94. TWENTY YEARS LATER: What Is The Purpose of Remembering 9/11?

I have this theory about the Star Wars movies.  That they’re not actually as brilliant as their many fans presume.  Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy them myself, but the story of Episode IV is nothing more than the standard hero myth and subsequent movies have merely expanded endlessly on familiar themes.  My theory about why the love for Star Wars endures is this: when the movie first came out in 1977 its special effects were amazing and the lasers and light-sabres burned themselves into a young audience’s growing imagination.  Audiences mistook spectacle for something special.  In those days there was no home video to enable repeated viewing and the lingering power of the movie’s visual magic had to be remembered and misremembered for those unable to afford to see it again at the theatre.  The movie stuck with them.  It reached mythic proportions in their mind.

The theory comes from my own love of the equally over-rated movie, Ghostbusters.  Instead of light-sabres there were proton packs but the light show, a few years after the original Star Wars movie had cast its spell, was equally compelling.  Like Star Wars, Ghostbusters is a fine film, but the legendary status it enjoys today comes as much from us having watched it as children and mythologised its greatness as any objective argument about its quality.

And we children of the late seventies and early eighties grew up.  We told others about what we had seen.  About Star Wars, about Ghostbusters.  We showed these movies to our friends, our lovers, our children.  We gained positions of power and influence in the culture and declared our love for these iconic pictures, suggesting that those who didn’t share our admiration for them might have something wrong with them.  And so, over four decades since Star Wars first shot its celluloid lasers into our hearts and minds, we are still watching The Mandalorian on Disney + in 2021 and eagerly awaiting new content.  We are desperate to see the Covid-delayed Ghostbusters: Afterlife movie.  We are keeping the myth alive. We are making sure the world never forgets our favourite movies.

All of which brings me to last week’s memorial events for the terrorist attacks on the United States of America which occurred on September 11th, 2001.

My own memories of the day are impossible to shake.  I had only just left New York the week before, following my grandmother’s funeral.  My mother was still there, sorting through her things and finalising the estate.  I was at home, on the phone with a friend, when he told me something odd had happened in New York.  An idiot had flown a plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Centre.  I stuck on the TV to see and we both laughed about what a fool the pilot must be.  It was some stupid accident and they would be in deep, deep trouble.  And then a second plane hit the second tower and we realised that this was no accident, it was a planned attack.

Hanging up the phone we stared at our respective screens trying to make sense of what was happening.  As reports came in about a similar attack on the Pentagon, I had in mind the movie Independence Day and imagined attacks all over the world at various politically and economically significant locations.

Then the first tower fell.  

Live.  In front of our eyes.

Before that we’d seen some people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors, a last desperate hope of escape as they realised the fire exits were gone and it was either that or choke to death on the smoke of the burning building.  That was already horrible, but this - a whole building collapsing with so many still inside - was the worse thing I had ever seen.

Until the second tower fell soon after.

It is not said enough that on September 11th, 2001, a significant number of people around the world witnessed on live television the death of nearly three thousand people.  Seeing one person die would be considered a trauma.  Something requiring years of therapy.  Something from which we might never recover.  Who knows how many of the terrible events of the last twenty years are the result of a traumatised humanity who never got the professional help they needed to come to terms with what they saw when those towers fell?

I say all this to make clear that I have no illusions about the horror of 9/11.  There is no denying the awfulness of the event, nor that, for those who saw it, it will be forever etched into our minds.

However…

I have this thing about “never forget” and remembrance.  I always wonder what the real purpose of mawkish memorials are?

9/11 was a horrific tragedy…but…It is not the worse tragedy the world has ever seen.  COVID-19 has already killed more than double the number killed on 9/11 in America alone and politicians in the US and elsewhere have actively encouraged behaviours and policies which continue to allow that number to rise every day of the pandemic instead of preventing it.  The two major wars 9/11 sparked, in Afghanistan and Iraq, killed more than 9/11 did too.  What exactly are we remembering when we remember the dead of 9/11?  Are we remembering something important, or merely something shocking?  After all, many countries outside the West have experienced civilian casualties and obliterated buildings as a matter of course as a result of western bombing long before 9/11 and continued to experience such tragedies in the decades after.  Are we saying that these three thousand American deaths somehow more important than all the others around the world we fail to memorialise?

When I remember 9/11, once I shake away the shock, I remember how the actions of nineteen men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Lebanon somehow led to a twenty year war in a country which had nothing to do with the attack - Afghanistan.  A completely unjustifiable war, whose goals changed with the weather, from retaliation to nation building, and which, ultimately, as seen by the recent reboot of the Taliban and evacuation of western forces, failed.  I remember how the claim of a “war on terror” (formerly the war against terror, or TWAT), gave Presidents and Prime Ministers a blanket excuse to whisk away innocent civilians to black sites of rendition, to torture and humiliate them, to beat out false confessions from them, to send drones to parties to murder family members and children, to fabricate reasons to invade Iraq.  And I remember the consequences of all these acts, as predicted by intelligence briefing after intelligence briefing.  Retaliatory acts at home from people radicalised by the mistreatment of those they felt connected to around the world.  The 7/7 bombings in London.  People blowing up children at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.  Soldiers being slaughtered in the street.  That sad, predictable, awful, and avoidable legacy of 9/11.  Because I also remember how there were options at the time that might have prevented such outcomes.  A criminal investigation into Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the nineteen individual hijackers instead of waging war against an entire country.  Negotiating with the Taliban and providing them evidence of bin-Laden’s involvement instead of meeting their reasonable request for extradition evidence with bombs.  Taking people like bin Laden’s frustrations seriously long before it reached an act of terrorism and considering the wisdom of keeping US military bases on religiously significant Saudi land.  To remember 9/11 is to remember how violence begets violence and is never a serious answer for those genuinely interested in reducing conflict in the world.  The pathetic acts of nineteen brainwashed soldiers were matched only by the equally pathetic acts of whole armies of brainwashed soldiers dropping bombs on innocent people in futile obedient response.  And to remember 9/11 is to remember how careless reporting, lazy generalisations and a lack of decent religious education led to a rise in Islamophobia from which Muslims in Western countries continue to suffer to this day.

If we must remember 9/11, then we must ask the question of why?  Of what such remembering is for?  If it is simply to remember as an act of jingoistic propaganda - a memory of the day that “they” attacked “us”, a memory that “we” are never “safe” from the “threat” of terror, a memory that the world is full of “bad hombres” - then you can leave me out.  But if it is to remind us not to be fooled by spectacle again, that just because something big explodes on TV we should not allow our leaders to use it to drag us into illegitimate wars, put us under increased surveillance and violate countless laws under the guise of “homeland security”, then maybe I would see the use?  That when something like this happens we ought to look beyond simplistic fairytales of being hated for our freedoms and take a serious look at what we might have done to provoke such heinous attacks.  That sometimes those charged with keeping us safe commit acts that knowingly make the world more dangerous.  That Tony Blair and George W Bush should continue to be remembered as the war criminals that they are, and not rehabilitated as nostalgic talking heads whenever the Donald Trumps and Boris Johnsons we elected in our post-9/11 trauma get too much for us to bear.

9/11 was a massively important event in world history.  I don’t deny it. It was an event which changed the world.  But in its way its importance was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  From the moment it happened on live TV, we were being told that this was an event which we would never forget and must never forget.  There were larger tragedies before, and larger tragedies after.  Tragedies which occurred away from cameras, and to people in places deemed less significant than Manhattan’s thriving financial centre.  In its way, 9/11 was Star Wars.  An ancient wretchedness, familiar and banal, yet elevated beyond its station simply because it imprinted itself on our brains at an influential time with its novel spectacle of unforgettable visuals and steady series of sequels, stand-alones and spin-offs.  And as those of us traumatised by its horror and compelled by the memories grew up, we spoke of 9/11 to our friends, our lovers, our children.  We gained positions of power and influence in the culture and declared the importance of those iconic images, suggesting that those who didn’t share our admiration for them might have something wrong with them.  We repeated the mantra to never forget and in so doing we never did, never stopping to consider the distortions such venerated remembrance might bring.  The emptiness.  The history repeated and left unlearned. The light show which hoodwinked us into wars of shock and awe.

It’s been twenty years since 9/11 and still the world feels no more safe than it did that crisp September morning.  Until our remembering the attacks of that day make such attacks less likely instead of more, perhaps then it is time to either forget about, or learn about and critically consider 9/11 and our response to it, rather than blindly remember it and continue marching along to the same ill-considered narrative that was already harming us then, and has been harming us now for so long?

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.