Get in here chapos! Any memes, rants, quips, jokes you have, let’s fuckin hear them! That shit is funny.
There’s a distinct lack of rants, so I’ll toss my annoyance out there.
There were days where covid in the US was killing a 9/11 amount of people every day and so many of the chuds who act like 9/11 was the worst thing ever did not give a fuck. And it pisses me off so bad. It’s the perfect “one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic” trap so many people fall into and that always pisses me off. One person dies because of weed - nation wide story. Tens of thousands die from alcohol - who gives a damn.
My interpretation of these people is that they actually don’t give a shit about anyone who died in the attacks. They pretend to, but what they’re really mad about is the fact that it was a successful attack on a widely recognized symbol of United States hegemony.
IMO there are two reasons why the 9/11 attacks resonated. The first one is crucial for the second.
The first is that it was spectacle, literally. It is impossible to deny that the image of a large passenger aircraft flying straight into a building and exploding is simultaneously nauseating, enthralling, and “better than fiction” in the emotional response it can get out of anybody. The second reason is that once cable news had that spectacle to get their viewers, it was like for them. Just play it back. Replay it. Play it again. Run that another time. Get the second angle. Get the third angle. Play it again. Play it another time. The ad money coming in at that time must’ve been tremendous. It was really time for the fourth estate to shine. Judith Miller can tell you all about that.
COVID deaths? No spectacle. It doesn’t matter that well over a million Americans died from it, as well as millions more globally (and we still are dying, too). It’s undeniable that COVID had media coverage, but it wasn’t like CNN was sending in camera crews into hospitals to catch people’s last gasps of air before they perished. Abstract reasoning is too hard. We need to see the explosion and the building collapse, not reason about a number.
I was in college on 9/11. If you weren’t old enough to know what was going on, it’s impossible to communicate how much of a “spectacle” it was. The closest I can come would be to say imagine if you woke up and aliens landed on earth. It wasn’t just that everyone was glued to their TVs set. It was just this… thing that was happening. In my dorm, everyone just watched it on their TVs alone. Got lunch with my friends and no one spoke hardly at all. Just a completely surreal day that’s hard to describe to anyone who didn’t live it.
Edit: to further emphasize the “spectacle” part, later in the day I had to run an errand with a friend. On that drive he confided in me that “I kinda want to see the number [of dead] go a lot higher”. He wasn’t saying that because he wanted a reason to start a war. And he wasn’t some weirdo. He was a very thoughtful, empathetic person (but brutally honest about things, like Jan Maas in Ted Lasso). I think a TON of people felt that way but didn’t say it out loud. I don’t buy that people were traumatized that day or anything. I think they were captivated by the spectacle and were mad that our collective ego was bruised, and didn’t really care about actual dead people.
There was also that odd time between the first plane and the second. You hear “a plane hit a building in New York” and you think it’s a tragic accident. Then a little later you hear about the second and you realize immediately it’s something else.
That event changed everyone I knew as well. Everything because about America. The nice Syrian family down the street became an object of suspicion, more than they already were.
9/11 wasn’t just that September either, I remember that general unease and media coverage lasting at least until September 2002.
Agreed. Lived it from a Nordic European perspective and we were similarly glued to our televisions.
But I do remember we were actually terrified of what the US will do to the world because of this. Will they start a world war over it. It wasn’t at all about the spectacle of it alone, but mostly the fear of what Bush will do (everyone saw him as unhinged). I remember how we sighed from relief after he did the speeches after it and did not bring about nuclear winter.
This was pretty much the most common reaction in my family and friends. Also the whole way in which the world police finally got to feel a bit of what it does all over sure was mentioned, nobody was honestly surprised.
Sympathy for the civilians of course, but I can’t claim there was any love for Murica the nation at the time or all the warmongering.
I was just a little kid when it happened, and in my house the TV was on all day every day. I saw it happen over and over and over and over again, before I could even spell my own name, drilled into my mind forever. :/
Looking back at the live news footage, it’s nauseating the way they show it, like a feeding frenzy of vultures on corpses. I think I know why I had so many violent nightmares as a kid now.
This is bang on
I don’t think anything will ever match the spectacle of seeing that second plane hit. It was a total surprise and just AWESOME in the literal sense of that word.
Honestly I don’t think I saw a single commercial all day on 9/11, it was nonstop news coverage on every channel as I recall.
The “one death is a tragedy” quote is often attributed to Stalin among many other Hollywood capeshit tier quotes. But the US continues to lead by example. 40,000 people each year from car accidents, no one cares. But a tragedy with hundreds of deaths involving a train of plane and it’s a matter of national debate for 6 months. Same with gun deaths.
Latuff don’t miss
Jeremiah Wright, September 16th, 2001:
I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday, did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out… that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammed was in fact true, America’s chickens…are coming home to roost.
We took this country by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arowak, the Comanche, the Arapahoe, the Navajo. Terrorism.
We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.
We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.
We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers, and hardworking fathers.
We bombed Qaddafi’s home and killed his child.
We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living.
We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they would never get back home.
We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children from school, civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.
We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.
Entire interview and sermon clip is worth watching, but this bit starts around 3:10
He’s so good, an absolute legend. Obama’s abandonment of him during his 2008 campaign made him retire early which fucking sucks.
Another incredible sermon is “Confusing God and Government” in 2003 which is the famous “God damn America” sermon.
some quotes
This Government lied about their belief that all men were created equal. The truth was they believe all White men were created equal. The truth is they did not believe that even White women were created equal, in creation nor in civilization. The Government had to pass an amendment to the Constitution to get White women the vote. Then the Government had to pass an “Equal Rights” amendment to get equal protection under the law for women. The Government still thinks a woman has no rights over her own body, and between Uncle Clarence – who sexually harassed Anita Hill – and the closeted clam court that is a throwback to the 19th century, hand-picked by Daddy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, hung between Clarence and that stacked court they’re about to undo Roe v. Wade, just like they’re about to undo affirmative action. The Government lied in its founding documents and the Government is still lying today. Governments lie. The Government lied about Pearl Harbor. They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Governments lie! The Government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin – they wanted that resolution to get us into the Vietnam War. Governments lie! The Government lied about Nelson Mandela, and our CIA helped put him in prison and keep him there for 27 years. The South African Government lied on Nelson Mandela. Governments lie! The Government lied about the Tuskegee experiment; they purposely infected African-American men with syphilis. Governments lie! The Government lied about bombing Cambodia, and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, “Let me make myself perfectly clear, we are not –“ Governments lie! The Government lied about the drugs for arms Contras scheme, orchestrated by Oliver North and then they pardoned – the Government pardoned – all of the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the Government. Governments lie! The Government lied about inventing the HIV-virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie! The Government lied about a connection between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, and a connection between 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie! The Government lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States’ peace. And guess what else? If they don’t find them some Weapons of Mass Destruction, they’re going to do just like that LAPD and plant them some Weapons of Mass Destruction. Governments lie!
Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontus Pilot – Pontius Pilate – the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from east to west. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Guana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British failed… And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian decent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese decent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African decent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not “God Bless America”; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God Damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!
No innocent civilians in the planes or towers deserved to die in 9/11 obviously (and I hope everyone agrees here), but what I despise about the event is how the American civil religion lionised it and reacted afterwards. The attack was carried out by a US asset gone rouge and a direct result of US meddling and old school imperial conquest in the Middle East, which included killing many innocent civilians there themselves. The 9/11 attacks were not some unforeseen unprovoked event.
Then there’s the response. It’s quite clear that the main issue with 9/11 to American leadership was not the number of lives lost, but the fact that it was a successful attack on Americas biggest symbols symbols of global financial and military domination. It was about the message that sent. A successful attack from the “jungle” on the “garden”, as old school racist imperialists would say. And how did America respond to that? By invading two countries that had nothing to do with the event, while becoming even closer allies with the country that the majority of 9/11 hijackers were from. Hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq over a lie about WMDs. Afghanistan pillaged for two decades before returning to the exact same position, Taliban rule. Osama was in Afghanistan by the time the US showed up? Yes, and I’m going to be a billionaire tomorrow. More instability, more US funded terrorist groups. The response was just to go and loot and pillage the Middle East 100 times harder with false righteous fury. Like bombing an entire neighborhood because you got mugged by one of its residents.
And that really showed the true character of the US as a country. Just how much bloodlust they had after 9/11. They just wanted to go out and kill a nation, any nation from the region would’ve sufficed. The were calls on national radio and TV programs for glassing and nuking the entire region. Around 75% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq at the time. An invasion clearly based on lies. But they didn’t care, they just wanted revenge. To kill someone, anyone. If you compare how the US reacted here, to how other countries reacted in the face of hardship, attacks and near civil war (see South Africa during the end of apartheid) it’s clear that the character of the US is rotten deep down.
Yes it was a reaction to imperialism, but it’s even more farcical bc in this case the US trained and armed the attackers. They didn’t only create the conditions for blowback they supplied the means for its execution!
Oh well at least we learned our lesson. It’s not like we’re blindly pouring billions of dollars of weaponry directly into the hands of right wing fanatics in war zones to intentionally protract a conflict being waged by our geopolitical rivals oh wait
Jk I’m sure all that stuff will stay in Ukraine they need it. Slava ukraini
And that really showed the true character of the US as a country. Just how much bloodlust they had after 9/11.
I would add that it wasn’t just the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that showed Americans’ character. After it was widely known and accepted that there were no WMDs and so many people had already died, Americans’ response was basically “whoopsie daisy”. Americans accepted, likely just as cope, that Bush and Cheney didn’t lie, the CIA didn’t lie, etc. No one did anything maliciously. Everyone was just doing their gosh darn best and they just got it wrong; like ordering some bad soup at a deli. So there has been zero accountability at all. Hell, I can’t imagine the President of the US just writing a letter of apology to the Iraqi people without most Americans losing their shit over it.
Bad countries refuse to acknowledge their faults and certainly don’t do anything about it. For as incomplete as de-Naziification was at least in West Germany, I do believe German society - even in the West - did try and come to grips with the horrors of the Nazi regime and do something about it. You’ll know about this much better than I, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but in the 90s it seemed at least to an outsider that there was at least some attempt for South African society to understand the scope of evil of apartheid, come to grips with it, and move forward in healthier ways. This is the sort of baseline requirement to being a good country and the Americans can’t even come close to this low standard.
The attack was carried out by a US asset gone rouge and a direct result of US meddling and old school imperial conquest in the Middle East
It goes back even further. The flight company that some of the terrorists used to train was owned by a CIA pilot whose son was connected to the Belgian Brabant serial killings/terrorists.
Genuinely astonishing how this hits every cord and beat perfectly correctly. Ending the tweet with the date is such a funny move, it just jumps out at the end to wrap up the hilarious context to such a sassy tweet. And the commas which are placed to give this tweet the feel of a poem:
I would like to extend my best wishes to all,
even the haters and losers,
on this special date,
September 11th.
Every line getting a bit shorter til the great punchline.
