How we live our lives does not,unfortunately depend on us alone.Circumstances,good or bad,constantly intervene.A person close to us die.A person not so close to us carries on living.All these things affect how we live.

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.

In the West, since the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the one discipline both the official and unofficial cultures have united in casting aside has been history.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

The European Union has lost virtually all of its credibility amongst large swaths of the European population.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.