ABSTRACT
In the sheer number of civilian victims – how else to measure the human catastrophe? – the 9/11 disaster is not among the very worst massacres in recent world history. Post-“9/11” lore indicates that much by referring to downtown New York as “ground zero”, a terminology of nuclear warfare vividly echoing the mass killing of 274 000 Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And since we are dealing with State terrorism here, we might also recall the virtual extinction of the American Indians, slave trading, Dresden, Auschwitz, and Srebrenica.
