The attack was unannounced, brutally swift, and it “startled us like some gigantic, dissonant fireball in the night of our false security”. So wrote the American diplomatist David Bruce, as he recalled the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Its ghastly memory was revived this week as the towers of the World Trade Center exploded into flames.
The comparison drawn by commentators between the two events achieved an immediate and obvious impact: both aggressions were of such magnitude to engrave themselves into the national consciousness, and to shock the country out of its cultural innocence (in America, cultural innocence can be lost, then retrieved, then lost again).
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