Even if you believe they deserved death, they deserved it through some sort of legal mechanism accountable to the people they harmed and not just one faction that also harms far more than the evil ones.
GivingEuropeASpook
joined 1 year ago
I'm saying that failing to realise the target was chosen for what was in the buildings and not just because they're tall buildings is pure liberalism,
You know that that's what every tall building is right? There's literally a whole thing about how skyscrapers basically exist for capitalism. They chose the WTC because that tall building in particular would be particularly terrifying to watch blow up and collapse for the rest ofnthe city (which you know, is mostly working class people, like everywhere else).
any questioning of what finance capital actually does would lead people to realising the vast majority of these people weren't innocents
Even if every single person of the 3k who died in the WTC was a CEO or high-level management in finance capital, they still wouldn't deserve to die how they did. Even if I personally support lining them up against a wall, I don't cease caring about 9/11 because I want them dead anyways.
Now, in the real world, for every finance capitalist, there is a team of employees, paid hourly, who are not capitalists but are selling their ability to work for a wage like most of us. They were the majority of the people who died in 9/11.
More like a handful of businessmen and then hundreds of hourly wage employees sitting in front of computers or cleaning bathrooms and having no involvement in the operations of capital.
Did you forget that 1 wealthy person relies on the work of dozens to hundreds of proles? Or did you think they somehow didn't work in the WTC
However 9/11 isn't about remembering the people that died, it's about the wound to America's pride created by the massive spectacle of the twin towers going down on national television.
I still don't see why this is cause to act, even if ironically, happy about 3000 dead people. "America deserved 9/11," taken on its own and without additional context, sounds to me like it's saying that every one of those dead people deserved to die solely because they were within US borders at the time (because I think this is getting lost on many people, hundreds of the deaths weren't American).
Like, I find the way 9/11 is reified in our culture to be wrong, insulting even, to the memory of those who actually died in the attack. I think that a lot of the reaction to it from leftists though demonstrates the similar levels of ignorance. The Right wing wants framing of 9/11 to be "America vs. The Terrorists", but that ignores that the most immediate response from every country was to condemn the attacks and express support. It also reinforces their implicit definition of who an "American" is, when people talk about how the ensuing Islamophobia showed what America really was, by equating being born in the United States with being anti-Muslim, which I feel erases all the native-born Muslims in the US that have been here for years and generations.
Likewise, people here are acting like all 3k who died were all white investment bankers or venture capitalists and that the legacy "proves" how a nation of 300+ million people all uniformly out for the blood of Arabs.
That also ignores that there actually were lots of Americans who spoke against the fervor sweeping the country. Musicians used their platforms to criticize how the Bush Admin was using the tragedy. Comedians and talk show hosts lost their sponsors and backers. I was literally brought to an anti-war picket line as a kindergartener in '03 so that my mom would have enough evidence for me to be a conscientious objector in 20 years
Like, considering how many people in this thread are also probably American themselves, it's silly at best and counterproductive at worst to make "America deserved 9/11" anyone's actual public opinion.
I mean, an attack on any institution of capital will inevitably result in the deaths of working class people. These buildings require all sorts of support staff that I don't think deserve to be written off as collateral in the hypothetical revolution or in when discussing actual terrorism.
I don't believe or agree with a perspective that treats human death like a numbers competition to see what the "real" or "actual" tragedy pr casualty is.
What is the threshold of human casualties that warrants public mourning? Why do you have to seperate out the ones who 'deserved' it in some way from the other people in that 3000 who were just IT workers, janitors, receptionists, etc?
Why should the tragedies of COVID or the millions of deaths in the war on terror cancel out the deaths of the people in the WTC?
Call me a simple person but I see or know about a traumatic experience being thrust upon bystanders and innocents, I am saddened. I don't start running some sort of mental calculus about how many people died vs other tragedies, or how the tragedy is being exploited in order to dismiss carnage.
In the real world, 9/11 lead to outpouring of sympathy in the short term. Iran and North Korea both condemned the attack. The US took that goodwill and spat in its face. If anything, that should be viewed as discrepctful to the citizens of several countries who died in the attack that their loss was used to justify the War on Terror.
A direct and targeted attack? It terrified millions of working class NYCers what are you talking about? The majority of the people who actually made up the workforce of those firms wouldn't be bourgeois - someone who's job it was to copy data or answer the phone for the head honcho.
The ash cloud and debris field was damaging to a hell of a lot more than just a handful of rich people who you think deserved it (even if you support lining them up against a wall, I feel like that's different because it would come as part of a broader revolution and not be the outcome of an isolated terrorist attack).
Most attacks on malls don't kill upwards of 3000 people at once. Heck, some malls can't even hold that many inside them.
Everything that happened afterwards doesn't change what the trauma was like for the people who where in NYC when it happened. My emotions aren't as such that I can just dismiss how it must have felt to have actually seen the two planes hit the towers.
It's also not true that it had full support - it was like McCarthyism, you couldn't voice an opposing point lest you get branded a traitor and terrorist sympathiser, lose your job, and potentially make yourself or your family the target of the people going full Patriot Act.
It rubs me the wrong way when people bring up the ensuing war on terror whenever someone expresses sadness about 9/11, as if by mourning 3000 civilians in NYC takes away from a finite resource of emotions. I always feel like the implicit message that somshow 3000 dead Americans (and also citizens from like 100 other countries btw) are worth less than 3000 Iraqi lives out of the millions dead.
How many of you are actually happy that people died? I think the memes are funny and I also agree with everything about the US and what it does to people around the world, but my outlook on the world isn't such that I'm glad when someone "evens the score".
Lies! I went outside and I saw a poster about CLIMATE CHANGE, and then I turned the corner and heard a family complaining about minimum wage being too low! So unfair, I just want to be ignorant of other people's suffering.
2023 and we're still calling things our spirit animals eh?
Al Jazeera's coverage is where it's at