This time of year, what’s at the forefront of my memory is my wife’s birthday, and my kids’ birthdays, which are mostly around this time of year. The thing that most people bring up around now is the ugly memory of 11 September 2001. I shy away from it, because while it was definitely a tragedy with significant loss of life, it was also an excuse, a justification, a starting point for excesses of evil on this country’s part. Also, a trigger for kitsch.
These days it’s perhaps more often utilized in memory of a great tragedy that happened 22 years ago this Monday, back at the dawn of the 21st century, the attacks on 9/11, when our own infrastructure was turned against us in an act of modern horror. So around this time of year, when we hear Never Forget, it’s most likely the attacks of that day being referenced. It’s on posters, and t-shirts, to help you remember. There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget. You can put it on your lawn, and maybe you’ll all remember who your enemies outside your borders are, and if you actually sometimes like to talk as if New York City is an unlivable hellscape full of your enemies inside your borders, maybe you’ll be so busy Never Forget-ing that you’ll forget to remember that you do that, at least until it is time for Halloween lawn decorations.
Oh god. $79.95. And the ugly upper-middle class house is a perfect background for it.
OK, AR Moxon mentions all the things we should never forget.
I’ll Never Forget the way the liars who had the steering wheel on that day bragged that they would create their own reality, and then proved it. I’ll Never Forget how proud they were of making us a country that tortures. I’ll Never Forget how lie led to lie led to lie, but never to consequences.
And I’ll Never Forget how the liars who came after—even less scrupulous, even more flagrant—noticed there would be no crime that an authoritarian-facing Presidential power couldn’t survive, no outrage that would not be normalized, no meat too raw for voters who craved bigotry, and pressed that advantage far past our breaking point, so that today we have an openly criminal party speaking and acting against any elections they do not win, and arguing in public and even in court that it isn’t illegal if a president does it, provided the president is an authoritarian.
I think we’d do well to Never Forget that the failure to prevent those attacks did not represent insufficiently aggressive national security, or insufficiently guarded borders, or insufficient domestic policing, or insufficient cruelty in our foreign policy, but rather insufficient attention paid to available information—an intelligence failure, in other words: a failure of awareness, of imagination, of competence. So it strikes me that those who still today insist on ignoring available information risk similarly catastrophic failures of our national intelligence.
Those are the things I already remember when the pretense of martyrdom rolls around every year.
I mourn the day so many civil liberties died. Never forget our elected representatives who clambered over each other to vote in favor of fascism instead of doing anything productive to resolve the underlying issues.
Never forget the president that said
“OK , you have covered your backs” to the intelligence officers that tried to warn him…twice.
Never forget this idiot was made president by conservative judges who blocked the recount in Florida 2000.
Never forget this idiot president prevented the mopping up of the last taliban forces because he moved the US troops to Iraq in a war based on a lie.
Never forget the even bigger bloodbath that happened 9/11 1973.
Because Nixon (and Kissinger, who is still alive and celebrated) overthrew a democratically elected government.
And how many of those politicians who did that clambering for the PATRIOT Act and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were/are liberals/Democrats? As I recall, the only Dem back then who wasn’t sounding like a warmongering fascist was Russ Feingold and he paid for his “disloyalty” with his job when Wisconsin voters–yes, even the liberals–replaced him with Ron Johnson.
Also, let’s Never Forget that there is a reason why Al Qaeda chose to target the US in the first place.
Here is more stuff you should not forget…
https://youtu.be/ AY_4BjX4ZRQ
Apart from Andrew, we have Louis Mountbatten who – in a case of just desserts- was blown up by IRA in 1979.
Dang.
https://youtu.be/AY_4BjX4ZRQ
I have it on my calendar as “Be Afraid and Vote Republican Day.”
Wow. Classy. Truly, there is no better way to commemorate the pointless deaths of thousands of innocent people than with a kitschy lawn ornament. Somebody should do a cuckoo-clock version, where every hour, on the hour, a little guy falls to his death from one of the burning upper stories…
What the hell is wrong with people? Who the hell commissioned this, and what sort of idiot buys it?
“As every cell in Chile will tell
The cries of the tortured men
Remember Allende, and the days before,
Before the army came
Please remember Victor Jara,
In the Santiago Stadium,
Es verdad – those Washington Bullets again” – The Clash
… at least until it is time for Halloween lawn decorations.
Uh, say what? Stores around here started pushing those last month.
@Akira #4 I remember that a lot of people who should have known better went right along with the naked power grab, including most of the Democratic caucus. I think that illustrates how few actual liberals there are in Congress, and how far right our mainstream was, even 20+ years ago.
This is a timely and on-topic response to a question posed to me by raven a couple of days ago:
Props to @1 Artor, @3 birger, @4 Akira, and @5 rietpluim for expressing a good part of what I feel about it. I will add that 9/11 makes me think of an empire that is afraid of everything: an empire that amplified its worst tendencies and let the worst war criminals of the 21st century off the hook for pillaging and looting the other side of the planet — an empire that was all too willing to trash our remaining civil liberties in the name of fear of an intangible, incoherent, and oxymoronic concept: a war on terror. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the ruling party is Democratic or Republican — we are infested with a sprawling and unaccountable U.S. military/paramilitary that is always agitating for more war, more sanctions of arbitrarily-chosen Official Adversaries, and more torturing of any civilians who happen to be in the way, seemingly all to enrich a privileged layer of weapons manufacturers. And they have the arrogance born of sheer ignorance to proclaim, “Never Forget”, or ask, “Why do they hate us?”
We sowed the seeds of our own downfall in our response to 9/11 and there are apparently still plenty of people who think our misadventures in the Middle East were all the right thing to do, we just didn’t do it hard enough.
Around this time of the year I am always reminded of this great performance by Volker Pispers.
I see that Beholder is still here and now stalking me.
No surprise. It’s a sick troll thing.
This is just gibberish. None of it makes any sense in the real world.
Beholder accidentally did one thing right in his dismal existence though.
Beholder absolutely hates the USA.
What US empire? There isn’t one.
What downfall? The USA is still the largest economy in the world, and still the leader in science and technology. We developed the first and best Covid-19 vaccines.
We are still a democracy. The freedom index has us at 23 out of 165.
The UK is 20, Russia is 119, China is 152.
Yeah, our reaction to 9/11 thanks to Bush and the GOP ended up being counterproductive and a disaster. That is one of the lessons of 9/11 that we need to learn.
.1 The invasion of Afghanistan to go after al Qaeda and the Taliban was under the aegis of the UN. Even Russia and China supported it at the time.
The Taliban were doing a Pol Pot/Cambodia self genocide.
It could be justified as self defense.
Staying there a long time was a mistake though as we found out.
.2. The invasion of Iraq was pointless, wrong and cost us and them a lot.
That was Bush and the GOP’s idea although the Democrats didn’t do much to stop them either.
Two of my friends were killed there, something that still bothers me whenever I think about it.
.3. Beholder: And they have the arrogance born of sheer ignorance to proclaim, “Never Forget”, or ask, “Why do they hate us?”
More cuckoo words from the fan of terrorists.
Al Qaeda were and are terrorists.
Those 3,000 people who died at the World Trade Center were innocent civilians.
Al Qaeda has since gone on to kill thousands more, it is probably in the 100,000s by now.
They’ve been involved in every Muslim war from Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, through North Africa to the Sahel.
They don’t like us but they really hate other Muslims.
Around 99% of al Qaeda’s victims have been other Muslims.
Al Qaeda are not nice people and what they want and what they do is not justified.
I’d rather forget. We got the guy, remember? Case closed.
When terrorists hit Israel, the Israelis just repair the damage and move on. Why give terrorists the satisfaction of our attaching to the suffering they caused us?
And while I’m at it; forget the Alamo.
I wonder what they think in Santiago, Chile.
Arundati Roy, ‘War is Peace’ date of publication unclear.
^ Used to have a link to that quote source but it seems to be broken now