Advanced Studies, Princeton.
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Views of a physicist
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Here are some thoughts about the disaster and our reactions to it. They
don't answer your question, but perhaps it may be helpful to look at these
events in a wider context.
The day after the disaster, I had lunch with an Austrian friend. He talked
about the events of July 1914 after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated in Sarajevo. Many people in the Austrian government, including
the Emperor, felt that this act of terrorism should be handled
diplomatically. But the newspapers were screaming for war against Serbia,
using the same rhetoric that we hear today. The Serbian government is
sheltering the terrorists and must be punished. The world must know that the
Austro Hungarian Empire is a great power and capable of defending its
interests. Since we can't make war on the terrorists, we must make war on
Serbia for helping the terrorists. This barrage of patriotic frenzy in the
newspapers continued for four weeks, and finally pushed the government to
take the disastrous steps that led to the outbreak of World War One at the
end of July. In many ways, our present state of mind is uncomfortably
similar to July 1914 in Vienna.
The events of September 11 brought to mind another vivid and uncomfortable
memory. I am sixteen years old, lying in bed at my home in London on a noisy
night in September 1940. I am violently hostile to the British Empire and
everything it stands for. I hate London, the citadel of oppression, with its
grandiose buildings sucking the wealth from every corner of the world. I lie
in bed listening to the bombs exploding and the buildings crumbling. What
joy to hear, after each explosion, the delicious sound of buildings falling
down, the great British Empire audibly crumbling. The joy far outweighs any
fear that my own home might be hit, or any pity for the people in the
falling buildings. How many sixteen-year-olds all over the world are now
seeing on television the pictures of the World Trade Center buildings
collapsing, and feeling the same joy that I felt in 1940. I find it easy to
imagine the state of mind of the young men who so resolutely smashed those
planes into the buildings. Almost, I could have been one of them myself.
The only wisdom that I can extract from these memories is that the problem
of terrorism is not a military problem. It is a problem of people's hearts
and minds. Attempts to solve it by military means will only make it worse. I
don't pretend to know how to solve it. A good way to start would be for our
country to stop telling the rest of the world how to behave. We must learn
to live with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. We must treat our
enemies with respect, so that we do not appear to be trampling on their
cultures and traditions. The ultimate goal must always be, not to destroy
our enemies but to convert them into friends. And meanwhile, do whatever we
can to defend ourselves without killing more thousands of innocent victims.
ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe...
Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of
thinking and living bring about intolerable situations." Dorothy Sawyers ( E. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful", pg 30).