Honoring the Dead

I have to say, I agree with the families rallying against the “International Freedom Center” which is proposed to be placed on Ground Zero.

At frist glance, the mission of the IFC sounds unassailable, “to understand and appreciate the story of freedom as an ongoing world movement, and to learn how the lives of the victims of September 11th were deeply connected to freedom’s evolution.” The problem is the connection that attempts to be made between 9/11, and the ongoing “evolution” of freedom.

Would you put a memorial about the evolution of genocide on the site of Auschwitz? Of course not. That’s tantamount to saying, “Yeah, this was bad and all, but take a look at the big picture. LOTS of people have been killed, this is just another brick in the wall.” Gee, thanks for completely taking away any possibility of understanding the proximate causes of the Holocaust and any chance of helping people identify what exactly went wrong so it doesn’t happen again.

The purpose of any memorial at Ground Zero is to pay a tribute to those who lost their lives on that horrific day. If any additional themes need to be explored, they should be themes that help people to better understand the forces behind what motivated that particular tragedy.

The whole idea is ill-conceived. The goal of those who were behind 9/11 (Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who is still at large, in case you thought it was Saddam Hussein and we can pat ourselves on the back), was not to oppress and conquer America. They weren’t trying to enslave us in an extremist Muslim world order, they were pissed off at our foreign policy and the perceived impact it had on their own lives. So why a “freedom” museum?

It smacks of the kind of polarized ideology that has taken over the White House and the conservative political discourse. “Freedom” has been the new buzzword of the Bush administration (once “getting rid of rogue states with WMD” turned out to be a lie). Since Bush’s state of the union address, the new justification for disastrous forays into “regime change” has been to promote freedom and democracy. The fundamental assumption being: “of COURSE everyone in the world wants to be like us.”

And now that hazy political concept is threatening to obfuscate the reality of 9/11.

It’s an insult to those who died, to pretend that they were martyers in the eternal struggle for freedom. They were people going to work. They were average Joes who were slaughtered by suicidal maniacs for whom the word “extremist” is insufficient.

I work for a scientific publishing company. If one day I go to work and a crazy author whose work we rejected drives a truck bomb into our building and kills us all, I would hope that any memorial erected would honor all of us who died, and perhaps say a little something to help explain to other people why this terrible event occurred.

I sure hope they don’t put up a museum to the history of scientific publishing through the ages.

I know Galileo had it tough, but confusing what happened hundreds of years ago with what happened today doesn’t help anyone.

If you want to honor the dead of 9/11, tell the truth about why they died. Don’t put up a “freedom” museum where you can extoll the heroic struggle of the Chechnyan separatists, or French Resistance fighters, or Tibetan monks, or Iraqi Shiites, or anyone else.

You want to memorialize 9/11. Then do it. And don’t muddy the waters with anything else.