Sakhra-l'Assal Interviews Peter Lamborn Wilson

SA: Can you tell us something about the current state of affairs in the
USA? What do you make of this general idea that the "world will never be
the same"?

PLW: That's practically the first thing I heard on Sept. 11th --
"Everything has changed -- now, everything's going to be different."
Everyone was saying that (except me, I wasn't saying that...) I'm still
not convinced that that's true. I mean obviously, in some way it's true,
it has to be, it's a big event, so things change. But in a broader
s ense, a philosophical sense, if you want to put it that way, in a
philosophy of history sense, is anything different? Has anything
changed? It's not clear to me that it has. For example we can say that
in 1989 and '91, with the fall of Communism, that history came to a
stop. This is the expression of people both on the left and the right
who saw the dialectic of the social as essentially synonymous with
history. So when that came to an end, history came to an end. Alright,
let's accept this for a moment as a hypothesis and ask -- I mean,
obviously there's some truth to it, whether you take it literally or
not, some sort of history came to an end -- so, let's look at the event
of 09/11 and ask whether history begins again. As someone said to me,
'Oh, I guess you'll agree that history has started up again.' No, I'm not
sure I do agree.

"Twentieth Century Most Murderous in History"

Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian [UK], Saturday February 23, 2002

The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history.
The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its
wars has been estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than
10% of the world's population in 1913. Taken as having begun
in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken war, with few
and brief periods without organised armed conflict
somewhere. It was dominated by world wars: that is to say,
by wars between territorial states or alliances of states.

Edward Said, "Thoughts About America"

Counterpunch

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite.

Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to "end" Iraq.

Full story continues at: said america