As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 (and the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor) approach I remain genuinely confused by the tendency of our culture to refer to 9/11 as the worst attack on America "since Pearl Harbor". This error is truly bizarre for two reasons.
Firstly, it is bizarre because we would think that 9/11 would be remembered as far worse than Pearl Harbor even if it wasn't because it is so much closer in time and memory to all of us, even those few of us who remember Pearl Harbor.
Secondly, and more confusingly, it is bizzare because by every conceivable measure 9/11 was objectively far worse an attack than Pearl Harbor, making it even more perplexing that we would exalt the former attack over the latter.
First, for the targets. The target of Pearl Harbor was an American military installation on Hawaii. Two facts are important to consider. Firstly, this attack was not an "attack on America" at all; Hawaii was not a state at the time and would not be for another two decades.
Secondly, the target was purely military and by any reading of international law, this was an entirely "legal" act of war. Uniformed Japanese soldiers in marked Japanese warplanes attacked uniformed American sailors in marked American warships. All Western moral and military law holds that this was a legitimate target; it was not terrorism.
The targets on 9/11, on the other hand were in the United States and almost exclusively and intentionally targeted civilians. This is properly understood as an illegal or illegitimate target; this was terrorism.
We can see this distinction within the 9/11 attacks themselves. While "9/11" is usually shorthand for "the World Trade Center attacks", there were 4 hijacked airplanes that day. The Pentagon attack was similar to Pearl Harbor in the sense that the target was unarguably military, thereby making it "legitimate" under the laws of war.
What made the Pentagon strike illegitimate, however, was the fact that the "weapon" used by the attackers was an airplane full of civilians, making it terrorism. So while the Pentagon was a legitimate target, the method of attack of entirely illegitimate.
The final and most straightforward measurement by which 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor was the number of dead. Even if we abjure all notions of "legitimate" targets and methods, even if we adopt the idea that "war is war" and "dead is dead", 9/11 was worse simply because more Americans were killed on 9/11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor. Simple as that.
Pearl Harbor killed approximately 2,400 Americans. 9/11 killed approximately 3,000. That's a full 25% more. The fact that they were civilians makes it worse, but even if they weren't civilians, it would have been a worse attack than Pearl Harbor.
So what accounts for this? If anything, we could be forgiven for exaggerating 9/11's magnitude and calling it "worse than Pearl Harbor" simply because people attach great self-importance to things they witness. But we don't need to do this. Instead, we're doing the opposite; we're downplaying the severity of 9/11 and exalting Pearl Harbor above its place.
The only thing worse about Pearl Harbor was that it led to the deaths of 400,000 Americans in World War II. But 9/11, it would seem, has led to the death of simple mathematics.
Take a good look at this picture. Even if the acronyms "ANP" and "NOI" mean nothing to you, you can surely tell that there is something strange at work here. The 3 white men in the foreground are Nazis, specifically members of the American Nazi Party. The far more numerous black men behind them are members of the Nation of Islam.
The obvious question is why Nazis (white separatists) and the Nation of Islam (black separatists) would be attending the same function without killing each other. And the answer has to do with the nature of extremes. If we understand the political spectrum as a circle rather than a line, we see that extremes are actually neighbors.
Just as Nazis and Communists were nearly identical while they fixated on destroying each other, the ANP and NOI were nearly identical as well. And while the Nazis and Communists would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy of liberal democracy, the ANP and NOI would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy.
And who was the common enemy of the NOI and the ANP? Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement in general. And here we see how "opposites" attract.
Deep down, the Muslims and the Nazis wanted the same thing. They wanted separation. Despite the fact that each group was racially monolithic and explicitly preached the inferiority of the other race, they were able to identify a common enemy in people who favored integration. So while these groups may have warred with each other if they were forced into close proximity, their entire ideologies were geared at preventing any sort of proximity.
Ironically enough, the NOI and the ANP were able to forge an alliance based on their hatred for one another. Their hatred for one another ran so deep that the only thing worse than the other was any person or group who would propose mixing the races. Therefore these hate groups hated integrationists more than they hated each other.
Martin Luther King was a threat to the Nazis for obvious reasons. He wanted black integration into the white-dominated civil society. Martin Luther King was a threat to the NOI for reasons that may seem counter intuitive but which are no less obvious than the former. King was a threat to the NOI for the same reason; he advocated black access to white institutions. To the NOI, who preached that all whites were "the devil", the threat is clear.
What is much less know, however, is who brought these groups together. Because no matter how logical their common interest may have been on paper, we should remember that these groups explicitly hated each other with a profound bloodlust. Nazis killed black folks and the NOI was exclusively black. Quite a bump in the road. So who bridged this bump?
Malcolm X. It wasn't in the movie, of course, but Malcolm X personally arranged this alliance and invited Nazis to NOI rallies and speeches. He forged a similar alliance with the KKK. Anyone who knows the contours of Malcolm's life knows that he considered King to be naive in the extreme and that black folks' salvation lay in separation and self-reliance.
But most people do not know how far he took that logic. And he took it far indeed, to the point where he was meeting with and making tactical alliances with groups who were murdering black people. Even if Malcolm and the NOI thought those black people were misguided, they were still "their" people, being brutalized and murdered by "the devil".
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but this one may take the cake. The closest analogy I can think of offhand would be an alliance between al Qaeda and the Christian Coalition, founded on the common conviction that American society was decadent and sinful. Quite a few inconvenient truths would have to be ignored to forge such a bond, but this should illuminate the bizarre gravity of the NOI-ANP alliance.
This part of Malcolm's life, and it was only a small part, is ignored by nearly all Americans today, and especially black Americans. But ignoring is not the same as erasing. The marginal nature of both groups should remind us that movements based on exclusion ultimately fail and that "the devil" is always in the details.
It is said that the victors write history. This is manifest, since in history the losers earn their title by being killed by the victors. And dead men tell no tales. Very often this truth means that the losers are assigned not just the title of "loser", but also that of "the bad guys". And while the losers are often in fact bad guys, so are the winners.
The winner's version of World War II was that the losers started it. Specifically, the losers (Germany) started the war on September 1, 1939 by invading Poland. There are several problems with this version.
Firstly, September 1, 1939 was not Germany's first aggressive action. It was, depending how we count, at least the 4th. And Germany committed NO aggression against the eventual winners on September 1. England and France declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. So while Germany was certainly guilty of starting a war against Poland, it was not guilty of starting a World War.
The winners, rather, declared that World War was necessary after the invasion of Poland. But here's the problem: Germany was not alone in invading Poland. While it invaded from the west, the Soviet Union invaded from the east, fulfilling a previously agreed upon course of action. The Nazis and the Soviets were allies, and they both invaded Poland.
Yet the winners only declared war on Germany, despite that fact that the Soviets were guilty of the very same crime. Why does this not matter to us now? Because when the guns fell silent, the Soviets were one of the winners. So the fact that they cooperated with Hitler in his aggression which triggered a World War was deemed irrelevant.
The Nazis never sought war with Western Europe; they sought war with Eastern Europe. Hitler's goal was to subjugate the lands to the east of Germany. The eventual winners decreed that this was unacceptable and accepted World War as the acceptable price to pay to prevent German subjugation of Eastern Europe.
But when the war ended, one of the winners subjugated Eastern Europe just as the losers had aimed to do. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in his aggression against Eastern Europe in the beginning of the war and, at the end of the war, accomplished exactly what Hitler failed to achieve.
The World went to war to prevent Germany from conquering Eastern Europe. When the war was over, Eastern Europe had simply traded one conqueror (Hitler) for another (Stalin). And Stalin was given his prize, because he was a winner.
Hitler's evil or Germany's guilt is not at issue; what is at issue is why Stalin's evil and the Soviet Union's guilt was ignored. This is inevitable, though, because the truth lays bare an awful fact: the entire objective of the war from the point of view of England, France, and the United States failed utterly; Eastern Europe remained subjugated.
The winner, by virtue of allying themselves with Stalin, simply traded one tyranny for another, while 50 million people died in the process. As Churchill privately admitted after the War, "we killed the wrong pig".
In my opinion, Hitler was not the wrong pig, but neither was he the only pig. One pig was traded for another. And despite the mantle of "winner", and the ridiculous charade of Stalin's henchmen putting Hitler's henchmen on trial, a pig is still a pig, no matter how much lipstick one applies.
The American author Thomas Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic". There are many examples of this tendency to commodify (or make chic) images and ideas that reject the very premise of commodification (because they are too radical).
The best example of radical chic is the cottage capitalist industry of selling commodifications of the image of Che Guevara. One wonders what Guevara might have thought of the specter of American college students wearing his face as a consumer product totally divorced from the man's actual ideas.
The t-shirt shown above is another example of this trend. But there's something deeper and more insidious about the hammer-and-sickle t-shirt. Ask yourself this: what would your reaction be if the t-shirt above showed the swastika? The shirt would transform from a piece of kitsch to a symbol of hatred.
But why should this be? The idea represented on the t-shirt shown above led by any measure to far more death and deprivation than the Nazis caused, yet it is not considered scandalous or even distasteful to wear this symbol.
The two most prodigious destroyers of human beings in history were both communists. Stalin and Mao. They accounted for far more death than Hitler, yet they and their ideas are not the intellectual and moral outcasts that the Nazis are.
How can we account for this? How is it that these bad guys (the Communists) are better than the ultimate bad guys (the Nazis) to the point where it is fashionable to literally wear their symbol on one's sleeve?
One direct answer would be that the Communist Soviet Union destroyed the Nazis. While they were helped in this task by capitalist countries, the USSR paid the huge majority of the blood debt to history in the crushing of Naziism.
And, since history is written by the victors, the Communists clearly benefit from this service to mankind. The Soviets' crushing of the Nazis has obscured two facts. First, that the Communists were quantitatively far more murderous than even that Nazis. Second, that the Nazis were only able to conquer so much of Europe because of their alliance with the Communists in the early years of the war.
But there is more than just that. The other reason that Communism is seen with less contempt than Naziism is that, for all its crimes, its ideology was still morally superior to that of the Nazis. Communism was at least rhetorically based on a more inclusive and constructive worldview than Naziism.
Nazi ideology was dominated by what it was against; it was primarily destructive. Communist ideology was dominated by Utopian images of progress and inclusion. Naziism explicitly could not be relevant to the huge majority of the world's people, while Communism implicitly claimed to be all inclusive.
Naziism was entirely based on racism; Communism could only work if racism were utterly rejected. Naziism rejected the premise that there was any such thing as equality, whereas Communism was based on the premise that the equality of all people was obvious.
This difference, as important as it is, still does not complete the explanation of the dynamic. What is needed to complete the picture is people. We know now that Communism failed to fulfill its promises, but this is obviously a hindsight that the people of the time did not have.
Therefore, we must ask ourselves this: what kind of person would be attracted to each ideology in, say, the 1930's, before they knew how each ideology would actually be manifested?
It strikes me that any person who ever became a Nazi must have, by definition, been a racist. People that became Communist, however, could have been guided by the better angels of our nature, even if we cast them as naive in retrospect.
Put simply, there could never have been any "good" Nazis, while there could have been literally millions of "good" communists, people who were motivated by love rather than hate. Nazism was an evil ideology which did evil; Communism was a good ideology that did evil.
Put another way, Naziism was evil because it succeeded in being exactly what it claimed to be. Communism, in contrast, was evil because it failed to be what it claimed. And perhaps being changed into a consumer commodity is the best evidence of all of Communism's failure.
We are left to wonder, then, how much better the world would be if the tables were turned. What if Communism had been true to its word and Naziism had not been? The world would be a much better place.
Communism failed because people failed to implement such an ambitious agenda without crushing all dissent. Naziism succeeded because, evidently and unfortunately, it spoke more directly to what people are, rather than to what they wish they could be.
