Today marks 25 years since 9/11, and every commentator and newspaper editorial board will be penning obligatory pieces on the meaning of the attacks and the way they reshaped the world over the last quarter-century. Matt Yglesias, in a podcast episode this week on the subject, kicked off his reflections by quipping something like, "so—9/11 was bad." The joke being that this is such an obvious and universal sentiment that it hardly passes for a "take."
But of course—and however strangely—it's not actually a universal sentiment. One of the biggest political controversies of the summer revolved around a years-old remark from leftist bro streamer Hasan Piker asserting that "America deserved 9/11" (Piker later disavowed the comment as "inappropriate" and quibbled "I didn't say Americans deserved 9/11—I said America deserves 9/11"—which is an interesting and perhaps not entirely hollow distinction; we'll return to that later).
You better believe that Republicans made political hay out of that one, after Michigan's progressive Senate candidate agreed to appear with Piker on the campaign trail. El-Sayed has been having to do some damage control on that relationship ever since. (For the record, there's no evidence whatsoever that Dr. El-Sayed ever endorsed anything like Piker's sentiment on this subject—though Piker's remarks were at one point falsely attributed to the Michigan candidate.)
But Piker is not the only one who's ever said something like this; nor is it just some revisionist take that only emerged 25 years after the fact—when memories of the horror of seeing thousands of people crushed or burning or choking or falling to their deaths had faded.
Virtually from the day of the attacks on, a surprising range of public figures have made remarks insinuating—or even flatly stating—that the destruction was justified. In those unclassifiable and endlessly rewarding and delightful collections of intellectual odds-and-ends he authored, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel (some of his great "notecard" novels)—David Markson collects a few of the weirdest examples from this genre:
"Wonderful news—Said meringue-brained Bobby Fischer at the destruction of the World Trade Center," writes Markson. (This was not the only bizarre statement on foreign policy Fischer ever made.)
"The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center," Markson also adds. (Stockhausen—the avant garde composer—apparently later tried to clarify that he hadn't meant this in a good way, per se.)
One could argue perhaps that even Piker's original comments didn't assert that 9/11 was good, just that the United States "deserved" the attack. Even he, then—at the time he first tosses off this since-disavowed comment—might have seconded Matt Yglesias's deliberately banal "9/11 was bad" take. But Bobby Fischer—who appears to have been dealing with some big issues by that point in his life—literally said it was "wonderful." And let's not even get into the whole Ward Churchill controversy.
So, since apparently not everyone in fact agrees that "9/11 was bad," I think my contribution to the 25th anniversary discourse today will be to reiterate why, in fact, yes, it was bad and indefensible.
One big reason 9/11 was bad was that, whatever you think of U.S. foreign policy, the people in the World Trade towers were not to blame for it. I don't believe in collective guilt. There is an awful lot to say against the Vietnam war or the 1973 coup in Chile, say, but someone working at a Dunkin Donuts did not choose either. And while "to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature," to quote Thomas Hardy.
(Piker may have been trying to gesture toward something like this moral distinction with his comment that "Americans" may not have deserved the attack, even if "America"—in his since-retracted view—perhaps did.)
Another thing that never quite worked about the "America deserved 9/11" take, though, is that the attack's perpetrators didn't even have a sympathetic beef. If a group of Chileans had attacked the United States twenty-five years ago in order to avenge the thousands of people murdered, tortured, and disappeared in the U.S.-sponsored coup a quarter century before that, this would still have been bad—because it would have punished the innocent—but it would have been somewhat more understandable on a human level.
Indeed, some leftist proponents of the "blowback" or "chickens coming home to roost" theory even pointed to the fact that the 1973 Chilean coup also occurred on September 11. But it's not at all clear that Al Qaeda was aware of that parallel or intended the date to have any symbolic significance. Indeed, it's not even clear that Al Qaeda would have objected to the Chilean coup. I suspect they would have regarded the secular socialist government of Allende as just as wicked and unbelieving as the U.S. regime.
Al Qaeda, in truth, never had a coherent or sympathetic grievance. Their ends were always as unattractive as their means. Mostly, they seemed to be motivated by rabid anti-semitism. Indeed, Jerusalem Demsas notes in the podcast episode mentioned above, they also floated the possibility of attacking various Jewish religious sites in New York, before settling on the twin towers as their chosen target.
It is one of the profound ironies and distortions of twentieth century "New Left" discourse that a member of the "anti-imperialist" academic left could end up comparing the victims of 9/11 to Nazis—when the perpetrators of the attack were the ones plotting to indiscriminately kill Jews.
So, you heard it from me, folks—9/11 was bad.
But to add something that should be equally obvious and universally agreed upon: much about the U.S. response to 9/11 was also bad.
Matt Yglesias would, I take it, agree with this too. But he also wants to carve out a little space in the discourse for acknowledging that the post-9/11 "neocon" or "liberal interventionist hawk" worldview was at least founded in genuine idealism—however misguided. People who held these commitments and advocated for nation-building wars to "bring democracy" to Afghanistan and Iraq, he observes, appeared to genuinely believe in liberal cosmopolitanism and universalism.
This may be true, in a sense; but you also have to ask—if the means people chose to use were so radically incompatible with their stated ends—could there really have been all that much sincerity in the way they actually held to those ends? Jerusalem Demsas, in the same episode, responds to Matt by pointing out that if you think you are entitled to use saturation bombing on a largely civilian population in order to "save" them, you have to ask whether a certain dehumanization of the intended "beneficiaries" is not a psychological prerequisite.
Matt points out, as I have in the past as well, that as bad as neocon universalism was, MAGA or paleocon particularism is even worse. And certainly I agree. I would take "bomb them to bring democracy" over "bomb them for the sheer hell of it" anytime.
But can't we pick neither?
The debate here is really much like the old "white burden" discourse at the end of the nineteenth century. Who was more racist—the European imperialists who believed in the "civilizing" mission; or the anti-imperialists who argued on grounds of some alleged "innate incapacity for civilization" on the part of the non-white world?
Most of us today would agree there is not much to pick between them—just as there is little to prefer on either side between those who say "bomb Muslims to give them democracy," and those who say "Muslims will never be capable of democracy."
Did the European proponents of the "civilizing mission" sincerely believe that they were doing their victims a favor? It's hard to tell. Probably some of them were just using this rhetoric as a smokescreen for self-interest (see Ernest Crosby on the subject of these "canting hypocrites," or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt on their "bald self-righteousness." Crosby wrote in 1902 of the "coward lie / Of blessings that the enslaved receives / Whose rights their arms deny!"). Doubtless others actually managed to delude themselves that they really were fighting all these wars for the sake of "civilization."
Here again—though—it's hard to tell which of those options is worse.
Indeed it's even possible to argue that to bomb to death hundreds of thousands of civilians and torture people and disappear them to CIA black sites—while sincerely believing you are doing so in the name of "democracy"—is even more fundamentally abhorrent than to do it in the name of straightforward greed.
There is perhaps something even more profoundly inhuman about the neocon or Hitchens-style "liberal hawk" worldview, which could distort the contents of liberal universalism so much that it could invade countries in unprovoked acts of aggression—and yet sincerely convince itself all the while that it was acting in the spirit of Byron at Missolonghi.
To quote Ernest Crosby again:
Oh, for the good old Roman days
Of robbers bold and true,
Who scorned to oil with pious phrase
The deeds they dared to do— [...]
I hate the oppressor's iron rod,
I hate his murderous ships,
But most of all I hate, O God,
The lie upon his lips!
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