The terrorists that killed 2,997 people 16 years ago Monday presented the 21st century with a radically different revolutionary than the ones that stormed our imaginations in the 19th and 20th centuries.Please read the whole article; it's worth it.
They didn’t overthrow the world order. They did overthrow our conception of where on the economic strata revolutionaries come from.
The 9/11 terrorists did not step out of the pages of Les Misérables. Like most revolutionaries, they stepped out of privileged places. Osama bin Laden, the seventeenth child of a billionaire, appeared as the type of figure Karl Marx’s proletariat rebelled against. Bin Laden’s followers, if not hailing from the economic stratosphere, generally emerged from comfortable backgrounds...
Robespierre, like his father and his father, worked as a lawyer. Danton? Lawyer. Desmoulins? Lawyer. Mao’s father was one of the wealthiest farmers in his area of China. Lenin’s parents taught in local schools before his mom turned attention to mothering and his dad became an administrator overseeing many schools. Che Guevara worked as a doctor healing people before he worked as an executioner killing them. Fidel Castro’s wealthy sugar-cane-farmer father sent him to elite boarding schools....
Occasional Holy Man and Luthier Who Offers Stray, Provocative, and Insouciant Thoughts About Religion, Archaeology, Human Foible, Surfing, and Interesting People. Thalassophile. Nemesis of all Celebrities [except for Chuck Norris]. He Lives Vicariously Through Himself. He has a Piece of Paper That Proves He's Laird of Glencoe.