Skip to content

Trevor Blake: 9/11 Timeline

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” [Why?] I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” [Here there is no 'why'], he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.
- Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity

There is no ‘why’ to 9/11.  I talk about it, study it, organize information, chase down conspiracies real and false, consult those I disagree with to see if I’ve missed anything, and there is no gesture that makes this senseless act sensible, this victory of stupid into a rational experience.   There are times when being an intellectual, looking for reason and preferring answers with a why, is no benefit to getting along in the world.  And there is no ‘why’ to the administration of President George W. Bush.  If only class war existed, if only historical materialism existed, then the heavy hands of the tyrants would be on the same puppet strings as my own hands and it would all make sense, it would all be rational.  But the closest I’ve found to a ‘why’ in this world is ‘because I said so’ being said by someone with the physical force to see it happen.  Sometimes we get a Cincinnatus or a Jefferson, sometimes we get a Caligula or a Bush.  Usually we get a Lincoln, neatly declining to be one or the other.  History unfolds without destiny, following no law, often changing but without pattern, and the best we can hope for is a tyranny of relative peace.

Is there anything to be gained by marking this day, repeating what I and others have already said?  Probably not for the world, but it offers me some relative peace.  Here is my public memorial to 9/11 for the year 2010.  Where there is a date in the front of the entry the entry is an eternal link.  Where there is a date in parenthesis the entry is from OVO.

Which brings us up to today.  While 9/11 first responders among the New York City Fire Department and New York City Police Department read books to children, children in Muslim countries are poisoned for wanting to learn to read.  While the United States leads the world in donations to flood victims in the Islamic nation of Pakistan, not a single Islamic nation appears on the list of donors.  While “Allahu Akbar, God is Great” is now carved into a medieval cathedral in Lyon, it is next to impossible to build or repair any cathedral in most Muslim nations.  While the streets of Paris are blocked by Muslims praying to Mecca, “apostates” are put to death in Muslim countries.  While the President of the United States asks a small church to refrain from burning a small number of Qurans on a specific day, Muslim nations burn Bibles every day as a matter of law.  The nation afraid to speak plainly of tyrants will get the tyrants it deserves.  As monstrous as the Bush administration and its bootlickers are, they are amateurs – amateurs – compared to the writhing pest hole that is Islam.

I vow eternal contempt for those who kill to serve an invisible monster that lives in the sky, be it god or allah.

Friday, September 10, 2010,. Filed under: 9/11, islam, trevorblake. Permalink.