chapotraphouse

Literally nobody here has a positive attitude towards the death of innocent people. 9/11 stopped being about that when it was weaponized to illegally invade and terrorize sovereign nations. Now it's just a symbol of the US' peerless narcissism such that having to endure any hardship at all is license to do whatever you want to whoever you want for as long as you want all while acting like you're the victim.

I guess this is what I notice right away:

positive attitude towards the death of people

desire to see human lives saved

glossing every nation and class as "people" or "human lives" is falling for the trick that liberalism tries to pull to make us feel equal even when we're really not. historically it's ideology that the bourgeoisie introduced to break down non-meritocratic aristocracies without endangering their own material situation. "we're all equal so no more hereditary titles. but oh you want to expropriate the kulaks? you want to guillotine your ceo? we're all equal though, they're people and we all have the same inalienable rights." actually, there are still oppressors and oppressed, and that contradiction can't be papered over forever with bourgeois appeals to common humanity

also:

deserved by all people in america regardless of any individual actions

I strongly disagree that there are no individual actions making ordinary americans morally responsible for the atrocities committed in our names

every day people take steps to deliberately materially support empire. we lavish support on troops and veterans, we hang up american flags, we carry water for our brands, we vote for cops and war criminals. and it only takes a 9/11 to unleash oceans of latent racism and bloodlust. even people who dislike americanism still passively sit and enjoy the fruits of imperialism because almost all of us are doing well compared to our victims and we naturally don't see it in our interest to violently equalize things. in fact socialists have so little idea of how to sell the american people on becoming as poor as everyone else that we're basically uncritical of patsoc lines about how americans could be even more prosperous under socialism!

even the anti-war pb, millennial hippies, the socialists, apolitical people, etc can't really escape culpability. in his introduction to fanon's wretched, sartre was pretty unsparing toward oh-so-compassionate protesters who enjoyed the fruits of empire but declined to actually kill anyone to shatter the status quo:

The pacifists are a fine sight: neither victims nor torturers! Come now! If you are not a victim when the government you voted for, and the army your young brothers served in, commits “genocide,” without hesitation or remorse, then you are undoubtedly a torturer. And if you choose to be a victim, risking one or two days in prison, you are simply trying to take the easy way out. But you can’t; there is no way out. Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.

You know full well we are exploiters. You know full well we have taken the gold and minerals and then oil from the “new continents,” and shipped them back to the old metropolises. Not without excellent results in the shape of palaces, cathedrals, and centers of industry; and then when crisis loomed, the colonial markets were there to cushion the blow or divert it. Stuffed with wealth, Europe granted humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: for us, a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation.