Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.
Jurgen HabermasRead
Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the profound impact of the September 11 attacks as a historical moment witnessed by the world.
Jurgen Habermas highlights the September 11 attacks as a pivotal historic moment that was not just a national tragedy but a global spectacle that affected the international community. He emphasizes how the events unfolded in real-time, allowing the world to witness the devastating consequences and the collective response to such an unprecedented crisis.
In practice
During a memorial speech, one could use this quote to emphasize the global significance of the events.
Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.
I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act
If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.
The scenarios of biological or chemical warfare painted in detail by the American media during the months after September 11 only betray the inability of the government to determine the magnitude of the danger.
The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.
Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism
This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.
He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass. But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light.
Life in freedom is not easy, and democracy is not perfect.
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
Sadness to me is the happiest time, When a shining city rises from the ruins of my drunken mind. Those times when I'm silent and still as the earth, The thunder of my roar is heard across the universe.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
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