Remembering 9/11

It’s not too difficult to find historical accounts of people who knew the world as it was before 1914, and the world as it was afterwards. They often say that it is impossible for later generations to really know what it was like in the before-time, before the war. The transformation had been so extensive that the old world was now essentially lost, if not entirely forgotten. Similar accounts exist for those who grew up in the roaring twenties, only to see their world ripped to ribbons by the clash of Bolshevism and National Socialism. They maintain that subsequent generations could never fully appreciate what the pre-war world was truly like. In fact, this sentiment can be found down through the millennia, for as long as men have been writing things down. They often wrote about how the world used to be good, peaceful and bountiful, only to suffer a collapse or devastation of one type or another, and how society was made afresh; the old world lost, living on only in the memories of those old enough to remember it.

I remember the pre-9/11 world. I remember it fondly. So fondly that I’m wary of falling victim to the above phenomena, allowing the last decades of the twentieth century to seem particularly optimistic and bright, set against the dark cloud of twenty-first-century terrorism and war. We must be careful not to think we are uniquely placed to witness a golden age followed swiftly by a type of civilisational collapse and decline. For that is the pattern of history, if there is one. Waves or cycles of peace and strife; from Gilgamesh to the Iliad, it’s the way it’s always been.

And yet, even bearing the above pitfall in mind, I cannot escape the feeling that historians will look back at the waning years of the twentieth century, and note that the waters were indeed remarkably calm. Between the Berlin Wall falling in 1989 and that clear blue day in 2001, despite isolated pockets of unpleasantness, there was largely peace in the world. Long and bitter wars which touched the households of untold millions were a thing of the past; giant acts of terrorism involving commercial airliners or the streets of New York were strictly reserved for Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis movies.  

Watching a number of 9/11 documentaries on the telly this week, and reliving that day, to some small degree, I have been struck by a number of different memories and emotions. Apart from the obligatory and unavoidable disgust and anger, I find myself returning to two particular avenues of thought. The first I have already articulated, about the pre-9/11 world and how that day was a fulcrum upon which the history of Man undoubtedly pivoted. The second set of feelings, which I just can’t seem to shake, and perhaps never will, is the impression of just how surreal the whole thing seemed, both at the time, and even now all these years later. A frightful, nagging, dreadful feeling. A sense, somewhere usually kept deep down inside, a ghastly sense that sometimes creeps up on me when I might least expect it, a monstrous sense that the whole thing was a little too surreal. That someone somewhere was using the east coast of America - and indeed the whole world - as a giant stage upon which to play out their spectacular drama, the inescapable feeling that what we witnessed was in some hellish way being stage-managed far beyond the reach and abilities of the hijackers. 

To recount my personal and completely unremarkable experience of that day I will have to date myself precisely. I have very recently turned forty, and so, on that day in September 2001 I was a fresh faced twenty year old Classics student. I was supposed to attend a lecture or a seminar that particular Tuesday, but not only had I not bothered, I was still in bed, sleeping off an extremely late night. A friend of mine who worked in an office called my Nokia 3210 to ask me to turn my telly on, as he’d heard a plane had accidentally crashed into a building in New York. It was 2001, remember, my friend could not just stream news channels from his desk, and apparently there was no television in his office. So, bleary eyed, I turned on the cube-shaped, ten-inch TV in my room, and there on the screen was the most shocking thing I think I had ever seen. It was a replay - only minutes later did I discover it was a replay, and thought I was watching a live feed - of United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the South Tower and exploding in a fireball; the North Tower already scarred and smoking.

It’s difficult, now, to express how shocking it was. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened. It’s difficult to explain to those too young to remember quite how iconic those two towers were. Their very silhouette was a thing of national pride. The old New York skyline was printed and reprinted everywhere; easily the most iconic skyline in the world. Those two towers were New York. You don’t see that skyline reproduced anymore. It has lost the thing that made it instantly recognisable.

And beyond that, the events were shocking because of their audacity. The sheer scale of what was happening was difficult to fathom. More and more news just kept pouring in of further attacks. The Pentagon, they had attacked The Pentagon. Surreal. This was really stuff straight out of a rushed Tom Clancy novel. It couldn’t really be happening. And yet it was. The news just kept going. There was talk for hours and hours that planes were going to fly into the White House or the Capitol building, maybe even Wall Street.

It was shocking and disturbing on another level too, in the same kind of why the Zapruder footage is disturbing (the footage of John Kennedy’s assassination), because after the immediate wide-eyed spectacle of it had passed, after the initial snap of unreality, when selfishness and self-preservation return to your mind, it becomes clear that they could do that to you. It could have been you on one of those planes, or working in one of those buildings. If they are prepared to incinerate whole floors worth of companies like Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bank of America, then they wouldn’t think twice about ending you and everyone you knew… If they could shoot President Kennedy in plain sight, no one was safe. That’s what it said, that’s what it screamed. You’re all targets.

Twenty years later it might sound naive to think that this realisation was new to most in the West. The scourge of Islam was unknown; really largely unknown. Islam practically never impacted day-to-day life. Most people couldn’t tell the difference between a Sihk and a Muslim. Men like Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network were remote and inconsequential things. Afghan Mujahideen were only in boring BBC2 documentaries and that one Rambo film. How had they possibly achieved such a set of incredible attacks?

It certainly was curious. Strange, even. Incongruous. As I say, something almost too surreal about it all, like a ghoulish type of show was being put on for the cameras. I certainly remember watching the coverage that day, and seeing and hearing some curious things. I distinctly remember the breaking news that Mohammed Atta’s passport had been found on the street very close to ground zero. Odd. I remember watching Paul Bremer being interviewed just hours after the collapses, and confidently telling everyone that it was Bin Laden and his evil-doers. He seemed very confident in his theory. Eerily confident.

Over those coming hours, and even days, the curiosities only seemed to mount. The clarity of exactly what had occurred on that day never seemed to fully reveal itself, not to my personal satisfaction anyway. Many unexplained elements which Wiki and the intelligence services are adamant about calling ‘conspiracy theories’, still remain unresolved.

There was the curious case of Flight 93 and the strange ‘crash site’ in Pennsylvania. There was the curious case of building 7 and Lucky Larry’s opportune insurance policy. There was the curious case of the Pentagon’s security cameras not working as well as expected. There was the curious case of something molten pouring from the towers and reports of lots more molten steel in the basement and footprint of the collapsed towers. That’s strange, isn’t it? What about the curious case of ground zero not being forensically studied and all the steel spirited away and recycled. How about the curious case of the 9/11 commission completely failing to address vital questions. And there still is, of course, the curious case of so-called ‘truthers’ being roundly stigmatised and ridiculed and largely silenced. All very suspicious… Even here, now, I must bite my tongue and vail the depths of my suspicions, lest the globalist establishment turn their Eye of Sauron in this direction.

A terrible, terrible crime was committed against civilisation itself that day. The full ramifications of which are still playing out. Much like the JFK assassination, unfortunately, it seems as though there are vested interests who don’t want the full undiluted truth to emerge. September the eleventh is a nasty boil that just won’t heal. It is scar tissue whose blemishes will never disappear. It is a wound whose trauma can only be assuaged by truth; the one salve which has still not yet been applied.