In his introduction (12/12/08) to an Arundhati Roy analysis of how “our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching ‘India’s 9/11′” in the Mumbai attacks, Tom Engelhardt recalls that
the single omnipresent historical reference in the American media immediately in the wake of September 11, 2001, was, of course, “Pearl Harbor“–and those code words for it, “infamy” and “day of infamy,” splashed in mile-high letters across the front pages of papers. What we had experienced, it was commonly said then, was “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.”…
Now, “9/11” has become the “Pearl Harbor” of the 21st century, the antecedent and analogy of choice, and so, not surprisingly, it was on all but a few media lips, during the recent massacre and siege in Mumbai, India.
In the piece that follows, Roy “explains just why using 9/11 as the analogy of choice there, as we once used ‘Pearl Harbor’ here, will lead in no less terrible directions.”
