If I hear one more unoriginal journalist hack out the phrase “everything changed” – related to 9/11, I’m going to scream.
The only thing that changed – the only thing – was that one of our chickens came home to roost. The US – a smug imperialist power with bases around the world, from which it is used to dealing fire and death to any who oppose it – suddenly experienced a bit of payback. It wasn’t a great shocking surprise, either; some people in the Middle East, tired of being juggled around as a token in “The Great Game” by the British, then colonized with Eastern European militants trying to escape racism and genocide in Europe, and finally used as a base for military expansion by the US, in an attempt to gain control of one oil-rich power or another, by playing Sunni vs Shia divisions and establishing permanent military bases in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. That was contextualized by the Middle Eastern militants in the religious terms of a Jihad, but the primary complaint was imperialism, colonialism, and the US following Britain’s habit of ‘realpolitik’ to secure oil supplies or strategic pathways in the underbelly of the cold war-era Soviet Union. It wasn’t a “wake up call” as other pundits have claimed – the spiritual leader of the 9/11 attackers, Osama Bin Laden, had formally declared war by taking out full-page ads in newspapers; he was largely ignored.
But, it was a great big freak-out to discover that Middle Easterners could be as vicious and ruthless against civilians as the US has historically been. They didn’t have B-52s so they used commercial jets. Like the American planes that bombed Iraq in Gulf War 1, they didn’t have military targets so they attacked civilians, like the US and its client state, Israel, have not failed to do in a single conflict since the founding of either of those countries. Of course, traumatized Americans can be somewhat forgiven for being shocked and awed by the attack, since it was much more successful than anyone (including the militants) could have reasonably expected – but in the grand scheme of things it was and remains another minor reversal in the history of empires. “Never forget” they say, but it will be forgotten in another generation, like the bombing of Hanoi, or the Highway of Death, or the marines’ invasion of Lebanon, etc., etc., they’re all just massacres of civilians whether in an uprising against an imperial occupier, or in retaliation for that uprising. Does anyone remember the fall of Khartoum and the bloody revenge the British took for that? In the long run, yes, 9/11 will be forgotten – we Americans have to forget it because otherwise we have to confront the ruthless mis-aimed violent retaliation we dealt out, and continued to deal out for 20 years. The things go together, even for people who are so weakly versed in history as Americans.
It’s impossible to escape 9/11 remembrance bullshit, today, and it does induce some guilt in me that I am angry that my heart-strings are being pulled at by heroic stories by some of the victims. This afternoon, I listened to the amazing story of a blind fellow who was on the 75th floor of the North Tower, whose dog led him safely down the stairs and away from the building. See how the process of fabricating memories works? They use a dog against a dog-lover, to humanize the incident. How many dogs have been pulverized in Iraq and Afghanistan by American bombs, or shot by American death squads? There, that’s the anodyne to that. Of course we should honor the courage of a dog who was caught up in events beyond her ken, but we shouldn’t erase the many hundreds of thousands of people who have been caught up in American-created disasters, one of which finally came home to roost in New York on that fateful day. I’m categorically not saying that 9/11 was a good thing, or that the people who suffered deserved to suffer. The people who deserved to suffer had, as is their wont to do, protected themselves. When 9/11 happened, Dick Cheney immediately got into the mobile command center and orbited randomly above the country where – above all – it was safe. That aspect, the utter cowardice of American power, is the thing I remember and understand most following 9/11. I remember there was talk about a “cowardly attack” and I remember thinking that it takes a certain amount of courage to fly an airplane, your hands still sticky with the flight crew’s blood, into a building at 400mph. That takes a certain amount of courage that pushing the “fire” button on a Predator drone does not. My world-view shifted that day because I started to ask “what is a coward?” which led me to re-assessing my lifelong interest in military history and some of its great figures. And, comparing those great figures to the pathetic corporate drones that run the US, I began to realize what cowardice really is. Cowardice is an old man sitting in a chair, sending gullible young men to a faraway place to kill and maim the people who live there, based on a convenient lie. I don’t respect Osama Bin Laden, either, because he also followed the path of a leader: he ran and hid when the reckoning for his decisions came due. The world is full of jihadis, civil bureaucrats, and libertarians who say “I will give my life for ${whatever}” but lawyer up and scream about the quality of the prison beds when they’re called to account for their decisions. In short: fuck them all.
And a special “fuck you” for the media, who are so lazy and ignorant that they never could do the “hard” work of researching the various stories that were getting thrown around and calling bullshit on the bullshit. The media who fell all over themselves to promote the FBI’s stories of fifth-column islamic terrorists operating out of halal grocery stores in New Jersey – for fuck’s sake, everyone in the world knows that the worst hotbed of terrorism is in Langley, Virginia, just off of Spout Run at that unmarked off-ramp where the big SUVs with government plates exit. Where the folks who train torture squads around the world have their headquarters. Where the agency that does that helps ensure that there are deep reservoirs of anti-American hatred by grabbing people and torturing them in secret bases – then, American blockheads like former president Bush say “they hate us for our freedoms.” No, Bush, they hate us because our geopolitical footprint has been horrific and global and anyone with any sense of justice may wish revenge upon the US. The media continue to promote the party line, not asking these questions which I, for one, find obvious.
After 20 years in Afghanistan, the US finally makes a big show of withdrawing – while simultaneously declaring that it intends to continue flying assassination drone-strikes and whatever the hell else it wants from across the border. Isn’t that absolutely sick? We lost the war, we finally gave up, but instead of completely admitting defeat we reserve the right to just keep on killing y’all until we feel better about ourselves. Like we did in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (after Gulf War I), etc. We are America, and our right to just kill a few motherfuckers now and then is unchallenged and unchallengeable. Is that the “freedom” for which they hate us? Our freedom to just reach out and blast some poor sonofabitch’s family from 12,000 feet up? Perhaps what Bush should have said, were he not such an inarticulate lunk, would have been “they envy us for our freedoms.” I hear in Bush’s words the echo of the American founding fathers who engineered a secession from Britain on the grounds that they were “attacking our freedoms” – namely, our “freedom” to continue to trade in human flesh chattel slavery.
What died for me, following 9/11, was any sense of hope for justice or sanity. The realization that the US military machine and the CIA are unstoppable run-away forces that are dead-set on building an empire, whether anyone in the US wants it, or not. This has been an old problem for us, here – even the great Mark Twain railed impotently against the unwisdom of US imperialism. Any student of history knows that imperial chickens come home to roost. Every empire is built using unhappy people’s trampled lives as the mortar between the great beautiful marble blocks, and those people have families and friends who say “never forget” – and mean it. We should be hoping the people of Afghanistan, who we stalked, bombed, prostituted, and pillaged for 20 years have short memories, but somehow I suspect they don’t. Meanwhile, the US has forgotten Colin Powell’s miserable presentation of CIA lies at the United Nations, Donald Rumsfeld’s arrogance, and George Bush’s recovering addict smile of approval as he tried to keep from drooling on his shirt. If there’s a lesson to learn it’s that when people chant “death to America” they may mean it and they may have a reason for feeling that way, that is deeper and more passionate than that they’re muslim. Or that they hate us for our freedoms.
The US empire is hardly in decline, though some people are calling the exit from Afghanistan a turning-point. What awaits us is an eventual collapse similar to the British one: their empire bankrupted them, and eventually the world was no longer willing to extend them credit to bring about their rather silly policy of ruling the whole world from a small island with a comparatively tiny population. There was nothing special about the British other than time, place, opportunity, and the ruthless instinct to dominate. The US fairly neatly came along and consumed the British empire from inside, like some kind of egg-laying wasp, The British were also unable to control their war-economy and endless conquests, and eventually the wheels came off the pram, with a nudge from the Germans. Afghanistan, or the 9/11 militants, aren’t enough of a nudge to derail the US’ war-economy but I think I know who will: our republican party. Remember, Rome didn’t really collapse from without – it was destroyed from within by its equivalent of political parties, and the job was finished by the cost of its succession of emperors. What will collapse the US will be the republican emperors that are about to follow, and the cost of dealing with climate change; they are exactly the right people to respond to that challenge.
So, did everything change on 9/11? Not really. Not much. For the people in the planes and on the ground, and Afghanistan and Iraq, a lot changed immediately, but the long-term changes were being swept under the rug even as the dust cleared. The defense budget was already going to spiral up, the US was already going to attack Iraq (they were, really, just calling it a “no fly zone” and trying to foment revolution via the CIA). The republicans were already in the process of looking at the nation’s demographics and realizing they were going to have to begin stealing elections (that’s what vote suppression and gerrymandering are, after all) because they weren’t going to win fairly any more, and a new generation of oligarchs were trying to build themselves lifeboats to get off the planet. I’m sympathetic to all the people who died because of 9/11 – don’t get me wrong – but for a lot of people around the world the roar of jet engines and a shattering explosion is “Monday” – we’re just upset because it happened to us. 9/11 revealed our deep-rooted Karenhood, but any observer had already recognized that. Not the “most important nation” – just “another bunch of Karens.” Never forget it.
Not exactly related but, because of the day it is, the podcast-sphere is full of media pundits talking about what a shitty job media pundits did with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I love when the fucking media pundits have a circular firing squad, but they never seem to learn from it. Anyhow, I had to hear more about how the buildings collapse looked like they were rigged to blow [which I have discussed here] and all that crap about how steel doesn’t “melt” in a jet fuel fire. Fuck me sideways, the media had plenty of experts they could ask about how steel behaves at various temperatures. You don’t have to “melt” steel – you just have to get it “mildly hot” – around 1800F (982C) at which point you can hammer it into shapes, twist it like taffy, or – no shit – hammer a nail through it. There were also lots of experts on explosive demolition, who eagerly stepped forward and called “bullshit” on the 9/11 conspiracies – but the media was too busy pushing its “we just report the news, we don’t make it” agenda. Which, as Howard Zinn pointed out, is how you distort history: by deciding who you report on and who you don’t. I didn’t see a single headline like: “blacksmith standing next to his coal-fired forge screams out loud in frustration after watching stupid youtube video in which they claim that jet fuel couldn’t melt steel” Or “New York Times receives a tart letter from demolitions engineer regarding their reporting.”
Yes, I can twist a 1″ square bar of damasteel with the strength of my hands, if it’s heated with propane and oxygen. And, if you ever visited the top of a skyscraper (I have actually walked around on the top of former World Trade Center North Tower) it’s windy. Really windy. What happens when you blow on a fire? Stupid fucking journalists.
I made the mistake(?) of talking about the “chickens coming home to roost” angle at a group therapy session at Sun a few days after 9/11. (One of our managers died in a plane.) The moderator asked us for our feelings, a lot of people lashed out in tears at {usual suspects}, and I was compelled to push back…. just a little. The fact that I was probably the only non-US citizen in the room wouldn’t have helped. Several people screamed at me.
Anyone that doubts what you say here should read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women
My best guess on the “jet fuel doesn’t melt steel” bit, is that some lazy, biased, hack, looked up an ignition temperature table, and then compared it to a melting point table, and forgot/neglected/intentionally avoided thinking.
I was enlisted USMC infantry, deployed to Okinawa when the towers fell. I remember being woken up with the news, and none of use believed it, because there was this asshole squadleader, who, for the past several weeks, had been waking us up in the middle of the night with bullshit emergency scenarios. Boy who cried wolf, and all that…
We ended up spending the next week or two “guarding” one of the airbases on the island. (I go the impression that nobody actually wanted us doing that, but I didn’t hear anything official, just my impression…) A couple of sleep-deprived marines, standing at the gates with weapons and live ammo, randomly demanding IDs from people. I was lucky, in that I had a day shift, but about half the people didn’t, and they were expected to attend daytime formations, PT, etc. The whole situation was basically an exercise in how not to secure an installation. Like, it went against the most basic concepts that even the PFCs and Lance Corporals (E-2, E-3) were expected to understand.
And then there was an unending stream of bullshit about how this airbase, or even our unit, was a “high-priority target” for the “terrorists” No it’s fucking not, that’s not how you do terrorism. And besides, Al-Queda, Bin-Laden, or whatever didn’t need to do anything else, because America turned itself upside down, threw the Bill of Rights in the toilet, and is quivering in fear that their local strip mall or highschool football game might get bombed next. it was fucking absurd.
Was still enlisted when the Iraq Invasion happened a couple years later. Was floating on a boat in the Pacific when the news came through. It almost reminded me of that seen in Starship Troopers when they got the news they were “going to war”, people were literally whooping and cheering. Almost everyone I remember talking to expected it to be a repeat of the previous Iraq war, but with more shooting on our end. All my fellow junior-enlisted thought Iraqis would just roll over and surrender, because America was so fuckin awesome.
It’s been done to death already, but all that bullshit for ~3K dead, and we are supposed to accept that as an excuse to eliminate constitutional rights and to march our youth off to war, to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, all so the corporations can have a really great quarterly profits (but we can’t talk about that). But somehow, at the same time, having that many people die every day, for a month or so, for a pandemic that should be controllable if we could act like adults, isn’t even something we are allowed to bring up, and all of a sudden personal liberties and constitutional freedoms matter when it comes to wearing masks and getting vaccinations.
This combination of stupidity, selfishness, and hate is just absurdly ridiculous.
I remember how excited people got at the time.
I had Jerry Pournelle’s blog on my reading list (as one of two “conservative” USA voices I followed), and boy was there ever a kerfuffle.
cf. https://chaosmanor.net/archives2/archives2mail/mail170.html
Two examples of the general sentiment from commenters:
Not that I expected differently, but I’m deeply disturbed that 9/11 is even featured by the media on the front page news at all today, when we’re losing a 9/11’s worth of people every few days due to covid. When this pandemic is measured in hundreds of 9/11’s, I can’t help but feel that the events of such a relatively minor incident are completely and totally irrelevant, and should never be spoken of again outside of textbooks. When the world is being overrun by a deadly plague, the proper response to 9/11 at the moment is “who gives a s**t?”
Over 220x the dead of 9/11, in the US alone. Two. hundred. twenty. Nothing else matters anymore by comparison.
When the news broke it was our department secretary who ran into the room with the fear that our little automotive supplier offices would be next. We were not a target, as mentioned above, that’s not how terrorism works. But her fear was palpable, if completely unjustified.
I served in Turkey in the 1980’s in the Air Force. One thing I learned there was that, at the time, the Muslim fundamentalists castigated two symbols of American imperialism. These were the symbols of western policies which were seen as raping a nation’s resources (natural and human), destroying national identity, and eliminating Muslim values from their societies. These two symbols were also seen as creating, supporting, defending, and attacking (financially and militarily) detractors of an nation newly created in a part of the world which had been controlled by Muslim’s for centuries, to wit, Israel.
These two symbols were Western Capitalism and Western Military Power, and they were represented in the Muslim fundamentalist culture by the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Two targets. I have no doubts that the plan was to have two planes for each target, because I’m certain they expected at least one to be shot down. I’m sure they had delusions of how well prepared our defenses were, I doubt they even considered that in our arrogance we would have none. Even if the planes didn’t reach the Twin Towers, having debris rain onto NYC would have made the point. This would have hurt, possibly killed, civilians. The target would have been clear, but the collateral civilian deaths would have, maybe, possibly, just a little bit, show Americans what their civilians have been living with for the last few decades. Maybe it would show Americans what encourages the people in Muslim countries to take up arms and fight.
Two targets, two jabs at them. No feints, that would tip their hand. The symbol of Western Capitalism, the World Trade Center, because it was western capitalism which they were upset with. They didn’t target the NYSE because it wasn’t the symbol used for decades in the Islamic world for western capitalism. The symbol of Western Military Power, the Pentagon, because it was western military power, interfering with running their countries, and imposing Israel (creating, defending, and helping) on the middle east which they were upset with. They didn’t target the White House, they didn’t target Congress. They didn’t target any national monuments. They were not targeting things which Americans have a unique and historical interest in. They were targeting symbols which, for decades, had been used as symbols in Islamic cultures of western capitol and military power.
They didn’t understand that your average American had never been taught that a lot of the world saw the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as symbols. They didn’t understand that after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (for the same motives as 9/11), that American’s still wouldn’t be educated as to the nature of those symbols. They did not understand that Americans, like the secretary of our department, would feel a personal imminent threat. They did not understand that people who feel an imminent personal threat will believe their leaders when their leaders lie about the source of the threat, or their leaders use that fear to restrict/reduce freedoms, or their leaders use that fear to supplement their own power.
I was just a minor cog in the USAF, but serving in the middle east for several years and being aware of my surroundings (I knew a number of airmen who never left the base), as soon as the news came out about the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon I knew why those targets were selected. I’m certain experts in the American (and other allied powers) intelligence services also knew. And I’m certain these experts immediately briefed the people in the White House and shortly afterward briefed the leaders of Congress. Were there possibilities of additional attacks? Sure. But the likelihood was diminishingly small and getting smaller as hours, and then days, passed.
I didn’t watch any of the coverage yesterday. I knew it would be entirely stories about American heroism, and probably no mention of the >10% of non-US citizen deaths of people working the the WTC. There would be no mentions of why that building was a target. I do not condone the attack on the WTC or the Pentagon, but the attacks were not isolated incidents by crazed Islamic fundamentalists. These were attacks on symbols of western imperialism. Western imperialism which was, and is, destroying their culture, nationality, and religion.
*narrator voice* None if this was in fact “necessary” either.
This complete lack of empathy and inability to see the world from a different standpoint is, why the terrorists have won.
When people talk about 9/11 and what a horrible disaster it was, I usually just ignore the content. I am not going to be rude enough to tell grieving people to stop talking about their grief all the time. After all, many people died, many lost their family members, and the whole thing was indeed tragic.
Yet I also feel relatively little sympathy whenever I hear yet another person publicly grieving about 9/11. Just during my own lifetime many much worse tragedies have happened. Earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, USA sanctioned torture programs, genocides, even an ongoing pandemic that has killed many more people than 9/11 terror acts. Consider, for example, the 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse. A terrifying disaster that could have been prevented if not for capitalist greed. Yet somehow people don’t talk that much about this incident. But 9/11? Somehow everybody cares about it so much. But really, what’s so special about this particular disaster? Worse things have happened just in the last two decades, never mind the last century.
And the way how American government used 9/11 as an excuse to murder and torture some people and start wars… Now that’s just disgusting.
I remember that the very first thing I thought of on 9/11 was “Now Americans will know what it’s felt like to live in Israel or much of Europe for the last decade.”
lochaber@#2:
I was enlisted USMC infantry, deployed to Okinawa when the towers fell. I remember being woken up with the news, and none of use believed it, because there was this asshole squadleader, who, for the past several weeks, had been waking us up in the middle of the night with bullshit emergency scenarios. Boy who cried wolf, and all that…
We ended up spending the next week or two “guarding” one of the airbases on the island
Oh, boy, have I got an Okinawa story for you. I’ve been sitting on it for years. But it’s depressing. Go figure.
The post 9/11 circle jerk was radical. Terrorists everyplace!! Of course it was just the police state/intelligence state realizing that they now had the ultimate excuse for whatever they wanted: an omnipotent blank check. And congress saw it was good, and gave the military one, too.
geoffarnold@#1:
Several people screamed at me.
That must have been freaky. A preview of politics, today: there are huge pieces of the population that have been ideologized to the point of violence over abstractions that they don’t even understand.
I’m going to go a bit out on a limb here, but what the hell…
My first encounter with that was with an American zionist whose attitude was that “Israel is wrong about nothing, ever, under any circumstances, because: Nazis!” I pointed out that the zionist anti-diaspora was triggered by French anti-semitism not German, and that it had begun well before WWII started. The next moment, he was shaking and sweating, waving his fist under my nose, calling me a bunch of stuff that was quite incorrect (I am not anti-semitic). I imagine now that’s the kind of “hot wire” experience a lot of people encounter nowadays when they confront an “anti-masker” or a QAnon follower. But, like you (I guess) I first encountered it directly in a community I thought was my comfort-zone, and suddenly it no longer was, because someone had a toxic idea that they were programmed to throw everything overboard for, with no warning.
Trump and other fascists latched onto that, with the “9/11 blood libel” about people dancing with joy when the towers fell. What a load of bullshit. Everything you read is that people around the world stared bugeyed in terror, knowing that the US was going to lash out in the most appalling possible way. And we did not disappoint.
John Morales@#3:
I had Jerry Pournelle’s blog on my reading list (as one of two “conservative” USA voices I followed), and boy was there ever a kerfuffle.
Oh, interesting. I had one encounter with Pournelle and his entourage of followers at WorldCon and steered away from the man and his thoughts thereafter. He strutted around the conference with this cloud of the most dweeby mouth-breathers, ever, pontificating about military SF and otherwise embarrassing the name “armchair general.”
I’m not surprised his followers are rabid nationalists, and I’m afraid that every American-dominated forum was full of that kind of thing for a while. Of course, a bunch of readers of a blog are going to feel empowered by the relative anonymity to say the most horrible, stupid things. And they explode in anger if you point out that when you say “nuke them to glass!” you’re also justifying nuking US cities.
The essential technique of political ideology is to establish a criterion that applies to me, not to thee. “We are the good guys” lets me say “you are not one of the good guys because you are not one of us” and therefore “you ought to be bombed.” I genuinely used to wonder if Bin Laden and KSM thought they were the good guys, until I realized that they must, Their actions emanated from a place of certainty.
atomjz@#4:
Not that I expected differently, but I’m deeply disturbed that 9/11 is even featured by the media on the front page news at all today, when we’re losing a 9/11’s worth of people every few days due to covid.
Amazing, isn’t it?
And this time they want you to forget. Forget the hydroxychloroquine. Forget Jared Kushner’s going to produce masks for everyone. Forget that the republican officials rushed to get the vaccine ahead of everyone else. Forget that they then pretended they didn’t have it. Forget that when they get sick, most of them got the expensive monoclonal antibodies containing Bill Gates’ semen. Forget the huge number of jackasses who said “it’s just a flu” and died with a tube down their throat. Forget Joe Rogan. Forget the Ivermectin. And most of all forget the climate change crisis that’s going to crush our civilization like a grape.
geoffarnold@#1:
Anyone that doubts what you say here should read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women
Damn, that’s reporting done right. Utterly bleak and horrifying.
And it matches things that I’ve heard from Vietnam veterans on the Vietnamese side: they didn’t know or care or really have a chance to understand what was going on because they lived in an information vacuum and it didn’t matter because everyone wanted to kill them. The Americans were just another bunch that wanted to kill them, that showed up in helicopters and were maybe a bit worse because they were exceptionally clueless.
There are some items in that article that trigger connections with other things in my mind. I’m probably going to have to post about it. How depressing.
flex@#5:
These two symbols were Western Capitalism and Western Military Power, and they were represented in the Muslim fundamentalist culture by the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Two targets
Yup. They didn’t attack the white house or capitol because they were sending a different message about US power.
Remember: Ramzi Yousef attempted to bomb the WTC with a truck bomb in 1993 and failed. Because, it turns out, the buildings were pretty solid. But the US government and media downplayed the attack, which was serious and did substantial damage:
Andreas Avester@#7:
And the way how American government used 9/11 as an excuse to murder and torture some people and start wars… Now that’s just disgusting.
I’m not going to tell people to stop grieving either, but – like you – I think there’s enough grief to go around and it’s almost embarrassing to get so wrought up about a single event. It’s disproportionate. Why? Because it serves a political purpose for the US, which is why the mandatory self-flagellation.
Next up: the two minutes of hate.
Tangential: One of the 9/11 podcasts I heard was talking to comedians about the problem of being funny about 9/11, and some guy from The Onion told about a headline they all loved but decided they couldn’t use:
How the attacks happened was a surprise. That the attacks happened was not. Anyone around in 1993 will remember Al Qaeda’s ineffective attempt to blow up the WTC with a truck bomb. The US views three months as “long term” (i.e. Bush saying “we’ve moved on”) while OBL and Al Qaeda view the crusades of a thousand years ago as current events. When you have more patience and see a bigger picture than the enemy, you have an advantage.
Editorial cartoonist David Horsey penned a good one in 2001, of a young woman wearing a US flag T-shirt and a man wearing a beret with a very “Red Brigade” look. She says, “The world sure has changed a lot since 9/11”. The man replies, “Actually, it’s the same bad old world. You’ve just been forced to pay attention.”
One thing I’m noticing less this year than previous years is the reduction of “only murrica exists!” attitudes when Chile’s 9/11 in 1973 is mentioned (and the US’s participation in it). Maybe defeat and 20 years of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan are making people re-evaluate their views.
“Maybe defeat and 20 years of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan are making people re-evaluate their views”
That first word is doing a LOT of work right there….
“it’s the same bad old world. You’ve just been forced to pay attention”
The lesson of the last 20 years is that very last thing you want Americans to do is pay attention.
The goal of any act of terror is in the name: To sow fear. And in that regard, 9/11 was a master stroke (probably unintentionally, to some degree).
On 9/11, America’s pants exploded, sprinkling half the world with little stinky nuggets.
Which was really embarrasing, io it had to get revenge and look like a tough guy again. Close to a million people had to die for that to happen.
That state of fear should not have persisted for so long. The average person is more likely to die from lightning strike or cancer or whatever than from terrorism, and yet it’s the latter the average dummy is afraid of/outraged by. The US propaganda machine has done its merry best to terrify people. Of muslims, of black people, of trans people, of antifa. Of anyone who threatens the WASPy status quo. Well done, dipshits. And in the process, more and more (actual) freedoms keep getting sacrificed in the name of security. How ironic.
I honestly have the impression that US citizens are the most craven, spineless lot on the planet. Conditioned to be afraid of everything and feeling justified–proud even–to respond violently to that irrational fear at a moment’s notice. It’s like they’re toddlers who never learned how to cope with real life (it’s scary sometimes).
Pathetic.
klatu@#20:
I honestly have the impression that US citizens are the most craven, spineless lot on the planet. Conditioned to be afraid of everything and feeling justified–proud even–to respond violently to that irrational fear at a moment’s notice.
Pretty much! Scared toddlers with a huge nuclear arsenal.