September 11

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 was 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 easy helicopter range of Manhattan, we all assumed that we might be receiving casualties. The E.R. went on emergency footing; 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 yet. 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 became clear that no casualties were coming, and the reason was becoming increasingly obvious. There were so few survivors that local hospitals 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. 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:

It seems manifestly obvious to anyone who surveys this afternoon's festivities that the primary targets were not the American people but the financial and military installations of those who spread murder, poverty, death and despair throughout the world.

"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 scum):

For many months now the government of America, with the backing of the British government and other lackeys around the world, has been directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of children in the Middle East. Sometimes your filthy friends dropped death from the skies in the form of bombs directed at the people of Iraq. Sometimes your fellow vermin in the American government sponsored other governments to do their murderous work for them, as has been the case with their support for the strutting war criminal Sharon in Israel. Sometimes you people starved your victims slowly to death, depriving them of medicines and other essentials, as has been the case not only in Iraq but also in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The difference is that we never heard about those deaths. We were not shown the pictures of smouldering buildings crumbling to the ground when they were Iraqi buildings. We did not see the bleeding bodies when they were the bodies of Iraqis. We were not allowed to hear the cries of the dying children of Afghanistan or Palestine. Those things were kept from our television screens. And because you kept it from our television screens, you kept it from the minds of our poor, betrayed people. Now, however, the chickens are coming home to roost. This afternoon a truly wonderful thing has happened: the oppressed of the earth have turned around and have shown that they do not have to be nature's eternal victims. They have shown that the poor, the downtrodden, and the powerless can strike back at the very heart of the dark forces that are oppressing them. This time it was not Palestinian children who cowered in fear as death came from the skies -- this time it was the very fat bankers and financiers who sustain the terroristic regime of Sharon. This time it was those very military men who mastermind the attacks on the women and children of Iraq. They thought they were so safe as they planned death and destruction from their comfortable offices in the Pentagon, and as they did their dirty deals in the World Trade Center. Now they have been given a bloody nose that they will never forget.

Today was a glorious day. May there be many others like it.

Death to American capitalism!

Death to international finance!

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." 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:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

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:

...National Socialism was a revolutionary movement that was based upon a wonderful dream. Forget the stories of corpses for a moment, and imagine a world very different from the world we inhabit today. Imagine a world free from the wars that have scarred the face of this tired old planet since the beginning of time; a world with no extreme poverty, with no disease, with no exploitation of worker by employer, no jolting financial crises (with the misery that such crises entail) -- a world united in a common purpose and a common vision. . . Imagine, if you will, a world where, through a process of artificial genetic selection, mankind has been enhanced to heights undreamed of: when, year by year, mere human beings grow ever closer to becoming gods. Think of the beauty of those people, of their art, their music, their literature. Think of their levels of culture, their humanity, their nobility. Now contrast this with the world that has been bequeathed to our children as a result of that needless and miserable world war. Just pick up a newspaper and look around you -- look at what your 'liberals' and your 'democrats' have left to them. Look at the dull-eyed teenagers, drugged to their eyeballs, staggering around bleak housing estates, their stereos blaring drum-beats! What do they know of the glories of a Bruckner symphony, or the heart-rending beauty of Nietzsche? What good have 'democracy' and 'liberalism' ever done for them? Answer me that! Look at Africa and Asia -- thousands upon thousands of square miles, characterized by war, starvation, famine, massacre, corruption, decay, filth. What good have 'freedom' and 'rights' ever done for the inhabitants of those miserable regions? Answer me that!

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. 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 deservedly. 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 the other way around.

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.

Never forget!