this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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No innocent civilians in the planes or towers deserved to die in 9/11 obviously (and I hope everyone agrees here), but what I despise about the event is how the American civil religion lionised it and reacted afterwards. The attack was carried out by a US asset gone rouge and a direct result of US meddling and old school imperial conquest in the Middle East, which included killing many innocent civilians there themselves. The 9/11 attacks were not some unforeseen unprovoked event.
Then there's the response. It's quite clear that the main issue with 9/11 to American leadership was not the number of lives lost, but the fact that it was a successful attack on Americas biggest symbols symbols of global financial and military domination. It was about the message that sent. A successful attack from the "jungle" on the "garden", as old school racist imperialists would say. And how did America respond to that? By invading two countries that had nothing to do with the event, while becoming even closer allies with the country that the majority of 9/11 hijackers were from. Hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq over a lie about WMDs. Afghanistan pillaged for two decades before returning to the exact same position, Taliban rule. Osama was in Afghanistan by the time the US showed up? Yes, and I'm going to be a billionaire tomorrow. More instability, more US funded terrorist groups. The response was just to go and loot and pillage the Middle East 100 times harder with false righteous fury. Like bombing an entire neighborhood because you got mugged by one of its residents.
And that really showed the true character of the US as a country. Just how much bloodlust they had after 9/11. They just wanted to go out and kill a nation, any nation from the region would've sufficed. The were calls on national radio and TV programs for glassing and nuking the entire region. Around 75% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq at the time. An invasion clearly based on lies. But they didn't care, they just wanted revenge. To kill someone, anyone. If you compare how the US reacted here, to how other countries reacted in the face of hardship, attacks and near civil war (see South Africa during the end of apartheid) it's clear that the character of the US is rotten deep down.
Yes it was a reaction to imperialism, but it’s even more farcical bc in this case the US trained and armed the attackers. They didn’t only create the conditions for blowback they supplied the means for its execution!
Oh well at least we learned our lesson. It’s not like we’re blindly pouring billions of dollars of weaponry directly into the hands of right wing fanatics in war zones to intentionally protract a conflict being waged by our geopolitical rivals oh wait
Jk I’m sure all that stuff will stay in Ukraine they need it. Slava ukraini
I would add that it wasn’t just the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that showed Americans’ character. After it was widely known and accepted that there were no WMDs and so many people had already died, Americans’ response was basically “whoopsie daisy”. Americans accepted, likely just as cope, that Bush and Cheney didn’t lie, the CIA didn’t lie, etc. No one did anything maliciously. Everyone was just doing their gosh darn best and they just got it wrong; like ordering some bad soup at a deli. So there has been zero accountability at all. Hell, I can’t imagine the President of the US just writing a letter of apology to the Iraqi people without most Americans losing their shit over it.
Bad countries refuse to acknowledge their faults and certainly don’t do anything about it. For as incomplete as de-Naziification was at least in West Germany, I do believe German society - even in the West - did try and come to grips with the horrors of the Nazi regime and do something about it. You’ll know about this much better than I, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but in the 90s it seemed at least to an outsider that there was at least some attempt for South African society to understand the scope of evil of apartheid, come to grips with it, and move forward in healthier ways. This is the sort of baseline requirement to being a good country and the Americans can’t even come close to this low standard.
It goes back even further. The flight company that some of the terrorists used to train was owned by a CIA pilot whose son was connected to the Belgian Brabant serial killings/terrorists.