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!
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.