Hi All,
the following document is being placed in the People's Geography Project
Teaching Clearinghouse, which we are currently working on.  However, given
that it is written by a geographer with whom many of us work , and who
lives not far from the destruction of last tuesday, I thought people might
want to read it sooner rather than later.
cheers,
lawrence

From Geographer Neil Smith in New York

Two days after the hijacked jets sliced into the World Trade Center I was
able to walk down to ground zero. It was night and I could get in because
our flat lies just south of Houston Street. The scene from Chambers Street,
four blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center, was truly
other-worldly. For blocks and blocks on the way south the streets were
almost empty and completely dark, the usual bars, boutiques and delis
closed, shuttered and flanged in ash. The closer I got to the destruction
the more its immensity became obvious.  Instead of darkness, the smoking
'pile' was emblazoned in high-powered lights, as bright as a sunny day, so
that rescue workers could dig. The most awful thing was the look on the
face of rescue workers, nurses, firefighters coming out after many hours in
the rubble.  Their faces were gaunt, expressionless, eyes sunken, shadowed
by ash. No-one said a word.

As I walked back north I tried to think how this could have happened.  How
are we to explain this?  What could anyone have been thinking to cause such
mayhem, misery and loss of life? The news media treated the destruction of
the trade towers and the plane crash at the Pentagon as highly local events
and simultaneously national affronts - an attack on America, CNN labelled
it after an hour of coverage - but what connected these different scales of
response. Why were attacks on two cities construed as a national attack? Of
course the symbolic choice of targets by the hijackers was neither random
nor the act of madmen; they were prime symbols of worldwide US economic
domination and military power. Before it was manufactured as a national
event, therefore, these attacks were simultaneously local and global events.

Still the xenophobic and nationalist hysteria was in many ways
understandable. Somehow, through nearly a century in which the US rose to
global hegemony, the actual territory of this nation never witnessed any of
the brutal death -- 20 million in World War I, more than 30 million in
World War III, and many tens of millions in other wars on four continents.
No other country has been so immune to the terror that made the twentieth
century the most violent in history. Nowhere else does a populace have the
luxury of deluding themselves that geography is salvation, that geography
protects power. That fantasy is punctured for ever.  A certain kind of
global parochialism, peculiar to a country that prides itself on its
cosmopolitanism, has been exposed, and the result is not pretty.

But why the rush to judgment? With or without evidence, Bush and the media
have screamed for revenge on Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire who has
dedicated himself to a religious war against those he sees as the enemies
of Islam. The same screams for Arab blood erupted after the Oklahoma City
bombing when in fact it was Timothy McVeigh, trained by the US Army, who
planted the bomb. Osama Bin Laden and the Afghanistan's Taliban government
were also trained and funded by the US defense establishment - the CIA to
be specific. Why did the US government fund and endorse people in the 1980s
that it now reviles as the world's worst terrorists? The answer is simple.
In the Cold War, the US prized the terrorism of bin Laden as long as it was
directed against the Soviet Union, which invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Any blanket US condemnation of terrorism is therefore disingenuous: the US
government, like most governments around the world, has historically made a
distinction between "good" terrorism and "bad."  "He may be a
son-of-bitch," President Franklin Roosevelt once said of the brutal
Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, "but he's our son-of-a-bitch."
Vilified by the US government since the end of the Cold War, when he turned
his focus on US attacks against Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere,
Bin Laden's main crime was that he chose to cease being "our
son-of-a-bitch."

As I crossed Canal Street on the way home I remembered a conversation with
a friend earlier in the day.  "They are worse than animals," he said.  "We
should kill all these people." "Which people," I asked. "All of them," he
shouted. "Bomb all these countries." The abstract anonymity of the people
he wanted dead was stunning, but so was the geographical anonymity. This
otherwise very intelligent man, who had friends missing in the tragedy,
wanted like so many others to take revenge on unnamed but very identifiable
people. It was never said but it was quite clear who "they" were. Just
hours earlier the news media frantically reported that various suspicious
"Arab nationals" were stopped at New York airports. What, I pondered, does
that make the rest of us: Caucasian nationals? Confucian nationals? Latino
nationals? Hindi nationals? Judeo-Christian nationals? Geographical
ignorance melds with cultural ignorance with dangerous global results.
Within 3 days of the tragedy two men, one Sikh, one a Lebanese Christian,
had been shot and killed in Arizona and California based simply on their
supposed Middle Eastern appearance and dozens others were attacked. After
McVeigh's terrorism, where were the calls to kill Christians?  Where were
the revenge shootings of "Christian-looking men"  in the street?

But the original question kept coming back: why would someone commit such
horrible acts? How could nineteen hijackers be convinced to carry out such
a suicide mission? Perhaps it goes back to the disjunctures of global and
local and the extent to which ongoing global struggles remain largely
unseen in the United States even when the US is heavily involved. If we
were to compile a list of countries which the US government had bombed or
attacked, or popular repressions that the US had supported in the last 15
years, say, and if we were to use this list as a means of gauging common
people's reactions to the United States, what would it look like? Top of
the list would have to be Iraq, which the US has bombed, intensely at
times, since 1991 and against which the economic embargo of trade has led
to the death of thousands of children and poor people. In Colombia
thousands of US troops are fighting popular rebels under the cover of a war
on drugs. In 1998, Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan,
owned by a member of the democratic opposition there, which not only killed
civilians and wiped out that very poor country's domestic source of vital
anti-malarial drugs and anti-biotics, but dealt a death blow to the
movement opposed to the ruling National Islamic Front.

Or take Palestine where the US has resolutely supported the Israeli
government's mounting policy of assassination aimed at the leaders of a
people who were brutally displaced from their land in 1948 and again in
1967. The Israeli government cynically used the "opportunity" to kill 21
Palestinians in two days of heightened state terror in the West Bank after
the World Trade Center tragedy. Even more disgusting, it is now apparent
that the CNN footage of Palestinians seeming to celebrate the WTC attacks
was a hoax; the footage was ten years old, taken by a Brazilian scholar in
Kuwait in 1991.

For many people in these places around the world, the US is involved in
campaigns of state terrorism that have already amassed many more victims
than the World Trade Center tragedy. The ongoing US-sponsored embargo on
Cuba is needless yet devastating for ordinary people; non-intervention in
Bosnia-Herzegovina enabled the mass slaughter of Muslims spearheaded by
right wing Serb nationalists; interventions in Haiti and Somalia dispatched
political foes but left local people worse off than before; the
post-colonial massacres in Rwanda and Burundi were allowed to continue at
the cost of nearly 2 million lives. Or there is Afghanistan, and its
capital Kabul, which Bill Clinton bombed in 1998. If that bombing is to be
justified in the name of revenge for the monstrous bombing of the Kenyan
and Tanzanian embassies, then this only begs the question: against what
monstrosities were the World Trade Center attackers responding?
None of this is to justify in any way the diabolical murder of perhaps
5,500 people in the September 11th attacks. It is, rather, to warn that
revenge is not an appropriate policy for guiding foreign and military
policy and that no act of terrorism comes out of the blue with neither
explanation, context or background. Afghanistan is one of the poorest
countries in the world and its people no more deserve to die because of
what its government did or did not do (or who its friends are or are not)
than workers in the World Trade Center deserved to die because of the US
government's bombing of Afghanistan, or Iraq (or its friendly support for
Israel).

The intense connections between local and global events expressed in this
tragedy also suggests the limits to national geographies. The nineteen
hijackers lived multinational lives between Florida and Riyadh, Boston and
Beirut. And the nationalist hysteria following the attacks quickly gave way
to a greater sobriety as television stations and radio talk shows that had
been whipping up anti-Arab sentiment in the aftermath began to recognize
the incoherence of such racism. Many of those being attacked on US streets
were US-born or just as patriotic as the next person. The nationalist
appeals were certainly powerful but their flimsiness was never far below
the surface. Even Bush the younger eventually came on television to say
that the millions of Muslims and Arabs and Iranians in the country were
"good Americans" and that attacks on them were as despicable as the
terrorist attacks. The definition of "America" and "American" has altered
dramatically and is significantly destabilized in the decade since Desert
Storm and the beginning of the US war against Iraq.

Getting back to the safety of Houston Street, a good mile away from "the
pile," the streets remain deserted and cordoned off from traffic. The new
geopolitics of Lower Manhattan, with its barricades, dark zones, speeding
emergency vehicles with sirens, ground zero, no-go zones, armored vehicles
and troops with machine guns, seem the local expression of a new global
reality - boundaries being drawn hard and fast and global marshall law. I
remembered an e-mail I had received earlier in the day. It recounted the
observation of John Maynard Keynes that the vast majority of the world's
wealth was owned by a very few people and that the main job of economics
would be to devise ways of making that inequality justifiable and palatable
to the have-nots. But inevitably, as the Black Panthers used to say in the
1960s, the chickens sometimes come home to roost. Certainly one thing is
clear.  A myopic response that sees only a "War on Terrorism" and not the
interwoven threads of global injustice from which these events sprang, will
intensify rather than compensate for the murder of innocents. The
maintenance of intense oppression, inequality and exploitation, much of it
made in America, is the single deepest cause of terrorism - on all sides.

I walked up the stairs to the apartment, and turned on the TV. My hackles
were up to find James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, and major
target of the anti-globalization movement, pontificating about the new
global order wrought by the attacks. How ghoulish, I thought, to be
vaunting the prerogatives of global capital amidst this. But I was wrong.
The events seemed to have affected him profoundly too. "Conquering
poverty," Wolfensohn concluded, "is the conquest of justice." Amen.

Neil Smith
Graduate Centre, CUNY