The Assholes Won

The sad legacy of September 11


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The Assholes Won
by Chris Hedges
14-Sep-2011
 

I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers.
 
I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.

Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.

The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live.  And we can die before we physically expire.

The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.

Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”

I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.

There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.

“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.

The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”

Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.

What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.

“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”

We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.

We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.

As Wordsworth wrote:

Action is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

First published in pacificfreepress.com.

AUTHOR
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. 


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Mohammad Alireza

This article by Chris Hedges

by Mohammad Alireza on

This article by Chris Hedges was not posted by him but by the editors of iranian.com.

His writings can also be found here:

http://www.commondreams.org/chris-hedges

The more the Iranian-American community becomes exposed to writers like Chris the better. Also, Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com, the Cockburn brothers at counterpunch.org, are worth a regular visit.

Why do I say this? Because I think many Iranian-Americans are not aware of the true nature of America and only see it on a superficial level.


maziar 58

.......

by maziar 58 on

If you're not in rush you can contact the editorials for that or the help section to register click(home ) on top once done with registering  its not as is as iranian.com but you will be able to do it or call them they can help you from there country code 31.

Maziar


amirparvizforsecularmonarchy

maziar 58, I posted a response there, but I couldn't create an

by amirparvizforsecularmonarchy on

account, each time i click nothing happens.  So I don't know how to create an account and contact him.

Any ideas,

Thanks,

Amir


maziar 58

Hedges

by maziar 58 on

amir khan

check  pacificfreepress.com

bottom of the page  the writers  type his name

will lead you to his articles and contact But you need to log-in to be able to send E-mail.

good luck                      Maziar


amirparvizforsecularmonarchy

Can anyone help me get the email address for Chris Hedges?

by amirparvizforsecularmonarchy on

Or a contact form or anything?

Thanks,

Amir Parviz


amirparvizforsecularmonarchy

Dear Chris I Feel Your Pain, sadly many are too brainwashed

by amirparvizforsecularmonarchy on

to know what you mean.

Your case is entirely missing the point of Motive by the US Govt and UK, why? It doesn't take too much research to discover say Iran before 1979 revolution used to get 75% share of income from it's sales of oil with ENI.  After the revolution and the imposition of fundamentalism by the usa &uk on Iranians via a coup in 1979, that number would change to 20% for Iran.  You mentioned Nationalism without explaining that it is a tool used by our leaders to pursue their interests.

If you could add the cold truth of over $10 Trillion Dollars of theft from the people of each of these societies, instead of Palestine, you would then be educating Americans for real.  As an answer to the question of why the USA and UK find it necessary to act in a way so as to increase fundamentalism & terrorism and steal the freedom of people in these countries.  The reason the USA will veto a Palestinian state and uses this issue to create/inspire the terrorist organizations is exactly because Iraqi Freedom was not the real agenda, infact Iraqi enslavement was the goal and will continue to be US Policy so long as people are kept in the dark regarding US imperialism, which I doubt any sane American would want.   

The real assholes use terrorism, nationalism etc that they are creating to steal peoples freedom, practice imperialism, militarize the world and lead us all towards a 3rd world war as these are all the exact same historical causes of ww1 and ww2.  We have learned nothing of history.


Jahanshah Javid

Thank you Chris Hedges

by Jahanshah Javid on

I couldn't agree more that war-mongers and prophets of hate and violence have been the main victors of 9/11. Freedom and democracy will never lose since they are the only hope people have for a normal life. Religion too will not lose to terrorism as there will always be people who need something to believe in other than humanity.

But one of the lessons from 9/11 ought to be that governments (no matter how democratic) and organized religion (Islam or any other) should never be trusted. Violence and murder can never be justified, under any guise, in the name of god or country.


Cost-of-Progress

Hey vatanam

by Cost-of-Progress on

you must not have a lot of technical knowledge to say what you said. There are a number of good technical papers out there describing the mechanics of how the towers came down.

If I find one on line, I'll post the link. Otherwise, I suggest you research it out for yourself. Conspiracy theories won't get you anywhere.

____________

IRAN FIRST

____________


VATANAM

Where is the proof that those camel rider arabs did it? Israel/

by VATANAM on

US had nothing to do with this? The plan to go to war was drawn before they even took office through a fraud election. Americans don't support invasion of other countries unless they feel unsafe at home. Did they find any bones/hair anything from those hijackers?

How could a building that is partially collapsed on the top floors force the building go down so straight, all columns collapsing simultaneously, as it was the best demoiltion job? There are just too many evidence to counter their claim acadamically if you have followed the evidence. There are evils out there called cheney the god-father! Without this there would be no occupasion of the middle east for the forseable future. Security of Israel and oil were the reasons that the whole thing happend. I truly feel very sad for all those who died or injured during this awful tragedy. This Bush/cheney devastated this country for many years to come, Hell is waiting them (if there is one).


Tavana

Of a disease....

by Tavana on

Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.

“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.

Does the above ring a bell with many IC's comrades???