Professor Devon Peña asked us, “Was there an ecological explanation for the September 11 attack?” He posed this question in the final few moments of our first class meeting in Environmental Anthropology. It was three weeks after the mostly Saudi hijackers flew airliners into buildings in New York City and Washington, DC, and a field in Shanksville, PA.
Shiva, a civil engineer and city planner who was born and raised in Kerala, India said, “Well, the attack was clearly a response to the Crusades.”
Melissa most recently worked for a high adventure eco-tourism company that took wealthy clients to exotic places, and she was conflicted about its impact on the life ways of simpler people. She said, “Any explanation must take into account the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Vanya, convinced that Western patriarchal military industrial hegemony was to blame said, “It was a reaction to globalization.” As if she was channeling Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.
My classmates were PhD and Master’s degree students, the best and brightest products of our university system, and it seemed to me they were missing a very fundamental issue. Wondering how ecology might explain why commercial airliners fly into buildings, I asked Professor Peña, “Does your question assume the complete absence of the element of human choice in explaining the attack?”
He said, “Absolutely, Michael, what do you mean by that?”
I replied, “It seems to me this event demonstrates only that evil exists and some people choose to commit evil acts.”
That’s when the class erupted in chaos, with everyone yelling in my direction; it seems that I had challenged some received wisdom.
Sharon, who used only lower-case letters when referring to herself and would likely announce her pronouns today, asked, “How do we identify evil?” I protested that evil was a universal value and even Islam as I understood it would call the attack evil.
Not for the first time, I had no idea what I was talking about. The events of October 7 in Israel persuade me that where the children are taught in school to hate Jews and celebrated the atrocities committed that day, evil is a normal state of affairs.
Peña cautioned us to be careful, and he launched into a speech about the relativity of evil.
I had just started an LLM in Sustainable International Development at the University of Washington Law School and was about to get my first exposure to postmodern analysis. That’s where deep thinkers use deconstruction to convince themselves that all values are contingent. It came as a surprise to me, and I resisted it until it dawned on me that I use deconstruction when I cross examine expert witnesses. Isolate the assumptions in any truth asserting statement down to facts that are subject to attack for confirmation or other bias, or inadequate information, then have at them. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.
Postmodern analysis attacks the basis for truth asserting statements such as: there is an objective natural reality, Enlightenment faith in science will reveal truth, or Western literature can teach us valuable lessons us about the human condition. Its practioners seek to destroy the bedrock institutions of the west, its history and traditions, and create a new world order around groups of the “oppressed”. These ideologies of race, ethnicity, sex, and gender are based on the Marxist theory that all relationships, and the words we use to talk about them, are built on structures of power in which the powerful oppress their victims.
George Orwell in 1984 was one of the first to notice how language can be used to conceal reality. He showed how a change in the meaning of words would lull us asleep, as in when war becomes peace, for example. After October 7, those whose brains are infected with the postmodern virus claim genocide by Muslims is resistance while Jewish resistance to it is genocide.
A few weeks later, California Governor Gray Davis called the alert, claiming there was a terrorist threat to several prominent bridges in the Western United States. He was concerned about the Golden Gate Bridge, which is as much an icon to American success as the World Trade Center.
We have bridges in Seattle, too; I watched the I-90 floating bridge over Lake Washington sink one stormy Thanksgiving weekend ten years earlier. When I got home from work the day Governor Davis said our bridges were at risk, my wife told me she was waiting at the children’s school bus stop when she saw a Middle Eastern looking man park his car in an odd place near the bus stop. He walked down to the lakeside and looked at the I-90 bridge with binoculars while speaking to someone on his cell phone. She called the police to make a report as soon as she got home.
Everybody was on edge. Anthrax poison was passing in the mail, some people who handled the mail died, and nobody knew where it was coming from. The government warned us to open our mail outside and not indoors in case we found a suspicious white powder in the mail. I still carry a heavy duty respirator in my truck just in case.
The next day, I was returning to my office after a meeting north of the city when I saw him. I’m pretty sure he was not the same fellow my wife saw. I was stopped at a traffic light, and I noticed a Middle Eastern guy who was waiting to cross the street in front of a rental car lot. He had three gym bags with airline claim check stickers that made me think he just got off an airplane.
I don’t know why, but I watched him. He looked like he had been sleeping in his clothes. He was a short man with an unkempt beard, and he didn’t look at anybody. He didn’t look at the traffic, he didn’t look at the women standing next to him, he didn’t look at anybody. He looked down. He looked guilty. I couldn’t not look at him.
When the light changed, he picked up his bags, and they were obviously very heavy. I drove ahead and I pulled over and stopped and watched him in my rear-view mirror as he walked down the street. He stopped at a mailbox at the next corner. I watched him reach into one of his bags, take something out, put it in an envelope and put it in the mailbox. Convinced that I was witnessing a terrorist attack in the making, I had to call the police, and I reached for my cell phone.
As I was telling the police dispatcher what I had seen, a motorcycle officer came down the street, and I jumped out of my truck and flagged him down. He pulled over and said, “What can I do for you?” I told him what I had seen, I said something was very odd about this man’s behavior, and I gave him my business card and I left. I was terrified and shaking with fear.
About an hour later, Officer Mike Henry called me and asked me to repeat exactly what I had seen. He said the fellow admitted putting two envelopes in the mailbox; they had called the postal inspector, and they were going to check some things out. He called me back at the end of the day.
He said they had to let the guy go. He was a U.S. citizen from the Middle East who had lived in the U.S. since age one. The postal inspector opened the mailbox and, to be careful, she seized the two letters for inspection. Officer Henry said, “It got real interesting when I asked him for his identification and he handed me a Florida driver’s license.” Some of the 9-11 hijackers lived in Florida.
I asked him, “What was in his bags?”
Officer Henry replied, “All of his life’s possessions.” The fellow was on hard times and he was on his way to Alaska, looking for work.
He said, “You did the right thing.” I think I had no choice.
And now I’m sure the reason this fellow looked so guilty and the reason why he wouldn’t look at anybody is that for the last six weeks everybody around him had been accusing him of being a terrorist. After all, aren’t they all? He probably couldn’t even get a room to rent and was forced to sleep in shelters or outside in the elements, what in the UK they call rough sleeping.
I wished I could have found him and given him a hundred dollars and say I’m sorry. I would have liked to tell him that sometimes we make choices and sometimes, whether we like it or not, the choices are made for us.
A small group of my classmates in Prof Peña’s class accompanied me to several other courses later that year, including Prof Lucy Jaroz’s course in the Department of Geography. Geography is all about the study of political space and not the maps and landforms we studied as kids. This course was devoted to the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda in 1994. The prevailing political theory claimed countries with a rich and deep civil society are more peaceful than those without. But Rwanda was deep and rich in civil society organizations with churches of many denominations, Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, Boys and Girls Clubs, Scout troops, radio and TV stations, and social clubs, and the Hutu turned on their Tutsi neighbors and hacked 750,000 of them to death with machetes. WTF.
One of our course readings was Mahmood Mandami’s book, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (2001). He said Rwanda’s British colonizers had privileged the Tutsis with admission to schools, cushy administrative jobs, and other benefits of status. In a warning about divisions spawned by identity politics that remains relevant today, his study argues that the massacre of Tutsis was enabled when the Hutu successfully re-cast the Tutsi as white colonizers. Is that your goal, Robin D’Angelo?
Some of my classmates by then knew that I would rise to the bait when evil came up and there were many opportunities to get into it in Prof Jaroz’s course about the events in Rwanda. Vanya raised the issue of evil and we argued about it, but Prof. Jaroz found ways to guide the discussion in a more productive direction. Vanya wouldn’t let it go and she got in my face at the break. After the class was over, she followed me out of the building and across campus, bickering the whole way.
At one point, I said to her, “Vanya, we’re like two ships passing in the night. We’re speaking English but it seems we’re unable to communicate. Let me ask you this. Do you believe the Holocaust was evil?” Without hesitation, she replied, “yes”.
Hallelujah! At least one young grad student in 2002 knew evil when she saw it. It could be the postmodern virus had not completely rotted her brain yet.
It’s too bad so many young people across America are unable to see and denounce obvious evil today, twenty years later. And that, even after the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in Paris, London’s subway and buses, the Madrid train, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, an Ariana Grande concert, those who chant “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House, and so many other hate-fest gatherings.
At college campuses across America, including the University of Washington where I studied in 2001, students are marching in support of the subhuman evil the Islamists called Hamas inflicted on Jewish babies, pregnant women, young and elderly people, and those dancing at a music festival for peace on October 7.
It is as if we need to be reminded evil exists, and some people chose to commit evil acts. The older I get the more obvious that truth becomes. I know this, why don’t they?
Mike,
You have written a brilliant essay.
Thank you for pouring your mind, heart and soul into it.
Sometimes all we need is ONE person to hear us.
I more than hear you, Mike.
I am going to learn a great deal
from you.