[EVA] Manga Volume 11 & the 9/11 terrorist attacks/Post-2I politics

[Codename V]

In the recently released (gasp) Volume 11 of the NGE Manga, on page 32
they show the September 11th, 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks as
among the events portrayed of humans "hurting one another".

In his postscript, editor Carl Gustav Horn points out that this is
anachronistic, though the explanation he came up with I feel is actually
also the most probable:

Second Impact happens on September 13th, 2000.  Mega-tsunamis and rising
sea levels from the polar caps melting (combined with the explosion
actually changing Earth's axial tilt enough that the northern hemisphere
experiences eternal summer) devastate the planet.  This also directly
leads to wars over resource shortfalls and refugee crises, a series of
post-Impact wars in which combined with the scope of the natural
disasters, human civilization nearly collapsed.  The fighting only ended
five months later on February 14th, 2001, with the "Valentine's Treaty".

So September 11th would have been a year after Second Impact when
civilization was still desperately trying to stave off collapse.

So on the one hand, it probably didn't happen exactly the same way as it
did in our universe, however, in the NGE-verse, it was probably part of
the "wave of terrorist and ethnic violence" that spread around the world
post-Impact as everyone basically went nuts and thought the world was
ending.

As for "why would they attack NYC if its under water in 2015?"

Well, parallel explanation to Tokyo:  not all coastal cities instantly
flooded.  The mega-tsunamis directly wiped out most coastal cities in the
southern hemisphere (i.e. I think Sydney would be gone in minutes) but the
"rising sea levels" from even the flash-melting of the polar caps probably
wasn't as fast as the initial tsunamis from Adam itself exploding.  So
*all* coastal cities didn't just instantly flood within a 24 hour period. 
Case in point, Tokyo was destroyed by a (terrorist?) nuclear bomb a full
week after Second Impact.

Further, the September 11th plot in the NGE verse probably didn't happen
*on* September 11th again, a full year later.  It can probably be chalked
up, again, to the "wave of terrorist and national conflicts" in the months
after 2I in late 2000/early 2001.  And there was still a city there to
attack (at least for some weeks) I think as a combination of it at least
taking some weeks for flooding of that magnitude in the northern
hemisphere/they might have tried to throw up sea walls for a while (in
vain).

That also puzzles me:  how can Nerv's second branch base, with its own
Magi system, be "on the MIT campus" when Boston is a coastal city?  Or did
the MIT organization move?

******

What I think is a subtle point that they TV show hints at, is that the
world of 2015 still has a LOT of problems.  They just "swept them under
the rug" and don't talk about them.  This is a commentary on post-World
War II reconstruction I think.

At first what really drew me to the storyverse is its kind of like
"Akira"; the apocalypse came and went:  they *did* rebuild...physically. 
But everyone's really psychologically scarred from what happened (directly
parallel to post-WWII, post-reconstruction Japan)

but the other thing is that over time I realize that it might be a more
subtle commentary on how....everything didn't get "magically fixed" for
EVERYONE when World War II ended, or indeed, when any war or natural
disaster ends.

Alright I'm in the USA in 2005-08 with CNN reports about Hurricane Katrina
on all day, that influenced this, but if you watch all the Katrina stuff,
with that natural disaster, the thing was how much they tried to *pretend*
that things were fixed.  That is, after a while the news simply didn't
talk about it that much, and when the one year anniversary came around,
the news actually started focusing on it again because people were going
"uh, guys, you didn't rebuild a lot of things and most of us are still
living out of trailers...why is there no big reconstruction effort?"

That is, it felt like they just did some token photo-ops of Bush wearing a
blue-collar shirt with his sleaves rolled up in the one or two houses they
rebuilt, so on TV it would *look* like they rebuilt, when really for
"certain persons" they actually hadn't helped at all.

So what this has to do with Evangelion is....if you pay attention to the
scripts for the 5.1 audio restored original background dialogue, at
various points when there's a TV on in the background, they actually say
that there's all sorts of terrorist attacks still going on in the Third
World; i.e. the Nansha Islands are still a warzone.

It's....what draws you in at first is the cool idea that, like Akira, the
apocalypse came and devastated Japan, but they fixed everything and built
Tokyo-3, this shining City of Tomorrow based on science and technology. 
And Tokyo-3 does seem like a technological utopia, actually more advanced
than 1995 despite being "post-apocalypse"

but I get the idea that while everything is "shiny and clean" in Japan,
it's really not good in other parts of the world.  I.e. they mention
off-hand in episode 7 that there's still tens of thousands of starving
refugees a year, and its actually a choice between funding them or the
Evangelion project.  And at various points on TV they imply that there's
simmering ethnic/refugee conflict all over the place, but that it's
literally "half a world away" so none of the happy 14 year olds in
sheltered Japan really pay attention to it; might as well be on the Moon.

But you see my general impression of post-Second Impact politics, is that
all of the "First World" countries, both Western and Eastern Bloc, banded
together to restore Order and bring civilization back from the brink of
near-total chaos.  They supercharge the UN, giving it full military
powers, and basically the "United Nations" of 2015 isn't the same as that
of today; they've "taken the gloves off" and are pretty much willing to
beat anyone into the ground who's a rebel group because it raises the
specter of a return to the chaos of post-2I.  Honestly, in Katrina-New
Orleans or 9/11-NYC, at least for the first few days after any major
natural disaster, would you mind having martial law declared?  No, the
whole point of martial law is to use it in times of great disaster and
such.  But the disaster of Second Impact was just so close to actually
wiping out civilization, that I think they developed this mentality of
"order at any cost", and they've basically (for lack of a better term)
been in "October 2001" mode for 10 years.

Case in point, in episode 11 Maya actually thinks its a wonderful idea
that Tokyo-3 is really run by the Magi supercomputers, their town council
is just a bunch of puppets, and they're not really a "democracy": so  long
as everything is run efficiently and there's "order" again, they don't
seem to care how bad things are.

Um...it's kind of similar to something from "V for Vendetta"; the
backstory (in the graphic novel) is that World War III happened (Britain
wasn't part of it so it wasn't directly nuked, but still has all sorts of
environmental/economic problems)...and for a while, it looks like
civilization will collapse.  Then the fascist "NorseFire" party, a
paramilitary junta, stages a coup and violently takes power; by just
indiscriminately rounding up any dissidents (to be killed in concentration
camps) and just keeping perpetual martial law, they're eventually able to
restore order.  The actual story of V for Vendetta takes place after "the
worst of it ended", years after The Party was able to restore
Order......and the thing is, most people are content to just shuffle
through things and let the Party stay in control and repress them, because
they're so afraid of that without the Party, they'll slide back into
chaos.

Similarly, in the NGEverse, I think they don't really have many civil
liberties and stuff (as we've seen from Nerv PR division's many exploits,
the government is lying to them all the time, and from Maya's scene in
episode 11 we find out that their "Democracy" is actually a joke)....and
more importantly, that it's really that the First World countries banded
together to restore Order, "took off the gloves" and just started crackin'
heads (sort of like how The Party restored Order in V for Vendetta)

I suspect that, far from the ravings of a V for Vendetta fan, there might
be truth to this, because I think its a commentary on post-World War II
Japanese politics.  Everyone was concerned with rebuilding and restoring
Order...the government really had a lot more control over stuff, and this
is why there were the infamous student protests of the 1960's in Japan (to
which the protest movement in the USA at the time paled in comparison;
thing "Jin-roh, the Wolf Brigade" here)

So I've extrapolated this working-model of the Post-2I global political
climate:  the "United Nations" is less a loose international peacekeeping
agency, and more of a strong NATO-like military alliance created by the
union of the Group of 8 /UN permanent security council member countries.

The First World wanted to restore order and rebuild, so they basically
just raped the third world of its resources to rebuild the First
World...well, at the least, they focused all of the "reconstruction"
efforts on the First World and just left the third world to rot.  Similar
to how post-Katrina, they focused on fixing the uh..."upper class"
portions of the city for the TV cameras, and ignored that they hadn't
fixed things for "certain persons".

Everyone just pretended that there was a return to normalcy.  Case in
point, in Japan they built up the myth (DRUMMED into the kids in school)
that "we rebuilt the world and look at our shiny new city of
Tokyo-3"....when in reality, the rest of the world was left to rot, all of
the reconstruction efforts were focused on the First World, and if any in
the third world didn't like it, the combined UN military would land on
them like a ton of bricks for "trying to disrupt the Order that we rebuilt
and trying to bring back the Bad Days of post-2I"

Judging by the Seele council's countries of origin, it's the USA, Russia,
Germany, the UK, France, and Japan that are calling the shots.  Oddly,
these are the permanent members of the UN security council, but with
Germany replacing China.  They do mention China a few times and there's a
Nerv branch base there, so they're probably important too.

These are all also G8 countries; what happened to Italy and Canada isn't
too clear, though if the Northern Hemisphere is pointed closer to the sun,
I don't know how things would be in northerly Canada..given that
present-day Tokyo average temperatures range from 4C (39F) to 27C (80F),
and they mention in episode 3 that average temperatures are now 28C
(82F)...which would be year-round, given that its "perpetual summer"...and
most of Canada's major cities are further north than that...You know, they
never mention then North Polar Cap in the series; I imagine that it melted
too, but probably over a period of time, given all the extra water plus
the Earth tilting the northern hemisphere noticeably closer to the sun....

anyway, as for the "Group of 8, plus 5's" 5 extra countries, China is one,
as well as Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and India.  I think the last 3
just get wiped out in Second Impact due to bordering the southern ocean. 
India they pretty much say "isn't there anymore" after getting the full
brunt of the tsunamis followed by a mutually destructive war with
Pakistan.

Well, that's as best as I've been able to figure it out; but I think it's
all a commentary on post-WWII Japan's reconstruction (similar to every
natural disaster reconstruction, like Katrina) : they didn't "fix
everything"; they fixed everything for the First World, left the Third
World to rot, and all of the people in the rebuild First World are
pretending that there is a "return to normalcy" while actually all
suffering from PTSD.

As for the 9/11 attacks, yeah an *alternate version* probably happened in
the NGE timeline as well, in the "wave of terrorist attacks" after Second
Impact.

-- V

("A building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it.  Symbols are
given power by people. A symbol, in and of itself is powerless, but with
enough people behind it, blowing up a building can change the world..." --
V for Vendetta, 2006 film adaptation)