9/11
Twenty years ago Susan Sontag said, Let’s mourn together, but let’s not get stupid together. Her advice has been, in the main, unheeded.
The frenzied myth-making following the September 11 terrorist attacks ramped up remarkably for the “Twentieth Anniversary.” We just witnessed an orgy of patriotic displays, memorials and testimonials, heart-wrenching personal stories—all of it deflecting, all of it silencing serious inquiry and analysis, or deeper reckoning and alternative conclusions.
Note: there are no testimonials from the victims of US wars; there are no memorials to those who died in twenty years of invasion and occupation; there are no heart-wrenching personal stories from those tortured in US secret prisons; there is no open accounting of the vast profits reaped by the war profiteers. There’s no mention, of course, of the anniversary of the “other 9/11,” the violent overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile by the US CIA in 1973.
Perhaps we are hearing and seeing all that we see and hear from the wrong side of imperialism.
Bill Ayers 