The Fault Lines of 9/11

Atlantic Centurion
September 11, 2016

I remember 9/11. It’s not something you forget. It traumatized an entire country for months, but how people reacted to it then and interpret it now is probably the world’s most macabre Rorschach test. What did it all mean? What had happened? What was happening? What was going to happen next? Why? How people who lived through 9/11 answer these questions and whatever consensus is ultimately ironed out to be fed to future generations is of no small importance. 9/11, more than any other event in US history since the Civil War, will be the ever present past for a long time to come.

I remember 9/11. Had it happened a few years earlier I might have been made an orphan. I was in grade school at the time. Our principal made a vague announcement and we were all herded out of our classrooms to be picked up by our parents. Most of us were able to go home with them. And what a process that was. Outside the sky was burning, as those incomprehensible, supernaturally gigantic Twin Towers you’d seen almost every day during your brief lifetime were now returning to the earth in the most brutal way possible. It was like watching the fireworks on Independence Day just a few months earlier; you could see them from the street.

2001 was a time before social media, before camera phones and spontaneous photography. One reason why so many of the images taken of 9/11 are such high quality is because only professional photographers really had their cameras handy, or enthusiasts who owned and knew how to use them. The rest of us didn’t really need to take pictures anyway though. No one who witnessed 9/11 saw it in passing. They stood there in awe of something incomprehensible, like they were witnessing the gods striking the earth. I can still picture the stillness of the streets as people watched the skyline. Gone was the bustling hive of activity and commerce. It was as if they’d all been nailed to the floor, with their eyes glued to the fire.

Like any good Americans, we turned our television set on when we got home. The kind with the big floppy antennae. We didn’t have anything fancy and we weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Of course, there were some technical difficulties since most television programming had been broadcast from the top of the World Trade Center until a few hours earlier. The Empire State Building, the former crown of the Manhattan skyline, was now picking up the slack. And the only thing on television for weeks, the only thing anyone could really watch in earnest, was endless footage of the Twin Towers burning, of planes flying into them, of heaps of smokdering rubble and billowing smoke, of emergency personnel responding to the disaster. That was television. All of it. That great anchor of the American home now drowned us in a different kind of surrealism than usual.

For most people in this country, 9/11 was a television screen or a newspaper. For the city dweller, it was all of those things all the time because nothing else was available, and then it played out all over again when you went outside. There was no barrier between the outside world and the inside—not even the five keys needed to get into your apartment could alleviate the impact of what we soon learned was “terrorism.”

I didn’t have any paradigms to look at 9/11 through. I was too young to have a political consciousness. For the rest of the country and its leaders, things were quite different. Men enlisted in the armed forces, without any clear foe to fight. Irate patriots fumed against the attack on “our soil,” though many of these people lived far from Ground Zero and ordinarily had no love for New York. As it became clear that the immediate perpetrators were Saudi nationals, a few turned to violent reprisals against Arabs (or people who were mistaken for Arabs), which led to the growth of the insidious Muslim/Arab ethno-religious lobby we now have today. President George W. Bush, who had previously referred to Islam as a religion of peace and did not renege on this, maintained our anti-white immigration policies which since 1965 had allowed the growth of a substantial Muslim population among other things. Today it numbers several million. Bush’s (((neoconservative))) courtiers used the anger and bloodlust of the American people to push through two wasteful wars that offered us no advantages and sparked a mass migration of Muslims to Europe.

On the other side of the aisle were, and remain, those who sympathized with the aggressor. We shouldn’t have bombed x or invaded y. This was “blowback,” as if for some reason that was a valid theory for explaining these things. No, only in the deracinated West do you have a fifth column representing every foreign country in your own country. But this wasn’t even country-to-country warfare. It was a clash of civilizations, but only bigots think in terms of identity so our cultural marxist comissars assured us. The West was the best because it was open to the rest.

9/11 changed a lot of things about American society. But obviously, it didn’t provoke the reaction necessary to right the ship. Symbols of globalism were knocked down by the consequences of globalism, but as a country we did not listen. Americans came together to defend our shopping malls, our freedoms, and our diversity. 15 years later we are still debating whether or not making the United States more Muslim as a percentage each year is a good idea. The 2016 election is a referendum on whether or not we hand the Empire over to the third world permanently—the economy, the nuclear arsenal, the land, the resources, all of it. If it comes to pass, the Islamic jihad against the United States will have been superfluous, and our conflict remembered as a curiousity of history.

On one side are the third worldists, for whom no person of color can be morally wrong. These wretched of the earth have legitimate claims against the White race and whenever they act out on them, it is our fault. They have every right to enter our countries, live off our taxes, and displace us from our national nests. And if they blow us up and large numbers of them support blowing us up, that’s because of our racism. Our failure to integrate them. Our original sin.

And on the other side is a reviled coalition of nativists and nationalists, wicked people who are just paranoid and bigoted over the loss of their power and place in society.

I mean who would be bothered by that, right? 

It’s like getting worked up over 9/11.

You being bothered by violence against your community is really just an expression of your own insecurity over feeling threatened by violence against your community.

You fucking White male.