21/09/2001
the beginning of the end? The end of the beginning? When an event with symbolic power indicates that the world
variable
By Aviad Kleinberg
After that, of course, everyone knew it would happen,/ except us, the dead.
Then
There were fingerprints, early signs found,/scenarios
And rumors... no
to mention/ the ship's bell that had cracks in it, the Bordeaux wine when/
the launch,
Château Lareau eighty-eight, who missed;/ the strange behavior of
the rats
In Queenstown, the last port on the way,/ and the raging sun
In the ship-church….
Yes, now,/ when it's too late, now everyone claims to have heard the
The organ/ plays
Without being touched by a human hand lewd songs, a final warning/ to anyone of my faith.
easy
To say: divine revenge! The penultimate words/ of a man with a body,
for example,
that were said to a man with a different body / before sailing at sea, and innocently: "Even
God
In his honor/ and by himself he won't be able to sink this ship!"/ Well, we are
No
we heard We are dead./ We had no idea.
(Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Psalm twenty-one" from the sunset of
The Titanic in translation
Shimon Levi)
On the face of Cleo, the goddess of history, we will draw an ironic and bitter smile.
In hindsight - no doubt the sharpest of evidence - it is easy to distinguish between few
The Cassandras and the countless prophets of doom who promise us every day
And it's time, because the worst of all lurks around the corner. Looking back the picture
It always becomes clear and the early signs are clearly distinguished from the noise. or then
One can wonder about the short-sightedness that our ancestors suffered from and that we are witnessing
a few days ago How could we not see, we fit. the address,
After all, she was on the wall.
In retrospect, the anxieties seem so ridiculous: why, for example, were we afraid at all
That's how hysterical and ridiculous it all looks - like an attribution
Meaning of the vanity signs on board the safest ship in the world. Chateau
For a fiancé who missed, a raging sun, an organ that plays pleasures without the touch of a human hand
- come on! The chance of the Titanic hitting an iceberg was not great
The chance that both twin towers will be destroyed in one day in a terrorist attack.
In hindsight, we know now, we should have known; Only now
too late. We are all dead, or dead-by-force. What is terrible about his race
The linear, old-fashioned and so conservative of the time, is that you get the intellect
After the fact, that human mistakes are paid for in life, that what is done is not
to reply. God can, perhaps, sink the Titanic, but wipe out the
The past, so the theologians gloomily state, even he cannot.
On second thought, it might not be a smile on Cleo's face but a twitch
of pain
The air is full of false signals; The walls are covered to the brim with inscriptions
contradictory It is not our myopia that is to blame for the confusion, but the overwhelming abundance
of signs which are only a partial expression of the enormous complexity of
historical processes. Every event in the world is a junction of forces
Infinite, some visible and some hidden. what makes product a
succeed and product B fail? The answer does not lie only in the quality of the products
Or in the nature of consumption at a certain historical moment and not even in the efficiency of a journey
The publication. What causes a group of people to react with indifference to event A and with rage
Crazy about Event B, which is seemingly similar to him in everything?
The answers are related to the complicated causal networks in which we move:
physical and psychological, political and cultural factors that do not stand
On their own but always depend on what happened before and what happens at the same time.
The world, in other words, is a chaotic system in which, to use an image
As is known, millions of butterflies constantly moving their wings cause storms
A hurricane thousands of miles away. In the act it is almost impossible to recognize
With certainty which storm belongs to which butterflies and even after that this can only be given
with great difficulty.
But the fact that full insight - or relatively full - always comes post
Mortam, doesn't mean we're not trying to look over Cleo's shoulder,
Just as our inability to foresee details does not mean that we cannot recognize
processes. At least we seek to identify the general trend are we
Moving towards a better world, after days of honey and milk and peace
My world, or towards the nightmare that the prophets of wrath promise us? Is there
Or is there no room for cautious optimism? Is this the beginning of the end or is this it
Just the end of the beginning?
In normal situations these questions are swallowed up among the uncertainties
The day-to-day of stock exchange fluctuations, weather changes, traffic jams
and the personal tragedies. They float and rise when companies cling to anxiety
existence and urgently need answers, or when it seems that something is too big
It so happened that the rest of the writings on the wall dim for a moment and the future is revealed - or
At least that's how it seems to us - with surprising clarity. This clarity is sometimes
It goes without saying - the attack on Pearl Harbor inevitably means war - but
Sometimes it can be misleading.
Thus, for example, in the fall of the city of Rome at the hands of the Visigoths in 410 AD.
This occupation, which only lasted a short time (the Visigoths did not bother to hold
in the city and continued westward until they established themselves in Spain and southern France), struck a shock
the world of those days. The last time the Eternal City was occupied was in 390 BC. Not that there weren't early warning signs. As usual, the writing was on the wall. In 378, the Visigoths defeated an imperial army at the battle of Adrianople and since then have been moving within the empire's territory and treating it as their own. But these signs were ambivalent.
The empire has already suffered defeats in one battle or another. The Visigoths, so the best commentators assumed, would assimilate within the empire or leave as they came.
But the conquest of the city - not a particularly important event from a strategic point of view, since the real capital of the empire was Constantinople - was a cultural shock. He expressed the startling possibility that what seemed until that moment impossible became possible; He exposed the fragility of human security. Everything - that is, Western culture - is collapsing.
In hindsight it seems that the anxieties were justified. The Roman Empire
It did fall. Symbolic events can reveal the hidden processes of history. However, at a second glance, it is not clear that the connection between the sudden recognition and the processes is indeed unequivocal. Roman culture did not collapse with the Visigothic invasion. There should have been another epidemic and a gradual and slow weakening of the Roman peasantry and intelligentsia, a reconquest of the West by the Byzantines and the rise of Islam. Another two hundred years passed before medieval culture took the place of Roman culture. More than the conquest of the city of Rome in 410 and the overthrow of the last emperor in the West in 476 express critical moments in the history of the West, they express moments with symbolic power, moments with poetic power that are easier to remember than the somewhat gray gradual changes that did lead to the collapse of Roman culture.
The collapse of the twin towers has such a poetic power. You are asked to draw big conclusions from the big pictures: the first crack in the hull of the Titanic, the birth of a new world. But these conclusions express feelings more than they are a balanced analysis of reality. The Roman Empire in the West was in a clear process of decline in the fourth century. This is not the situation of the West today. To some extent, the success of terrorism can be compared to the initial successes of the great Jewish rebellion in the first century or to the one-time success of the Zulu against the British. A bold attack on an empire at the height of its power can cause it damage and pain.
The rebels in Judea inflicted such heavy losses on the Roman legions that the emperor avoided the accepted formula, "Peace to me and my legions". The attackers can gain achievements, but the differences in power between the contenders are such that the weak has no real chance of collapsing the strong. The Jewish rebellion had no chance in the first place; Islamic terrorism, too, even had many times heavier losses.
The collapse of the twin towers is a painful slap in the face; It is not the beginning of the end. It expresses the largely barren rage of the forces opposing the West in the face of its overwhelming supremacy. More than that, it expresses the hard feeling that the West managed to achieve more than political and military hegemony this time; He managed to penetrate into the most intimate fabric of culture: to determine basic values, to define passions and hopes, to paint more and more the dream. More and more, all over the world, the dream that people dream is the American dream.
All this does not mean that deep processes are not changing, at this very moment, the world as we are used to experiencing it. It means that such processes are more difficult to perceive and do not necessarily take place in front of the television cameras.
And what about Israel? The general trend indicates that the West is not collapsing, but in this trend we are included, unfortunately, within the standard deviation.
It is therefore better to make sure that sharp-eyed observers follow the movement of glaciers in the area and it is better to make sure that the captains do not lead us - as it seems to an observer from the side - straight into one of them.
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