September 11 Friday roundup

The latest podcast episode explores how twenty-first century authoritarians are nostalgic for the symbols and violence of their predecessors, but the common thread today is the global demonization of immigrants. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

So many people are writing about 9/11 today on the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks. I’ve described that day in the newsletter a little before—explaining what it was like being in Northern Virginia and DC in the midst of it all. But today, I want to address another aspect of that tragedy, one that relates more directly to the present day.

People under thirty, or maybe even forty, may not have been following events enough in their youth to remember that the Bush administration had been made aware back in 2001 that a terror attack using American airplanes was in the planning. Even all these years later, it’s painful to contemplate what might have been prevented: the thousands of deaths a quarter-century ago today; the use of international support in the aftermath to launch wars, create black sites, and commit torture around the world; and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Recent reports from Haaretz inspired a similar agony, as readers learned that not only was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in advance about the attacks that took place October 7, 2023, but the warning had come to him from a UAE official who had been told directly by a Hamas official. The paper further reported that the Israeli government ceded its hostages to the terrorists very early on. From the beginning, the official response seemed to prioritize slaughter and revenge.

These shocking discoveries don’t confirm the countless conspiracy theories about 9/11 or 10/7. Instead, the conclusions they imply feel somehow worse. No conspiracy was necessary. There was no grand plan by those with the most power to deceive the public by staging an attack. Officials’ arrogant negligence and failure to listen or do their jobs simply allowed terrorists to kill at will.

In both cases, the much greater violence unleashed in the aftermath of terror attacks destabilized the world and led to the death of civilians, including countless women and children. And it’s both an American and a global tradition to look back after horrific government overreaction, waving cruelty and even crimes away by saying “everyone panicked” or “no one knew it could go so wrong.”

In my experience looking at history, however, this is rarely the case. Again and again, not only were contingents of people speaking up at crucial moments, standing against the deep harm that specific government policies or institutions would inflict, but they often predicted exactly the outcomes that would follow.

An early example of such harm was the decision to maintain chattel slavery at the founding of the United States. Many of the Founders were well aware of how damaging it was but moved forward, despite an abolition movement among settlers in North America beginning nearly a century before before the Revolution.

Another example is the first concentration camps, imposed by Spain on its then-territory of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Arsenio Martínez Campos, in charge of Spanish forces, believed that removing and reconcentrating the rural population behind barbed wire and fortifications might be the only way to defeat the rebels. But even then, he understood that to do so would lead to “horrible misery and hunger.” To his credit, Martínez Campos resigned, but his replacement instituted reconcentración, bringing modern concentration camps into the world and leading to the deaths of more than 150,000 people.

I remember talking to my grandfather decades ago. He had served as a navigator during World War II in Asia, and that service had been the high point of his life. I once asked him about the tragedy of Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. citizens—being herded into detention camps during the conflict. He gave me a longer version of the “we panicked” story, explaining that no one knew it was wrong at the time.

And my grandfather might have been sincere in his belief, but U.S. Naval Intelligence, along with many key members of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, had understood perfectly that it would be a mistake and perhaps even a risk to create concentration camps for Japanese Americans. They proceeded anyway, due to political pressure.

The trend holds right up to the present. After the October 7 attack, President Biden went to Israel, and in a public speech, compared the aftermath of that tragedy to 9/11. He understood the rage that Israelis felt, he said, but also told his listeners, “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.” He said the United States had made mistakes in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers.

Joe Biden was far from devoted to Palestinian safety, and would end up prioritizing and supplying the very rage-filled massacres he went to Israel to warn against eleven days after the attack. Yet he knew, and told Netanyahu, with neither of them heeding his words.

The older I get, the more I learn that public memory is a fleeting thing. It has to be maintained and protected. People don’t learn permanent lessons.

Why bring all this up on 9/11? To point to the next obvious tragedies, crises we’re all aware of, ones that are already underway, but which are being met with negligent non-responses or outright dismissal by people in power far more often than not.

This 9/11, I would ask you to remember the ethnic cleansing led by an administration that currently prioritizes admitting white immigrants only, and has only gotten started on removing millions of brown and black people from the country—overwhelmingly vulnerable people not even charged with crimes. I would ask you to consider the degree to which by creating punitive laws in red states and threatening hospitals in blue states, the government and its lackeys are working hard to make it impossible to exist as a trans person in much of the United States.

When someone like U.S. Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico caves to demands that he will vow to support the discrimination and the denial of rights to a community that just had those rights taken away, it is not some fringe hypothetical about a debate over something abstract (even if is presented in bad faith within a dishonest frame). He is participating in rearranging deck chairs on the next disaster, which has already begun. You don’t have to be at the helm of the ship to harm others.

I don’t know anyone who supports trans rights who would rather have a monster like Ken Paxton than Talarico in the U.S. Senate. But I also think it’s clear enough what’s happening that those who wish to be our leaders shouldn’t go along with it. The biggest danger is when you pretend you don’t see what’s going on—that nobody warned you. You leave all the bad actors free to persecute others.

Looking back at 9/11, I can remember how, at first, the day seemed terrible enough that I though it would loom over every national disaster of my adult life. But really, the first heartbreaking tragedy is only the beginning. And the greater the number of people who don’t see what they don’t want to—or refuse to acknowledge what’s inconvenient—the more devastating the aftermath will be.

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