Stewart Home (London, UK) on 9/11

AF: I heard Martin Amis talking about 9/11 on Bill Moyers. He said it initiated a "global depression" among writers & intellectuals. Do you agree with that? Do you have anything to say about 9/11, five years on?

SH: Bull. Its' like the nonsense about the alleged collapse of communism (the USSR was a capitalist state not a communist one, the Bolshevik revoltuion was a bourgeois one not a communist one, it was about the transition from the formal to the real domination of captial) causing depression on the left. Well, these things cause depression amongst morons, not to me. Of course it was obviously gonna have bad effects and it doesn't matter who was behind it (I'm not interested in conpiracy theories about bin Laden or US government); what needs dealing with is what it led into. So it's about being against war in error and also putting 9/11 in perspective (hundreds of people were being killed at a time in terror attacks in Moscow before that, for example). So it was not anything new, strange, or unique. Yeah, it was on a large scale and yes, as usual, it was ordinary workers (cleaners etc.) who seem to have suffered most. But this sort of thing has been going on for years around the world and it's always bad, and it might be used in an attempt to justify war and oppression, but it doesn't justify them. To return to Martin Amis, all he knows about is the cost of dental surgery.