Remember the Alamo? That historic battle where brave Americans fought against the evil Mexicans and tragically died? Well, that’s not accurate. Actually, they were a bunch of assholes fighting to maintain slavery.
…the legend of the Alamo is a Texas tall tale run amok. The actual story is one of White American immigrants to Texas revolting in large part over Mexican attempts to end slavery. Far from heroically fighting for a noble cause, they fought to defend the most odious of practices.
Yeah, I know. Is there anything from America’s noble history that the woke mob isn’t willing to destroy with facts? If America wanted to have a truly noble history, it should have behaved nobly in the first place.
While we are on the subject of historical things that Americans are told to never forget, but that are factually very different from the version we’re supposed to remember, let’s talk about 9/11, that modern defeat that inspired so many glorious victories for Christian nationalism and neoliberal capitalism. Before I get into it, I need to emphasize to you that those terrorist attacks were quite simply wrong; I’ll get into why. We can all agree on that detail.
MOTIVE
Both Christian nationalists and neoliberal capitalists were quick to declare that the terrorists were motivated by their hatred for our “freedom”. In reality, their grievances against the United States were identical to the grievances that Christian nationalists have against the US government, and include both religious/ethnic grievances and socioeconomic grievances.
Most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, which has a very special relationship with the US government and the American empire.
After World War 2, the US was the only major economy still functioning well; this fact, plus the fact that the US dollar was backed with gold, made it easy for the world to decide that the US dollar would be the international currency of choice. Then, in 1971, Nixon unilaterally decided to unlink the value of the dollar from gold, which created economic instability. Nixon then made that deal with the devil (in this case, the House of Saud) that they would require everyone to buy their oil with US dollars in exchange for the US protecting them no matter how they treated people in Saudi Arabia. In response to the oil shocks of 1974-75, the US government expanded this plan and by 1975, all OPEC oil was sold in US dollars.
Side note: The main reason the US government hates Iran is probably because they keep threatening to sell their oil in their own currency instead of US dollars, not because of any human rights abuses. Economics are the primary tool of US hegemony, but economic power is always backed up with violence, i.e., the enormous US military.
This agreement is extremely beneficial to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, but allows them to oppress the Saudi Arabian people as much as they want, and Saudi Arabians understand that the United States is the power behind the Saudi throne oppressing them economically. Moreover, Saudi Arabians are aware of the “degenerate” way westerners live, at least partially because western corporations are always trying to colonize their country, and doing so through the promotion of western culture (especially western media). The result is that they experience constant culture shock in their own country.
Related: ‘Culture Shock Within Their Own Country’: Saudis Come To Grips With Swift Changes
Does this sound familiar? It should. These are exactly the same grievances that American conservatives have: The wrong people have all the economic power and are impoverishing them, while promoting a rapidly changing culture that is more and more degenerate. Conservatives are very similar wherever you find them even if their narratives are very different — even if they hate each other for their differences.
Let me just emphasize: These grievances are real in both cases! There really is material harm going on, and there really is a rapid change in culture that is dismaying to conservatives — in both cases. However, their solution to these problems (in both cases) isn’t liberty, but rather oppression that has been given a thin veneer of moral goodness. When conservatives say “freedom” they mean their freedom to force others to comply with their particular conservative culture.
From the perspective of a person who values actual democracy and has the ability to empathize with others, both groups of conservatives are clearly the bad guys. While the harm is real, their solutions are horrifying and both groups have killed Americans in pursuit of those sinister goals. The radical Muslims that executed the 9/11 attacks are really no different from our own radical Christians, and yet Christian nationalists in the US see Islam as part of the army of Satan (literally) and Islamic radicals see the US as a component of “the Great Satan”.
In September of 2001, I was a normal American in the sense that I was blissfully unaware of what was going on in the world, and didn’t even watch the news much less try to get beyond the news media to find the truth. When the 9/11 attacks happened, I was at work, and everything ground to a halt as we brought up the footage of the Twin Towers getting hit. It was extremely surprising and traumatizing. I at least knew enough about international politics to suspect that it might have been Muslim terrorists, but the majority of Americans were completely dismayed at why anyone would want to attack the US in such a horrific way.
HARM
The targets of the 9/11 attacks were the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and the White House. These were all obvious symbols of the real oppression that the Saudi Arabian attackers experience; moreover, they were practical targets. Destroying them materially affected the cultural and economic war going on between western Christian nationalism and neoliberal capitalism on one side, and the Muslim world on the other side. Moreover, New York City is functionally the capital of capitalism. The narrative that these were random targets who had done nothing against the attackers is absurd, but it worked well on the largely ignorant US population.
Why did American conservatives care? US conservatives actively hate New York City. They are actively trying to figure out how to overthrow the US government and have been since the 1970’s. You’d think they’d be celebrating the 9/11 attacks, like they celebrated the Oklahoma City bombing. The difference between Oklahoma City and 9/11 is that Christian nationalists were the perpetrators of Oklahoma City. The conservative problem with 9/11 isn’t the death, the destruction, or the choice of targets, but only that it was a symbolic domination of white American Christians by brown foreign Muslims.
In terms of the material harm, the number of victims of 9/11 is officially 2,996 but the odds are high that more people will ultimately die from exposure to the dust created by the destruction of the buildings in New York City, and over 1000 have already been diagnosed with conditions that are likely related to that exposure. This was the highest death toll of any terrorist attack in US history, with the Oklahoma City bombing coming in a distant second place. It was also the greatest destruction of infrastructure in the US by a terrorist attack. (I have to wonder if the American far right is jealous of how effective the attack was.)
But let’s look at COVID-19.
When US officials first figured out that a pandemic was underway, they proposed a lockdown, but “essential” workers kept going to work. The US didn’t even make a serious effort to stop international travel (unlike the complete shutdown of flying that happened after 9/11). Most importantly, conservatives chose to completely ignore the lockdown and the modest requests the government made in terms of masking and social distancing. As a result of all this, the US has had an extremely high per capita death rate due to COVID-19 — about 3000 people have died per million so far, which is well over a million people.
Again, the death toll for 9/11 was 3000 people. The number of people killed by COVID-19 as a direct result of conservative jackassery far exceeds this number. There have been points during this pandemic where one 9/11 of people were dying every day from COVID-19. Certainly, some of those deaths were unavoidable, but I think it is fair to say that we should have been able to keep the death rate at close to 1000 per capita (Canada, for example, was able to do this), or more like 350k people total. That means conservatives (and I do include neoliberal capitalists who were more concerned about the economy of wealthy people than human lives) caused something like 650,000 American deaths.
That’s not the only way US conservatives kill other Americans. The domestic policies they insist on in terms of maintaining poverty (even punishing the poor!) and withholding adequate medical care are deadly and they know it. About 91,000 deaths per year can be attributed to social factors in the US; these are all a direct consequence of conservative policies that value the maintenance of hierarchies over human lives.
From these population-attributable fraction estimates and mortality data, we estimated that approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in 2000 were attributable to low education, 133 000 to poverty, 162 000 to low social support, 39 000 to area-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 176 000 to racial segregation.
Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United States by Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH,Melissa Tracy, MPH, Katherine J. Hoggatt, PhD, Charles DiMaggio, PhD, and Adam Karpati, MD, MPH
Moreover, Americans kill people in other countries all the time — not because we were materially harmed but just to keep those people under the domination of this unholy partnership between neoliberal capitalism and Christian nationalism. For example, after 9/11, the US didn’t attack Saudi Arabia (even though the terrorists were almost all from there) but instead used the attacks as a flimsy excuse to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the war against Iraq, over a million people died. Direct deaths caused by violence were around 150k, and the rest were indirect deaths caused by the complete disruption of the entire country. The US lost 4507 soldiers in this conflict.
Related: The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq
In the war against Afghanistan, about 200k people died. The US lost 2420 soldiers in this conflict.
Again, 9/11 only killed about 3000 Americans. In relation to the death and destruction caused by US conservatism manifested in domestic idiocy as well as the ongoing domination of the rest of the world using a combination of coercive economic force and the overpowered US military, the 9/11 attacks were insignificant. Even if we only count deaths of Americans, 9/11 is insignificant. Even if we only count deaths of US soldiers, 9/11 is insignificant.
PROPAGANDA
In light of the facts (that the 9/11 attacks were wholly immoral and yet inspired by legitimate grievances and that the actual harm of 9/11 was small relative to the ongoing harm caused by American conservatives), why do we still care about 9/11? The answer is that 9/11 has become an important part of the conservative propaganda machine — yet another tool for promoting mindless nationalism rather than patriotism. This aids the fascist side (white supremacists and Christian nationalists) the most, but it helps near-right neoliberal capitalists as well.
In short, whatever legitimate trauma we experienced as a nation over the 9/11 attacks (and I do feel that personally), it is time to let it go because 9/11 became a propaganda tool for harm and domination. The primary reason conservatives squeal so much about people discarding these symbols of nationalism is that it means they are less able to enjoy their historic domination of society. They don’t actually give a shit about anyone who died as a result of 9/11 except maybe the cops and firefighters, but I doubt that they are sincere about even that. Remember that they love to fawn over US soldiers as well, but then refuse to spend any money on their health and well-being after they complete their service, and recall how they used US flags to beat the police during the January 6 insurrection. We need to throw all this conservative propaganda in the trash so that the vulgar truth of conservatism can be laid bare.
THE TRUE MEANING OF 9/11
In light of all that, what is the best way to think of the 9/11 attacks?
Terrorists seem to universally come to the conclusion that everyone is guilty, and that justifies the randomness of their victims. The victims are “fungible” — meaning that the whole class of people are seen as guilty with no consideration for what any individual victim has actually done in their life. The 9/11 terrorists saw all Americans as guilty. Similarly, McVeigh and Nichols saw all government employees as guilty. Dylann Roof saw all Black people as guilty. Omar Mateen saw all LGBTQ people as guilty. This view is fundamentally immoral, amounting to execution without trial or evidence. It is the genocidal point of view shared by all fascists.
The 9/11 attacks were an opportunity to learn, but America failed to do that. The true meaning of 9/11 — particularly as it relates to the recurring quasi-holiday that it has become — is a monument to the willful, hateful ignorance and corrosive selfishness of Americans. That monument isn’t something to be celebrated; like the deaths caused by the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, it is something to be mourned.