The Twin Towers were attacked because of what they represented, not because of who happened to be inside [them]. -- "An Empty Plan for Ground Zero," editorial in The New York Post, 25 June 2003.
In its Winter 2002-2003 issue (#54), Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed ran a review of the 34th (July 2002) issue of NOT BORED!. The review included the following sentence:
This issue opens with a description of the publisher's original reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center last year -- "amazed and impressed" (though he seems to think that others who were "shocked" by the attack weren't also "amazed and impressed" -- let's face it, most anti-capitalists were quite happy to see the World Trade Center building erased from the skyline of New York; it was the loss of relatively innocent [working class] lives that was appalling).
In his letter to the editor, which was published in its entirety under the headline "No WTC Innocents" in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (#55), Bill Not Bored ignored the claim that "most anti-capitalists were quite happy to see the World Trade Center building erased from the skyline of New York" (emphasis added) and didn't bother to (yet again) point out that, as a matter of fact, most anti-capitalists have not yet moved beyond the passive (merely seeing the WTC erased) to the active (celebrating its destruction in a public forum of some kind). In his letter to the editor, Bill Not Bored confined his comments to "the loss of relatively innocent [working class] lives."
Thank you for once again reviewing Not Bored! and for once again giving it a good review. One comment, though. Your anonymous reviewer (in response to one of our statements about 11 September 2001) reiterates one of the cliches that we have heard too many times (mostly from Leftists!) and that indeed motivated us to produce this statement in the first place: namely, that "working class lives" were lost in the disaster at the World Trade Center. False! As several subsequent news articles have made plain, the vast majority of the people who worked at the WTC -- which for the entire duration of its existence was a hub for international capitalist exploitation, not working class resistance! -- lived in one of two locations: Staten Island and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, both of which are far too expensive for working class people and are in fact havens for yuppies, upper middle class people and the rich. Wring your hands in anguish if you will, but these were far from "relatively innocent" people, as your reviewer maintains. There aren't any innocent people in America: we all -- no matter who we are or claim to be -- benefit from the crimes perpetrated in our names.
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