...in 1973, agents of the United States government assisted in the overthrow of a democratically elected head of state, Chilean president Salvador Allende, as part of a decades-long effort to advance the interests of global capital and the Western settler colonial project. Never forget.
I share this on 9/11 because it reflects something I was too young and ignorant (not an insult, merely a descriptor) to understand when I saw the towers fall on live TV from a cafeteria chair as a college freshman. Not to mention something I was blissfully unaware of (or perhaps unwilling to acknowledge) for many years following, if you feel like digging through this very forum for the bullshit I "contributed" two decades ago (ergo why I'm not here to shit on anybody who's pieced it together since then or maybe known it from jump).
The victims of 9/11 do not deserve to be the butt of jokes any more than do the over a million civilians murdered by the unlawful wars which followed. The United States, as in the 350M+ people who reside here, did not "deserve" the events of 9/11. However, it is by now impossible in good faith to deny that those events were a reaction to decades of exploitative and imperialistic US foreign policy on just about every continent. And the almost immediate reaction of our government in the wake of that tragedy, and indeed the ongoing actions of our government in the intervening quarter century, have if anything doubled down on global pillaging and extrajudicial murder.
Only now, as the surveillance state enables the imperial boomerang to spin its way back onto our own soil, are many people realizing what took me over a decade to be able to admit: Both the victims of 9/11 and the victims of the "Global War On 'Terror'" are victims of US foreign policy, the Western settler colonial project, and the global capitalist order both exist to enable. 9/11 showed the world what America the government, America the economic project, America the perpetual motion global war machine has been for nearly a century now. And before someone talks about how it "brought people together," at some point I'll need to tell you (maybe on 9/12 if I can be bothered to remember) why it exposed what America the society has ALWAYS been for at least someone right here at home.
And before somebody trots out the same tRoOpS they seem to conveniently forget whenever the VA gets its funding slashed, I have several family members who are no longer with us and many friends, including some of my closest, who have served in the military. I am not interested in individual appraisal of anyone in uniform, because if you want to chase down EVERY person who to ANY extent has participated in or profited from the evils America has wrought in the world, I and most of us in the US need to go look in a mirror.
