The Damage Done on Sept. 11th

On yet another anniversary of the tragedy on Sept. 11th, humanity has much to reflect on its aftermath. That fateful day which will live in infamy,  terrorists who attacked America did not bring down only the New York’s World Trade Center towers. On that day, the prospects of peace in a world which had seen the end of the cold war era and collapse of communism,  crumbled like the Towers’ beams. On that day the Middle East conflict graduated from its regional status to a global one with far reaching consequences. Thousands of lives have been lost in wars and terrorist attacks without remarkable improvements to any of the people involved. In the end the aftermath of 9/11 comes at a huge cost paid not only by those who have lost their lives, but by all of us as governments around the world have restrained freedoms (spying  on us, torturing and jailing individuals without due process) and wasted billions of dollars in the name of security. Most important of all, we are left with the huge opportunity cost of not being able to shift, after the end of the cold war, the world’s minds and resources to more vital challenges (poverty, child mortality, development, climate change, etc). The damage done on 9/11 is that our entire planet is still crumbling under the weight of yet more senseless wars and our species’ gift for continuously falling short of its potential.

The Madness of Man and War

The marking today of the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I gives us time to reflect on the madness of man. Nature and the animal kingdom are filled with examples of cruelty in the battle for survival, man however, a species supposedly blessed by a  superior intelligence, excels above all in the art of killing and warfare. History is littered with bloodshed, some caused by inevitable natural disasters, but most is the result of the belligerence man that has not been tamed by the painful lessons of the past. In World War I for example some 20 million soldiers and civilians are thought to have lost their lives (70,000 died just in 1 day in the battle of Somme). Although ancient history through the middle ages and modern times have seen numerous conflicts and death, the 20th century was by far the bloodiest. Over 70 million people, the majority of them civilians were killed in World War II making it the deadliest conflict in human history. Trench warfare of course pales in comparison with the deadliness of the nuclear bombings by America of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed 140,000 and 85,000 lives. By far the worse however were the slow extermination by Nazi Germany under Hitler of millions of jews and europeans in gas chambers and concentration camps. On an even grander and more disgusting scale were the millions more of russians and chinese who died in gulags, labor camps or of famine under the madness of communist cultural revolutions created in Stalin’s Soviet empire and Mao’s China. As we write today, conflicts are still flaring in almost all of earth’s continents, some small others far bigger, pointing to a future where humanity’s tears and blood will still flow abundantly as if to prove that man is a species whose madness still far surpasses its own limited intelligence.