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The view from a quarter century later...
It's 8 o'clock on a Tuesday and I am just starting my shift. Ordinarily the TVs on display for sale would be playing a demo-loop fed from a DvD-player behind the counter but this morning they're tuned to CBS. A small crowd has gathered to watch as Tower 1 burns. I'm supposed to be answering questions, and trying to upsell people on the company's membership discount program and extended warranty plans but my heart's not in it. I watch the second plane hit live. I remember the collective gasp, and the horrified silence that followed. Then like Colonel Kurtz's diamond bullet it strikes me. This is no mistake. This is a deliberate act. An act of courage, an act of perfect crystalline Will.
100s of people dead in an instant because somebody made a choice. By the end of the day that count would be in the thousands. I would later find out that a friend of mine had lost an entire branch of their family tree in that fireball. An Aunt, an Uncle, two young cousins, and a dog all reduced to ash in the impact of United Flight 175 with Tower 2's southern face.
As the morning progresses there are rumors of other hijackings. Over a dozen planes are unaccounted for or not responding to ATC. There is rampant speculation about what target will be hit next. The President is in the air, and National Guard jets are being scrambled. The rest of my shift passes in a blur, but certain images remain seared into my brain.
Under my initial reaction of rage and helplessness something simultaneously imperceptible and momentous has shifted. It's cliche to say that 9/11 was the death of innocence for a generation but there is a truth to it. Things that had been mere abstract concepts to me when I woke up that morning, "Free Will", "Horror", "Heroism", "Good", "Evil", "Civilization", and "Civilization's Enemies", were suddenly real, immediate, and vital to me in a way that they hadn't been 24 hours previously. I can look back on my life today and say with confidence that, philosophically, the Charlie that woke up on the morning of September 12th 2001, was a fundamentally different person from the one who had gone to bed on September 10th.
In the interests of full disclosure I am tempted to turn this post into a rant about how politics and war are downstream of culture, and to wax philosophical about 9/11 as an act of theater, but I also feel like doing so would cheapen the moment, and be disrespectful to those who died 25 years ago today.
So instead I will ask, where were you on the day they wounded New York?
I was 16, and in journalism class.
As everyone was glued to the TV, my instinct was to write a poem. I did so in the moment and recited it quietly, without being asked, in front of the class. I don’t remember the poem but it had an impact and I wish I had saved it. My teacher was army national guard, and we talked one on one four about 45 minutes.
My first instinct was to join the marines but I was talked out of it by my parents. Within a year I was living in the Middle East.
9/11 had a huge impact on my life. I learned a new language, learned about Islam and deepened my knowledge of Christianity and Judaism. Poured myself into learning the history and culture of the region. Became more religious at first and eventually became an atheist and remained that way for almost my entire adult life. Studied history of the region in university.
It set up an odd dynamic to my life given the changes in culture that have happened in the last 25 years. People who know me even a bit know that I’m very educated, both formally and self taught, in multiple areas that relate to the region and its people and its enduring legacy.
They, being largely “well-meaning” liberals tend to think because of my expertise and first hand experience assume I tend to have sympathy towards certain groups and movements.
They are extremely mistaken, as if they have trouble conceiving of someone increasing their dislike of various groups in line with increased knowledge.
I grew very quickly to detest Islam, even as I got along very well with individual Muslims, and had an entirely pessimistic view of the Muslim Middle East and the greater Umaah.
I noticed how it increasingly alienated me from other atheists who only ever seemed to criticize Christianity. I noticed how cowardly they were as atrocities in the name of Islam continually stacked up and up into the millions of casualties in the decade that followed and these people basically said nothing.
Honestly, knowing what I know now, if I was sent back in time to Sept 12th, 2001 in a bid to change the course of history I’d be a nonstop advocate for nuking the Kabaah.
I feel like it would have saved my fellow Americans a lot of trouble in the long run, even if we couldn’t have brought ourselves to do it out of some misguided sense of decency.
How would nuking the holiest site of a quarter of the global population, not to mention more than two million innocent men women and children. In an American ally no less for the actions of a few thousand radicals in the mountains of Afghanistan save the US trouble. It would turn the world against America. And easily be a worse atrocity than anything Muslims have done in recent memory. It would be a great evil and barbaric tribalism. Not mention stupid seeing as the Saudi government is a cooperative ally of the US.
Religions can die. Countless religions lie in the trash heap of history. Even if it didn’t die completely, Zoroastrianism is no longer important.
Islam is much stronger but much more brittle than Judaism. I doubt they’d survive long after the destruction of their holy site. It’s a religion that’s much more “particular” than most in that it’s formally attached to a set of places and yet claims universality through historical conquest.
Islam can’t handle huge setbacks in the secular / physical world, it’s part of the reason 9/11 happened in the first place. It was almost like a violent outburst born in a fit of narcissistic rage on a societal level.
Ironically there was an Iraq war era general that I will paraphrase here: you pay the butchers bill up front or you pay it with interest over time. The network of Islamist parties in the decade after 9/11 were directly responsible for the butchery of millions of people, mostly Muslims.
Leveling Mecca and fatally humiliating an awful religion into obscurity seems very tempting given a full and honest accounting of the bloodshed directly caused by Islam in the 21st century.
The United States was explicitly modeled on the Roman republic, and this is one aspect of our pagan past I wish we would have the balls to recover: the ability to unashamedly and utterly crush our enemies without moralizing or hemming and hawing about it.
The whole world would turn against the US, you say? I say a US government acting in the best interests of its citizens would find that to be essentially inevitable, and the last 25 years have vindicated me.
If you put those that would have opposed a punitive war against Islamism directly after 9/11 and those “allies” who have been leeches and fair weather friends in the last 25 years into a Venn diagram it would be a goddamn circle.
I've discussed how certain theological claims of Islam are more brittle than its Abrahamic brothers before but I think you're not accounting for inertia and adaptation and the fact that these religions have absorbed enough from Judaism to follow the same path.
Judaism adapted because it had to, it once also had the problem of not being able to handle earthly failure. David's kingdom did not in fact last forever, despite the unconditional covenant. The Deuteronomist message of obeying to avoid punishment via curse and political cataclysm didn't really work out: given where the Jews were geographically, they got rolled over despite trying to be faithful anyway and we got apocalypticism instead.
Islam hasn't had to adapt, despite having a rough time in modernity, because it's had the demographic weight as a cushion against total calamity.
Here's the thing: a lot of these adaptations are already within the Qur'an. The Qur'an is inherited apocalypticism but paired it with a more high agency response in jihad (George Bush's invasion of Iraq led to a rise in apocalyptic feeling), it already has a detached corpus and distributed system of religious common law, and already has pragmatic adaptations to the inability to fulfill divine commands. It maintains the locale-weakness but Judaism shed this without dying.
Christianity is evidence that disconfirming events are no obstacle to human stubbornness. Too many people believe in Islam to stop, there's no reason to think it will not be subject to the same cognitive dissonance strategies the Jews and other apocalyptic cults were, especially given how much it draws from the former.
Especially if you just mega-super-duper-jihaded them. The Kabba didn't fall into a sinkhole, Mohammed's tomb wasn't hit by an asteroid. A kaffir President in the Dar-al-Harb (this is a concept a lot of Muslims don't think about but, trust me, it'll be relevant again) simply brought the war to Islam. It's not a refutation. It's the sort of attack that unites people. Plenty of Muslims were disgusted by 9/11 (what you see now from many younger Muslims in the West is a response to the idea that their elders apologized for a decade for something that had nothing to do with them, to no end), every Muslim will be aligned against the US if it robs all of them of the Hajj.
As for the lack of the Hajj: Islam would lose something in terms of being able to get everyone back on the same page yearly but telecomms allows that anyway. The Arabic tenor of the faith won't end because it's tied to the Qur'an itself which is portable and beyond questioning for Muslims (it's not really a problem, ime all of the criticisms of Western language dominance and so on apply mainly to Westerners and it doesn't even occur to Muslims to apply to Arabs). Why on Earth would it break the faith rather than scholars simply accepting that a commandment that cannot reasonably be fulfilled doesn't count against someone? Hell, you can end up in an even worse situation: without Hajj some might suggest other ways of accruing religious status (jihad) count for more.
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I guess it would show that Allah was not powerful if the American government could destroy islams holiest site.
Did Judaism end after the Temple was destroyed (twice)? Did Christianity end after all Jesus's OG disciples were dead and buried ("some of you standing here will not taste death...")?
They're perfectly capable of creating new copes. In fact, they'll probably just steal the original: "God has punished us for our degeneracy."
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I was in grade school, in rural Alabama. We were put in the library and then a TV was wheeled in and turned on, showing the two towers burning. I was good friends with a pair of twin boys. I don't remember which was in the room with me, but he was crying. Both brothers wound up doing tours in Afghanistan 10+ years later. I could talk about how insane the Courtesy of the Red White and Blue era was, from 9/11 to invading Iraq, but when I think of 9/11 I think of the veterans.
Mercifully, most of the guys I know who spent time in the sandbox made it out more or less alright. But then there was Zach. Zach was a coworker of mine at a pizza place circa 2010. I didn't know him super well, only knew that he'd had a five alarm meltdown over a minor fender bender on the job and that was the last I saw of him. Another driver I was closer with explained: They'd grown up together, done Boy Scouts together, and so on. Apparently he'd done two tours in Iraq. The first was a cakewalk. The second was Fallujah, and he'd survived in body but not in spirit, lost his best friend in rather graphic fashion (The driver who told me this, an Air Force brat who'd been kept out of the service by a bad back, used to drive me nuts in how he'd get guys fired up to tell their war stories but not really listen to them.).
The last I heard Zach was on drugs and in and out of jail. I have no idea what happened to him. I hope that he's found peace, in this life or the next.
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I was not yet 10 years old. I vaguely remember watching television footage of it. I remember my mother asking my father where they would attack next, and he said "here, probably," in that way men do. It wasn't a crazy idea, though, young Shrike lived not far from a sensitive location, and steps were taken to defend the airspace.
I can't talk about some of the more meaningful ways 9/11 impacted me without something close to doxxing. Most prosaically, I seem to recall that we had been traveling before and got rather lucky not being stuck elsewhere after the flight ban came down. Somewhat less prosaically, one of my parent's careers was substantially derailed. I also saw a bit about how poorly the US government treats those with whom they entrust the most and grew up amid a string of what I viewed as bad domestic and foreign policy decisions.
Looking back, it seems likely that 9/11 had a direct or indirect influence on a lot of my life. Maybe I would have considered different careers if it hadn't happened. Certainly it seems likely that my political concerns would be, if not opposed, at least different. One wonders if the Motte would talk about the same things, or even exist.
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There is a news article I've never been able to find again, published on 9/12 or 9/23, about how we mustn't give up the rights and freedoms that make America special when responding to this threat. It's such a shame to look back on it and think we almost did it, almost held fast to our principles in response to an attack unlike anything the world had seen. And then instead, once the shock wore off, we had the PATRIOT Act and all that followed.
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Middle school for me, PDT, so it had happened before I woke up. When woke up and came out of my room, the TV was on, which was odd, and my dad said I needed to watch what was on. I ended up at school. I don't remember much from the day, but I remember I was in chemistry class early in the morning and our young-ish female teacher was pretty shook up about it. She talked in front of the class for a while. I also remember the afternoon class, combined LA/SS in two blocks with one teacher. She had us write something about what we thought about it at the time. I remember not knowing anything about what had happened, but I had picked up something about the gulf war, and so I remember writing down that I expected it was done as revenge for the gulf war. More right than I knew, but also not an original idea.
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I was thirteen years old. I remember being at home, and my parents came up to me, with very serious expressions, and told me there had been a terrorist attack in America.
I was confused. I was not confused by the attack - I was confused by why they were telling me. A terrorist attack in another country? Aren't those very common? World Trade Centre? Never heard of it. Is three thousand a lot, relatively speaking?
After some more time had passed I did figure out why it was a big deal, but I remember that in the first moments, my reaction was to be surprised that people were acting as if it were a big deal. Mum and dad never told me about random news events in other countries before. My first reaction, therefore, was to get on with what I was interested in, without having any emotional reaction. It was the same kind of story, to me, as "many dead in earthquake in India", or "Russian separatists bomb city in the Caucasus", or "civil war breaks out in Latin America". I heard it, went "oh, okay", and that was it.
Over the coming weeks I did realise its importance. I remember thinking that the real crime of the hijackers wasn't killing such-and-such number of Americans, but rather making America afraid, and now America was going to make the entire rest of the world afraid in revenge.
Though I am a bit ashamed of teenage-me's initial response, I am proud that my teenage self then immediately opposed both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, correctly calling that the invasions were unlikely to apprehend the people responsible for September 11, or to make the world safer from terrorism.
What do you mean by this? To the best of my understanding, al-Qaeda was a transnational movement that had coalesced geographically in Afghanistan and had deep and abiding ties to Pakistan prior to September 11. When the US invaded Afghanistan, substantial parts of al-Qaeda fled to Pakistan, where all five of those currently on trial for 9/11 were apprehended with the help of Pakistani security services. Except perhaps for al-Baluchi, who operated in the UAE, it seems plausible that the US invasion facilitated their capture by constraining their operating environment. Presumably, without the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would have remained in hiding in Afghanistan given the relative willingness of Pakistani intelligence to cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency. Similarly, the invasion of Afghanistan facilitated the killing of bin Laden, as US forces staged in Afghanistan to carry out the operation.
I think there's an interesting counterfactual question to be had as to whether the US could have captured KSM and his associates and captured or killed bin Laden without invading Afghanistan, and whether doing so would have been more humane, just, cost-efficient and so on, but from what I can tell in the world we actually got it seems like the invasions did assist in the apprehension and/or killing of those responsible.
I have read offical Iraq War after-action reports that basically concede that the United States would not have invaded Iraq if they hadn't been the only country in the world to not send official condolences after 9-11.
I'm very open to counter-evidence here but I am not sure how new (and very interesting!) facts about the invasion of Iraq is going to change my opinion about the invasion of Afghanistan.
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Despite, not with. Much of the trick to catching bin Laden was cutting Pakistan out of the loop on promising leads to his location.
My understanding from reviewing the captures of the 5 who are currently on trial is that they were captured by Pakistani security services, with the CIA involved.
Now, it seems quite possible that the Pakistanis were only so "helpful" because they didn't have any other real choice.
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From where I stand, the invasion of Afghanistan was an almost unqualified success. We swept away al-Qaeda, swept away the Taliban, kept bin Ladin on the run, mended our wounded pride, and demonstrated to foreign leaders that they didn’t want to harbor terrorists that would attack the USA. It was the extended occupation that was the problem.
I don't think you can divorce the invasion from the occupation. Once the invasion happened, the occupation was inevitable and unavoidable.
I also do not consider 'mended our wounded pride' to be a valid objective for a military operation.
I think if you had asked even the most ardent American patriot on 9/12/01, “Do you think we should invade and occupy Afghanistan for the next 20 years?” he would have looked at you like you were crazy before answering “No. We’ll just bomb the shit out of them.” We could have gone in, bombed whatever we felt like bombing, taken out the Taliban leadership, hunted down al-Qaeda without letting Pakistan know, and left. We didn’t have to try to form a modern Western democracy out of illiterate goat herders, child rapists, cousin marriage enthusiasts, and Islamic fundamentalists. It’s not like we didn’t have plenty of historical examples to warn us against getting bogged down in Afghanistan.
As for wounded pride, I suppose I just agree with the old adage, “war is politics by other means.” If the offense is great enough, war seems like a pretty reasonable response.
No, I don't think you could have. I think that's the same kind of 'hard man' fantasy that gets you Trump saying they should just tale Iraq's oil or whatever other nonsense.
Pragmatically, the question is whether just bombing Afghanistan and leaving would meaningfully contribute to fighting al Qaeda or global terrorism, and the answer there is "no". Sure, you could try to take out the Taliban leadership and then leave, and what do you think happens in Afghanistan after that? Just blowing everything up was not a solution.
Politically, is that something that the US could viably have done, considering domestic pressures, the ideological and cultural mood in the country, and the international situation? I do not think it could have.
I think that killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people over twenty years is neither a reasonable nor a moral response to September 11, all the more so because the the majority of those casualties had nothing to do with September 11.
It couldn't be done by air. But the US could have invaded, killed Al Queda in Afghanistan, killed all the Taliban who protected them and their subordinates a few levels deep, and then left -- basically a punitive raid on a massive scale. The new Taliban that would take over after that would likely get the message, and if they didn't the lesson could be repeated. I think this is basically what we should have done, but only in hindsight.
Has "mowing the lawn" proven an effective strategy for Israel?
Better than not mowing, which is what lead to the October 7 attack. But the US had an easier task -- we didn't need to convince people who considered us our sworn enemy to be destroyed at any and all costs not to attack us. We just had to convince people who hated us but mostly wanted to run Afghanistan not to attack us nor give shelter to those who would.
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Why should anyone believe this? History (including American history) is filled with examples of successful punitive expeditions.
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
If it was not politically feasible, then do you agree that not invading was also not politically feasible?
...and what exactly do you think would have happened if the US hadn't occupied Afghanistan? Do you think Congress was going to impeach Bush? Reagan managed to respond to the killing of 220 Marines and the near-sinking of a warship by Iranians without invading Iran or being impeached. I agree that after 9/11 Americans wanted revenge but I don't follow your idea that the Americans somehow lost the social technology to "blow stuff up and leave" during the Clinton era.
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The great lesson of the Trump administration is that something is only off the table until it isn't.
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I was in pre-K, or possibly preschool actually, so it’s a hazy memory, but I do remember it. I think I’m basically the youngest possible person to actually remember 9/11; I suspect this is a factor (among many, but still) for why I’ve always identified more with “young millennials” than “old zoomers”. I grew up in a town in North Jersey where people commuted into NYC for work, the kind of place where you can see the skyline very clearly if you get up on a hill, so it was pretty personal for me and mine.
I can remember being pulled out of school early, but I can’t remember how the teachers were acting or what they told us (I assume at this point I was still just thinking “yay, half day!”). My mom picked me up and to distract me, or possibly to distract herself, took me downtown to go to a certain toy store that I liked. It was a very nice day to walk around after all, perfect sunny weather. By this point I remember noticing that she was stressed out, as though something was wrong. When we arrived, the store had closed early for the day, and in fact there was almost nobody around on the whole “Main Street” area. This was weird, so I asked my mom why everything was closed. She said that everyone had gone home because there had been “a big tragedy” (in retrospect, I’m not sure if she knew yet that it was a deliberate attack, not an accident… she probably did by then, but I don’t know what time this was all happening). I asked her, “what’s a tragedy?” Can’t really imagine being in her position for that one, but she explained — I don’t remember how much she told me, but at least to the effect of “something very bad and very sad has happened in New York, and people have gone home to talk to their families” — and everything felt very serious.
It was almost certainly the first time in my life I had ever really felt somber, or had the realization that truly bad things do happen in the world. I assume afterward when we went home I just played in the yard or read a book or whatever other normal kid stuff, but that moment really stuck with me, and I do remember exactly where I was.
Obviously not everyone my age actually remembers the day, but it definitely had a big impact on all of us in town. I grew up in a small town, so we basically knew all of the same people all the way from the beginning of school through graduation. One of my classmates lost his dad in the attack.
One of my history teachers (who was supposed to catch a flight the very next day in fact) made a point of reminding students what it was like in the area at the time, since none of us could remember. Our town was under the takeoff and landing paths for an airport, so normally you’d hear a vague background noise of jets all day. In the weeks after the attack, it was silent, punctuated every couple hours by the roar of a fighter jet on patrol.
I think the day had a huge formative impact on everyone my age and a bit older. Really planting the idea that yes, there are sometimes real enemies out there. Despite being a thoroughly left-liberal town/school, we never really had an anti-American set of kids, even among the SJW-types and the edgy punk types (who I was adjacent to) they’d at least keep that kind of thing to themselves. I recently watched the documentary “102 Minutes That Changed America” with my wife, which is a really excellent compilation of footage from various people on the ground on the day of the attacks, played in real time as events progress, and including some street interviews. It was an emotional experience watching ordinary people reacting and slowly realizing what was happening; surprisingly raw even now, frankly enraging, dredging up a latent feeling of “fuck the people who did this” that’s definitely etched deep in my bones in a personal kind of way.
One more aside: when the SEALs finally killed Bin Laden in 2011 (8th grade for me), it was a party atmosphere in the whole school. Basically everyone came in (spontaneously, with no real coordination, we just all heard about it in the morning and reacted the same way) decked out in American flag T-shirts and hats and whatever like it was the 4th of July and we’d just won the Super Bowl all at once, and nobody got much work done all day.
Until you mentioned you lived in a small town, your account is so close to my experience that I thought you might be one of my classmates or neighbors. I think we must've lived very close to each other - my mother was on her way over to Highland Avenue when the second plane hit. We literally have the same story of going to the toy store and finding everything closed and the streets deserted - though in my case it was my birthday that week, and I doubt we tried to go to the same toy store. Judging by your timeline I'm about 2-3 years older than you.
Definitely not the same town. There wasn't much reaction at all that I could tell in my school, my town was super ultra liberal (starts with an M). TBH the fact that it was my (liberal) girlfriend who told me that bin Laden got got actually made me think it was bullshit for a hot minute.
Anyway, the world is surprisingly small sometimes. Hello not-quite neighbor! :)
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I was an undergrad at UW Madison. I had an ATI All-In-Wonder card in my PC and a scheduled task to wake up the PC and turn on CNN every morning as my alarm clock. That morning, the news was about a plane having crashed into the WTC. I had heard about the plane crashing into the Empire State Building and figured this was a similar story. I went to breakfast in the student commons where CNN was also on TV, and as I ate my toast and eggs I watched the second plane come in. I instantly lost all appetite and went back to my dorm room, glued to CNN while I called a couple of people on the dorm landline and talked a bit. I didn't like the feelings of rage that were bubbling up, so I had a couple of shots of bourbon and headed off to my first class. I can't recall at all what took place in the classroom. IIRC the rest of the classes that day were cancelled via electronic mail shortly afterwards.
Do you still have that ATI All-In-Wonder?
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Barely sentient preschooler. I have no memories of the event, but I got my Star Wars toys taken away around that time because I was talking too much about Mace Windu in class.
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I wake up to both my parents watching the TV, which is odd because I usually got up before my mom and we didn't watch TV in the morning. They seem upset about something, and I could see there is a sky scraper on the TV that is on fire. I don't have any context for whether that was something that happened often. My mom has siblings that live in New York and she tells me one of her sisters called her and she's worried for a cousin.
Almost as soon as I take this in the tone shifts. Whatever is going on in New York is no longer sad, it's scary. I know this because my parents are scared and not because I have any idea of what is going on. I wake my siblings up and help them eat breakfast. My parents tell me they won't take me to school today. My mom tries to call her family back east and she can't get through to a single person for hours.
My father tells me we'll be going to war. The TV is filled with News and before now News had always been boring adult stuff. I don't understand what they are talking about, what a terrorist is, what a hijacking is, what the tower is or how many people may have been inside it or why it mattered. It seems like anything could happen or might have already happened. Anyone could die, any landmark I had ever seen on TV could be destroyed. My father tells me that evil people far away are celebrating and good people far away are pledging support.
With the TV occupied by my parents and school cancelled, I spend the day playing with my toys and trying to figure out how Batman would have saved everyone. I can't figure it out and it bothers me because I've never encountered a situation like this before. I bring in my Aladdin doll but even with this back-up the problem seems too much. They can't get everyone out before the towers collapse on them as well.
The next day at school all the girls talked about their daddies maybe going to war, maybe there would be a draft, maybe we would be next because we had an Air Force Base nearby. All the boys wanted to fight, (fortunately the worst of the fighting would be over before they turned 18.)
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While 9/11 is the "I remember exactly where I was at" thing in my life I've been thinking this week about how little I now care. It just doesn't feel culturally relevant. That may be because the ways it altered culture are so pervasive and encompassing. I'm sure someone can drum up a narrative of why it wasn't a complete waist of time but that's what it feels like - like the US would have been better off just to shrug and done nothing internationally.
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I was an edgy, America-hating 16 year old. I was excited to finally be living in interesting times. I posted some things that were stupid and probably hurtful. Those sentiments are probably fairly mainstream today.
I asked my English teacher who she thought did it. She said it might have been white supremacist militias. My father scoffed at that. It took me another decade to notice that some people are much better predictors than others.
I wasn't an edgy America-hater, but I didn't feel viscerally that I had been personally attacked. In small-town Pacific Northwest I felt like big cities like New York got all the attention and we were an afterthought. I remember thinking that the inner city schools depicted on TV shows often looked much nicer than my schools. Now I'm sure in reality they were far worse to attend, but they also got a lot more funding and attention than Small Town High.
I'd never been to New York at that time. Since then I've connected through JFK but never stepped outside the airport.
I just didn't feel much kinship with such distant parts of the country. An attack on Seattle probably would've registered emotionally even though at that point I'd been on the ground in Seattle only a couple of times, always for school field trips.
I think my post-college civic self eduation instilled a better sense of myself as an individual contributor to and part owner of the great American project. I'd be on board with dropping bombs if a terrorist attacked a pelican in Myrtle Beach. But 22ish years ago I agreed with Kerry that the response should have been closer to a law enforcement action than a war.
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my story is very similar.
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I was in undergrad in a small town in a very red state and about to head to class. I checked CNN site's for no particular reason that morning (it was not a habit of mine) and saw the news (when the site finally loaded).
I first thought, "this can't be real, this is from that Tom Clancy book."
Then I remembered the recent Onion article and thought, "well, we're fucked."
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I was on the West Coast, so this happened as I was preparing for my day. I glanced at the TV on my way out -- funny how we used to watch TV for news back then -- and was bummed to see what looked like some kind of terrible accident or relatively-minor terrorist attack on one of the towers.
As I traveled, the radio said it was both towers now, and it was planes, and I got to thinking.
I'd had an axe to grind against Islam for a long time. I grew up a conservative Christian and had been frustrated for quite a while with the average person's total lack of awareness about differences among religions. "But there are no real differences," the mainstream sentiment seemed to go. "They all just say, 'Don't be a dick.'"
I knew better. I knew Islam was bent on conquering the entire world; on taking sex slaves as it did so; on killing anyone who disagreed or wanted to leave its ranks. I knew it was an existential threat, and I was reasonably sure that people who would fly planes into buildings must be muslims.
The anecdote about
ChestertonMuggeridge feeling relief when the bombing of London commenced, because finally everyone else was living in the same world as he'd been for so long, comes to mind. I knew that finally the West was going to wake up and realize the problem. And when the towers collapsed, I knew the lesson would stick.Never Forget, we all said. Well, I was young. I believed it.
Then Bush got on TV and said Islam is peace. HR and media went into full swing insisting that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. How could they have? All religions are equal. We're all very sure about that, and if you don't think so, you're creating a hostile workplace environment.
For a few years you could get away with suggesting it anyhow. I remember my family members being afraid to visit big cities, or even local shopping malls, because the next attack could happen at any moment. People generally seemed to get the idea that Islam was a problem and something needed to be done about it, even if it was considered gauche to mention so in polite company.
But the Bush administration squandered a lot of that will, and the Left took full advantage of it. Pretty soon I saw teenagers putting "No Enemy" stickers everywhere and when the Dixie Chicks said America had 9/11 coming I noticed that while some people were outraged a whole lot more were not.
By 2010 everyone seemed past it. It's been one of the biggest blackpilling events of my life.
Now, watching our countries flood themselves with overtly-hostile muslims, and Englishmen go to jail for suggesting this might be a problem, and essentially no politicians anywhere being willing to suggest that hey maybe Islam is intrinsically dangerous, I realize that I gave up hope in pretty much everything a long time ago. In my fellow man, in democracy, in politics, in elites, in academia... really, in the West in general.
It's not like 9/11 was the end, either. Muslim aggression continues apace, at large and micro scale. But somehow the West seems to have inoculated itself from noticing. At this point I'm not sure what, if anything, could happen to make people wake up.
When I remember 9/11, I remember the horror of the event. But what I dwell on is the much greater horror of how easily it has been forgotten.
What else should they have said? This was useful propaganda. In order to effectively fight the people who had attacked us Al Qaeda the US needed the cooperation of the worlds Muslim governments and the world's Muslims. Obviously the attacks were motivated by an Islamic ideology but equally obviously declaring war on the world's 1.8 Billion Muslims would serve no purpose. You lament that people understood that something "needed to be done about Islam" but what do you propose? What we got was the GWOT with US special forces fighting Islamic extremists globally. What do you suppose should have been done instead the religion has now 2 billion followers and 1.8 billion at the time. What Bush said was strategic to help Americans fight Al Qaeda and channel rage, what good would pograms against Arab shopkeepers in America
Contrary to this belief most Muslims and Islamic governments don't act like ISIS. This is a common insistence among conservatives but the world would look a lot different if they did. Most Arab governments are sluggish and corrupt not motivated by fanatical dreams of world conquest and the democratic Muslim countries also don't elect people like that. In the face of that it would seem that Islam isn't bent on those things even if you think they should be. Now I'm not saying that there isn't a dangerous current of extremism running through Sunni Islam that attracts young men to these Salafist ideologies or that we should let millions of unskilled Muslim refugees into Western Countries. But the average Muslim or Muslim politician is not bent on conquering the world they aren't the borg. Also for an existential threat a majority of Arab governments are American allies and far more concerned about Iran then invading the infidel west and taking concubines.
The Dixie Chicks argued aganst the war in Iraq this is the quote;
And they got cancelled hard for it this was an era when people's blood was up and unmoderated internet comments basically any news story touhgign the wars had people saying we should nuke Mecca and Medina. And the Dixie chicks were proven right,, the Bush administration cynically channeled rage against Islamist extremism into overthrowing a secular dictator do to their own Neocon fantasies. Neocon foreign policy at the time was utterly delusional they thought creating a democratic Iraq based on conservative economics would create a booming new American ally and unleash a collapse of Arab autocracies has had happened with Communism in Eastern Europe. These fantasies were what American rage was channeled towards and the invasion of Iraq ended up being the biggest boon for Islamic extremism possible. It removed a secular check against Iran and provided fertile ground for Al Qaeda and later ISIS to bloom. Introducing any sort of democracy to Iraq naturally made them much more pro Iran, and it had the effect of convincing many Muslims the US war really was against Islam. Not to mention it was an immoral farce a ginned up war of aggression without proper casus belli, and a gigantic waste of taxpayer money.
People were over the wars by 2010 because they realized supporting Shia Islamists and child raping warlords wasn't making America any safer. The American security state has good handle on preventing terrorist attacks at home. Such a good handle most of the people they arrest these days is basically entrapment. The global war on terror was bad enough a global war on Islam like you seem to want would be catastrophic.
Propaganda that is not true always has costs. For starters, there's the cost of credibility. Just look at how much of a problem we now have forming consensus on facts. We had a mechanism to check facts, that mechanism was abused egregiously for partisan gain (and during COVID, for getting people to do what the health experts wanted, even when that wasn't completely aligned with their interests), and now one side of politics doesn't trust it even when it is telling the truth.
There is also the problem that people might believe the propaganda even after it stops being useful. There is no Door to Nothingness that will erase the idea you've put out and all of its consequences; even an outright "we lied lol", which people are generally unwilling to give for obvious reasons, will by the nature of statistics not reach all of the people who heard the lie, and this isn't even starting on the policies that others draw up in response to that lie, many of which have serious inertia (note that Western society has become more sclerotic over time, so it's harder to get a policy revoked in the future than it was to get it instituted in the past).
To take an example of some of these dynamics, and without even any deliberate deception, nutrition advice. The BMI chart categories are bad; the lowest-mortality group is what are considered "overweight" by the chart. Doctors know this. But the chart hasn't been updated, because we aren't a society that Does Things anymore. The ridiculous "fat-free" craze* also has left a mark; it's been discredited for ages, and yet the "lite" milk section of the supermarket is still as big as the "full"-cream (which generally isn't quite full; AIUI there's more cream taken off for sale as-is and for butter than what compensates for the skim milk). And that's milk, the single worst place to cut calories because most of the vitamins are in the fat part. And, of course, people listen to nutritionists less even when those nutritionists are telling the truth.
Lies are bad. Sometimes they are necessary, but most people overestimate when this is so.
*Please note, lack of essential fats - rabbit starvation - is literally the fastest-killing form of malnutrition; if you were to eat a truly fat-free diet, you'd be incapacitated in a week and dead in three.
Huh? Is anyone in the USA at risk of rabbit nutrition, no matter how much nonfat milk they drink?
Basically not. Even the people who obsess over "fat-free" do not actually "succeed" sufficiently to be in danger. It's just a funny irony.
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Rabbit starvation isn't caused by lack of fat. It's caused by lack of fat and carbs. Or more accurately, by excessive protein. The body can survive for months and up to a year with zero fat because it makes its own fat from carbs, as well as having stored body fat.
Do you have a source for someone surviving a year with zero fat intake? Polyunsaturated fatty acids are essential nutrients, much like the essential amino acids; humans cannot make them (we can only make saturated and monounsaturated fats from carbohydrates). We don't need much, but we need some (they help keep membranes fluid, and are anabolic materials for making prostaglandins). My understanding is that they also don't tend to have particularly-long biological half-lives, as PUFAs are quite susceptible to peroxidation.
Angus Barbieri survived for more than a year with literally no food. He was obese and lived off his stored body fat, which presumably included lots of PUFAs from all the deep fryer oil (he worked in a fish and chip shop). There's a school of thought (that I subscribe to) that it's actually excess PUFAs in vegetable oil that is causing the obesity epidemic.
IIRC, lioleic acid has a half-life of about two years, which could explain why it's so hard to lose weight through dieting. If your body fat is full of linoleic acid and it has such a long half life, any calorie controlled diet is just going to release a bunch of LA into your bloodstream.
I avoid vegetable oil myself (well, not completely, because lol, but I think it's only bread and occasional ice-cream that have it). Of course, I get PUFAs anyway, just not in that kind of absurd quantity - I eat plenty of butter and fatty cuts of meat.
Yeah, losing the weight would definitely have helped repurpose the PUFAs, but even then that he survived a year is a significant update. Thanks.
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The mass hysteria around the Uncommon Cold (or 'covid' if you prefer) is already more or less forgotten, and is my Never Forget.
And what's worse, the resulting financial fuckup- perhaps even an inevitable one due to absurdly irresponsible fiscal policy- is caused by something that people can't even remember now.
I will not forget that 15% unemployment + 3 months of helicopter money = mass rioting.
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It took me until Charlie Hebdo, and the response to it, to understand this.
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The Bush administration made it cool to hate America. Then during the Obama administration everyone still habitually hated America and had to reach for increasingly tenuous reasons to keep doing so, and that's how we got to today.
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I was trying to figure out how Chesterton's Fence applies here, but I think you meant Churchill?
Also, the Dixie Chicks criticized the war and said they were ashamed of George Bush, but I definitely do not remember them saying "America had 9/11 coming," though a few other pundits said or implied it.
Pretty sure it's one of either Muggeridge or Menken, the anecdote being mentioned in Scott's review of their autobiography.
[edit] - It's Muggeridge.
H/t
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I've recently wondered whether 9/11 bought america 10 years on islamification compared to europe.
The Atlantic Ocean did most of the work there.
Coming through for the USA once again.
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IDK. But if anything I think it accelerated that for everyone else. Simple pipeline.
Sneering at the US is high-status -> The US is perceived to be anti-Muslim -> Therefore it's high-status to be pro-muslim
There's an upshot I doubt Bin Laden foresaw.
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