On A Day Like This ...

A couple of years back, something very bad happened on this day.

I don't just mean the sudden loss of almost 3,000 lives, the destruction of iconic property, the terrible, terrible fear.

I mean the blossoming of ignorance and bigotry, fear and opportunistic greed which seemed to well up from the dark underside to spread like a blood stain around a dying man.

Time and again, I am reminded of this scene from Babylon 5, where a man who peddled Hate, who used Hate as an excuse to destroy, found himself tasting its bitter and reluctant fruit.

And I hear these words, spoken in the late 1990s, as though they were yesterday.

'Every day, here and at home, we are warned about "The Enemy." But who is "The Enemy?"

'Is it the alien? Well, we are all aliens to one another. Is it the one who believes differently than we do? No.

'Oh, no, my friends! "The Enemy" is Fear! "The Enemy" is Ignorance! "The Enemy" is the one who tells you that you must hate that which is different, because, in the end, that Hate will turn on you; and that same Hate will destroy you!'

We haven't forgotten 9/11. The ignorant cannot let go of a grudge, even when the man who purportedly instigated the event has met death at the hands of the nation he supposedly attacked, eleven years ago today.

What we have done is swept the memory under the carpet.

We've forgotten why the US went to war in the first place, why we in the UK then followed along, and why we are in the messes we are both in to this day.

We went to war because, both here and over there, our politicians were being shown up as utter and abject failures; incompetents and opportunists.

This event was not just a massacre. It was a catalyst, to pull the wool down over everybody's eyes, leading to almost the first one-fifth of the first century of the Third Millennium starting to look like a backslide down into barbarism. As though we weren't all just sliding down, scrabbling for a handhold to prevent the fall, but were actively scooting along downhill on our backsides, cheering and whooping, as if we were on a water slide at a fun fair or something.

So let's note 9/11 in the history books, in the same way that we note the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the fake Labour Letter to the Bolsheviks of 1924, and the Reichstag Fire. Let's remember this day as marking the beginning of the Descent of the West, in the same way as we note the day the Roman Empire fell in 476.