chat

The Twin Towers were targeted because they were the center of American finance. And finance firms are arguably more deadly than American guns and bombs. Finance capitalism drains the lifeblood of the global south to fuel the insatiable greed of the American elite. The bankers intentionally target the people at their weakest and subject them to humiliation rituals so that entire countries and their descendants will be starve to feed the west. The immeasurable wealth of the US is predicated on draining resources and impoverishing black and brown people around the world, the empire cannot function without financial foot soldiers.

No, everyone in the Twin Towers didn't deserve to die. There were non financial firms, as well as maintenance or other proletariat workers who died in the blowback. But the vultures perched in the Twin Towers were as complicit in American hegemony as the Pentagon or the Whitehouse.

The real 9/11 was in 1973

"amerikkka deserved 9/11" is about the concept of blowback. which is also the name of a very good podcast. engaging morally with whether the actions of the attackers could be justified is to basically miss the entire point of material analysis. the design of the middle eastern states following the dissolution of the ottoman empire and its administration by violently racist european empire, particularly Britain, was centered around rendering the will of the people impotent, stoking ethnic tensions, and dividing the resources and means of production and geopolitical boundaries in such a way that the states in general were stymied. 3000 civilians in amerikkka died because of a long historical process involving far more people in the middle east dying for a much longer period of time.

A tad more complex, sure, but only a tad. Innocent people did die in the attack on the Twin Towers. But the number of those is absolutely negligible compared to the number of innocent people killed by America which we never hear about. The idea that 9/11 was some unique horror which should be treated with absolute respect, when none of the people who say that give a shit about any of the worse crimes committed by America, is laughable to someone who has an idea of the bigger picture.

Several things. Terrorism is meant to use fear and violence to influence societal change. Here, the terrorists win. The point was do something spectacular that would inspire fear and hatred. To create the largest lasting effect. They couldn't have done better.

Now, It may seem pedantic, but I don't agree with your use of the word "we". I live in the United States. In a literal sense I am part of the 'we' who live in this place. Who pay taxes to the same government. But I am not a part of the lineage of people whose brutalization of others led to those planes hitting those buidings.

As for the death toll. Keep it in perspective. There have been order 10x as many children murdered in Gaza as people who died on 9/11. 9/11 victims annually become the tragedy porn "we'll never forget". Until 9/12. At least we never forget the kids. We never knew they existed.

We can mourn the innocent working class people who died in the attack while also cheering the deaths of the corporate bourgeois ghouls who, in an extremely rare case, actually encountered some consequences for their part in pillaging of the rest of the world. But even as we mourn the working class people who died on 9/11, it could only be typical American chauvinism if we didn't also simultaneously mourn the millions of victims of US aggression and imperialism, victims of murder (both immediate with guns and bombs as well as the slower economic and social murder) who are many magnitudes more numerous. The victims of imperialism who are always left out when the "never forget" crowd push their agenda of painting the US as the victim. It is disgusting and cynical how that crowd cites the deaths of the innocent people who died in the attack as a way to deflect the blame away from the true culprits. All of these deaths are ultimately to be blamed on the US imperialists, the ruling bourgeoisie, as others have pointed out. We don't have to support the specific actions of the attackers to recognize them as an understandable (perhaps even inevitable) consequence. It is not a contradiction to say that the US as a geopolitical entity absolutely deserved what happened on 9/11 (and frankly deserves much worse) while also not condoning the killing of working class civilians.

America sowing: omg this is awesome, killing civilians and sowing political terror is the fucking greatest!!!

America reaping: waaaah we must never forget

(Editor’s note: America immediately went back to sowing)

The thing about 9/11 memes is that they are a response to 9/11 culture. Posting this stuff in the 00's would have been unthinkable as the imagery was absolutely sacrosanct. And obvs it was all tied up with US militarism and Christian nationalism. Nowadays, the pressure to Never Forget has subsided considerably, meaning you can stick a Hulk Hogan on these sacred symbols, and it suddenly becomes very very funny.

FUCK IT I'M SAYING IT

I don't think anyone here supports 9/11 (well, some irony-poisoned person probably does), they just like mocking the sacred national mythology built up around it and say that the US was reaping what it sowed. Like, if someone is just prodding a wasp nest for no reason, I would think it's funny as shit if they act like a victim for getting stung, but that doesn't mean, in a scenario where the wasps didn't get agitated, that I'd think it was a good thing to do to covertly agitate the wasps to that they attack the person or something ridiculous like that.

No, I'm not comparing people to wasps, I'm just alluding to a common idiom.

in an ideal world, a bunch of amerikkkan civilians wouldnt have randomly died. in an ideal world, a bunch of civilians all around the world wouldn't have been killed by amerikkka. put yourself in their shoes, it wasn't just a matter of amerikkka and its allies (iϟϟrael) disregarding civilian casualties, they intentionally murdered civilians all the time, for decades on end, and were seen as the good guys by most of the world. there are so many countries where 9/11 is just tuesday. nobody living in that situation can be expected to make any distinction between military and civilian targets, you can't ask them to take the high road when the situation is so horrific, amerikkka provided them justification to carry out any action against it.

My heart goes out to the janitors, but it was the World Trade Center They were probably coming up with new ways to privatize water for african rural communities. Plus it was a symbol of pride for american capitalism so I will never cry over it. Another one, please.

Those in the towers on 9/11 were victims of the American empire.

Imperial violence rarely reaches those most responsible

No British monarchs were ever harmed in colonial resistance

Just another reason why these systems of empire and oppression must be destroyed

::: spoiler spoiler

Helmet belonging to FDNY firefighter Kevin M. Prior, 28 years old

I think the WTC was chosen because it's a much easier and more visible target than a government building, I know they tried to hit the Pentagon but I can't imagine it being that easy to hit with a plane ().

The meming is mainly due to all us who were alive on 9/11 and remember all the NEVER FORGET crap and the islamophobia, racism and warmongering that followed. There's also the hypocrisy of weeping endlessly over those 3000 people while the US killed millions in the ensuing wars.

It's like if the school bully is beating up on one of the nerds and the nerd manages to land a nose-breaking punch to the bully's face. We'd all cheer that. I am with you on the one hand, these people largely had nothing to do with the violence in the middle east. But on the other hand, many of the companies based in the WTC definitely did.

I've written and erased a lot here. It's a difficult subject. I can't speak for anyone else, but what it comes down to for me is the notion of critical support. The middle east has been ravaged by western hegemony for at least 100 years, so their fighting back should get our cheers, even if we disagree with their reasons or methods.

In the end, because it was a century of abuse that led up to the attacks, we should blame western politicians for it. After all, it is ultimately they who are the ones that actually caused the attack. So when people here say "bush did 911" they fucking mean it, but not for the conspiracy theory reasons. Bush killed those ~5,000 Americans (and so did all the other ghouls, but you know what I mean) because he was one of the main people causing terror in the middle east.

Say it with me class: “the ultimate responsibility violence resulting from imperialism, no matter who enacts a given atrocity, lies with the imperial power”

Condemning 9/11 because it was a unique tragedy

Condemning 9/11 because Bush did it

The finance ghouls who hedgefunded there deserved so much worse.

Reminder that Israel places military command centers and government buildings purposefully near civilian infrastructure.

Also reminder that the working class people who had life altering complications from the event would not be treated properly under the broken healthcare system and later would suffer the 2008 financial crisis. The widespread support for the invasion and exterminations of Iraq and Afghanistan and continuing islamophobia and anti-arab racism should also be considered. A majority of previous "freedoms" were explicitly rolled back for americans (patriot act/snowden leaks)

Also reminder that the other targets were the pentagon and the white house.

9/11 is a rebellious strike against the ruling class, never concede on this point. Never forget the fear the empire felt as the end of history ended.

Not that many people actually died from 9/11. It's less than 3000. And the vast majority of those <3000 are either finance ghouls or NYC/NJ proles (plus members of al Qaeda lol). This means that if you didn't live near NYC, 9/11 had no direct impact on your life whatsoever. I didn't know anyone irl who was affected by 9/11 because I'm not from NYC, my family is not from NYC, none of my neighbors are from NYC, none of my neighbor's direct families are from NYC, and so on.

But the post-9/11 climate meant that we're supposed to somehow care about these randos, many of them vampiric finance ghouls, and they used that emotional manipulation as a blank check to butcher millions in West Asia.

It's would be like if people kept on going "remember Katrina" and used the hurricane as an excuse to invade Mexico because Bush gave a speech about how hurricane Katrina was formed by a Mexican hurricane machine.

Other people already made political arguments. I'll go crude.

But look if you are sad about mass death in NYC here are some things to be sad about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_in_New_York_City_by_death_toll

I am not going to even get into AIDS (84,000 NYC deaths and counting) except to suggest read And the band plays on published a decade prior to 9/11 it is basically an excruciating detailing about the question of why america cares about certain tragedies and not others. 9/11 fits perfectly into Schultz's analysis.

9/11 = 2,753

Covid 19 dead nyc 2020-2023 = 38,795–45,194

First NYC covid death was March 14. April 3 was the date 9/11 death toll was passed (3,132 deaths)

Latinos dead in NYC from COVID March-May 2020: 5,200 (more than double 9/11!!)

Where are the memorials.

All of us have so much pain from our lives and contexts to see the reification of these particular "martyrs" and "hero's" it pokes ones heart with a needle each time.

To make space for our own griefs and those of others instead of displacing on this nationalistic militaristic fake ass bullshit.

I think it was Michael S. Judge who talked about 9/11 and October seven when he talked about aaron bushnell. He talks about how abstraction drags away real things into the void. He mentions the deaths in the twin towers. He says all that is converted to something the american elite use for their ends. A signifier to be deployed. It became a claim to what was to be done by the west. They became draped around the project that was to occupy iraq or Afghanistan or palestine or lebanon or syria.

was doing it the correct move?

False flags to further the agenda of the west isn't new.

Like Reichstag fire or tonkin, they happen cause it was set it stone to further capital's powers.

Even if they aren't really false flags, if they are real incidents carried out by political actors against the ruling class : like oct 7 or harper's ferry.

Was the harpers raid or oct 7 right thing to do?

I mean those or 9/11 are not really comparable beyond some parameters.

These attacks on towers were set in stone.

It isn't some adventurism just as reichstag fire isn't. It was political theater.

At this point or then america or americans never cared about the attacks. It was a emblem to further exceptionalism. Still is.

Now saying uh think about all the loss of life, only ever considers the americans and puts it through a context where this happened in some vaccum and america was some victim.

I'll finally put this in a further different context. There was attacks in kashmir months back. Everyone is enamored in the political theater. Broadly everyone was condemning the incident and mourning. Now mourning the people is fine. But to portray themselves as unattached victims is bullshit. That was india's fault and action. "But the victims" is just a way to obscure from what kashmiris endure.

Anyways 4$ a pound.

I’m late but I will say this:

You mentioned you don’t think it could bring about real change, however right after you say it brought about a surveillance state.

That was the point, essentially. It created a scenario that pushed America into devaluing their dollar to fund a war that could never be won, to drive dollars towards things that didn’t help anyone, and to force them to print more. The devaluation of the dollar from that event (that long event) is now starting to show its head, and in my opinion, it was the killing blow that put America on a path towards destroying their own currency. Honestly an incredible long term strategy that America did not foresee because it didn’t exist in the next financial quarter