horrifying act in NYC

[Andrzej Kozlowski]

It is quite legitimate to compare in one respect two things which may be 
quite incomparable in another. I would consider it monstrous to compare 
Winston Churchill to Hitler in any moral sense, but not to compare them 
as military strategists. The comparison to Pearl Harbor in respect of 
the impact on the American psyche is quite reasonable. In both cases the 
Americans were shocked to discover themselves suddenly in a state of 
war. In some aspects no comparison between these events can be made. In 
others, it remains to be seen. Although I have lived in Japan for many 
years and my wife is Japanese neither I nor she feel anything 
inappropriate in this comparison as long as it refers only to the way 
the Americans experienced these events.

Andrzej Kozlowski


On Wednesday, September 12, 2001, at 09:39  PM, Nevetsgnow at aol.com wrote:

> perhaps there is no need to walk on egg shells - why be sorry for your
> opinion.
> The recent e-mails had an initial question - what the list thought of 
> the
> relationship between pearl harbor and the recent incidents, to bring the
> dialogue back to the nature of this list - Japanese Cinema - Black Rain
> although made in 92 (?) is a perfect example of how Japanese cultural
> production deals with the representation of its wounds, albeit, some 
> years
> later. What does this tell us?  That wound remains a part of Japanese 
> society
> and it remains something that people have to deal with, irrespective of 
> the
> generations that go by. I have never lived in Japan and so would not 
> know the
> extant of it. However, films like Black Rain effectively exposes and 
> attempts
> to deal with those wounds - in the wake of the events in New York and
> Washington the really sad and confounding evidence of both the senator 
> who
> mirrored these events to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the media's
> subsequent decision to use it shows us something very wrong with 
> dominant
> culture.
> Both American and British television have referred to the senators 
> remarks
> and continue to use it throughout their coverage of events. Does this 
> not say
> something equally disturbing. In their haste to pin down the 
> perpetrators,
> both western cultures have done nothing more than reflect the 
> methodology of
> martyrdom upon themselves? How does this differ from the ideology of 
> people
> like Usama Mohd. bin Laden?
> The most frightening aspect of all of this is that after 50 years of 
> western
> cultural domination we are no further away from the events or mind set 
> of
> WW2. No doubt, there will be an American need to find a common enemy to
> displace their collective anger onto. Irrespective of who this enemy is,
> someone somewhere will get the collateral damage of this kind of 
> mentality.
> That is terrorism.
>

Andrzej Kozlowski
Toyama International University
JAPAN
http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/