign policy in many important areas. Quick: Name one thing the old continental European powers have done to help stabilize Iraq. O.K., France has detailed one officer (literally) to help train the Iraqi police. But when Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi wanted to meet with France’s president last year, he was refused. Instead of offering practical guidance to the new leader of one of the globe’s hotspots, Jacques Chirac rushed off to the deathbed of Yasser Arafat, whom he fawned over and called “a hero.”[ … ]
“A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile General Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero... Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing—Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria, and until yesterday Hussein and his sons— nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.”
Krauthammer's conclusion is that the European Left's "concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism."»Time seems to be running out.
«And it’s not just Americans whom Europeans are falling behind. The people who invented industrialism are now also being outstripped by residents of Asian and Latin American countries that have embraced globalization. Kotkin reports that Europe’s share of world Gross Domestic Product (which inevitably corresponds to international influence) shrank from 34 percent to 20 percent over the latest lifetime.[ … ]
It was by adopting free-market capitalism that Asians and Latin Americans bolted upward—and in particular by copying productive ideas from the world’s largest economy (the U.S.) as fast as they could figure them out.
The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces. In terms of spending power, homeownership, educational opportunities, and so forth, even relatively low income.
Americans are now demonstrably better off than typical Europeans.
So which economic alternative is actually more “harsh on the poor and economically underprivileged”? Today’s socialized European economies bill themselves as generous and progressive, but in cold practice they are proving illiberal and reactionary. Reforms that could open up new fresh opportunities for stagnated workers are being blocked by Europe’s dominant class, for fear that a more freewheeling system might reduce the privileges of those currently in command.»h/t – to RV
A quote: very bad lefty ideas. Why did they stop caring about free speech?
«But the Americans don't know anything about human rights.
Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament.
We do not agree ... that the human rights of the victims are more important than the human rights of the terrorists.»
Indeed a captured terrorist does have rights, but no effort should be expended prior to their capture which would place any person at risk becuase of the wooly headed way some people interpret it, and do it at the expense of society. Random bag checking in order not to seem like a profile is being drawn, frisking little old ladies, to save face with pressure groups who themselves are the ones who can't make a distinction between criminality and ethnicity.
Concider for a moment the Palestinian bus driver who didn't want a certain someone (who was also Palestinian) on his bus because he suspected him of wearing that season's chic new self detonating colors. Would his judgement survive that test if he was obliged to neither judge nor refuse? In case you're wondering, the refused passenger detonated hiself outside the bus, and only the bomber himself was hurt.
What's worse is the erosion of rights running along side it. Hard as it is for the European left to accept, you can’t stop people from talking and thinking, regardless what awful things they’re talking about. That's the greatest lesson of the 20th century which showed itself in the blood stained snows of the Gulags and Concentration camps.
Curtailment of speech, no matter how awful, is indeed throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
This is from a continent that while not taking the point in protecting their citizens against terror, feels perfectly comfortable identifying and not tolerating of abhorrent speech which will only drive incitement further underground and poison the air for everyone else in a way that the Patriot Act never did.
Palestinian Authority Animal House
They'll soon be pissing and moaning about the deep humiliation stemming from difficult conditions as justification for blowing themselves up.
... the overwhelmed forces were unable to halt looting of the area's prized greenhouses.
The greenhouses, left behind by Israel as part of a deal brokered by international mediators, are a centerpiece of Palestinian plans for rebuilding Gaza after 38 years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinian Authority hoped the high-tech greenhouses will provide jobs and export income for Gaza's shattered economy.
Maladie métastatique à extirper du corps social
Que l'élève se trouve dans une madrassa au Pakistan, ou que celui-ci ait pris la forme d'une prothèse humaine suspendue à l'extrémité d'une onde de la mort Al-Jazirienne dans un apart' à Sarcelles ne change rien au problème.
Monday, September 12, 2005
DC at sunset
It's September 11th, and a cool night out. Quiet too. Crickets - lots of them. Gentle waters making a licking sound. Birds flying high and far off. A few pleasure boaters out. There is a skyline, but it seems far away, and quite mercifully it seems to be leaving us all alone.
The joggers seem as happy at they could be. A pall of anger over little detail might be falling in every part of town, but not here, and not right now. Someone more decent than that is running this place right now.
They can talk in circles all they like. Here, all I see is the river which never stops rolling, and a monument to Lincoln that they can't dismantle. I was hanging out with a kid who stopped here too. He set his truck by the curb and the stone balustrade overlooking the river.
He's a marine. Shipping out Tuesday. He wanted to see Lincoln before he left. He sensed the cool night air and the precious last minutes of sunlight. He seemed to want to have thins to remember. Another kid had a guitar. He came where he couldn't bother anyone with noise. I taught him the only good chords I know. He practiced them to the exclusion of everything around him, even the painting the sky made for him tonight.
The Marine's under no illusions. He's also under no derision right now – no girlfriend with fear and doubt, no buddies from home who won’t talk to him. No 'friends' second guessing him. He mentioned Lincoln's compromises.
Quite aptly he sought this place out. It will be in his mind while he is in a Wadi somewhere in the Middle East.
For me, a Wadi in the Middle East is on my mind while I'm here. Will the old hippies with the sour stomachs and the full bellies in the near-exo-suburbs, their inclusive Utopian experiment, really let them be free? Or will they tear through this too like they have everything else?
Will the people there be able to even have what people here seem to hate or ignore? Abuse and mock?
Today? Today, I think so. I think that it can. I think it will. When these men are done it won't seem as pure, we’ll disagree eventually, but it will be done. All war is bad, but their future will start right.
So right that none of the special people will ever want to mention it or notice it, and will find some details to complain about. I say to them: let them eat freedom.
Diplomacy with a carrot and stick
«US President George W. Bush excluded his Lebanese counterpart Emil Lahoud from attending a reception in New York for leaders taking part in the UN summit next week.
Clear enough, for you, Assad?
But Bush extended the invitation to the Lebanese prime minister Foaud Sinioura to attend the reception.»
Where’s Bono? All is Bono, and he is everywhere
From practitioners of recreational compassion to abject liars - the euro-media claims to be sending aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina, but they really aren't. DW prattled on about sending 40 tons of aid, but put into a meaningful context, it's half of the mass of a 747's luggage hold. Never mind that they find a way to link the issues with any other lefty hobby horse they have on the air, but trying to leave no trace of it in print.
Meanwhile the BBC continues to use a natural disaster covering an area nearly as large as the UK for their pedantic vendetta against President George Bush.
Here’s a handy guide to looking at the European press’ output:Suspect a pathological liar if:
Remember, use this knowledge only for good, and never, never, for evil.
the stories seem too dramatic or unrealistic
the lies seem to serve no purpose except to impress people or
the lies can easily be shown up
School: highway to unemployment
This blog’s good friend and occasional informant RV prefaced his translation of an article on the education system in France by Patrick Fauconnier published in the Nouvel Observateur with the following: The percentage of students in France reaching higher education compared to other states which France’s cultural critics often compare themselves to: Australia: 77% France is ranked 30th out of the 40 OECD countries studied. «You obviously already know the French are the most sophisticated, educated, clever and sagacious people around the world, a kind of beacon of universal erudition, don't you? Here is my translation, but please be tolerant, I was taught English in French schools -»
School: highway to unemployment.
Too many young French end school without any qualification. What follows is an investigation on the reason of such a waste, and how to save your children from sinking.
One would like to rejoice and be optimistic on this years 'rentrée' (back to school). But sometimes lucidity is saving. State's lucidity which confesses, at last, that terrible number: every year, 163,000 young people end schooling without any qualification. But reality is worse: about 270,000 young people -- over one third -- leave schooling "without marketable knowledge." The numbers are inexorable: 58,000 give up altogether and leave; 75,000 fail their CAP or BEP, those 'professional diplomas' certifying the basic knowledge any employer requires; 30,000 fail the baccalaureate. Then, 20,000 quit higher education with only a DEUG (university degree of general studies awarded after two years). And 89,000 fail at this very same DEUG, a simple diploma preparing to 'license' (4-years graduation) therefore unmarketable.
A National tragedy.
Result: 109,000 are "without practical knowledge" and 163,000 "without qualification" -- 270,000 young people, 37% of a generation -- try to get a job without certified training. Whence this calamitous paradox: in one hand the astounding number of unemployed youngsters, and on the other little companies who can’t recruit good employees. As a result the state eventually offers 1 000 euros to anyone who accepts certain types of work and agrees to be trained in hotels and hospitality, retail sales, insurance or in building construction trades.
[Fields which in virtually every other part of the world need no inducement to enter whatsoever, and where training is generally not in need of the intervention of national governments. In the US retail is one of the most readily accessed jobs, and the perfect starting point to move on to a better paying, more specific field, and rarely an end in itself.]
Let us not be afraid: it's a national tragedy. Because this observation comes 20 years after the beginning of massive rise in youth unemployment, self-contented (refusing to see the actual statistics), lacking in political courage (refusing to make students marketable), we postponed what was mandatory and inevitable. Now we pay at the high price: mass unemployment, fearing the future, stopped consumption, a majority of youngsters wanting to become civil servants [75%], the others fleeing abroad, enduring sullenness and depression.
A country leaving a third of her young without education digs its own grave. The sources of such a failure? First, too much 'academic' and elitist education, scorning anything about labour, enterprise, and management. Thus, it's the 'ABE' orientation: 'Anything But Enterprise'. Young people thus dream of the admiration in becoming sportsmen, musicians, stylists, or civil servants. As a result the school system amounts to little more than a sorting mechanism where rank eventually prevails over knowledge.
Result: teachers behave more like judges than coaches encouraging specific talents and traits seen in the students. For several years the OECD has been leading a long term study of education systems named ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ or (PISA), among 250,000 pupils in 40 countries. During 2003-2004 questions were about the atmosphere ay school.
We discover that we're ranked last in school spirit. In math, we are below the average concerning the feeling of learning math fluently. As for teachers' sense that they’re supported in their work, we are 29th. Facing such statistics, how could one 'challenge the thermometer' or complain to the bearers of bad news and not look at the causes.
It’s wiser to look at how other nations do this. "In this investigation, Germany and France have very bad results. In Germany, that had a tremendous national impact. In France, one hardly heard about it," observes Walo Hutmacher, education sociologist in the University of Geneva. The most appalling is that, (according to the OECD,) we are the biggest spenders of tax monies for higher education, with one of the largest number of employees at 5th out of the 40 countries sampled.
Our pupils work in average 400 hours more than Scandinavians, who nonetheless placed first in the PISA test. Therefore, the solutions won't stem from curriculum adjustment, but an actual 'cultural revolution', a redesigning of its’ ends and the role of teachers. That's what the [cutely named] 'National Debate [findings/study] Commission on the Future of School' headed by Claude Thélot was about. His report was trashed at the first grunt of the main teachers' union, the SNES. It's nothing about joining in the criticism concerning the “alleged” French decline, but simply that the school system is in urgent need of reformed.
- Patrick Fauconnier.
NouvelObs adds:
(Source: OECD)
United States: 64%
OECD average: 51%
South Korea: 49%
United Kingdom: 47%
France: 37%
Germany: 35%
Etats-Unis: Un Colosse Aux Pieds D'argile ? – Is the U.S. a Giant With Feet of Clay?
According to France 5 the answer is: of course, do you think we would air anything on the U.S. otherwise? Doesn’t Serge’s Head Tilt give it all away? «Qu'a révélé le cyclone Katrina ? Une Amérique raciste et la fin
Is it finished? Yes, it’s finished! All 300 MILLION OF US PLAN ON COMMITTING SUICIDE FOR THE SAKE OF EMMANUEL TODD’S EGO!
de son hyperpuissance ? Est-ce un nouveau "11 septembre" ou
une catastrophe naturelle ? George W. Bush doit-il "déposer le bilan" ? Est-il fini ?»
On September 11th, a few of those arrogant self appointed big-brain types that France is so well known for decided that this would be a good time to engage in the usual class and nationality hatred on the air, and inviting viewers to gripe in a forum with the usual fashion with the usual arguments, much in the way a five-year-old takes comfort in repeating the same joke over and over. «11 septembre 2001
”Riposte de Choc”
Il y a quatre ans, jour pour jour, à New York, les tours jumelles s'écroulaient dans un nuage de poussière et de larmes. On découvrait alors, stupéfaits, abasourdis, une Amérique frappée au cœur, vulnérable. On découvrait alors une force terroriste capable de défier la plus grande puissance du monde.»
It’s a good thing that this is what they think of as an intellectual assault on America. It has the appearance of a hen party after that had 2 Margueritas too many.
At the end of the show the presenter looked at European Regional Chairman of Republicans Abroad, Robert Pingeon and said something to the effect of “You, who speak French so well, I am sure you realized that everything we say about America is colored by our love affair with her” Pingeon calmly replied: “Well, I must have missed that” and said he’d have to watch the show again later to see if he had indeed missed something. Indeed he did. There is no love in the pretext he uses to convince himself of his abusiveness, and there certainly aren’t many facts.
The French panel wouldn’t let Pingeon finish more than 2 sentences at a time, for fear of him saying anything balanced, realistic, or convincing. Repeating a moronic statistical fiction circulating in American leftist circles, Jake Lamar, an American who hasn’t lived in the U.S. for 12 years, quoted the NY Times and said W. had created 17% more poor in the USA than before. With purchasing power rising, and unemployment below 5%, (less than half of Germany and France), it’s an impossibly stupid argument that hinged on 17 percent of black people in the US not getting poorer, but not getting more well off as quickly as the top quintile, even though the income growth itself exceeded inflation. It also would require one to believe that the entire U.S. population is black. So in the lefty mind, of course, no racism could ever exist since only white males could be racist, and every last one of them IS a racist in their minds.
The president, does even have a way of ‘creating poverty’ without it being stupidly obvious and politically suicidal. It’s one of the looniest bits of leftist received wisdom out there, and not only did the NYT repeat it, but an American who appears to have it in for his fellow citizens has no problem parroting it on TV abroad.
Lamar, on his website refers to himself as the ‘leading writer of his generation’, indicating of course that as an American that this is how he’s seen in the U.S. An amazing assertion given that hardly a soul, even among black writers and readers, hardly registers a blip if they pay any attention to him at all outside of fans of mystery novels.
According to Todd, the decline of America has begun. While he was hogging airtime, you could see him smiling to himself once his little diatribes were over. Just grinning like a kid who’d just put one over on someone. Little do they know that the only people on the other side of the puddle paying attention to them are laughing, and are only mildly concerned about how this fits in with their benighted incitement and hate speech laws, and wondering if they will be met at the ferry with an ASBO.
Despicable all around. Think for a moment about the arguments that they were trying to make, and how small in scope and intellect their world really is.
This post written with the former E-nough-ista, Valerie.
The America-Bashers' Use of Symbolism on September 11
When confronted with the tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001, it has become a tradition for some to recall another event that occurred on another September 11.
On that date, in 1973, General Pinochet overthrew Chile's President Allende.
This is supposed to make us think. Hard.
The problem with this, of course, is that there have occurred 500 September 11s in the past 500 years (to take the first round number that came to my mind), with varying occurrences on various continents, in various countries, in various regions, in various cities, in various neighborhoods, and in various personal homes around the world, and just about any one of those occurrences could have been picked to make a comparison with (and provide matter for reflection on, and some kind of metaphysical lesson for) September 11, 2001 (or September 11, 1973, for that matter).
As I have written elsewhere,
If looking down their noses, [America-bashers] ask "Do you know what other event occurred on September 11?", answer "Yes, a terrible tragedy." Pause while they nod approvingly, then add "George Washington lost the battle of Brandywine" (in 1777) or even "Brian De Palma was born on that date" (so was Ferdinand Marcos, by the way), although I'm not sure to what extent that counts as a tragedy. If they object that they are referring to something more recent and more tragic than that, agree and say "you must be talking of Hitler ordering reinforcements to Romania" (1940) or "FDR ordering any Axis ships in U.S. waters shot on sight" (1941) or even "wasn't it the first TV broadcast of a Miss America beauty contest?" (1954). How about, "that was the date (in 1962) that the Beatles recorded their first single at EMI Studios (you know, 'Love Love Me Do')".This symbolism makes as much sense as noting with alarm that our 40th president sported three names with six letters each, supposedly marking the alleged number of the beast.
(If any association with September 11 should be made — with regards to the 2001 attacks, that is, not the 1973 coup — as several readers have pointed out to me, it would perhaps make more sense to call up the 1669 defeat of the Muslim armies besieging Vienna, bringing an end to the Ottoman advance into Europe.)
But what it all boils down to this: for symbolism to have any kind of meaning, it needs to stay close to its subject and, in my opinion, reflect on the better angels of our nature. What it should especially avoid is collective guilt, not least because that collective guilt is necessarily one-sided, i.e., used exclusively against Americans and their allies (or, historically, by any group against any group's alleged enemies).
For instance, it would probably not be too difficult to search through Chilean history and find some kind of tragedy (nation-wide or otherwise) on a September 11 that proved that the 1973 coup d'état was the Chileans' punishment for the earlier disaster (notwithstanding the fact that many believe that Pinochet's coup averted a far worse catastrophe for the country). In another example, which is actually far more coherent than simply noting a similarity of dates, many state that every setback by Bush or by a Bush ally amounts to (well-deserved) punishment for sending troops to Iraq, but because members of the Coalition of the Willing keep winning elections, this symbolism is discretely ignored. (I call this the wait, wait, wait syndrome.)
The use of symbolism says far more about those who wield it than about those the symbolism is meant to describe (and judge).
So, anyway: we know the date that Pinochet grabbed power in 1973.
Bien.
But what was the date that he relinquished power?
What was the date in 1990 that Pinochet handed power back to a civilian government?
The answer is: March 11.
Now, we all remember what happened in Madrid on March 11, 2004, don't we?
So what is that supposed to mean? What is that supposed to symbolize?
Somehow, we are led to believe, the wholescale murder of 3,000 people in New York and Washington would not, or might not, have occurred had a strongman with no link to (and probably wholly unknown to) the perpetrators not grabbed power on that same date 28 years earlier.
What is the wholescale murder of 191 people in Madrid supposed to mean? That it would not have occurred had that same strongman not handed power back and had he remained in power 14 years earlier?
Your guess is as good as mine…
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