I still have mixed feelings about 9/11. The first point that should always be emphasized is that 9/11 happened as a result of Seppo imperialism and was used as an excuse for more of the same (not to mention the surveillance, police militarization, and a general rightward shift that created the environment for the later 9/11-a-day during lockdown) — millions of people were killed by imperialism before 9/11, and millions more were killed by imperialism after 9/11 was used as an extremely flimsy casus belli for wildly disproportionate collective punishment. So if people cheer for 9/11 or say that it was deserved, then they shouldn’t get any crap for it, because that attitude is a natural expression of the deep frustration that comes with being victimized by the Great Satan’s terrorism against the imperial periphery.

At the same time, Osama bin Laden wasn’t some hero of anti-imperialism, he was a bourgeois anti-communist who led a far-right organization, he came from a well-off family with ties to the House of Saud and had enjoyed Seppo funding and support when fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. 9/11, accordingly, was blowback for Seppo imperialism, yes, but it wasn’t an “anti-imperialist action” so much as it was just pure spectacle. A recurring theme I notice in the world’s issues is that of “false enemies”, and this is no exception: Al-Qaeda, Daesh, and other Wahhabis or Salafi jihadists aren’t exactly disingenuous in their ideology, but they’re nevertheless dependent on the same people they hate to continue existing and hold relevance. So, consciously or not, they engage in spectacular “blood theater” to continue reproducing the “brown people bad” dynamic that they have with their “false enemies”, who themselves benefit from their own imperialist “war on terror”: 9/11 could only happen because (1) Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had received so much support from the Seps historically leading up to the event; and (2) the Seps in their arrogance — that arrogance being a product of the ideology that comes with being at the top of the imperialist pecking order — created the opening for such an attack to happen.

And then there’s the matter of the casualties of 9/11 itself. There were just short of 3,000 people who died in the attack itself, and somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of these were “non-Hispanic whites”. My understanding is that a majority of those killed directly from the attack were either bourgeois ghouls, their “another day of being a morally neutral and innocent civilian!” pencil-pushing lackeys, or other traitors of the working class. And these racial and class demographics are definitely decisive factors behind why 9/11 has had its place in the popular consciousness of the imperialist West: the bourgeoisie remembers 9/11 because it killed a bunch of their own, and they want you to remember it because they want you to value the lives of WASPs far above those of Arab Muslims.

Yet at the same time, many of the people killed in 9/11 genuinely were just average working class people working normal jobs, or they were children, and a fifth to a third of the people directly killed in 9/11 were racialized people. Then zoom out a bit and remember that 9/11 made the air of Lower Manhattan toxic for like five months, and the government did fuckall to protect people from that. “Three-thousand” is the number we’re taught to remember about 9/11, but an unknowable, larger number of people died from breathing the lead- and asbestos-filled miasma that 9/11 left behind. How many of those people were children or racialized working-class people? As said, it’s an unknowable number, but at this point we’re talking about the large-scale social murder done by public health authorities not warning people about a known danger just so that crapitalism could “get back to normal quicker” (plus ça change !), or the social murder done by systemic discrimination in healthcare that makes the same diseases deadlier for racialized, working-class people. Not to mention that 9/11 made it so that any Lenape person who wanted to access the particular bit of their nation’s illegally-annexed territory that is the southern end of Manaháhtaan, would for that five-month period have been met with an undisclosed serious risk of developing deadly cancer, all because of the actions of their colonizers that they had no control over. Whether any specifically Lenape people actually did die from breathing the miasma from 9/11,^[1] I do not know, but Indigenous people of other nations — namely, Mohawk ironworkers who participated in the rescue efforts and reconstruction — did end up getting sick or dying from improper respiratory protection.

The direct casualties of 9/11 mean that “one country had a mere 30% higher death rate than expected”, yes, but this analysis presupposes that (1) the direct casualties were the only casualties, and (2) Seppoland is a real “country” rather than a “prisonhouse of nations”. Some of those imprisoned nations living under the Stars and Stripes probably did have a far greater than 30% higher death rate than expected as a result of 9/11, with the “expectation” for these nations already being much higher than that of these imprisoned nations’ shared colonizers. It’s just that the deaths of these imprisoned nations get erased and forgotten, compared to the deaths of the colonizers. As 30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs is saying, chuds are all “never forget”, only to conveniently forget that the casualties of 9/11 included several Muslims when this gets in the way of their frothing-at-the-mouth racism.

So, this whole debate reminds me a bit of the way some leftists talk about things like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the wildfires in Australia. Not that these events are super comparable with each other, I just mean that a lot of what people say about them is “cathartically edgy” without being dialectical, that their ideas get bogged down by very bourgeois understandings of countries, justice and morality. But maybe I am myself just brainwormed and playing “Abraham defending Sodom” by pointing out ways in which 9/11 particularly impacted racialized, working-class people, or particularly impacted children.

In any case, I do have a very flippant 9/11 commemoration planned, which will have a lot of jokes about the event, but will primarily consist of me showing subtitled coverage of the event at the time by two different Norwegian media sources, and trying to compare and contrast these two sources to do some analysis of how they were trying to spin the event for their respective audiences of hearing and Deaf Norwegians. And I think this is a fine sort of commemoration to do: I’m not playing into the “national tragedy” framing, but rather seizing the opportunity to analyze and criticize how the event has been used for propaganda.

Postscript: I was a little kid when the 2011 Norway attacks happened, and because I was a little shit with a poor understanding of time and everything in general, I asked the people around me at the time why they were so much more upset by the deaths that had happened in our own country, when so many more people had died or been injured or displaced by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. I said, “the people impacted by the tragedy in Japan are farther away from us, but that doesn’t mean that the people killed here were more important than them.”

GOOD post

Yeah, the fact that we were up to a 9/11 per 2 or 3 days at the height of Covid was brain-breaking for me at the time.

A virus does it, and we just accept the deaths as the price of progress, but if you can put a few brown faces as the culprits, it magnifies our will to act by 100x? And what was our military and civilian corps even for if not to protect American lives in the only mass casualty event of COVID’s magnitude in my lifetime?

I literally lived thru the event on site since my college campus was in downtown Manhattan and my main thoughts during the time were “what took them so long”

For me 9/11 isn’t the reason for anything, it is just the break out moment for the US police state. It is a tragedy in the fact that a million of my Iraqi and Afghani brothers and sisters had to die.

Americans shouldn’t just get over 9/11, they should treat it with the same indifference that they show to every comparable case of mass death far from home.

I don’t think we should be indifferent. I think we should take every opportunity to point out how it was and remains the cause justification for every horrific foreign and domestic policy since, and I still think there was, at minimum, inside assistance.

My special treatment for 9/11 is celebration and cheering while watching the planes hit the twin towers on repeat from dusk till dawn

It’s going to b extra annoying this year. All the chuds are signing a petition to keep Mamdani away from the anniversary because he’s Muslim. They’re going to be crying for the next few weeks leading up to it.

Hold on, racism is involved with Consequences of American Foreign Policy Day?

Charlie Kirk was shot the same day as a school shooting was going on in Colorado, but there’s no chance 9/10 is remembered for the Colorado shooting. Ergo, 9/11 taking up all the air in the room when discussing the violence inflicted against the MENA region makes the world trade center the Charlie Kirk of towers.

It’s racist to talk about 9/11 as the reason for any foreign policy

it’s not racist to say it was casus belli. it was used how it was because playing to racism is a great way to build public support for the imperial ambitions of the state and whatever familial grudge W carried because daddy failed to subjugate Iraq and W hired all his guys.

To give any special significance to the people who died that day is to say that American lives are thousands of times more valuable than those of people in the Global South.

white american lives. magically swap 9/11 and Katrina and they might not even bother drumming up a war over it.