September 11: Five years later

Today is the fifth anniversary of September 11. There will be a whole lot of verbiage put forth into the blogosphere, spanning the gauntlet from blaming all Muslims for the attack, to blaming America for bringing it upon itself, to the idiotic 9/11 conspiracy mongers who will claim that George Bush and/or the Mossad were responsible for blowing up the towers or that the planes that hit the tower were remote controlled. (Who knows? Perhaps the Masons and the Illuminati were involved as well, all as part of a plan to produce the dreaded One World Government.) Given all this verbiage, I wasn't sure what, if anything, I should post today. Certainly, I find it very hard to believe that it's been five years. In some ways, it seems so acute, but in other ways it's already starting to seem like ancient history receding into the mists of time. It's through an odd quirk of fate that I actually now live close enough to New York City that I can get NYC media coverage. Consequently, my wife and I almost felt as though we were New Yorkers in the aftermath of the attack, and for the first week or so I spent pretty much every waking moment that I wasn't at work watching the news coverage. For a brief, shining moment, all the things that divided us as Americans seemed to melt away. We all knew that it couldn't last, but labored under the illusion that it would.

Consequently, I decided simply to repost an updated version of what I wrote last year. The reason is that there were some things that happened that day that, if you read this blog, may inform you a bit of how I came to be what I am today. Because there have been further developments in one of the aspects of last year's post, I will add notes where appropriate to let you know what has happened since. September 11 was without a doubt the worst single day in the history of the United States encompassed by my lifetime. It is our generation's Pearl Harbor. Although the attacks of September 11, 2001 did not precipitate our entry into a World War, their repercussions continue today and will likely continue for at least the few decades that I have left in my life. It has led to a war that we had to fight and one that we never should have started. Many things have changed, but much has not. Most frighteningly, the attacks have provided the pretext for the government to try to chisel away at our Constitutional freedoms. No doubt any government in power at the time of such an attack would have done this, as war always shifts the balance between state power and individual liberty towards the state, but this particular government has been frighteningly aggressive about claiming power for itself, all "to protect" us.

Recently, I saw the Oliver Stone movie World Trade Center. To my utter surprise, given who directed the film, the WTC vividly portrayed all that was good about that day: the heroism and self sacrifice of the rescue workers (people who, while everyone else was running away, ran into the mortally wounded towers), the desire of "regular" Americans to do whatever they could to help, and the coming together of people from diverse backgrounds. On this, the fifth anniversary of the attacks, I wish I knew how we could recapture that spirit again.

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The fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is upon us, and it seems odd to me. In one way, so much has happened since then, such as the invasion of Afghanistan (which I supported) and the war in Iraq (which I started out ambivalent about and then came to oppose), that sometimes the attacks seem like ancient history, distant and increasingly irrelevant. Yet, in another way, it seems like only yesterday that the horror of the images being beamed to the nation from New York and Washington were burning their way into my consciousness. Today, I'd like to reminisce a little, maybe ramble a little as one can only do in a blog, but with a purpose (I hope). Because on that day, I discovered online just how pervasive hatred of America was even before our invasion of Iraq, and, given how complacent I had been in retrospect, this revelation shocked me even more than my discovery of Holocaust denial eight years ago.

It was a Tuesday morning like any other Tuesday morning, except that the weather was spectacularly beautiful. It was a little after 9 AM were wrapping up our usual weekly Breast Cancer Conference, when a faculty member poked his head into the door of the conference room and informed us that apparently a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers and that there was a huge fire there. As the meeting was ending anyway, we all got up and headed over to the chemotherapy suite, where there were several televisions provided to help our cancer patients pass the time while they received their infusions, which for some of them could take 3 or more hours. There, the staff and patients were all riveted to the screens of every available TV. I gently muscled my way in and what met my eyes was far worse than anything I had expected. By this time, the second aircraft had hit the other World Trade Center tower, and enormous plumes of smoke and flame were pouring out of both towers. All of us remained riveted to the television, with only breaks to tend to the patients, as the chaotic news reports came in, with news of the Pentagon attack, news of the crash of the fourth plane in Pennsylvania, rumors of multiple other planes still in the air. I missed the fall of the first tower, but I was watching, jaw agape, when the second tower fell. I remember muttering intentionally loud enough to overhear something along the line of, "We have to get whatever fuckers did this," with a quivering rage greater than any I could remember every having experienced before. I think I knew then what people must have felt like when they learned of the Pearl Harbor attack; only in 1941 people couldn't watch it happening live on TV. I called my wife, who was not working that day, to see if she had turned on the TV yet and just to talk. I called my parents to let them know I was OK, even though I was many miles from the carnage.

It's easy to forget how chaotic the reports coming in were that morning, how full of rumors, how full of fear over planes unaccounted for, how difficult it was to know what was really going on. Given that our affiliated hospital is within helicopter range of Manhattan, we all assumed that we might be receiving casualties. The E.R. went on emergency footing; at the cancer center, we closed the chemotherapy suite and sent the patients home as soon as we could. Orders came down that no physician was allowed to leave. Not that any of us wanted to leave yet. We wanted to help if we could, if we were called upon. The rest of the day was a blur, as we scrambled to set up, and as others used the chemotherapy suite for an impromptu blood drive. We had more donors than we could deal with quickly.

Night fell, and the last college students from our University filtered out after having donated blood, it had become clear that no casualties were coming, and the reason was becoming increasingly obvious. There were so few survivors that local hospitals in Manhattan and just across the river could handle them. As the medical staff had still been asked to stay, I went back up to my office and listened to the news reports on the radio. I couldn't concentrate on doing any productive work; so I fired up my computer and browsed the Usenet newsgroup, alt.revisionism to kill some time until word came down from above that the medical staff could leave. I immediately came across a thread begun by an angry post entitled Who Blew Up the World Trade Centers and Pentagon? It wasn't long before I came across a post by a regular on the group, who said:

"Festivities"? Then unknown thousands of my countrymen had just been murdered in terrorist attacks, and this asshole was calling it "festivities" only three hours after the towers fell, as if it were a joke, a celebration? Suppressing the urge to respond immediately, I continued reading the thread, and came across this post by the same author in response to a comment calling him "beneath contempt" (a sentiment I thoroughly agreed with; this guy was and is scum):

I was flabbergasted. "A truly wonderful thing"? "Glorious day?" "May there be many others like it"? Here was a Brit who hated America so much that he was rejoicing in the deaths of thousands of us. Although I had become somewhat familiar with how much many Arabs and Palestinians hated the U.S., I had never seen such an intense hatred of the U.S. before coming from someone like this.

Time went by, and memory of the attacks became less intense. Then, earlier this year, I was reminded of this Usenet encounter when the Ward Churchill controversy arose. Ward Churchill, as you may recall, is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado who apparently had had a bit of his brain snacked on by the Hitler zombie, inspiring him to write an essay about the September 11 attacks that surfaced early this year and caused him no end of trouble, thanks to his referring to workers at the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." (NOTE: A university panel has since recommended that Ward Churchill be removed from his tenured position at the University of Colorado for plagiarism and other academic misconduct) His essay entitled Some People Push Back: On the Roosting of Chickens, written not long after the September 11 attacks, seemed to me to be an expansion of that Usenet post that I had seen mere hours after the attacks, so much so that I almost wondered if he was channeling that British Usenet poster. Consider this quote by Professor Churchill:

Or this quote referring to the civilians killed in the World Trade Center:

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

He went on to compare Americans to "good Germans" who supported Hitler's aggression, at least until the defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in January 1943. Sound familiar? Yes, it does sound a lot like that Usenet post I encountered that day four years ago, the one that turned my stomach. But what really caught my attention was the dichotomy between the two sources. You see, in marked contrast to Ward Churchill, the person whose post on September 11 churned my stomach was not a leftist, an aggrieved Native American, or an Arab. No, he was a British ultra-right wing white nationalist, Hitler apologist, and Holocaust denier named David Michael with whom I had been sparring in alt.revisionism for three or four years before. He had also admitted admitted involvement with the National Front and the British National Party in Britain and the Conservative Party, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, and Afrikaner Volksfront in South Africa. Michael's usual modus operandi was either to downplay the Holocaust as exaggerated or, failing that, to claim moral equivalency between the Nazis and the Allies because, according to him, the Allies did just as bad or worse. All the while he denied that he was an anti-Semite, even though he oozed contempt for Jews and blamed them for "exaggerating" the Holocaust. As an example of the sort of mindset David Michael was coming from, I quote one of his most infamous posts about National Socialism:

If that doesn't sound like Nazi apologia, I don't know what does. Michael seemed to be arguing that it was a bad thing that the Nazis lost the war and that democracy is not a good thing. The funny thing is, he would somehow manage to get all indignant any time anyone accused him of being a Nazi apologist.

As I first started to write this post many months ago, inspired by the Ward Churchill controversy, I still thought it odd that a leftist Native American "activist" could sound almost indistinguishable from a hard core British white nationalist Holocaust denier (who now calls himself a National Anarchist) in his contempt for America and its policies and that they could both argue that we "asked for" the September 11 attacks. [NOTE: David Michael's website no longer appears to exist, but, thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can get a flavor of his ramblings here.] I could fall back on the idea that the far left and the far right start to resemble each other as one moves away from the center as one explanation, but that doesn't seem to cover it, even though both Ward Churchill and David Michael used very similar imagery and language in their indictments of U.S. behavior. In the end, I think it doesn't necessarily boil down to whether one is left wing or right wing, but rather one's sense of victimization--and upon whom or what one blames for that victimization. As the world's only superpower, the U.S. represents a big fat target for blame for whatever goes wrong in the world--all too often deservedly so but also often not. Ward Churchill identifies with the victimization of Native Americans, even though he is probably not himself of Native American ancestry. Given the unfortunate history of how the U.S. has treated American Indians, it is not surprising that he would come to view the U.S. as a major source for evil in the world and behave accordingly. David Michael, who apparently lived in South Africa for a time, given his involvement with nationalist political groups there, seems to consider himself a victim of increasing liberalization that led to the loss of his privileged status as a white person as Apartheid ended. It is less clear to me why he would consider America to be a major source of his victimization, except that he seems to blame globalization and multiculturalism for his woes, and the U.S. is indeed at the heart of these. I also rather suspect that, as an anti-Communist, he still blames us for having aligned ourselves with Stalin to defeat the Nazis, rather than with the Nazis to defeat Stalin.

Although Churchill and Michael are generally nonviolent (although they appear to applaud violence against those they disapprove of), this same sense of victimization, whether justified, imagined, or exaggerated, very likely played a role in motivating the terrorists. I was not alone in being taken aback at the intensity of their hatred. Nor, I suspect, was I alone in being surprised by the number of our own fellow citizens who share a less homicidal version of that contempt and who, metaphorically speaking, spit on the victims of that attack by claiming that they deserved their horrible fate on that clear fall morning four years ago, as both Churchill and Michael have. Since adulthood, I had always recognized that my nation, as much as I love it, has done things throughout its history that did not even come close to living up to the lofty ideals expressed in our founding documents or the writings of our Founding Fathers, but I had always believed (and still believe) that, in the balance, the U.S. has been and is far more a force for good in the world than evil. Certainly, I've always viewed it as a good thing that we try to strive for those ideas, even though we often fail to live up to them. Maybe I was naïve or ignorant before, my contact with right wing Holocaust deniers notwithstanding, but 9/11 was a major wake-up call to me. Part of that wakeup call was the utter intensity of the hatred some have for us, to the point that some would be willing to commit suicide in order to commit mass murder of me or my countrymen and others like Ward Churchill, David Michael, and others willing to justify or even applaud that mass murder, representing it as "just" retribution for America's sins, both real and imagined. The second part of that wakeup call was that the hatred of and contempt for America doesn't just come from radical Islamicist or Jihadist beliefs, but can also arise from more conventional left wing and right wing radical ideologies in our very own country or in western Democracies. Paradoxically (or maybe not so paradoxically), whether this rhetoric comes from the right, the left, or from fundamentalist religious beliefs, it ends up sounding very much the same, and its results can be seen today in the empty site where two of the tallest buildings in the world once stood.