I get the memes and all that, but am I wrong in thinking it’s a tad more complex? In any context, I can’t help but regret such loss of life. As I think about it, though, I guess we wrought all manner of havoc in the Middle East, and we didn’t spare civilians, so why should we expect any different. All the horrific things we did there… I see clearly why it happened. I just can’t see myself supporting such an action. If they flew planes first into government buildings (which I know they tried) or military bases I could understand better. I just can’t in good conscience support either what we did there or what happened here. I also won’t say the US didn’t deserve it; we totally did, but was actually doing it the correct move? How is it entirely different from going out and shooting random finance bros or billionaires. Sure they deserve it, sure it’ll make us feel better, but I don’t think it’d bring about real change. It’s the argument against adventurism. And it helped fast-track surveillance fascism here, though I don’t blame them for that, that was our own ghoul-ass politicians and scared people.
I guess this could be a common sentiment, and people just like memeing, which is all right, I suppose, so long as it doesn’t get you in prison for making an ill-advised joke.
EDIT: I guess I still have some pacifist brainworms. I keep wanting our “good guys” not to use such violence, when comparably it is a drop in the bucket of the violence used against them. Also, of course, the responsibility for what happened to the US is lies within themselves. I do regret the loss of life, but I need to remember to keep in mind the many many many more lives lost due to US imperialism. Thanks for the replies!
Other people already made political arguments. I’ll go crude.
But look if you are sad about mass death in NYC here are some things to be sad about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_New_York_City_by_death_toll
I am not going to even get into AIDS (84,000 NYC deaths and counting) except to suggest read And the band plays on published a decade prior to 9/11 it is basically an excruciating detailing about the question of why america cares about certain tragedies and not others. 9/11 fits perfectly into Schultz’s analysis.
9/11 = 2,753
Covid 19 dead nyc 2020-2023 = 38,795–45,194
First NYC covid death was March 14. April 3 was the date 9/11 death toll was passed (3,132 deaths)
citation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_New_York_City using the Data interactive graph
Latinos dead in NYC from COVID March-May 2020: 5,200 (more than double 9/11!!)
citation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_New_York_City
In April 2020, The New York Times reported that the virus was twice as deadly for Black and Latino people than whites in New York City.[277] Officials attribute this difference to longstanding inequalities of health care access, economic status, prevalence of chronic health issues or other co-morbidities, and the fact that Black and Latino people might be over represented among essential workers.[277] 75% of front line workers are minorities.[278] By early May, over 5,200 Latinos in the city had died of COVID-19, making them the ethnic group with the highest number of deaths from the disease.[279]
Where are the memorials.
All of us have so much pain from our lives and contexts to see the reification of these particular “martyrs” and “hero’s” it pokes ones heart with a needle each time.
To make space for our own griefs and those of others instead of displacing on this nationalistic militaristic fake ass bullshit.
Not that many people actually died from 9/11. It’s less than 3000. And the vast majority of those <3000 are either finance ghouls or NYC/NJ proles (plus members of al Qaeda lol). This means that if you didn’t live near NYC, 9/11 had no direct impact on your life whatsoever. I didn’t know anyone irl who was affected by 9/11 because I’m not from NYC, my family is not from NYC, none of my neighbors are from NYC, none of my neighbor’s direct families are from NYC, and so on.
But the post-9/11 climate meant that we’re supposed to somehow care about these randos, many of them vampiric finance ghouls, and they used that emotional manipulation as a blank check to butcher millions in West Asia.
It’s would be like if people kept on going “remember Katrina” and used the hurricane as an excuse to invade Mexico because Bush gave a speech about how hurricane Katrina was formed by a Mexican hurricane machine.
I’m late but I will say this:
You mentioned you don’t think it could bring about real change, however right after you say it brought about a surveillance state.
That was the point, essentially. It created a scenario that pushed America into devaluing their dollar to fund a war that could never be won, to drive dollars towards things that didn’t help anyone, and to force them to print more. The devaluation of the dollar from that event (that long event) is now starting to show its head, and in my opinion, it was the killing blow that put America on a path towards destroying their own currency. Honestly an incredible long term strategy that America did not foresee because it didn’t exist in the next financial quarter
That makes a lot of sense! I guess I didn’t see that connection either.
And just a follow up it’s important to devalue the dollar because it’s the most important step to removing it as the world reserve currency. If the dollar breaks in this regard, America’s debt finally matters and it would likely destroy the country because it would cause extreme inflation and eliminate most of their leverage over trade. It’s a situation the US cannot recover from if it’s lost, ever
The Twin Towers were targeted because they were the center of American finance. And finance firms are arguably more deadly than American guns and bombs. Finance capitalism drains the lifeblood of the global south to fuel the insatiable greed of the American elite. The bankers intentionally target the people at their weakest and subject them to humiliation rituals so that entire countries and their descendants will be starve to feed the west. The immeasurable wealth of the US is predicated on draining resources and impoverishing black and brown people around the world, the empire cannot function without financial foot soldiers.
No, everyone in the Twin Towers didn’t deserve to die. There were non financial firms, as well as maintenance or other proletariat workers who died in the blowback. But the vultures perched in the Twin Towers were as complicit in American hegemony as the Pentagon or the Whitehouse.
people understand that vulture capital is ruining their jobs and whatever but have no concept of social murder or what kind of resistance that should justify. we need a million luigis.
The real 9/11 was in 1973
“amerikkka deserved 9/11” is about the concept of blowback. which is also the name of a very good podcast. engaging morally with whether the actions of the attackers could be justified is to basically miss the entire point of material analysis. the design of the middle eastern states following the dissolution of the ottoman empire and its administration by violently racist european empire, particularly Britain, was centered around rendering the will of the people impotent, stoking ethnic tensions, and dividing the resources and means of production and geopolitical boundaries in such a way that the states in general were stymied. 3000 civilians in amerikkka died because of a long historical process involving far more people in the middle east dying for a much longer period of time.
I get what you’re saying about material analysis. Regardless of whether we like it or not, the US and the West as a whole set those events in motion. It’s not even totally a matter of whether it was “deserved,” the West brought it upon itself in a more literal and direct way.
Yeah my choice of words is definitely not “deserved”, I think “the US had 9-11 coming” is more accurate cause it’s exactly the kind of violent blowback that happens when you are a key perpetrator of violence for decades.
A tad more complex, sure, but only a tad. Innocent people did die in the attack on the Twin Towers. But the number of those is absolutely negligible compared to the number of innocent people killed by America which we never hear about. The idea that 9/11 was some unique horror which should be treated with absolute respect, when none of the people who say that give a shit about any of the worse crimes committed by America, is laughable to someone who has an idea of the bigger picture.
Several things. Terrorism is meant to use fear and violence to influence societal change. Here, the terrorists win. The point was do something spectacular that would inspire fear and hatred. To create the largest lasting effect. They couldn’t have done better.
Now, It may seem pedantic, but I don’t agree with your use of the word “we”. I live in the United States. In a literal sense I am part of the ‘we’ who live in this place. Who pay taxes to the same government. But I am not a part of the lineage of people whose brutalization of others led to those planes hitting those buidings.
As for the death toll. Keep it in perspective. There have been order 10x as many children murdered in Gaza as people who died on 9/11. 9/11 victims annually become the tragedy porn “we’ll never forget”. Until 9/12. At least we never forget the kids. We never knew they existed.
That last paragraph fucking slaps
We can mourn the innocent working class people who died in the attack while also cheering the deaths of the corporate bourgeois ghouls who, in an extremely rare case, actually encountered some consequences for their part in pillaging of the rest of the world. But even as we mourn the working class people who died on 9/11, it could only be typical American chauvinism if we didn’t also simultaneously mourn the millions of victims of US aggression and imperialism, victims of murder (both immediate with guns and bombs as well as the slower economic and social murder) who are many magnitudes more numerous. The victims of imperialism who are always left out when the “never forget” crowd push their agenda of painting the US as the victim. It is disgusting and cynical how that crowd cites the deaths of the innocent people who died in the attack as a way to deflect the blame away from the true culprits. All of these deaths are ultimately to be blamed on the US imperialists, the ruling bourgeoisie, as others have pointed out. We don’t have to support the specific actions of the attackers to recognize them as an understandable (perhaps even inevitable) consequence. It is not a contradiction to say that the US as a geopolitical entity absolutely deserved what happened on 9/11 (and frankly deserves much worse) while also not condoning the killing of working class civilians.
America sowing: omg this is awesome, killing civilians and sowing political terror is the fucking greatest!!!
America reaping: waaaah we must never forget
(Editor’s note: America immediately went back to sowing)
The thing about 9/11 memes is that they are a response to 9/11 culture. Posting this stuff in the 00’s would have been unthinkable as the imagery was absolutely sacrosanct. And obvs it was all tied up with US militarism and Christian nationalism. Nowadays, the pressure to Never Forget has subsided considerably, meaning you can stick a Hulk Hogan on these sacred symbols, and it suddenly becomes very very funny.
yeah but sticking Hulk Hogan on it was from around those times
if anything 9/11 memes have lost their edge and I don’t find them funny that often anymore
I might be wrong, but I think most of these memes are a decade old at the very most. And I reckon it’s just one of those things that the 9/11 cohort are never going to get tired of, because we’re all irreparably traumatized by it
The famous Hulk Hogan image set was posted on the very day of 9/11 apparently only hours after, and there was also one with the kool aid guy smashing through it
Ok I stand corrected. But I swear 99% of people who’ve seen those memes saw them in the last couple of years.
I’m not so sure about that. Back at that time most people (in the US) who saw the memes looked at them with shock and disgust while clutching their pearls, shaking their head at how sacrilegious and gauche youth and/or internet culture had become, but still, everybody did see them at the time.
I remember there was big hoopla about some ridiculous group called Voluntary Human Extinction Movement that put out a video [not sure if this requires a CW but just in case, graphic description:] with a title like “I like to watch” with spliced clips of different angles of the towers getting hit and falling along with pornographic cuts of a woman as if licking one of the towers like a phallus. And some other one “LOL Superman” with clips of people jumping from the towers to avoid the flames. The response to those was like a mini satanic panic, though mostly contained on the internet. It’s actually a little weird how they were all over the place at the time as shock content to the point they were hard to miss, kinda like goatse .cx, but they are now almost entirely scrubbed from the sanitized, tech giant enclosed internet. If you were even a little bit of an internet nerd at the time, you had seen them. But everyone who used the internet at all had seen stuff like the Hulk Hogan meme, even if those memes were near universally condemned and you were A Bad Person if you thought they were funny.
I don’t think anyone here supports 9/11 (well, some irony-poisoned person probably does), they just like mocking the sacred national mythology built up around it and say that the US was reaping what it sowed. Like, if someone is just prodding a wasp nest for no reason, I would think it’s funny as shit if they act like a victim for getting stung, but that doesn’t mean, in a scenario where the wasps didn’t get agitated, that I’d think it was a good thing to do to covertly agitate the wasps to that they attack the person or something ridiculous like that.
No, I’m not comparing people to wasps, I’m just alluding to a common idiom.
The joke was mildly funny the first time, but the second time is just tiresome. It’s a reactionary, anti-social sentiment and it shouldn’t be humored “ironically”. Would it be helpful for me to explain why 9/11 was a bad event?
9/11 will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the American empire. It was an attack against the heart of the most violent institutions In america - the pentagon and the financial vampires that the pentagon protects. The stated reasons for the attack were very specific and focused onthe empire’s actions abroad.
I will never tire of dumb 9/11 humor because because of the decades of Americans’ bloodlust that I’ve witnessed, and decades of reverential propaganda ive endured. Sorry it offends you, but its not reactionary to attack the symbols and narratives of the bourgeoisie
Sorry it offends you
Turning Point Hexbear
but its not reactionary to attack the symbols . . . of the bourgeoisie
This really depends on what you mean by “attack the symbol”. If you mean rhetorically, then yeah, you’ll see that I supported exactly that with mocking the national victimhood narrative, etc. If by “attack the symbol” you mean “do the terror attack” or “support doing the terror attack,” which is not normally how I would interpret it but is the thing you started off saying (“supporting doing . . .”, obviously), then yes, it is reactionary and obviously so. It slaughtered minimally hundreds of blue collar workers, from janitors to firefighters, and obviously the executives dying is no loss, but the companies overwhelmingly just got insurance payouts and kept on doing their thing, meanwhile the whole event was used as an effective causus belli to push the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, and so on.
The Weimar-era Reichstag was a shitty institution filled mainly with bad people (who weren’t hurt), but setting it on fire only helped the Nazis. If we were around then, it would probably make sense to mock the victimhood narrative that instantly emerged around it, but that’s different from saying that setting it on fire is a good thing.
Turning Point Hexbear
Indeed. We both could be targeted by the regime for this conversation, and here you are trying to sus out whether or not i condemn Al Qaeda. For legal reasons, I condemn Hamas, Al Qaeda, and all leftist twitch streamers
but the companies overwhelmingly just got insurance payouts and kept on doing their thing, meanwhile the whole event was used as an effective causus belli to push the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, and so on.
AKA the imperial boomerang. AKA the beginning of the end of the American empire. My opinion doesn’t matter, it just is what it is
FUCK IT I’M SAYING IT
Doooo eeeettt
AMERICA DESERVED 9/11
:based
: 🎇 
My heart goes out to the janitors, but it was the World Trade Center They were probably coming up with new ways to privatize water for african rural communities. Plus it was a symbol of pride for american capitalism so I will never cry over it. Another one, please.
For the majority of you who weren’t adults in the 90s, I think it might be helpful to understand a couple of things:
-
NYC was widely perceived as the greatest city in the world, by every metric. In this era of global megacities, we might forget that NYC was in the top 5 cities by overall population, and that competitor cities such as Tokyo were in the midst of major economic slumps (or in the case of Shanghai and Beijing, only beginning their economic takeoff). It might have felt different living in the city itself, but from the outside it was the embodiment of American hyperpower.
-
The WTC was the central imagery of NYC as a powerful city. Sure, you’ve got the statue of liberty, the Brooklyn bridge, the empire state building… but if a TV show wanted to establish where you were, it would flash the Manhattan skyline, with the twin towers as the center of attention.
Choosing the WTC as a target was particularly ambitious, because to really have the desired effect they needed to hijack TWO planes simultaneously. But it was such a dominant symbol of US power, that I think even if the US Capitol had been destroyed by flight 93, that the twin towers falling would still be primary imagry.
-
in an ideal world, a bunch of amerikkkan civilians wouldnt have randomly died. in an ideal world, a bunch of civilians all around the world wouldn’t have been killed by amerikkka. put yourself in their shoes, it wasn’t just a matter of amerikkka and its allies (iϟϟrael) disregarding civilian casualties, they intentionally murdered civilians all the time, for decades on end, and were seen as the good guys by most of the world. there are so many countries where 9/11 is just tuesday. nobody living in that situation can be expected to make any distinction between military and civilian targets, you can’t ask them to take the high road when the situation is so horrific, amerikkka provided them justification to carry out any action against it.
