...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.
No.
Neiher the people who died on 9-11, or the country itself, deserved to be attacked on 9-11.... but (your true opinion, in almost your next sentence) actually DID allegedly deserve it because
"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" (no examples cited) ?!?
As a Canadian journalist wrote 25 years ago, for all its mis-steps, the United States has done more good and less evil than any other major power in world history. Have there been examples of U.S. over-reach and hubris? Yes. But the United States, particularly at any time since World War II has had the ability to seize the world at any time, and has not. As the same Canada writer cited, rather than crush all opposition after 1945, we instead completely re-built our two greatest enemies (Germany and Japan), and allowed them to become our largest economic competitors, and incredibly, our friends and allies.
I find it hard to label my own country "evil", particularly when it has done such generous things, that no other country would have done.
Anywhere in the world where there is a devastating earthquake or hurricane/typhoon or other disaster, the U.S. sends its military in along with doctors, food and other humanitarian aid to re-build their homes and infrastructure, to save and heal their children.
"Evil, imperialistic"?
I think not.
Compare how the U.S. helps develop a country, vs. how a place like China does. The U.S. builds infrastructure in third world nations, and shares the profits with them, trains the locals so they know how to continue it, even if we leave. Whereas when China develops a country, they take total control and burden them with debt and permanent obligation to China, all the key people who develop the country are brought in from China, and if China leaves, they are helpless to keep it going. Worse off, not better.
Read the book WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA, by Dinesh D'Souza, to see a factual argument against what you have been led to believe.
D'Souza mentions an article he previously wrote before his book, called "Two Cheers for America." He says he can't quite have three cheers for European/American colonialism, because some bad stuff happened over those centuries. But on the net, he cites, all these former colonized nations are far better off for having been colonized by Europe.
D'Souza cites his own native India. That if 150 years of British colonialism had been nothing but bad, India would have rejected all things British as soon as they gained independence. But they have a business system and stock market like the British, and even dress like Europeans there, they have a university system like that of the British, they have a hospital system like the British, and a military heirarchy like the British.
EVERY SINGLE NATION in world history has its recorded hubris and over-reach, every nation was built on territorial conquest, on every continent, every race, and each has its atrocities. Despite the U.S. over-reaches of the CIA and its military, I would argue that it is restrained, relative to the history of possibly any other nation. I fail to see what makes you hold up the United States, your own country, to exceptional scorn.
Communist nations and revolutions have murdered at least 100 million people in the last century.
Who has done more damage: The U.S. in supporting a counter-revolution against communism in Chile? Or the successful communist revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Vietnam and Angola? MILLIONS more dead in these places, despite the absence of the United States in these communist regimes.
And Islam has been slaughtering millions, wiping out whole civilizations and destroying lives since the 7th century, long before there was a United States, long before there was European colonialism. In fact, the Moors and the Ottomans brutally conquered an occupied half of Europe for centuries.
There is absolutely NOTHING you can say to convince me that the U.S. "caused" Islamic radicals to attack us, on Sept 11 2002, or any other time. They have been fighting a war of extermination on every non-muslim civilization before we had a chance to commit any transgressions against them. Nations and peoples who did nothing to them, other than exist, and have the misfortune to not want to be muslim.
And just as often, killed Muslims who just had a different view of how to practice Islam, and so were slaughtered for not being of the One True Faith.
So I think your embracing the talking points of our enemies, people who hate us, people who want to overthrow and replace us, who look for any pretense to kill us, is deeply misguided.
Suicidal empathy.
