Last year, I broke. I couldn’t contain it anymore. After spending years not indulging myself and my peers with commentary pertaining to America’s annual 9/11 media memorial, I snapped and took to Facebook for the purpose of deflating the year-to-year nationalism that corrupts my feed.
My rant, which can be read here, was intended to counter images of bald eagles with American flag-printed wings, the trending #NeverForget hashtag, and the countless “I was ________ when the planes hit the towers…” personal essays, with some much-needed sobriety — how American counter-terrorism tainted the dead with reckless abandon.
This isn’t to say that I’m standoffish or antagonistic toward the 3,000 American men and women whose lives were needlessly and abruptly ended via something as idiotic as religious extremism. Their deaths are a tragedy. But, while we pollute the Internet with armchair patriotism and pseudo-survivor stories, we appear to be collectively mum about what counter-terrorism has done in the wake.
I see very little commentary about how badly the American government fucked up counter-terrorism and how 9/11 has been used as justification for the many atrocities the United States has committed in the aftermath. The collective preference appears to be putting a hand on the heart and playing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” on repeat instead of having an actual conversation about how the the USA PATRIOT Act was passed through Congress quickly, unchallenged, and basically unread, how Congress effectively declared war on a concept, or how American imperialism in the Middle East (via said war on a concept) has caused over one million deaths, many of which were innocent men, women, and children. Not to mention the various war crimes committed by U.S. military and intelligence over the duration of this conflict, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the damning information contained in the CIA torture report.
There appears to also be very little discussion that this reckless and violent response to 9/11 is the reason why the Islamic State exists.
The failure of post-9/11 counter-terrorism is the conversation we should be having, not giving each other “likes,” “re-tweets,” and uplifting comments about how our lives were changed while brushing our teeth. As I said above, the attacks were a tragedy. No one deserves to die like that, which is ultimately my point. No single person deserves to die via the violent hand of a terrorist state, whether it be Americans killed by the Taliban or swaths of the Middle Eastern population killed by the United States.
In the wake of 9/11, the American method of counter-terrorism became terrorism. This is what we should be discussing today, not how we were sitting on the shitter when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
