The Evil We Do IS Evil We Get - Chris Hedges on U.S. 9/11 Attacks

[Fleetinglife]

''The hijackers who carried out the attacks on 9/11, like all radical jihadist groups in the Middle East, spoke to us in the murderous language we taught them.

The explosions and collapse of the towers, however, were, to me, intimately familiar. I had seen it before. This was the familiar language of the empire.  I had watched these incendiary messages dropped on southern Kuwait and Iraq during the first Persian Gulf War and descend with thundering concussions in Gaza and Bosnia. The calling card of empire, as was true in Vietnam, is tons of lethal ordnance dropped from the sky. The hijackers spoke to America in the idiom we taught them.

The ignorance, masquerading as innocence, of Americans, mostly white Americans, was nauseating. It was the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It was the greatest act of terrorism in American history. It was an incomprehensible act of barbarity. The stunningly naïve rhetoric, which saturated the media, saw the blues artist Willie King sit up all night and write his song “Terrorized”.

“Now you talk ‘bout terror,” he sang. “I been terrorized all my days.”

But it was not only Black Americans who were familiar with the endemic terror built into the machinery of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire, but those overseas who the empire for decades sought to subdue, dominate, and destroy. They knew there is no moral difference between those who fire Hellfire and cruise missiles or pilot militarized drones, obliterating wedding parties, village gatherings or families, and suicide bombers. They knew there is no moral difference between those who carpet-bomb North Vietnam or southern Iraq and those who fly planes into buildings. In short, they knew the evil that spawned evil. America was not attacked because the hijackers hated us for our values. America was not attacked because the hijackers followed the Quran — which forbids suicide and the murder of women and children. American was not attacked because of a clash of civilizations. America was attacked because the virtues we espouse are a lie. We were attacked for our hypocrisy. We were attacked for the campaigns of industrial slaughter that are our primary way of speaking with the rest of the planet. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in the summer of 1965, called the bombing raids, which would eventually kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon, a form of communication with the communist government in Hanoi. 

We did not, and do not, grasp that we are the mirror image of those we seek to destroy. We too kill with an inchoate fury.

The lives of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans, and Yemenis are as precious as the lives of those killed in the twin towers. But this understanding, this ability to see the world as the world saw us, eluded Americans who, refusing to acknowledge the blood on their own hands, instantly bifurcated the world into good and evil, us and them, the blessed and the damned. The country drank deep of the dark elixir of nationalism, the heady elevation of us as noble and wronged people. The flip side of nationalism is always racism. And the poisons of racism and hate infected the American nation to propel it into the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one from which it will never recover. 

We did not, and do not, grasp that we are the mirror image of those we seek to destroy. We too kill with an inchoate fury. Over the past two decades, we have extinguished the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who never sought to harm the United States or were involved in the attacks on American soil. We too use religion, in our case the Christian faith, to mount a jihad or crusade. We too go to war to fight phantoms of our own creation.''

 

"The manipulation of the images, however, had already begun. The scores of “jumpers,” those who leaped to their deaths before the collapses, were censored from the live broadcasts. They seemed to wait for turns. They often fell singly or in pairs, sometimes with improvised parachutes made from drapes, sometimes replicating the motions of swimmers. They reached speeds of 150 miles an hour during the ten seconds it took before they hit the pavement. The bodies made a sickening thud on impact. All who saw them fall spoke of this sound. 

The mass suicide was one of the pivotal events of 9/11. But it was immediately expunged from public consciousness. The jumpers did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The hopelessness and despair were too disturbing. It exposed our smallness and fragility. It illustrated that there are levels of suffering and fear that lead us to willingly embrace death. The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live. 

The story is fabricated out of the ashes of the twin towers was a story of resilience, heroism, courage, and self-sacrifice, not collective suicide. So, mass murder and mass suicide were replaced with an encomium to the virtues and prowess of the American spirit."

 

''The intoxication of violence, the anodyne of war, is a poison. It condemns critical thought as treason. Its call to patriotism is little more than collective self-worship. It imparts a god-like power and licenses to destroy, not only things but other human beings. But war is, ultimately, about betrayal, as the defeat in Afghanistan elucidates. Betrayal of the young by the old. Betrayal of idealists by cynics. Betrayal of soldiers and marines by war profiteers and politicians. 

War, like all idols, begins by demanding the sacrifice of others but ends with the demand for self-sacrifice. The Greeks, like Sigmund Freud, grasped that war is the purest expression of the death instinct, the desire to exterminate all systems of life, including, ultimately, our own. Ares, the Greek god of war, was frequently drunk, quarrelsome, impetuous, and a lover of violence for its own sake. He was hated by nearly all the other gods, except the god of the underworld, Hades, to whom he delivered a steady stream of new souls. Ares’s sister, Eris, the goddess of chaos and strife, spread rumors and jealousy to fan the flames of war.''

''This moral fragmentation, where we define ourselves by tangential and often fictitious acts of goodness, is a psychological escape hatch. It allows us to avoid looking at who we are and what we have done. This willful blindness is what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “doubling,” the “division of the self into two functioning wholes so that the part-self acts as an entire self.”

This doubling, Lifton noted, is often done “outside of awareness.” And it is an essential ingredient to carrying out evil. If we refuse to see ourselves as we are, if we cannot shatter the lie perpetuated by our moral fragmentation, there is no hope of redemption. The gravest danger we face is the danger of alienation, not only from the world around us but from ourselves."

https://scheerpost.com/2021/09/10/hedges-the-evil-we-do-is-the-evil-we-get/

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by Fleetinglife

[Fleetinglife]

George W Bush on 9/11: "We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from the violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, but in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them."

Bush is publicly comparing 9/11 to Jan 6.

Guess Bush went from his nationalist and neo-conservative arc during his presidency to his solid liberal arc in old age and retirement due to the effect the wars he helped initiate and start had indirectly on the changing circumstances and public opinion climate in his own country.

[Fleetinglife]

20 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

America has killed so much more innocent people in the following Iraq war, self bias at its' finest.

Yep, this:

''The lives of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans, and Yemenis are as precious as the lives of those killed in the twin towers. But this understanding, this ability to see the world as the world saw us, eluded Americans who, refusing to acknowledge the blood on their own hands, instantly bifurcated the world into good and evil, us and them, the blessed and the damned. The country drank deep of the dark elixir of nationalism, the heady elevation of us as noble and wronged people. The flip side of nationalism is always racism. And the poisons of racism and hate infected the American nation...''

It can happen to any nation's people and is in fact even more pronounced and present to nations outside of America and the West. The self-bias of peoples is present more or less everywhere, the question is only to the extent of what degree and denial and alienation of other people's humanity and interests.

[Leo Gura]

The only thing that can destroy America is America. Bin Laden was wise to understand this. His aim was to trick America into debasing itself. And in that sense he won.

This 9/11 fetishizing and pearl clutching plays exactly into Bin Laden's evil genius strategy.

[Leo Gura]

Deaths from Covid in the last month: more than 9/11

[Endangered-EGO]

8 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The only thing that can destroy America is America. Bin Laden was wise to understand this. His aim was to trick America into debasing itself. And in that sense he won.

This 9/11 fetishizing and pearl clutching plays exactly into Bin Laden's evil genius strategy.

@Leo Gura Nato is stronger economically and militarily than ever before. It's a decentralised world power. Nato has about +80% of the worlds economy.

Bin Laden caused more harm to his muslim in-group than to America.

@Husseinisdoingfine Why do you blame the USA, I can just say: Al-Qaida deliberately destabilised america in order to sow chaos.

Al-Qaida killed: 200 000 + 2977 civilians.

 

I hope you're not buying into the staged-war for oil. Because the country that invaded another (Kuwait) purely for Oil was Iraq under Samad Hussein.

 

[Leo Gura]

@Endangered-EGO Of course Bin Laden cannot win in the end because his actions were coming from low consciousness. But he certainly leveraged his limited power exceedingly well. My point is that Americans should have been too wise to allow that to happen.

Sure, you could blame Bin Laden for the Iraq war.

But think of how much stronger America could have been if we invested that $20 trillion spent on wars into education, social welfare, infrastructure, green energy, and scientific research.

[Fleetinglife]

This was the mess that was made worldwide by the pumping of funding and armament and positive public opinion, support, and propaganda for the mujaheddin while at the same time having a military presence and meddling in Middle Eastern affairs and was used as a justification for the crimes and legitimacy of other nationalist leaders across the globe for their vendettas and oppressions and for some to hold on to power still on the basis of using this justification to demonize others and to legitimize and paint over their own war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crackdowns, discrimination on the one hand and all this with separatism on the other:

Yugoslav Wars:

Bosnian mujahideen:

"A former US State Department official in October 2001 described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a safe haven for terrorists and asserted that militant elements of the former Sarajevo government were protecting extremists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden.

According to Middle East intelligence reports, bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan. Among them was Karim Said Atmani, who was identified by authorities as to the document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings in the United States. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canada–United States border in mid-December 1999 with a car full of nitroglycerin and bomb-making materials. He was convicted of colluding with Osama bin Laden by a French court.

A Bosnian government search of passport and residency records, conducted at the urging of the United States, revealed other former Mujahideen who were linked to the same Algerian group or to other groups of suspected terrorists and had lived in the area 100 km (60 mi) north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years. Khalil al-Deek was arrested in Jordan in late December 1999 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist sites. A second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated with Osama bin Laden. In its June 26, 1997, report on the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, The New York Times noted that those arrested confessed to serving with Bosnian Muslim forces. Further, the captured men also admitted to ties with Osama bin Laden.

In 1999, the press reported that bin Laden and his Tunisian assistant Mehrez Aodouni were granted citizenship and Bosnian passports in 1993 by the government in Sarajevo. The Bosnian government denied this information following the September 11 attacks, but it was later found that Aodouni was arrested in Turkey and that at that time he possessed a Bosnian passport. Following this revelation, a new explanation was given that bin Laden did not personally collect his Bosnian passport and that officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna, which issued the passport, could not have known who bin Laden was at the time.''

Albania:

"SHISH's head Fatos Klose said that Osama was running a terror network in Albania to take part in the Kosovo War under the guise of a humanitarian organization and it was reported to have been started in 1994. Claude Kader, who was a member, testified its existence during his trial. By 1998, four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) were arrested in Albania and extradited to Egypt. The mujahideen fighters were organized by Islamic leaders in Western Europe allied to him and Zawahiri.

During his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević quoted from a purported FBI report that bin Laden's al-Qaeda had a presence in the Balkans and aided the Kosovo Liberation Army. He claimed bin Laden had used Albania as a launchpad for violence in the region and Europe. He claimed that they had informed Richard Holbrooke that KLA was being aided by al-Qaeda but the US decided to cooperate with the KLA and thus indirectly with Osama despite the 1998 United States embassy bombings earlier. Milošević had argued that the United States aided the terrorists, which culminated in its backing of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War."

September 11 attacks:

''God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers, but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.''

— Osama bin Laden, 2004

''After his initial denial, in the wake of the attacks, bin Laden announced, "what the United States is tasting today is nothing compared to what we have tasted for decades. Our umma has known this humiliation and contempt for over eighty years. Its sons are killed, its blood is spilled, its holy sites are attacked, and it is not governed according to Allah's command. Despite this, no one cares". In response to the attacks, the United States launched the War on Terror to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and capture al-Qaeda operatives, and several countries strengthened their anti-terrorism legislation to preclude future attacks."

Sources: All from Wikipedia

The mess that was made and was consistently ignored or not given proper attention.

 

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by Fleetinglife