The annual 9/11 commemoration comment

September 11, 2020

19 years after the horrific September 11 ! We must never forget innocent individual victims of war and other violence.

But there is more to the day of September 11 and what has been the consequence of the US response to it.

On 9/11, 1906, the nonviolent movement led by Gandhi was born in South Africa — TFF Associate Chaiwat Satha-Anand wrote about it on The Transnational 15 years ago.

On 9/11, 1973, the coup d’etat in Chile took place with heavy US involvement, leading to the death of President Salvador Allende and the Pinochet dictatorship.

And on 9/11, 2001, targets in New York and Washington representing the economic, military and political power of the US Empire were hit, killing almost 3000 people (around 12% non-US citizens).

The US response was to initiate — with the attack on Afghanistan on “10/7” — the Global War On Terror.

According to a recent report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, here are some horrific data from the US post-9/11 wars;

1) 800,000 civilians and combatants have died directly from war operations since U.S. forces began fighting in several countries.

2) More than 3.1 million people have died as a result of disease and impoverishment caused by the US wars and the destruction of health care systems, employment, sanitation, and local infrastructures.

3) 37 million refugees were forced to flee their homes as economical, political or ethnic refugees.

How about a moment of reflection and prayer for these millions of ‘forgotten’ war on terror victims as well, and for other victims in many other human rights cases of abuse around the world, not all far away but also in your own backyards?

And where is the media attention to them? It seems that the morally indefensible distinction between worthy (Western/US) victims and unworthy (the rest) is still in vogue, thoughtlessly.

The major results of this, exceptionally counter-productive, war has been a vast increase in terrorism, a minimum of 37 million people displaced in 8 countries, countless dead and wounded people — innocent victims like those in New York and Washington but never commemorated, often not even reported. Remember “We don’t do body counts”…

In addition, the Global War of Terror has served as a major factor behind the decline of the US in the world — think factors such as legitimacy, leadership, trustworthiness and respect for international law.

Or, think the gigantic economic costs and hatred against the US — and think countries turning their backs to it.

TFF has published hundreds of articles and videos related to “9/11” and the Global War On Terror — you’ll find some of them here:

Major articles on the old and present homepage

Search “September 11”

Search “War on Terror”

Imagine instead…

• that the US/Bush administration had chosen to analyze why 9/11 happened and why those particular targets were hit,

• that they had then employed political and moral power instead of worldwide military mass-killing out of proportion to the event.

In other words, imagine how the US would have been compelled to think had it not had a worldwide military second to none that corrupted its mind.

Or, imagine…

• that the US had chosen to prioritize much larger domestic killers of US lives at the time — the roughly 30 000 deaths caused by revolver violence and the 300 000 deaths by obesity…

If that had been the road chosen — and quite a few of us proposed exactly that back then — the world and the US itself might likely have been a better place today.

And where are we standing today 9/11, 2020?

The US has declared a new enemy and is busy placing new ticking bombs… stimulating a new war-driven episode of instability with a potential risk for a new generation of innocent victims.