In my first few years working as a journalist in Japan in the late 1980s, I immersed myself in covering issues pertaining to the Korean community. It was as good an education as any young, eager reporter in this country could get: One of the hottest issues I was covering at the time was the forced fingerprinting that tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans living in Japan had to go through from age 16, and the identification they had to carry on them at all times.

Never mind that many of these Koreans were born and raised in Japan, yet not allowed to vote under Japanese law or even to obtain Japanese citizenship. They were a kind of stateless minority in Japan, and were tired of being treated that way.

The American people do love their wars. Every few years there’s a new “war” declared on one thing or other that the news media pick up, run with and replay to death. “The War on ______________” (fill in the blank) is always on the socio-political menu somewhere, somehow in the United States, like a perpetual soup d’jour.

Scan the news and the Internet these days and you find no lack of such wars. A perennial favorite is The War on Drugs, which the U.S. government purports to be dutifully fighting (at the same time that U.S. government agencies are actively but covertly involved in the global drug trade). There’s also The War on Cancer, The War on the Common Cold, The War on Poverty, The War on Illiteracy, The War on Pornography — yes, even a “War on War” and a “War on Peace”. And of course, we all know by now about The War on Terror and the toll it has taken on the world.

People around the world are remembering today, September 11, 2013, as the 12th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks in New York City, in which more than 3,000 innocent people from the U.S. and other countries died.

People around the world today are also remembering a different 9-11 from 40 years ago, in which the United States was not the victim but the victimizer. This was September 11, 1973, the day when the U.S. government set in motion a military coup in the South American nation of Chile. At least 3,000 innocent people were killed there too, with hundreds or possibly thousands more “disappeared”; their bodies have never been found.