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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 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 Chesterton 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.
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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.
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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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