9/11: fourteen years
On 9/11’s 10th anniversary I wrote a post that contained this observation:
For those of us who were grownups when 9/11 happened, it’s also been transmuted””not to something that was always there, but to something that’s been incorporated into our view of the world. We’ve all done that differently. But for us, the shock and surprise and horror reoccurs (to a somewhat diminished extent, of course; there’s no shock like the first shock) whenever we see the footage, or when we think””really really think, without the protective shield of familiarity””of what actually happened on that day.
I believe that, in the four years that have passed since I wrote those words, 9/11 has been transmuted into something that was always there, something that no longer surprises. And although I haven’t watched any footage today of the attack, I think there is less shock and no surprise.
The reason for that is that a great deal has happened since I wrote those words four years ago. Since then, although we had responded in Afghanistan to 9/11 and then to Saddam Hussein’s defiance of nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq, the Obama administration has purposely wiped out those gains, particularly in Iraq. When I wrote that 10-year anniversary piece in September of 2011, the US was poised on the brink of Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, which he was determined to accomplish against the opinion and advice of every military adviser. In the four years since that withdrawal, ISIS has risen up in the vacuum that was left, and it has wreaked horrors on civilian populations, barbarities that are of enormous scale and magnitude even compared to 9/11 and which have reverberated around the world with images of sadistic violence. Does anyone doubt for a single moment that the killers would wreak a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand 9/11s on us if they could?
And then there’s the Iran deal that looms on the horizon, debated in a Congress that seems powerless against a tyrannical president bound and determined to sell our country out to a regime that is worse than Saddam Hussein’s and more implacably our enemy and the enemy of the world.
I could not have made up such a scenario back when 9/11 happened. And yet here we are.
The anniversary of 9/11 is a very solemn day. Today, when I say that “there is less shock and no surprise,” I mean neither disrespect nor belittling of the terrible event that was 9/11. The horror is just as horrible, and perhaps even all the more horrible knowing the point we’ve reached now. The 9/11 dead are still dead, their families still bereft, the 9/11 perpetrators still vile, the 9/11 heroes still heroic. We need to remember them and to bow our heads in grief, and in prayer if we are religious people.
But what I will be hoping for is a sea-change. I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t know how it will happen. I don’t know if it will happen. But I know we need a new dedication to the spirit on which this country was founded: that of courage, liberty, dedication, and clear-sightedness.
9/11 was not like Gettysburg. It was not a battle where soldiers died; it was a sneak attack on civilians going about their daily lives, although many who died were in the line of duty as police or firefighters. On the 9/11 anniversary we honor and mourn them all, every single one. But I want to paraphrase the closing of the Gettysburg Address and add:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us””that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain””that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom””and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
[ADDENDUM: Here is the story of my own experience on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.]
Colleges brainwash students into believing 9/11 was our fault
http://nypost.com/2015/09/06/revisionist-history-of-911-being-taught-to-our-college-students/
DESPICABLE: Look what universities are now teaching about 9-11
http://allenbwest.com/2015/09/despicable-look-what-universities-are-now-teaching-about-9-11/
Shocking details emerge on professor who teaches 9/11 course at UNC
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/24126/
right now they are disenfranchising citizens in favor of others, and some of us are just waiting to die and hopes that this bs doesnt get so bad they ask us to crawl into ovens after a round of torture rather than just passing away…
The aftermath for the Jewish Defense league fighters:
… Irv Rubin, 56, chairman of the Jewish Defense League, and Earl Krugel, 59, another JDL activist, were jailed this morning at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.
The two were arrested Tuesday night after “explosive powder,” the last component of a bomb, was delivered to Krugel’s residence, a federal prosecutor said. Other bomb components were seized at Krugel’s home.
The two are believed to have been preparing to attack the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles and the office of US Representative Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), a grandson of Lebanese immigrants….
Incarcerated in the general prison population as to be ventually, executed:
…In November 2002, while imprisoned at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles awaiting trial, Rubin’s throat was cut and then he tumbled off an 18- to 20-foot balcony. He had been threatening suicide in the days before. The injuries from the fall resulted in his death at Los Angeles County General Hospital several days later. Some people consider the circumstances surrounding his death to be suspicious, and Rubin’s wife demanded an investigation. But defense attorney Mark Werksman said that Rubin had been despondent for months, losing 40 pounds, and that the pressure of an upcoming trial “may have pushed him over the top.” The Rubin family launched a wrongful death suit against the government….
… On November 4, 2005, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Arizona, Krugel was murdered by another inmate, who used a concrete block to strike his head. Krugel had been at the medium security prison for just three days.
The suspect, David Frank Jennings, 30, allegedly attacked Krugel from behind with a piece of concrete hidden in a bag while Krugel was using an exercise machine, delivering multiple blows to his skull, face and neck. Krugel suffered multiple skull fractures, internal bleeding and multiple lacerations to his head, face and brain. The beating knocked out teeth and also fractured one of his eye sockets. Krugel was pronounced dead at the scene.
Krugel’s widow has questioned why Krugel was placed in an exercise yard with Jennings, a skinhead with tattoos indicating his Aryan Brotherhood affiliation.
In 2007, Jennings plead guilty to second-degree murder, and in 2008 was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
By my reckoning, the people of this country had not resolved themselves to anything of significance since VJ Day. Can’t say as I blame them. The government had resolved much for them. Asking of them anything more than wearing ribbons is, I think, too taxing.
As I age, every time I read or remember to recite to myself “The Gettysburg Address” I am ever more awestruck and humbled by its simplicity and its incredible depth.
Thanks for the reminder on this day.
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Gettysburg Address
The heart of the problem is not Obama or a traitorous/collaborative Congress.
The heart of the problem is that 25% of Americans do NOT believe in or agree with Lincoln’s point of view.
Instead, that ≤25% of America agrees with George Soros, “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”
And another ≥25% of Americans are duped, indoctrinated, “useful idiots”. “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” A. Lincoln
That is the heart of the problem.
It all comes back to the people. Neither Obama nor a traitorous/collaborative Congress would hold office had they not been elected. Nor would the media have the influence they have with that half of America if those ‘Americans’ did not hold the beliefs that they embrace.
Given that reality, what the future foretells is obvious,
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”” Abraham Lincoln
The horror is just as horrible, and perhaps even all the more horrible knowing the point we’ve reached now. The 9/11 dead are still dead, their families still bereft
Yes, The horror is just as horrible.
But what we say about Iraq or Syria, what The horror & horrible there and how many families still bereft for the last 13 years in Iraq and more than 4 years i Syria, but those who funded the Al-Qaeda and ISIS still at large hearting more human on the earth causing more horror is just as horrible>
Are we really after those killer and criminals?
I remember Pearl Harbor. I was eight years old. My family huddled around the radio and tried to understand what had happened. Even though I was only eight, I knew our lives were going to change. And they did. We were all involved in the war effort. On the home front we had rationing of gasoline, meat, nylon, and many products that were necessary to the war effort. We did scrap iron drives, paper drives, war bond drives, and we saved aluminum foil/grease/tin cans/tires/ and more.
There was a feeling of unity and all being in it together – at least in fly over country where I lived. The story of the mobilization that took place over the next four years is told in the book, “A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II,” by Maury Klein. It was a gargantuan effort that could only have been accomplished by the unity of pulling together of most of the population.
We didn’t know how long it would last. As I turned 12 near the war’s end, all boys my age and older all expected to serve. It was what you did.
The country demobilized quickly after 1945, but soon was remobilizing for Korea. I was deferred while in college but was drafted shortly after graduation. There was never any question in my mind about my duty to serve. I managed to get into officer training and eventually into flight training, a skill that would become my profession for life.
Instead of the Axis, the new enemy was worldwide Communism. The Communist strategy was to gradually takeover (through people’s wars of liberation) most of the world’s resources, which would allow them to crush the capitalist system dependent on oil, rubber, copper, etc. – the resources that made a manufacturing economy possible. Our strategy was to contain Communism by helping small countries resist people’s wars of liberation. Vietnam became much more than assistance. Even though it was a full blown war, left leaning intellectuals and Communist operatives managed to destroy our will to prosecute the war to a clear cut victory. Though we never lost a battle, our will to continue was sapped, and although we pledged to aid the South Vietnamese, we cowardly reneged on that pledge. From 1945 we changed from a united country with an unbeatable military into a country with a capable military but little will to use it.
We demonstrated our military capability in Desert Storm, but did not have the will to deliver the knock out blow.
When 9/11 came along, I believed for the first few weeks afterwards that the country was once again uniting as it had after Pearl Harbor. However, it didn’t take long for the nattering nabobs of negativity on the left to mount an anti-war, anti-American campaign to sap our will to defend ourselves.
Here we are 14 years later, with an anti-war, anti-American administration running the country and no signs of unity against the three foes (China, Russia, and radical Islamism) who have been on the march with ever more boldness for the last 6 1/2 years.
14 years ago I was confident that we would get our act together and do what was necessary to defeat the radical Islamists. Today, I recognize that the next major attack we sustain may lead to calls for surrender or accommodation to our enemies. I shake my head. I weep for my country. I tremble for what is going to happen to our children.
I keep hoping the country will awake as I recall the words of Patrick Henry:
“It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Thank you for that biographical summary, JJ. If I didn’t have faith in God, I would despair. Prayers for the USA and world.
Since 9/11/2011 we’ve witnessed a dozen or so of our embassies surrounded by rioters, in an Benghazi, our consulate attacked and our ambassador killed on 9/11/2012.
Since 9/11/2011 we’ve witnessed horrors that should have been just as shocking as the 9/11/01 attack – Western hostages gleefully beheaded, Jordanian pilot set on fire (and televised!), Yazidis dying while stranded atop a mountain, mass (brutal)executions and rape performed weekly by ISIS and Boko Haram, and emboldened jihadis executing Westerners in broad daylight (Charlie Hebdo, UK soldier beheaded).
It’s hard to process this accelerated descent into numbing, everyday brutality.
I will never forget 9/11, but I’m honestly more scared today than I was back then. I see people in power not only not fighting it, but facilitating it–no, guaranteeing that things will get much, much worse.
Neo: “and then to Saddam Hussein’s defiance of nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq”
I know you know that piece was just part of the reason for the Iraq intervention, which included Saddam’s primary terrorist threat that intersected with al Qaeda terrorism. (Charles Duelfer, for example, is quick to remind that Saddam’s combined WMD/terrorism threat was a major, even principal factor in the Clinton and Bush evaluation of the Iraqi threat.)
Nonetheless, for the sake of comprehensiveness, link to the explanation to the law and policy, fact basis for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Crosspost:
History rhymes. As an exercise make a list of the dates of major military engagements of the United States. There is a rhythm – it is generational. The same pertains to major social changes.
As the prophet said “The Times They Are A Changin”. Same guy said “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is – do you, Mr. Jones”. Or going totally banal – it is darkest just before dawn.
I sense (or maybe it’s just the rheumatism acting up) an impending sea change. May “special Providence watches over children, drunkards, and the United States” remain the melody.
JJ:
On anniversaries of 9/11, every schoolboy should read and reflect on what President Bush said to us and for us on 20SEP01.
“As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.” – President Bush, 20SEP01 (regarding the 9/11 attacks).
“In the century we’re leaving, America has often made the difference between chaos and community; fear and hope. Now, in a new century, we’ll have a remarkable opportunity to shape a future more peaceful than the past — but only if we stand strong against the enemies of peace.” – President Clinton, 16DEC98 (regarding enforcing Iraq’s compliance).
JJ:
Neo’s interview with Steve Beren described the nuts and bolts of the immediate Left activist exploitation of the 9/11 attacks, which dovetails with Neo’s study of the preceding Left activist exploitation of the Vietnam War.
In fact, your formative social cultural experience as a boy during WW2 was not spontaneous. The zeitgeist that shaped your worldview was a deliberately manufactured activist product.
On their merits for Why We Fight, the post-9/11 War on Terror, including Operation Iraqi Freedom, is no less justified than WW2 and the Cold War. The difference is a practical one in the make-up of the dominant activists who engineer the zeitgeist that controls the social consensus of the national will to compete.
The American people today are not intrinsically lesser than the American people of your childhood. The difference is the zeitgeist, which is different because the dominant activists who engineer the zeitgeist have changed since your childhood.
Restoring the American nationalist will to competitive greatness does not begin with the vote or person-to-person rhetoric. It begins with seizing the creative and productive mechanisms of social culture and re-engineering the zeitgeist, which is the activist game.
Eric: “The zeitgeist that shaped your worldview was a deliberately manufactured activist product.”
Admittedly, the Communists were much less numerous and influential in those days. Also, that we were allied with Stalin was a factor that made them pro-war during WWII. There was censorship and pro-government propaganda produced by Hollywood’s best – no doubt about that. Most of that was not all that necessary. At least in my area. There were no men in my town between the ages of 18 and 30. They were all at war. My father, an electrician, was too old for service but left home to take a job constructing military bases.
During the early months of 1942 we knew the war wasn’t going well in the Pacific. The Japanese rolled up a string of victories. That wasn’t hidden from us. It appeared they might be impossible to beat. In fact, there was talk of forming irregular militias to defend the homeland when the Japanese invaded. The Battle of the Coral Sea in May of ’42 and a month later the Battle of Midway were the beginning of a turn in our favor. You had to be alive then to get the feeling of unity, determination, and fighting spirit among most of the population. There was no talk about avoiding service. Whenever someone in uniform ate in a restaurant, a civilian would pay the tab. We were truly grateful for, and proud of, those who served. There was a spirit in the land that only a population of people who know they are involved in an existential struggle for survival can have. Some of it was driven by propaganda, but most of it was based on a common knowledge of what was at stake.
That all began to change after Korea and picked up speed during Vietnam because the Communists (all though they were not openly Communist) were now actively opposing resistance to International Communism and attacking the capitalist system. You’re correct that in the last 50 years the anti-American zeitgeist has been carefully nurtured.
Eric: “The American people today are not intrinsically lesser than the American people of your childhood.”
I disagree. All you have to do is watch the “Watter’s World” segments on O’Reilly. The average young person today is softer, less knowledgeable, less patriotic, more selfish, and more self indulgent. They don’t have enough knowledge to judge whether they are threatened by radical Islam. Most of them are more concerned with how many Face Book “likes” they have or being cool and snarky on Twitter. There is not enough common sense left in this country for the majority of people to know what a wise and courageous leader looks or acts like. Sex drugs, and rock and roll are all much more attractive and easy then duty, honor, country.
I’m doing everything I know how to that might instigate change. I’m sure you are too. We’re losing, but I’m not going to quit trying until they pat the dirt in my face.
14 years ago I was confident that we would get our act together and do what was necessary to defeat the radical Islamists.
It is past your era, JJ. It is not the duty of your generation to complete the killing required to fix this Titanic journey of retards and blind scouts, panicked captains. That is for the generation closer to my own to do.
The duty of the ancestors is to pass on the torch of inheritance to the next generation, as the Viking ancestors successfully did for the Scandinavian people. If the generation that receives the torch, decides to sell it and trade it for some weed and a slave shackle, that’s the choice of those inheritors.
However, what wasn’t their choice is to sell the freedom and inheritance of all future generations to some Islamic or Leftist slave lord. That wasn’t the power they inherited. That was’t part of the package or deal.
There will be a reckoning, one way or another. That is why CW II was inevitable.
The average young person today is softer, less knowledgeable, less patriotic, more selfish, and more self indulgent. They don’t have enough knowledge to judge whether they are threatened by radical Islam. Most of them are more concerned with how many Face Book “likes” they have or being cool and snarky on Twitter.
With FDRoosevelt, came the economic enslavement of American patriots.
You cannot be a free man or woman, when you are a serf or vassal to an aristocratic lord that pays for your job, your family, your healthcare, your education, and whatever trickle you get from your other sugar daddies.
It’s not possible. People who are not independent, in economic terms as well as abstract ones, are not free. They are merely slaves that think they are free in the system of Slavery 3.0
It’s a better more efficient and profitable form, just look at Planned Profit’s application of slavery. But it is still Slavery. The Union did not wipe out slavery as the victors propagandized. Nor did the South rebel due to wanting state rights to become more powerful than the feds. The Democrats won Reconstruction and reconstructed history to their liking. They did it again in Vietnam. They did it again in Iraq. They did it even as the Union was fighting to take Richmond after 1861.
It is not merely the Left that corrupted this country. This country has been fighting an internal disease and virus since 1820 at least, if not before. This fate was inevitable for the United States. There was no way around it. It was going to happen with or without Islam. With or without weak Republicans.
George Pal Says: “By my reckoning, the people of this country had not resolved themselves to anything of significance since VJ Day.”
O, come now.
The Cold War was waged for some 45 years – successfully – and with bipartisan support.
The failure of 9/11 entirely rests on the failure to identify the enemy, is nature, extent, and identity.
As Americans, we are too optimistic about anything like religion. And Islam qualifies. But to do what? And wage…what?
Is it any coincidence that the resistance to the ongoing invasion of Europe by Muslims stems from realms occupied by the Muslim Ottoman Empire for some 250 years? Central Europe? I hardly think it could be otherwise.
We Americans have no such history – we blanch in denial, and since the 1990s, the Left does so aided (and incapacitated) by post-modernist moral and epistemological relatavism.
Neo, since you mention your college minor in anthropology, do have a look at the brief but lucid at the late great philosophical anthropologist (at Cambridge), Ernest Gellner’s “Post-modernism, Reason, and Religion” (1992)
POSTED ONLINE HERE
http://okhovvat.com/files/en/content/2011/6/4/351_379.pdf
His PhD thesis at London in the late ’50s was on Islam and its inability to modernize. He then joined LSE teaching scientific method, but always interested in social anthropology, and influenced by Karl Popper. (The Wiki entry on Gellner is reasonably instructive.)
Clarity – that’s what Gelner offers. His later years, in the ’90s, including a trio of posthumous works, found him celebrated as the savant of post-communist civil society: the necessity of private social connections, and the Burkean “little platoons” – if liberty is to flourish.
An example of Gellner’s acute insight, relevant to us here, is seen on page 52 (of “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”).
He articulates American exceptionalism is a unique way, here. He uses it to explain a place where Clifford Geertz claim of a “Big Ditch” or an important epistemological divide, might exist.
Or, in other words, most PoMo blather about communities that cannot communicate with outsiders are contrivances. But, in the case of American naivete about “how things are done,” and thus American interventions – for instance – fail.
And therefore, there are such instances. But not at all of the kind the PoMo’s believe.
These are cultural and experiential hurdles – larger ones for nations – but not insurmountable ones.
Gellner’s example: certain traits make
And contrariwise, how can a God-fearing Abrahamic religion like Islam be a threat to us? How can we treat them any different than Christians and non-Christians?
Thus, maybe there is another “Big Ditch” here, today. And with the deep Denialism of the entrenched establishment Left, we see another one swerve us into certain harms way with the “Iran Deal.”
“…9/11 was not like Gettysburg. It was not a battle where soldiers died; it was a sneak attack on civilians going about their daily lives, although many who died were in the line of duty as police or firefighters. On the 9/11 anniversary we honor and mourn them all, every single one. But I want to paraphrase the closing of the Gettysburg Address and add…”
Technically not quite true. The attack on the Pentagon seems largely forgotten. But members of the armed forces did die that day.
The 9/11 attackers chose their targets with care. They attacked targets that symbolized American’s military and economic might.
Not to nitpick. I just don’t think the attack on the Pentagon should be forgotten.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
Let us all unite behind Obamunism to march into the glorious future of Socialism.
Then again maybe division is the only real choice.
Steve57:
I agree that the Pentagon attack should not be forgotten, and that it often is.
But in writing “it was not a BATTLE where soldiers died,” my point was not the soldiers didn’t die, but that it was not a battle where soldiers died.
It was a sneak, terrorist attack. No one on our side had a fighting chance.
A terrorist attack isn’t foiled by military centralized forces, that’s what, because a terrorist attack is asymmetrical. They strike at your weaknesses, not your strengths.
That means if the civilians are the ones being attacked, the civilians have to stand up and defeat the terrorists. Nobody else will be in a position to, short of using military jets to blow away the planes.
The fact that those planes were in the air with the right orders, just means Bush II had a very high decision cycle speed. It doesn’t mean much for the civilization those jets are part of.
Many excellent comments on this post – thank you all for your stories and thoughts, and neo for the post.
I don not remember where I saw it, and there may have been several places now, but one common remark is “I never thought on 9/11/01 that, only fourteen years later, I would see our President buy nuclear weapons for Iran.”
Which is effectively what Obama is trying to do.
On the other hand, one cartoon that encourages me is of a couple of range hands wondering if there is any way to stop the Islamic terrorists, and one of them drawls, “Well, we ain’t played Cowboys and Muslims yet.”
(with suitable apologies to any PCists on board who feel microaggressed by references to certain Historical Incidents.)
The Pentagon staff, military they may be, are also soft targets, as with Ft Hood 1 and 2 and various other bases in this country, including recruitment centers. The reason is simple, the upper staff of the military are not warriors, their job is to give orders in an organization.
Thus the weakness of the US military and the West isn’t the grunts at the bottom killing enemies and defending democracy. The weakness is at the top, decapitate their leadership, which is what AQ may have wished for.
That was actually somewhat crude. The new and improved way to fight drone strikes and circumvent US military might, is for Islamic jihadists to go into the US, with the help of Syrian refugee asylum bullsh con artists like Hussein, and then target the families of US drone pilots and other fighters.
That is the very epitome, Ft Hood 1 wise, of targeting the soft spots in your enemy. And it is a strategy very close to the one I hypothesized about in 2007 and a few months before Ft Hood 1 happened. Asymmetrical warfare is about hitting your enemy’s weaknesses, not their strengths. And a general that’s dead, cannot command their armies effectively.