World History 3201
Current Events
Shelby Ralph

Over the many decades of human existence, there has been unimaginable struggles and many gruesome attacks on humanity. We have come to realization today that we could not have prevented them from happening, nor can we change what has already happened. The only thing we can do, is learn from our human errors and continue living our lives, and focus on preventing them from happening again. We have many events that has happened which has haunted and will continue to haunt people for the rest of their lives. We’ve had dictators who ran dictatorial governments, we’ve had rallies, and suffrage movements, people have been exiled, and there’s been mass genocides, wars, and plenty of bombings and billons of causalities. At first, it all came as a surprise. No one had suspected any of this to happen, so they had to take it as it came. History has made a repeat as much as we tried to avoid it, and it is still fresh in our mind; with the attack on 9/11, and we’ve had many more horrifying attacks since then. Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, had brought the United States of America (USA) into the war, when it became an obvious target for the Japanese troops due to the fleet being stationed there. On the 7th of December in 1941, the Japanese troops had taken the American ship off guard. With this American fleet now eliminated, Japan now had supremacy in the Western Pacific Ocean. With this attack, 2400 military personnel and civilians had been killed. There had been 150 planes lost, and 19 ships had been destroyed or disabled. America had quickly recovered and declared war on Japan, thus causing America to quickly have an advantage over Japan. The Japanese were planning a quick attack over the USA because American industrial power could wipe out Japan, so they planned for this to help Japan gain supremacy. On the 11th of September in 2001, four passenger airplanes were hijacked by 19 members from the group al-Qaeda and were flown into the North and South towers causing the death of 2,996 people. The third airplane was flown into the Pentagon headquarters, and the forth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Due to the collapsing of the Twin Towers, many buildings nearby had collapsed along with it. Things had then become cancelled and evacuated due to the fear of another attack. Osama bin Laden had at first denied involvement, but took responsibility for this attack. He then fled to hiding, and nearly a decade later he was found, and killed by US forces in May of 2011. This was Osama bin Laden’s declaration of holy war against the USA, he had many reasons for his attacks which had been stated in a letter called, “Letter to America,” and he also recorded it in a video tape. In the aftermath of the crash, there had been over thirty different toxins leaking into the air, which caused illness and death among 18,000 people. After this attack, American troops went to war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and Islamic troops. Both of these attack are both very similar, they were both caused by people wanting to be more superior then another, and were both unprovoked attacks. Before Pearl Harbour was attacked by Japan, American wasn’t even in the war, and the same with the 9/11 attacks. New York and Washington had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, when al-Qaeda attacked. A second similarity of these attacks would be that they were both failures of intelligence. During both attacks we had information that the “enemy” was up to something. We could have pieced it together with Japans rising tension that they were coming up with something, and the same with al-Qaeda. With al-Qaeda, we had all the information that something huge was going to happen, but we just didn’t connect any of the dots. Both of these attacks are failures of intelligence, and both could have been prevented. But you always miss the most obvious things. These attacks both made people fear their lives, and that’s a third similarity.