9/11 Proved That We Are Governed By Idiots
As America's leaders move from one catastrophe to the next, it's clear their continued rule will mean the death of us all.
September 11th, 2001 - radical Islamic jihadists funded in part by Saudi Arabia carried out a series of highly coordinated terror attacks against a Western superpower that had its hands in the preponderance of violence, death, and meddling in the Middle East during the 20th century.
The war hysteria that ensued in America was sadly predictable. “September 11 had a terrible shock effect on the millions of Americans who get all their news from the corporate media and who were secure in the belief that everyone in the world secretly wants to be an American,” wrote Michael Parenti in The Terrorism Trap. “[A]lmost all of America know next to nothing about how US-supported terrorists have taken millions of lives in scores of other countries. The media have little to say about those acts of terrorism, and so the general public knows relatively little about them.”
Mere days after the attacks, having watched the endless, grim jingoism spouted by American media in response, Susan Sontag had the courage to write in print: “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” The unforgiving response to her sentiment was sadly predictable.
The West – bruised as it was from 9/11, a comparatively tame event to the horrors unleashed by the U.S. throughout the world since WWII – was now ordained, by virtue of its modern “values,” to control the fates of millions of Muslims, millions who had tried again and again, whether through the Iranian nationalism of Mohammed Mossadegh or through the nonviolent uprisings of the Arab Spring, to secure their own liberation but had been routed at every turn by Western imperialists and their puppet regimes. That some of these disillusioned people, apprehending the astounding moral hypocrisy, cultural vapidity, obscene decadence, and spiritual wasteland of the Western “democratic” powers, instead found meaning and purpose in the dangerous utopian illusions of radical Islam, a movement that was abetted for decades by the West, is as understandable as it is frightening.
America’s culturally illiterate cabal of neocons - Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, and others - set their sites on remaking the Middle East to comport with their mad visions of an entire region of Arab client states. Elected leaders with no sense of history, proportionality, or humility, thus took America down the path of decades of strategic folly. Karl Rove, Bush’s senior advisor infamously made this deranged comment to a reporter:
You’re in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. [...] That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
You may call this hubris. I call it psychotic.
Once the U.S. put boots on the ground in Afghanistan in retaliation for an al-Qaeda threat it itself had created, the impoverished country devolved into a 20 year nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of lives were violently taken and trillions of dollars were wasted. For what? With the taste for the American Forever Wars beginning to sour back home, in 2021 the U.S. finally retreated with its tale between its legs. Afghanistan swiftly fell back again to the Taliban, surprising only those who knew nothing of the corruption and mendacity of the U.S. efforts to “rebuild” the country, or of the litany of U.S. war crimes committed against innocents in Afghanistan which drove many civilians into the arms of the Taliban.
The illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, a war crime which no one has been hanged for as German and Japanese leaders were for their wars of aggression, ruined Iraq, contained a litany of American atrocities, pushed the country into the arms of Iran, America’s sworn enemy, and birthed the inchoate rage of ISIS. Because of the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. will likely never recover its already precarious diplomatic legitimacy with the rest of the world. The rise of the economic conglomeration of BRICS, an express threat to dollar hegemony, is a testament to this. The world is not taking our shit anymore.
But America’s love for war is still here. The fanatical anti-Islamic attitude in the West – resulting from the terroristic blowback to the West’s own bolstering of both Islamic extremists and tyrannical governments in the Middle East as a way of quashing leftist, nationalist, and anti-imperialist movements – feeds the ideology of radical Islam. Western violence perpetrated against Muslims confirms the central tenants of jihadism, namely that the West desires the absolute obliteration of Muslim culture and the eradication of Islamists. And this vicious cycle is exactly what the neoliberal imperialists want to maintain. Our Orwellian Forever Wars are extremely beneficial to powerful interests, ensuring not only a permanent war economy, but a permanent wartime state of mind. As James Baldwin wrote, the “myth and menace of global war are nothing more and nothing less than a coward’s means of distracting attention from the real crimes and concerns of this Republic.” And on we march into a maelstrom of death, as weapons manufacturers receive billions of our dollars every year, our intelligence agencies are turned inward to study, influence, and corral the domestic populace, and increasing use of military force only begets increasing threats to our security.
For precisely how long a society can keep up this state of affairs, where Western citizens, or rather, those who think they are citizens, are forced in the name of anti-terror to sacrifice not only their own dear civil liberties, those things which they are taught make their country better than all the rest, but are even forced to give up their very human faculties of trust, community, cooperation, and regard for their fellow men, thus bringing them to the level of jackals, all in service of an imperialist project which they have no say over and, indeed, which they materially benefit from very little if at all (did my minimum wage get raised because of the Afghans vaporized in an instant?), will be just as long as the Western conscience fails to recognize that its fate is inextricably bound with the fates of the least of these, our brethren. So long as we manufacture everlasting enemies, in other words, so long as we permanently menace an entire people, the whole of our society will be under threat from both within and without by that same menace we think to be our salvation.
9/11, as a world-changing event that our leaders did not react rationally to, serves as a dark parallel for the current global climate catastrophe: Western, developed nations, responsible for the preponderance of carbon emissions, the looting and pillaging of the natural world, and the capitalist desiccation of entire ecosystems, will soon bear the dire consequences of their actions. Our leaders will not react rationally to the climate crisis either.
The victims of the climate crisis will not only be those who suffer and die from its most obvious consequences - crop failure, flooding, fires, massive storms, heat waves, and bloody wars over water and food - in the same way that those who died on 9/11 were not only those killed in the initial explosions of the airplanes colliding with the towers; it was not only those who were unable to escape the buildings before they came crashing down into a wasteland of twisted and toxic rubble; it was not only the first responders who dutifully ascended the many flights of stairs in efforts to reach the top floors; it was not only those who suffered and died from chronic diseases caught by inhaling the poison ash.
It was also the jumpers.
Up to 200 people are estimated to have jumped from the towers that day. Most of them jumped alone. Some grabbed ahold of flimsy improvised parachutes in vain attempts to slow their fall. Others fell together in pairs, holding on to each other in their last moments. The jumpers would reach up to 150 miles per hour before hitting the ground. The sound of the sickening, explosive thuds continue to haunt eyewitnesses.
The tragedy of the 9/11 jumpers was eerily similar to another New York City disaster - the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In 1911, a fire broke out on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the factory. The fire originated from a scrap bin and quickly spread throughout the 8th floor and upwards. Many of the employees, mostly young immigrant women, found escape to be impossible. Doors to stairways were locked so that managers could monitor workers, keeping them from taking unauthorized breaks or from allowing outside union organizers inside. Fire ladders weren’t tall enough to reach the 8th floor. A poorly constructed steel fire escape collapsed under the weight of those trying to seek refuge, sending dozens falling to their deaths. Elevators began to fail. Some jumped to their deaths down the elevator shafts. Others, with nowhere left to turn, ran to the windows. The windows, instead of opening outwards, opened inwards, making escape even more difficult. Knowing that they would succumb to the flames if they stayed, many chose to jump instead. Of the 146 people who died that day, at least 62 jumped from the building.
"I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture – the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk," the reporter William Gunn Shepard remembered. The New York World reported:
…screaming men and women and boys and girls crowded out on the many window ledges and threw themselves into the streets far below. They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements. It is a ghastly fact that on both the Greene Street and Washington Place sides of the building there grew mounds of the dead and dying…
From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death - girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.
Another eyewitness, Louis Waldman, later recalled, “Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street.”
Faced with such unimaginable extremity, the jumpers of the 1911 disaster and the jumpers of the 9/11 terror attacks were both forced into choosing their own form of death.
“The mass suicide was one of the pivotal events of 9/11,” writes journalist Chris Hedges,
But it was immediately expunged from public consciousness. The jumpers did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The hopelessness and despair were too disturbing. It exposed our smallness and fragility. It illustrated that there are levels of suffering and fear that lead us to willingly embrace death. The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live.
The story being fabricated out of the ashes of the twin towers was a story of resilience, heroism, courage and self-sacrifice, not collective suicide. So, the mass murder and mass suicide were replaced with an encomium to the virtues and prowess of the American spirit.”
We, today, facing the compounding disasters of climate change and the betrayal of the political elite, will be forced to make our own choices.
As the climate catastrophe continues unabated, acts of self destruction will only get worse. This may take several forms: self-immolations, alcoholism, drug overdoses, domestic violence, suicides, mass shootings, riots, theft of resources, political violence, state-sanctioned crackdowns on dissent, and more.
So long as the society refuses to face what must be done in order to turn back the tide of our rising oceans, our total annihilation will be assured. The question, then, is not how we will live, but how we will die.
So long as we cling to illusion, to the belief that we are historically exceptional and immune from the sways of the universe, we will be unprepared for what is coming. We must shatter our myths of innocence and progress. America was defeated after twenty years in Afghanistan just as we were defeated In Iraq, just as we were defeated in Vietnam. Our enormous C-130 airships desperately evacuating hundreds of Afghans fleeing the Taliban were just a newer version of our many helicopters that airlifted Vietnamese from rooftops during the fall of Saigon. The U.S. empire, knowing that it cannot stand up under the weight of its own lies, chooses to obfuscate and lash out against invented enemies. The inchoate violence of our adventures of empire only hastens our decline as we attempt to decapitate an endless-headed hydra.
“America was not attacked [on 9/11] because of a clash of civilizations,” Hedges writes, “America was attacked because the virtues we espouse are a lie. We were attacked for our hypocrisy. We were attacked for the campaigns of industrial slaughter that are our primary way of speaking with the rest of the planet.”
Soon after 9/11, Osama bin-Laden issued a message to the world, a message that the U.S. government did not want to be heard. He said, “What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years…Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins…To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to god…neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad…”
The deaths on 9/11, treated as heroic, were used to justify an escalation of policies already carried out in the Middle East. Then we act surprised when our hegemonic machinations are responded to with violence. “The hijackers spoke to America in the idiom we taught them,” Hedges writes.
We have forgotten, or simply never learned, the central lesson of Vietnam: The U.S. empire is not the good guy. Now, post-9/11, we have yet again waded neck-deep into the swamp of death.
The antiwar self-immolations of the Vietnam era, carried out by Americans such as Alice Herz and Norman Morrison in response to the Buddhist immolations of people like Thich Quảng Dức, divided the Western public. Some called them insane, ineffectual, deluded. Others called them saints, martyrs, and prophets. Given that we now have a fuller picture of what happened in Vietnam, the immolators of the antiwar era may be called the vanguard. They saw the path that the U.S. was going down. Through their sacrifice, they kept hope aflame.
Alice Herz was the first American self-immolator of the Vietnam era and a refugee from Nazi Germany. She understood the inhumanity that humans are capable of. She could not sit idly by in 1965 as she watched her adoptive country crack down on civil-rights marchers in Alabama, or as it began its own industrial mass slaughter of Vietnamese with the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign.
In a letter to a fellow activist dated just days before her immolation, Herz wrote, “The air is full of mendacious fog. As I listen to the radio news getting more menacing with every hour, I ask what remains of America to distinguish this country from Germany, as I knew it in the first terrible months of the Third Reich?”
Today, environmental immolators such as David Buckel and Bruce Wynn are vanguards of today’s climate crisis, itself a form of industrialized slaughter.
The difference this time is this: In Vietnam - after Americans waged total war on the countryside, dumping millions of pounds of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange over the land; after Americans wantonly raped, tortured, and murdered civilians with the full power of our military machine standing behind them, all under the impunity of the racist “mere-gook rule”; after Americans extinguished the lives of millions of people throughout Southeast Asia and permanently scarred countless more - the American war in Vietnam ended, the survivors carried on.
With the climate crisis, nobody will live to see the end of it.
The United States and its idiot, mediocre leaders cannot be said to be a moral nation because we have so clearly disregarded the well-being of our own children - to say nothing of the world’s children, our very future. We have bequeathed unto them a hell-scorched earth. To confront this fact would mean confronting death itself, a concept which America is quite uncomfortable with, for the nation wishes to keep going and going and going, staying one step ahead of the ghosts at its heels. Is it any wonder that as we continue to ravage the Holy Lands, watering the sand with blood, as we continue raping the earth, whole forests at a time, and as we consign our own citizens to pauperism and tyranny, that these children, these future terrorists - representing at once our shameful history, our very living issue, and our future legacy - are running up behind us with a knife aimed squarely at our back?
