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A Russian-American's perspective
on September 11


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By Lev Navrozov
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Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

May 30, 2004

These were the keynotes of the ÒSeptember 11 Commission Public Hearings,Ó televised last week. The goal of the hearings can be presented as follows. Here is a building as tall as was the World Trade Center. Of course, Islamic suicidal terrorists will be eager to ram it with passenger airliners. But no! Inside, it will be all different, taking into account all the mistakes in the architecture and engineering of the World Trade Center, and it will be under the guidance of the best of all possible managements!

The trouble is that those publicly audible and visible in the United States have been presenting 9/11 as one of the two or three biggest attacks on the United States since the War of Independence. This is true, but so what? The United States had no common border either with Hitler's Germany or Tojo's Japan. Nor was North America within the range of Nazi bombers. Imagine them over New York. Thousands of buildings would have shared the fate of the World Trade Center even under the best of all possible managements. New York has not been built to resist bombing, even at the level of the 1940s. The Moscow subway where I lived was 150 feet deep. Why? To serve as a bomb shelter. The New York subway where I now live is above the ground for miles.

In the 1960s Soviet Russia (and later China) became able to reduce the U.S. cities to nuclear radioactive ruins, and what prevented the holocaust was not the best evacuation of tenants by the best fire staircases and other miracles of house management and city security, but the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, according to which U.S. bombers on duty in the air, nuclear missile fortifications deep underground, and submarines deep under water, would have retaliated by nuking Russia (or China).

In the 2000s, China and Russia, Òin strategic partnership,Ó are looking for weapons able to overcome Mutual Assured Destruction by destroying the Western means of retaliation and hence have the West at the mercy of China (or of both China and Russia). Yet the participants in the 9/11 hearings this week assume that the destruction of the World Trade Center is the biggest military attack on the United States possible, and the goal is to save another New York building from the same fate. Just think of it: about 3,000 victims!

Of course, every human life is priceless, but speaking in global military terms, it can be recalled that in Hitler's attack of 1941-45, Russia lost 27 million men, women, and children.

Let me call the Islamic suicidal terrorists Òcriminals.Ó Not to show my scorn for them (Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were no better) but to stress the fact that their mode of operation before the Òterrorist actÓ is no different from that of common criminals before the crime: both conceal what they are going to do. To assume that all suicidal terrorists can be apprehended before the Òterrorist actÓ is the same as to assume that all criminals can be apprehended before the crime, and thus there will be no millions of crimes, including thousands of murders in the United States every year.

The apprehension of a criminal depends on the criminal's mental ability, ranging from clinical idiocy (and then the criminal is likely to be apprehended) to genius (and then it takes a detective of genius to apprehend the criminal). Soon after 9/11, a criminal/terrorist mailed out letters containing anthrax. Even AFTER the criminal/terrorist act, he has not been apprehended, in about two and one-half years!

But I have never heard or seen anyone publicly audible or visible and asking how intelligent this or that of those 19 terrorists of 9/11 was. Instead, it has been assumed that 9/11 was invented and carried out from his cave in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden (though he had nothing to do with 9/11 except for having boasted of itÑin a special videoÑas of his own achievement).

Let us analyze 9/11 as an invention. ÒMolotov cocktailsÓ began to be used by Russian guerrillas and soldiers in 1941. Take a vodka or beer bottle, fill it with gasoline, cork it with cloth or cotton, set the cork on fire, and throw the bottle with a burning cork at a German tank.

The discovery was that an airliner with its passengers is a giant ÒMolotov cocktailÓ! See? You ram it into a building, the higher the better. The airliner bursts like a vodka or beer bottle, and the gasoline (Òjet fuelÓ) pours down like a burning flood. The metalwork melts. The upper floors, with burning gasoline and all, crash into the lower floors.

Well, the Arabs gave us algebra and numerals. Some of those 19 terrorists were graduates of the Hamburg Technological Institute. I think that the Moslem who invented the Ògiant Molotov cocktailÓ was an inventor of genius, except that unlike Edison he was genetically suicidal and erotically starved, and invented an appliance for his own death, in a huge funeral pyre, to fly as sparks and smoke into the arms of an inexpressibly beautiful virgin.

    I swear by all numbers, even and odd,
    I swear by the omniscience of the Prophet,
    No male lips have touched such flesh divine,
    Without ever stopping.

It is quite possible that no U.S. detective that might have been involved in the case was a detective of genius, able to conceive of such an invention of a giant Molotov cocktail!

All I have heard and seen at the 9/11 hearings is the description of bureaucratic irregularities like the poor condition of cell phones and a description of the new bureaucracy to the cost of $200 million (for New York) owing to which the best of all possible security will prevent disasters like 9/11.

The trouble is that inventors of genius produce new inventions and do not repeat what has been invented. The next terrorist act (the occurrence depends on the genetic suicidal curve and the sublimation of the suicidal urge into Islamic martyrdom) will have nothing to do with 9/11, and even if Congress creates a bureaucracy that will cost two trillion dollars a year, this does not mean that any official of it will be a detective of genius, able to foresee a new terrorist invention of genius.

What I have heard since 9/11 about Òthe war on terrorÓ has been bureaucratic twaddle by those who know nothing about (Islamic suicidal) terrorism, but know everything about bureaucracy, and so they see the victory in Òthe war on terrorÓ in the creation of the biggest bureaucracy imaginable, with good salaries, quick promotions, and as many telephones as possible to lead, instruct, link, coordinate, and congratulate each other until the next 9/11, totally different from that of 2001.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

May 30, 2004

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