Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts

11 September 2021

Remembering 9/11

I woke up at around 5.40am on 12 September 2001, in Wellington and switched on National Radio (as it was then) to hear a broadcast, with American voices, describing some disaster. At the time I was living alone, having broken up with my wife the previous year.

I didn't think much of it for the first few minutes, thinking it was some recorded show syndicated by RNZ, until it became clear it was a live feed, from CNN.  It took around 10 or so minutes before I started piecing together what had happened, one, two, three planes flying into buildings, it seemed surreal. So I got out of bed, switched on the TV and watched for about 20 minutes, the largest terrorist attack on the United States. It was all too much, I was 31 years old, and the scenes of the World Trade Center towers were dramatic and devastating. I thought for a moment that perhaps had my life been only a little different, I might have been working in an office in one of those towers, and the people trapped above the flames with no way out, and those below, streaming down stairwells for their lives, in horror. For so many it was too late. Barely over four years later I would be working for a large multinational American consultancy, in London, months after the 7/7 tube attacks, all inspired by the same ideology of misanthropic theocratic death worship.

I showered, got dressed for work and left for the office, at just after 6.30am, because it was too much to watch. I was at my local bus stop in 3 minutes standing, when the only other person standing there, a women in her 30s took a phone call, and it was clear she hadn't heard the news beforehand, as she spoke in utter disbelief. The bus came and after the usual 20 minute ride I arrived stunned at work, much earlier than normal, and nobody else was there yet. Of course I got more of the news on the internet, and as others trickled in, there was only one topic to discuss.  How many people had died? Were other attacks on the way? Who was responsible? How would the US respond?  US airspace was shut down, and so much would never be the same again. Whether it was New York, the Pentagon or indeed the hapless brave victims of UA 93 who fought back, it was a series of events far more profound than fiction.  People born in 90 countries died in 9/11, it was an attack on humanity.

We'll never know the true cost of 9/11, the cost of the lost of the thousands of lives, what they might have created, what their children might have created, and how much richer humanity would have been for it.  It was an attack not just on them, but on an idea.  The idea that free people can choose how they live, to work, to trade, to enjoy life, and to not have their lives owned by others, by self-serving authority bowing to an ideology that shackles them to the literal interpretation of some aged religious tracts. The idea that Government should be to subordinate people to the will of theocratic bigots, rather than exist to protect their rights and established by the people to protect them from those who wish to take away those rights.  Yes, the United States in 2001 (let alone 2021) has many many flaws, and has never met that ideal consistently, let alone for all Americans, but the idea of the United States was and is revolutionary - and Al Qaeda hates that.  The Taliban hates that, ISIS hates that, indeed autocrats of many different stripes hate the United States, because it is antithetical to what they want for humanity. 

The US response to 9/11 should have been a rallying call for freedom, for civilisation, for modernity and to seek to confront not the religion of Islam in some sort of new crusade, (for as with all religions, people can follow religion in their private lives and not seek to attack a free, pluralistic society), but to confront Islamist fascism - the application of fundamentalist Islamic sects, such as Salafism and Wahhabism, to impose Islam and Islamic theocratic rule.  This was, sort of, what George W. Bush was looking to target in his "war on terror", but he couldn't really confront it, because one of the great protagonists of Islamist fascism is a US ally, and one of Bush's great enemies was not really an Islamist fascist, but just a fascist - Saddam Hussein.

Attacking and seeking to destroy Al Qaeda was right and moral, as was overthrowing the Taliban.  There was no way the USA could let Afghanistan be. However, the US was never willing to take over Afghanistan and mould it into a tolerant liberal democracy, like it did with Japan, and West Germany.  It allied itself with the then Northern Alliance, who were a bunch of warlords united more by tribal and economic interests than a grand belief in Islamist fascism. Perhaps if the US had sought to occupy with the brute force, sheer numbers and cost it once had done in the 1940s and 1950s, it could have not only defeated the Taliban, but understood Afghanistan enough to convert hearts and minds, and the events of the past few weeks may never have occurred.  However, Americans were unwilling to sacrifice the blood and treasure needed to achieve that, so instead they spent 20 years treading water and keeping the Taliban at bay, just.  So Jo Biden could leave them millions of dollars of military equipment.

However, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, as moral as it was, also suffered from a lack of US willingness to follow through, to establish government that could prevent the deadly insurrection, fuelled by Iran, that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq. That ultimately spawned ISIS.  Saddam Hussein was not remotely behind 9/11, but Bush had a score to settle, and although it was credible to believe that Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction (since he demonstrably did use them before), it was proven not to be.  The US spilt much blood and treasure mismanaging Iraq, again because it was unwilling to impose a liberal democracy on a population that wasn't liberal.

In all of this remained Saudi Arabia, the great funder and fuel of Wahhabism, and the Gulf states which themselves kept free from Islamist fascism because of their own wealth and ad-hoc ruthlessness.  Saudi is a US ally, because they have needed each other. Saudi needed protection from the USSR and more latterly Iran.  The US wanted the dominant oil producer on its side (although fracking has completely undermined the importance of that). Furthermore, the chance that the House of Saud would be replaced by a worse regime if it were overthrown. So Saudi Arabia, which spawned those who committed the 9/11 attacked, became the great ally in the "war on terror" as the war on the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

Al Qaeda, and indeed no other Islamist terrorist has been able to come remotely close to inflicting a similar scale attack on the US, but 9/11 inspired the multiple Islamist fascist attacks in Europe.  It remains the great watershed of the 21st century, almost the point when the optimism of the end of the Cold War was smashed, as it was followed by a new age. An age not only of sporadic Islamist terrorism, but Putin's Russia turning the clock back to a Cold War era hysterical nationalism, and irredentism. A few years later the Global Financial Crisis knocked economic optimism and more recently Xi Xinping reawoke China's past remoulding it into an increasingly monstrous Mk. 2 Maoism of authoritarian-corporatist Marxism-Leninism, willing and wanting to become the world's number one economic and ultimately military and political power.  

For me this date has another significance. My Mum died five years ago today. She had been ill, and had had a successful colostomy operation the previous day, but was too weak and passed away in the early hours of 12 September NZST.  I was and am profoundly sad I didn't get to see her or be with her that night, as I had already booked flights to come see her days later.  She died weeks out from her 78th birthday.  I miss her greatly, and indeed am reminded of her daily as we spruce up her (and Dad's) house to sell in due course.  She was a great source of resilience, strength, warmth and courage for me, as someone who had many trials in life, from emigrating with next to nothing in the 1950s, to looking after her terminally ill mother in her 20s, to her first marriage ending in divorce due to discovering her husband was, in fact, gay when it was a crime, to not being able to have children with my Dad (and then adopting me).  So on 12 September, we'll be having dinner and raising a glass to my Mum, and to the memory of those who were killed so tragically on 9/11.


12 September 2011

Vileness appeared today

It had to happen.  The London Metropolitan Police has today protected about 100 protestors who in Grosvenor Square - the location of the US Embassy to the UK - held placards proclaiming "Islam will dominate the world", calling for an Islamic Caliphate for the UK and the US and celebrating that Afghanistan is a graveyard of US soldiers.  They deliberately broke the minute of silence held to commemorate the dead and are now celebrating the same on their website.  They burnt the US flag.


This is a war between ideologies, namely between those who stand on the side of Islam and those who stand on the side of democracy and freedom. In the West they use different terminologies, they call it a war between freedom and terrorism, it is strange though that all the "terrorists" are Muslim and all those Muslims have as there ideology Islam.

The claim is that the US has lost the ideological war.  They are worshippers of a death cult of slavery and depravity, they openly despise freedom, openly believe laws cannot be created except in the shadow of their misogynistic violent death cult.   They use the freedom of the West to fight against it,

It is worth noting that two groups counter-protested.  A group of Muslims appeared holding placards saying "Muslims against Extremism", "Keep the Silence" and "If you want Sharia, Move to Saudi".  Good for them.  The more British Muslims confront the Islamists the more it will be accepted that the majority of them live in the UK because of freedom, not to destroy it.   According to the Daily Mail one said "If the moderate Muslims all came out and spoke out, that would defeat them..I am proud to be British. I love my country. All these people are doing is breaking Britain apart."

Another group comprised the English Defence League, a group commonly described as fascist/far right, which is largely a bunch of working class men who are loudly and usually rather bluntly against Islamism.  The Police moved them so that the Islamist misogynists could have their protests.  For all of their faults, the EDL is at least NOT against the freedoms and secularism of modern Britain.  Indeed, treating them as being as bad as the Islamists will simply encourage recruitment.

What's most telling is that today, of all days, those who would destroy our way of life were allowed to be unspeakably disgusting and vile.  It makes a profound mockery of so called "human rights" laws that don't allow people to express offensive views based on race, sex, religion and sexuality, when people who hold those very views, are protected by the state to express them.

Now I would not stop people expressing those views, but would also not stop others counter-protesting, and would not move peaceful citizens on to let people protest.   Islamists sought to protest outside the US Embassy, knowing how inflammatory and offensive it would be, and got state protection to do so.  Would anyone who dared go to Muslim majority parts of Britain expect the same protection if they wanted to protest for a secular state, freedom and equal rights for women?

11 September 2011

9.11 some thoughts ten years on

The Western world today offers unrivalled freedom and opportunities for humanity.  It may have a small number of naysayers who use its freedom (and capitalism) to damn it, condemn it and criticise it (rarely offering alternatives), but people from all over the world strive to live there, to learn there and do business there.  The wealthy from Africa, the Arab World, Asia and Russia all flock to the West to do their shopping, to have a good time and to buy healthcare for their families and education for the children, even if they return to maintain and profit from the corrupt autocracies that facilitated their opportunities.

9/11 was an attack on modernity.  The philosophy of Al Qaeda, and indeed that of all Islamists is rooted in a rejected of globalisation and capitalism, one reason why retaliation gets such lukewarm responses from the far left in the West (those who moved on from appeasement of the USSR to eco-socialism).  However, it is far more than that.  It is a fundamental rejection of the enlightenment, of political and civil freedoms, of feminism, of secularism and religious tolerance.  It is the embrace of a stone age patriarchal theocracy that no more embraces the secularist leftists of the West any more than the Christian conservatives, or the libertarian capitalists.  It used the tools of modernity to attack it.

Some apologists of Al Qaeda claim it wouldn't have attacked the US if the US had no military presence in the Middle East, or if Israel was destroyed (and presumably replaced by an anti-semitic Islamist theocracy).  However, its interest is not in peaceful co-existence, its interest in peace is seen in how barbarically it treats girls and women - breeding chattels undeserving of education.  It is beyond disgraceful that so many leftwing feminists turn a blind eye to the brutality of Islamist attitudes and treatment of women, for they fear having conservatives, capitalists and true liberals as allies - so adolescently knee jerk they still are.

Peaceful people were murdered by Al Qaeda.  People who took flights and worked on flights, people who worked at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and neighbouring buildings.   Some died instantly, some knew they were going to die, some jumped, some were crushed.   For those who attacked, they were meant to die, their lives were a means to an end.  For that is the collectivist philosophy - that human beings and lives are meaningless, unless they are categorised, pigeon-holed and treated as such.   It was enough that they lived or worked in the USA - a legitimate target.

If my career had been a little different, it could have included me, or people who I know. 

So 9/11 for me is always a day of some reflection - that there are people ready to destroy modernity, civilisation and freedom, for their twisted, backwards, bigoted, totalitarian view of how people should live their lives.  That history did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that there remains people who don't think that human beings have the right to live their own lives, or to think for themselves.

Meanwhile, the freedom and capitalism the West allows also allows conspiracy theorists and deniers to continue to claim that it was a self-inflicted attack by the US, or carried out by Israel.  Whatever it takes to demean and defame the West, feeding the irrational frenzy of hatred, racism, religious insanity that infects much of the Muslim world.  Such people should be treated with the same disdain and irreverence as Holocaust deniers, Moon Landing deniers and flat earthers.  They are a step below those who think it was the USA getting its just desserts, which of course is legitimate if you too think human beings are but a means to an end.  If you think terrorism - blowing up bodies of innocent civilians - is ok, then 9/11 can be justified.  If you express sadness and remorse, but then go "but", you are justifying it, you're expressing the view that it could have been prevented if only someone else had done something that would have meant the perpetrators wouldn't have bothered to murder.   A bit like "it's sad he hits you, but...".    On this day, such people should be ignored, for they are not just wrong, but in appalling bad taste and a combination of stupid and evil.  Nothing can justify such mass murder.  Not even the echoes of vileness from those who have said "not enough bankers died".

As long as there are people willing to do violence to inflict their religious preferences on others, free people cannot rest to confront them and defend themselves and civilisation from their barbarism.  It is as destructive and evil as Nazism, as Marxism-Leninism, as all forms of eliminationist authoritarianism.   On 9/11 they extended from their own vile little fiefdoms of totalitarianism (Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia) into the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Bear in mind that they wouldn't have thought twice had you been there too.

For today we are all Americans.

11 September 2009

Half a man on 9/11

It's that anniversary again.

I can only link to what I wrote before as it is still apt, whilst there remain those keen to engage in mass murder for the sake of their ghost.

So to help darken the day further, the Daily Telegraph reports that the highest paid actor in the USA - Charlie Sheen - has come out supporting most of the lunatic conspiracy theories about 9/11. Bush ordered it and Bin Laden worked for the CIA.

The sitcom he acts in, Two and Half Men, is meant to be about a financially bereft divorced man and his young son living with his wealthier brother (played by Charlie Sheen). The half is meant to refer to the son (who has been 10-15yo as the series has run).

Now it's pretty clear which one is half a man. Although apparently this is old news, he is insane, stupid or evil, or some combination of the above.