In Tokyo, Japan on March 28th, 2003, an agreement was made between the governments of Japan and Canada. Thus was the beginning of an underground paedophile ring to be headquartered in a New York City pizzeria.
That was a joke. Please God, understand that that was a joke.
No, on that date and in that location, Japan and Canada came to an agreement regarding the sharing of information and resources to combat the kinds of terrorism seen on 9/11, roughly a year and a half before this date. The agreement was made in light of the ratification of certain United Nations policies promoting an international effort to combat terrorist organizations. The agreement can be found here. You might have to be in Canada to access the agreement; I'm not sure.
Why this document intrigues me is because it does something that I think often gets overlooked in considerations regarding terrorism: its potential for productivity, sometimes even at the expense of the respective terrorist organization intended effort.
A terrorist event doesn't really say anything definitive because nothing definitive can come about a one way interaction. When people are killed, it isn't the end of something social, it's the beginning of something (this is one of the masterful ways that the social has kinda displaced concerns over our collective mortality; death being seen as a beginning of something is a theme expressed since time immemorial). When a terrorist organization performs an operation resulting in any kind of destruction, be it property or person, they're not saying anything; they're asking something. The questions are: how will you respond?, how will you deal with what we've brought upon you?, will you be able to come to an agreement as to what the next should be? These are the questions that something like 9/11 poses. The deaths of these people is not the end of anything and that will always be the case when death is understood inside of a sociological lens.
Laws were made. Coalitions formed. Nations bolstered by not only their mutual recognition of one another, but also by the idea that the nation itself was what was being directly questioned by these actions. 9/11, though many things, was without a doubt, to a large extent, a question to the nation. Why do I think this. Because the nation has taken it upon itself to provide the answer, as can be seen in the agreement between Canada and Japan on March 28th, 2003.
As much as this is an agreement between states, its an agreement between nations who are saying to one another that they have a relationship with one another that isn't only concerned with logistics, but with morals, ethics and reason. The responses to the events on 9/11 were nationalistic in the sense that there was a moral and cultural component involved. The treaty between Japan and Canada was a language that surrounded the question of right and wrong. This is the kind of question that the nation thrives on to maintain itself as a differentiated social system.
Its also the question that will forever link the nation to the religious.
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