I hope you will pardon me for making a major point out of a minor remark in the text you posted in which you rightly made the link between the terrorist airplane attacks in the USA and the start of World War One by a bomb thhrown by hand in Sarajevo in 1914.
I had also the name of Sarajevo on my lips when I saw the almost life broadcast of the NY events... another fuse is lighted...
My feeling is that the way of coalition making at that time (Entente) inflated whatever tension there was at that time... dichitomizing nations into big camps and thus preparing the slaughtering grounds of war...
Recently Sadam Hussain called the Gulf war "The Mother of All Wars", which might explain why in response we do now get offered "THE NEW WAR". Such slogans are there to confuse us, to disassociate the past from the present. And we need the past so much to be able to face the present. The First World War which is mentioned by Janos Sugar in his article was called "The Great War" and of courser only decades later, rebaptised The Second World War, hence our collective fear for a Third one and so on...
Now on one not unimportant issue raised by Janos Sugar I have some comments, and that is that the death toll and how the balance shifts through time from military to civilian victims.
First of all Janos gives a number of victims of the First World War which has no ground, or is it a typing mistake, or are also wounded calculated?
" It was a long and cruel war, with close to a hundred million casualties, most of them civilians."
... "most of them civilians"?, as far as I have understood these events, it is the other way around, most of them military. Which is logical as most of the big battles were fought by armies at both sides in trenches, having machine guns, heavy artillery and in some cases poison gas... also many soldiers were not directly dying in combat but just got ill in the terrible conditions of the trenches...
What has been a good source for me over three decades but of course not anymore up to date is Gill Eliots's "Twentieth century book of the death", published in 1972, which is one of the few non-biased and careful attempts at bookkeeping of death by human violence. Eliot mentions a number of military death in the First World War between 8,5 and 10 million (of which 1 million dying of dissease). Civilian death is estimated between 0,8 to 1 million, but of course massive disruption of social structures has caused maybe many more millions dying of what is sometimes called 'demographic death', but that number is always very very diffcult to estimate. But when these numbers may be too low in some people opinion it might be 3 to 5 million more indirect civilian death, but that is about it, NOT a hundred million!.
-- Single battles lasting weeks had an enormous death toll, like Verdun (French 377.2312; German 337.000) and at the Somme (French 200.000; British 420.000' German 450.000), in total 1,75 million military death just of two battles. (Alistair Horne "Death of a generation" 1970). --
With the Second World War the balance shifts. When -at a macro level- one does not put the murdering of Jews as a seperate case and adds this number of 5 to 6 million to the civilian death, then we can speak of am equal toll of soldiers and civilians, each group 10 million, twenty million in total.
The overal picture of human death by human violence tended to be that of a pyramid with at the top the one's killed directly by heavy weapons and and the base the one's killed indirectly by illness, hunger, displacement and other disruptions of social structures. It has always been more easy to measure the top of the pyramid as estimating the base, which often seems to float in an ocean of insecurity and iceberg like size speculations can not be avoided there.
We seem to get soon some reasonably exact numbers of the death toll in the airplane attacks in the USA (compared to other instances of mass violence) and the range will be between 5 and 6 thousand. Which is, with the exception of the atomic bombs on Japan, a very high figure, inflicted by just three airplanes.
For instance the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans in 1940, which laid the complete inner town and several neighbouring areas in ashes, counted in the end 'only' 800 so and so death (right after the bombing there were very high numbers ranging from 12 to 20 thousand). The later carpet- fire-bombings of Germany and Japan by the British and Canadian and American airforces during the Second World War needed each time hundreds and sometimes even thousands of airplanes to kill tens of thousands people in a single big raid (a rough estimate is that between 700 and 800 thousand people died in those aerial bombardments).
Important is to look back at that part of recent history and to understand that the shift from military to civilian targetting has one of its roots in what many of us have learned to be the struggle for freedom, the struggle against the barbarism of the Third Reich and the Japanese Imperium.
One can hear the same debate as at the end of the Second World War, if the effective economic blockade of Japan was not sufficient, if the fire bombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1945 (between 100 and 150 thousand death) was not already the defeat of that nation, and if the use of the atomic bomb was maybe not needed, or mayber had quiet another future aim...
..the same debate now, wheather or not an economic blockade of those states harbouring terrorist groups might not be a better weapon, then a military attack with the unavoidable, or some would say covered up killing of civilians.
I know many people who do not like or refuse to discuss the numbers of death, who find it unethical or do get emotional and say they can not differentiate between such enormous figures... anything beyond one or ten...
My plea is to be precize... yes dig up each bone... count all the skulls, sample all the DNA remains of what once were human beings, and when you want revenge, keep at least the real number of your 'own victims' in mind. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 counted some two thousand military and at the most 50 civilian death (several ones by their own misdirected anti-aircraft fire). The American retaliation was a hundredfold that number, and certainly not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki.. Most of them were civilian death... designated as 'economic targets' .Were not all Japanese working for their war industry? It was Henri Kissinger who suggested immedeately after the recent airplane attack that America should remember the way it re-acted on Pearl Harbour.
One would wish (cynical) that the primitive form of revenge, an eye for an eye, would be at the basis of the policy of those who have been elected as the government of the United States, so we would see "just" 5 thousand so and so alleged terrorists killed... but one fears it will be worse when reading the repeated slogan on American television, not:
AMERICA'S REVENGE
but
AMERICA'S NEW WAR
The outrage over the mass murder of 5 thousand people in New York and Washington, is a good sign. The endless world wide showing of all details of human suffering and material damage makes one hope that we may have learned something, as so many more people, so much more human habitat and culture has been violently destroyed only decades ago, without such a massive public reaction.
But when this public outcry, when this humanist response will be diverted, corrupted in yet another military overkill action, nothing will have been won, and we let ourselves 'mentaly' be thrown back to the historical stage of a bomb being thrown at one of the heirs of the Austrian-Habsburg empire, Francis Ferdinand, to Sarajevo in 1914 and the subsequent events that soon went out of control.
We can see daily how the carriers of these humanist opinions are at the same time being pushed and pulled by war monger forces... it is scarry to see the oscillation between these two extremes.. it shows us how fragile this 'humanist attitude' is, how easy it is to go back to tradfitional 'big stick' politics, how difficult to prevent this last option from happening.
We have a lot more to do to be more then mere targets or recruits in whose-ever war...
Tjebbe van Tijen
Tjebbe van Tijen
Imaginary Museum Projects (IMP), Amsterdam
Background information on:
http://people.a2000.nl/ttijen/Index.html