By Conrado de Quiros

Published in his column ‘There’s the Rub’ in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 10, 2002

FOR DAYS now, the media have been full of exhortations for us to remember 9/11. Well, how can anyone forget the image of those two planes diving into the two gleaming towers of the Manhattan skyline, sending them shuddering and crashing to the ground? It opened whole new doors in the meaning of vulnerability. And fear. And anger.

If you have friends and relatives in New York, you are not likely to forget it. I do. And though none of them ended up being inside the doomed buildings or near them at the time, the what-ifs continue to boggle the mind. Had they been there for whatever reason, they might have been one of those who were trapped in the rubble and never ferreted out. Only candles burning above ground might have been left to mark their having been in this world, before they departed it in this gruesome way.

No, it is not easy to forget 9/11. But it is not easy to sympathize either with the breathtaking self-absorption of many of those who call for remembering it. One Arab woman and a professor of the London School of Economics, also a woman, put it very well in a roundtable discussion in BBC some weeks ago on the aftermath of 9/11 when they said the US frittered the goodwill and compassion of the world far too easily and swiftly by conscripting that tragedy to flex its muscle rather than to examine its conscience. I agree. (Those two were the most brilliant in that discussion, and it is probably not an accident that they were both women. Head and heart are not naturally opposed faculties.)

I myself had thought that event would spark some introspection among American officials, and indeed among American citizens themselves, and cause them to look more closely at what they had done to make the world what it is, in the same way the Vietnam War did for them in the 1980s. Not so. Or at least it hasn’t happened yet (I continue to hope it will). It has only fanned the fires of anger, it has only beaten the drums of war.

My specific problem with the kind of remembering we are being asked to make it is that it asks us as well to indulge in a grand forgetting. At the very least, what that means is that we see no other pain but America’s. Not the pain of other victims of terrorism, not the pain of the victims of unjust wars and occupations, not the pain of the victims of utter devastation, often of America’s making. Indeed, not the members of the Afghan wedding party who fell victims to George W. Bush’s smart bombs. Not the women and children who died in the buildings when the Israeli army razed down whole quarters of Palestine. Not the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, many of them Red Crescent volunteers, who were sent to the bosom of Allah by George Bush Sr.’s smart bombs. Unlike the dead in 9/11, they will forever remain nameless and faceless, Arab names being hard to pronounce and Arab faces even harder to etch in the minds of CNN listeners.

Still more. It asks us to forget that the US not very long ago propped up Idi Amin, Bokassa, Duvalier, Noriega, Van Thieu, Pinochet, our very own Marcos, and a host of other nasty characters in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who unleashed their murderous thugs to keep the world safe for democracy. Every time we recollect them-indeed every time we mention Balangiga and the origins of American presence in these islands-a flood of angry voices comes bursting at us demanding that we see these concerns as unimportant, irrelevant, and insidious. They mean nothing in a world riven into Armageddon, the US charging at the head of the forces of Good, banners flailing in the wind, against the forces of Evil led by the “rogue countries.” It is Armageddon, except that it is not Yahweh or Allah who sits in judgment in these Last Days. America does.

And still more. It asks us to forget that the CIA and American covert operation have been responsible for wholesale slaughter in various parts of the world. Indeed, it does not only ask us to forget that, it asks us to transform them, by the magic dust of Hollywood, bat wings, and the tears of those who grieve for 9/11 into knights in shining armor, Men in Black, and Marvel heroes rolled into one. It asks us to forget America once lamented the folly of the Vietnam War, through elegiac novels and plays and movies, and see that they were right to carpet-bomb it with Agent Orange after all. That is what a spate of movies has been trying to do lately.

Even worse, it asks us to forget, through a neon-lit recruitment ad called “War Against Terror,” that the very people who have signed up for it, who are now being hailed as the staunchest defenders of freedom, are the very thugs in uniform who propped up the rule of the nasty characters in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and made the world ring with the cries of those they tortured and “salvaged” while they played the ukelele and sang “Home on the Range.” Chief of them the American-trained Special Forces of Indonesia, who made the streets of Indonesia run with blood so Suharto could keep his country safe for democracy. But not least our very own West Point- and PMA-trained cutthroats in uniform who along with one Wahab Akbar, formerly of the Abu Sayyaf, now governor of Basilan, are roaming the South to keep this country safe for democracy.

I grieve for those who died in 9/11. But I do not see why that grief, and those of others, should be yoked to a vision of the world that bears little resemblance to how most of us remember it. I cannot see how we honor the dead by turning their bones into separate and saintly relics rather than letting them mingle with the bones of the other dead in recognition of our common humanity.

By all means let us remember 9/11 with all the passion we can muster. But let us not forget everything else.

This article was named ‘Best Opinion Piece’ (Category B) by the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) during its annual awards held in Hong Kong in 2003.