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n_n wrote

In 2001, I was too busy trying to not die of hunger in the street, so I didn't know nothing about it at the time. Child malnutrition reached hundreds of thousands at that year in my country due policies imposed by the US and its allies.

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hermit_dragon wrote

Biden said some shit yesterday about how the day was proof that the USA was 'unbroken' by 9/11

And I just wanted to respond with all the 'looking around and pointing at everything' gifs

Not that the USA wasn't 'broken' before, and not saying the attack itself broke things. My thought is more along the lines of what the administration at the time, and successive administrations after, used the event to justify, and how broken things are as a result of their actions and policies. Forever wars, ICE, the surveillance industrial complex, global Islamophobia, the rise of the alt-riech, Trump - all this shit. And this guy stands around talking about how 'unbroken' we are. Shit dude. That privilege must be a hulluva drug.

My experience of 9/11 was conflicted as a immigrant and dual national - I was 20ish, in Australia, and I was a US citizen and a culturally US-ian person surrounded by Aussies who are often very anti-USian and loudly so. I remember riding the tram that day and hearing everyone around me talking about how 'they deserved it' and laughing, and that really hurt back then. I remember making plans to move out of the city in case we were 'next'. I remember how worried we were about my sister, in Hawaii, in case that was 'next'.

I remember thinking that the worst possible people were in charge of how the US was going to respond, and I remember a feeling of doom because I knew it would be a prime excuse for another war.

Lot's changed since then, and a lot has changed about how I perceive the world and events in it, but I do know that the feeling that something awful was going to be set in motion in response, and that would be worse than the event itself, was a solid instinct.

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Basil OP wrote

Thank you, this was a very detailed answer. Biden is a bastard unaware of all that happened, as are most other candidates, I think.

your experience in Australia though... I can only imagine how that must have sucked. Even if you aren't the biggest fan of the U.S., it's not right to say that 3,000 people deserved to die.

Your instincts were right it seems. things did get worse, and quickly too. They haven't gotten better either, in my opinion. In less than a month, kids will be able to sign up in the army to fight in a war they weren't even alive for the beginning of. Though I am generally anti-war, this especially seems like a crime in this day and age, where even the longest wars typically last only 10 years.

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hermit_dragon wrote (edited )

Hey thanks

On the kids who might go off to this forever war, these discussions made me think about what freedom of movement was like for those privileged with it back before all the security theater. And how a lot of people I think kinda thought the new world order would be 'temporary' while we 'fought the war on terror'. I mean it's clear ideological 'wars' don't work like that right?

And it struck me that kids going to fight would be fighting for rights they've never experienced, that will probably never exist again. Like being able to go meet your family at the gate in an airport. Not to see 'Homeland Security' vehicles in your town, not to have the govt. and corporations undermine every right to privacy we used to think we had.

I think part of the horror of the idea of people who weren't born when this started going to be part of the meat-grinder is that they are people who don't remember, have never experienced, and can never know what the world was like before.

On my experience in Australia - nowadays, on balance, I understand better the motivation of the attacks, and how much it was a predictable response to US imperialism. I can't celebrate the deaths of random individuals caught in that event, nor can I lionize them. People making a joke of it hurt at the time, but I understand the response more now. Folks always seem to have trouble separating US citizens from US govt/administration. I was 20 and scared and it felt like people wanted me dead, but people weren't thinking in empathy with individuals.

My issue with mainstream (so like, not anarchist or leftist) Aussie anti-US-imperialism tends to still be the smug, back-patting 'OUR colonialism is better than THEIR colonialism' denial of what a shitty, white supremacist, colonial wannabe-imperialist, xenophobic, racist, violently misogynist, nation Australia is . There was a tendency when I was growing up (idk if there still is, but I'd guess so) to see 'US cultural imperialism' as the source of all ills, which always seemed to become a way to never focus on the ills of white Australian colonial history and present.

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ploopt wrote

It was crazy seeing so many people I thought I knew turning into warhawks. Punks with American flag patches and shit. Fucking surreal. That didn't last all that long though. I distinctly remember one sudden patriot who I cut ties with only to run into him at an anti-war rally ~1.5 years later. "You were right, dude." Small comforts I guess.

The really terrifying stuff was the Patriot Act, the daily threat-level updates, the creation of a department of Homeland Security, etc. It really felt like an Orwellian tale. The reality turned out to be much more banal and much more insidious. I remember Rick Roderick saying in a lecture that he found Orwell's boot stomping on a human face to be overly optimistic. Orwell supposed that there would be a situation in which there were clearly drawn lines, a resistance to join, a world with human faces. It seems we weren't so lucky.

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mofongo wrote (edited )

That week is engraved in my heart. It was my birthday a few days prior and was having a hard time accepting that the adults in my life were seeing me as too old for bday parties. A few days, an uncle I never knew died, which killed every chance of a party out of respect for the dead. Then 9/11 happened, I remember all my neighbors in my street coming out to talk about it in amazement. I was pissed because all the channels were talking about it and I just wanted to watch cartoons. It was the topic for weeks to come, never got my birthday party and the only gift I got was a bootleg pacman handheld console out of sympathy, but my brother also got something which negates it being a birthday present.

I spent the rest of the week watching 9/11 footage. But not being american, it did not affect me much.

Edit: I also saw the bombing of Iraq on TV two years later, that was more horrific that what I saw on 9/11.

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videl wrote

yet another melancholy event in the senseless mixture of error and violence known as history

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asbestosstar wrote

Think that the USA made to big of a deal about it and just victimised themselves to justify imperialism, the us has Dine lots of worst things and never talked about it . Such as the real 911 in Chile

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Best praxis the Bush 43 admin ever did was kill 3000 of their own citizens

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El_Sabate wrote

I don't even know how to describe it. I watched it happen in my school classroom as a 17 yr old. When it happened, it was clear that everything had changed. I was raised in Texas, where GWBush was governor before he was President, my community was firmy in support of Bush even before 9/11, and it was blindly, psychopathiclly loyal after 9/11.

My viewpoint is pretty well aligned with Ward Churchill, whose CSPAN speech I saw for the first time the other day. The US got a fraction of what it deserved from a group of people with legitimate reasons for attacking.

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