Somehow more significant this year than previous years since 2001, both because of my unearthing (without earnest searching) of a couple of documentaries raising doubts about the 'official story' of '9.11', and also more mundane matters. The weather forecast promises this to be the last morning I will be able to take my tea comfortably warm on the veranda ... probably, and after a relatively long period without the trip to Ajdovscina, we return to the 'work routine' today. So it feels like some sort of turning point. Last night we found three new-born kittens in a small box whilst tidying out the loft of our small barn, and this morning I gave them to the woman next door, one of whose many cats was surely the mother (but harbouring grave doubts about their survival as their huge number of cats seems to be diminishing) . Such matters are hardly relevant to the dramatic events of eight years ago in another land, but doubtless contribute to my state of mind as I write: it feels like the sun is going down.

Another, more obviously pertinent background detail is that I have been reading Chomsky. I am old enough to be aware of a change in politics (at least in the UK) from (for want of a better word) 'honourability' to overt 'spin'. I think the key word here is overt as I cannot believe that politicians never lied before. In short, it seems that the lies have become thinner, barely concealed, without even a facade of 'honourability', by which I refer to the contempt with which they half-heartedly dress up 'the truth'. This surely amounts to taunting us with our powerlessness - so the difference between a dictatorship and democracy is ...?
Few despots would survive very long if they did not cultivate a degree of paranoia, probably intrinsic in the character of those who 'would be king', doubtlessly recalling the ruthless aspects of their own rise to power and perceiving it in both friend and foe. What appears to be America's simple arrogance in its overwhelming dominance, would seem to be better explained as paranoia. For such overwhelming and unchallenged military and economic superiority not to satisfied with maintaining its position but feeling a need to increase its hegemony at the risk of its (and certainly our) survival summons an image of Nero 'fiddling as Rome burned'.

The comparisons with the decline of the Romans abound, going back long before the twin towers collapsed - Kenneth Clarke's 'Civilisation', for one, of 1969. One wonders if Chomsky's bleak (235 pages of detailed, depressing revelation versus 2 pages of tentative, generalised optimism) analysis of American foreign policy, leaves us with so many possibilities (probabilities, even) of violent/military destruction from a school bully becoming so crazed with power and out of control that someone, somewhere, is simply bound to push the button. But this book has a deliberate focus, and I'm sure that elsewhere Chomsky, or someone equally as bright and committed, has explored the implications of its foreign policy upon America's domestic situation, though he does mention short-term economic greed as a motivation. First Reagan, then the Bushes (Clinton started to reverse the trend briefly) have taken the USA into an economic slump comparable to the start of World War 2 with a quite overt strategy of looking after the rich, genuinely philosophising (as did Thatcher) that wealth permeates downwards. Nothing guarantees re-election like a 'good war' (Falklands, Iraq etc., etc.), distracting the discontented masses, even providing jobs - but this is strictly short-term, as discontent grows again when the 'body bags' start coming home and, in a smaller but extreme example, Milosevic was only stopped when the Serbs themselves ran out of food. Nearly ten years ago, a little shocked at the passionate vengefulness I encountered in Zagreb, I asked a bitter Croat rather nervously if there was going to be another war - he said: "Oh no, we can't afford it". Willingness to die for the glorification of one's country and its leaders soon stops when there is not enough to eat. (I imagine this would extend even to self-defense against threat of invasion if one's own government were unable to feed its people.)
Hegemony is a strange concept, dryly defined in some quarters as "hundreds of thousands of big, strong soldiers obeying one little old lady" (in the UK at any rate!) Put another way, it points to the lack of desire for power in the vast majority. Leadership, and leadership qualities are recognised, like exceptional intelligence or beauty, as a rare commodity - it starts for all of us in the school playground. But school bullies, despots or even democratically elected leaders still only survive at the top by keeping enough of the right people happy. All of the aforementioned, in slightly differing ways, create powerful elites around them, making the numbers they have to keep happy much more manageable - just as the kings and their courts before them. Somewhat reassuringly, history furbishes many examples of downtrodden peoples ultimately overturning leaders who abuse their positions of power, though often only after an awful lot of abuse. Rome may have been a special case, slowly fading away after a succession of decadent, apathetic, even insane emperors let the people down, and there was no real alternative. Possibly, after the alternative of communism collapsed, we are in a similar situation nowadays, where the noble republic of the United States is starting to become crazed with power, behaving (frankly) insanely, without any effective checks to its power - less because nowhere else has as powerful an armoury, but more because it represents global capitalism - globalisation - and nobody is proposing any viable alternative. The destruction of Rome hardly compares in scale to the destruction the Americans are capable of, or capable of causing, but the implications for any survivors are comparable, and the setback for the evolution of human civilisation is quite immeasurable.

I was driving a van on the north circular in London at about 2pm on the 11th of September 2001, on my way to Earl's Court to strike Sarah Jane's stand at a trade fair. It was a warm sunny day and was (unusually) listening to the radio. I can't really describe the sense of shock, disbelief and I continued to be glued to the radio along with all the other truck drivers waiting their turn to pick up their loads in the car park near the exhibition halls. There was a heightened nervousness as we gazed up at the planes coming in to land at Heathrow, with one eye on the skyscraper nearby, and a strange speechlessness. With the benefit of hind-sight, I can compare it to Kennedy's assassination, or at least to what an eight year old picks up from the effect on his parents. Certainly, in both cases, we can all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when news broke. The significance of the attack upon one of the main centres of global capitalism seems to have been played down, or at least understated since then, but was one of my first thoughts. As people began to talk about it a very common reaction was, though sympathetic, grimly that it was 'about time', after so many terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere, that the Americans experienced it first hand. Equally common, and following on from that was a general fear of how the States might react, made more worrying by the knowledge that nobody could stop them. Tony Blair's subsequent mystifying behaviour over Iraq I initially (and optimistically) put down to him being 'privy to information we are not' and it was not like him to ignore public opinion, then I thought maybe he was acting on the age-old wisdom of being better to be 'inside' to change things, especially where what you are trying to change is so powerful. Maybe he did mitigate American actions in ways we will not know for a long time, or maybe he was just ambitious, or maybe he dug himself in over his head, but although something did feel a bit strange about 9.11, just the deaths of all those people - the scale of the atrocity - seemed to justify the whole 'war on terror' thing. One of the most sobering realisations came from a radio broadcast just before the bombing of Baghdad. A BBC journalist was canvassing opinion in a Baghdad cafe and after a while became curious about the civility with which he was being treated by people who were soon to be on the receiving end of our bombs. He asked them why they were being so nice to him, and they replied that they did not blame ordinary people - "after all, you are no more responsible for the actions of your leaders than we are".

Jon Hatfull

September 2009