this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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How many of you are actually happy that people died? I think the memes are funny and I also agree with everything about the US and what it does to people around the world, but my outlook on the world isn't such that I'm glad when someone "evens the score".
I think it's worth correcting this. The people of the WTC were not just random innocent people. The tenants list of the towers was:
WTC1(North)
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - Randos
Marsh & McLennan Companies - Huge finance capitalist firm
Bank of America
Cantor Fitzgerald - Huge finance capitalist firm
Dai-Ichi Kangyo Group - A japanese Keiretsu (monopoly group) (more bastards)
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood - Law firm, primarily serving finance capitalists
Restaurant "Windows on the World" - Randos
WTC2(South)
Verizon - Randos
New York Stock Exchange - Finance capitalists
Morgan Stanley - Finance capitalists
Xerox Corporation - Randos
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods - Finance capitalists
Aon Corporation - Finance capitalist advisory firm
Fiduciary Trust Company International - Finance capitalists
WTC7
Salomon Smith Barney - Finance capitalists
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - Finance capitalist regulator
Standard Chartered Bank - Finance capitalists
U.S. Secret Service - Ghouls
My point here is that these were not random innocents that were attacked. This was a direct and targeted attack on the bourgeoisie. This was targeted directly at the ruling class of america and the response that occurred posing it as an "attack on america" was because the bourgeoisie consider themselves to be america and that any attack on them is an attack on the nation. Had this been a bombing against randos it would have been largely ignored, as you see with most bombings of random shopping centres etc. It was because it was an attack on the ruling class that it created such an extensive response from them.
95-97% of the people in a typical high finance office are working class or PMC people. The reason why finance is so lucrative is because it concentrated wealth so effectively. I know this because I was an IT guy in a very very high finance firm a long time ago - the vast majority of people are paper pushing schmucks and excel/PowerPoint contortionists and, like, 3-4 guys are partners or whatever and take the dough. And most of the times they're going to be at home or on a trip sipping martinis, possibly with clients. Another 4-12 people are going to be sharing a bit of the profits in exchange for overworking the rabble. It's a bit different nowadays since the quantitative finance people took over a lot of it and they only employ people that could work in tech but yeah traditional finance is mostly a PMC trap. The bourgeoisie is too smart to spend their life in a cubicle. At most there would maybe be the replaceable CEO.
This argument is like trying to claim cops are working class.
I was gonna say “IT professional for an admittedly evil corporation” is probably a bit too close to home for some PMC folks here to not identify with that position. But at the same time, every job I’ve ever quit has been because I learned about my employer taking on a client that rubbed me the wrong way. No bankers. No defense contractors. No government entities. No finance. Etc.
I know after a certain point it’s arbitrary but it helps me sleep and if I couldn’t code from home I’d just be going for disability, which has ludicrous restrictions in the US.
I never said working class. I said PMC. Ie, not bourgeois. Being a glorified excel formula or a janitor for a parasitic industry does not make you guilty and it's not equivalent to being a cop or a soldier. The class interests of those respectively are PMC and working class.
Fine. Change the line to "This argument is like trying to claim cops are PMC." then. Still has the same fucking point.
You keep harping on about janitors while completely ignoring the people actively managing and seeking better ways to hyper-exploit people around the world with their capital investments. Like get a fucking grip. Would you also behave this way if it was Wall Street that got hit? I suspect you would do exactly the same "Well accchhhtually they're mostly PMC and only the owners of firms were bourgeoisie" lark with them as well. It's fucking ridiculous.
The reason you keep bringing this back to the cleaners, the reason you keep stipulating them and not the others, is because deep down you fucking know they're not innocents, so you make sure to pick the people that are unambiguously the most innocent in the building.
I mean, an attack on any institution of capital will inevitably result in the deaths of working class people. These buildings require all sorts of support staff that I don't think deserve to be written off as collateral in the hypothetical revolution or in when discussing actual terrorism.
so everyone deserved 911
No. America Deserved 9/11
A direct and targeted attack? It terrified millions of working class NYCers what are you talking about? The majority of the people who actually made up the workforce of those firms wouldn't be bourgeois - someone who's job it was to copy data or answer the phone for the head honcho.
The ash cloud and debris field was damaging to a hell of a lot more than just a handful of rich people who you think deserved it (even if you support lining them up against a wall, I feel like that's different because it would come as part of a broader revolution and not be the outcome of an isolated terrorist attack).
Most attacks on malls don't kill upwards of 3000 people at once. Heck, some malls can't even hold that many inside them.
I'm not saying it was anticapitalist. I'm saying that failing to realise the target was chosen for what was in the buildings and not just because they're tall buildings is pure liberalism, and a view that liberals would love you to have because they absolutely don't want anyone questioning why finance capital would be the target when attacking america with the intent to provoke the reaction they achieved. Because any questioning of what finance capital actually does would lead people to realising the vast majority of these people weren't innocents and that would harm the entire propaganda party that ensued immediately afterwards about all those "poor innocent people who didn't deserve it" as part of the immediate consent manufacturing for the war on terror and axis of evil efforts.
You know that that's what every tall building is right? There's literally a whole thing about how skyscrapers basically exist for capitalism. They chose the WTC because that tall building in particular would be particularly terrifying to watch blow up and collapse for the rest ofnthe city (which you know, is mostly working class people, like everywhere else).
Even if every single person of the 3k who died in the WTC was a CEO or high-level management in finance capital, they still wouldn't deserve to die how they did. Even if I personally support lining them up against a wall, I don't cease caring about 9/11 because I want them dead anyways.
Now, in the real world, for every finance capitalist, there is a team of employees, paid hourly, who are not capitalists but are selling their ability to work for a wage like most of us. They were the majority of the people who died in 9/11.
No they fucking didn't. The "rest of the city" has absolutely no impact on decision-making, they are proles with zero power and zero impact on what direction the ruling class takes in foreign or domestic policy. This is nonsense idealism derived from having a sincere belief in liberal democracy.
I physically watched Grenfell burn, in front of my eyes, the whole city of London did. What came of that? Absolutely fuck all. Because it was a building full of proles. Literally nothing has happened over it, not even regulation changes. Zero. Because the ruling class doesn't want it. The notion you have that the average people of the city matter in decision making is fucking absurd.
I agree. They would deserve considerably worse.
Big time "soldiers are just selling their labour" and shouldn't be judged or wished death upon energy.
The people who died didn’t deserve to die but America deserved 9/11 does this make sense?
Also if you were going to pick a target with the highest percentage of people I don't feel bad about a skyscraper full of finance ghouls is a pretty good starting point.
Obviously feel bad about all the working class people required for those assholes to have cocaine and gin lunches bit I would say it is, on average, less tragic than most ways 3000 people could die.
Also worth remembering the plane that hit the pentagon and the one that was trying for the white house, both of which are fair game imo.
All the planes should have hit the pentagon
One plane for each side would have been cool
Rerouting all plane's autopilots for a day to a high-speed landing at Langley, as a bit
It was a terrorist attack on civilians. That's a tragedy no matter the surrounding context.
The surrounding context can give a different perspective on a tragedy, though. In the context of nurturing the conditions that produced 9/11, creating a civic religion around it, doing horrific war crimes as a response for the past 20 years, and then sweeping under the rug that month during the pandemic where we had a 9/11 every day, I find that humor is the best way to communicate "shit's crazy, man."
See also: school shootings, suicide.
It sucks that some average working class people died that day and in the aftermath years later thanks to the toxic asbestos that capitalists installed on those buildings. My condolences goes out to those people, they didn't deserve that, they were caught in the middle of the empire's blowback.
I don't think it's correct or good to accept the idea that the people there were innocents. Some were certainly, but the target was chosen because it was filled with the absolutely NOT innocent american bourgeoisie. Not just because it was a tall building.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3935238
The vast majority of people there were PMC at worst, not bourgeois.
If you don't consider the literal headquarters of finance capital to be guilty you are not judging things correctly.
The entire point of financial capital is that attacks against things like their headquarters mean nothing. That's not where they get their power. All you're going to do is murder replaceable cogs for no reason.
They didn't mean nothing though. That is demonstrably incorrect.
You are also applying a theory that is only supposed to be applied to the context of ending capitalism to the context of an attack that wasn't intended to do that.
If your goal is to hurt high finance then anticapitalist theories are correct, not salafism.
And of course it didn't mean nothing, it was a terrorist attack. It just wasn't any kind of remotely effective attack against finance or some bullshit like that, it was just an attack against the tallest building because what else would you attack with a plane. I'm not the one giving it meaning that the authors of the attack never gave it.
This is nonsense. Especially given that the Pentagon was hit and that's like 5 floors tall.
An attack against any other tall building wouldn't have provoked the reaction the US had to it because it wouldn't have been a targeted attack at the very people responsible for imperialism around the world. If you attacked a random residential building full of proles the ruling class would have shrugged, like they do when 2 or 3 of them collapsed last year and it was given literally no attention at all.
The reaction they had, dragging the US into multiple wars, signing off incredibly invasive laws that could be used for invasion of privacy, anti terror, etc etc. All of this came from the chosen targets of that day.
Stop talking about it as an attack on finance and start understanding it as a targeted attack to provoke a very intentional reaction from the american ruling class dragging it into a series of events that would lead to its decline.
The people that died on 9/11 were victims of US imperialism and it is a tragedy that they died. However 9/11 isn't about remembering the people that died, it's about the wound to America's pride created by the massive spectacle of the twin towers going down on national television. If America gave a shit about people dying we would have have a national day of mourning for Covid every year for at least the next 20 years, there were weeks when America had a 9/11 worth of people dying every single day. They don't matter because those people were dying in a hospital bed and there wasn't a spectacular wound to America's pride.
On the other hand, the people who worked in the CIA and the Pentagon were working directly to advance US imperialism and thus did deserve to get killed.
I still don't see why this is cause to act, even if ironically, happy about 3000 dead people. "America deserved 9/11," taken on its own and without additional context, sounds to me like it's saying that every one of those dead people deserved to die solely because they were within US borders at the time (because I think this is getting lost on many people, hundreds of the deaths weren't American).
Like, I find the way 9/11 is reified in our culture to be wrong, insulting even, to the memory of those who actually died in the attack. I think that a lot of the reaction to it from leftists though demonstrates the similar levels of ignorance. The Right wing wants framing of 9/11 to be "America vs. The Terrorists", but that ignores that the most immediate response from every country was to condemn the attacks and express support. It also reinforces their implicit definition of who an "American" is, when people talk about how the ensuing Islamophobia showed what America really was, by equating being born in the United States with being anti-Muslim, which I feel erases all the native-born Muslims in the US that have been here for years and generations.
Likewise, people here are acting like all 3k who died were all white investment bankers or venture capitalists and that the legacy "proves" how a nation of 300+ million people all uniformly out for the blood of Arabs.
That also ignores that there actually were lots of Americans who spoke against the fervor sweeping the country. Musicians used their platforms to criticize how the Bush Admin was using the tragedy. Comedians and talk show hosts lost their sponsors and backers. I was literally brought to an anti-war picket line as a kindergartener in '03 so that my mom would have enough evidence for me to be a conscientious objector in 20 years
Like, considering how many people in this thread are also probably American themselves, it's silly at best and counterproductive at worst to make "America deserved 9/11" anyone's actual public opinion.
Would you say this about phrases like "Atlanta deserved Sherman" or "Germany deserved to be bombed in WW2"? A great many innocent people died in both of those. If you think those are different, is it because they happened a long time ago or because they didn't involve a non-state actor? I personally don't see any difference between our style of 9/11 posting and the Sherman-posting that can be found outside our website.
The unfortunate reality is that those people are politically irrelevant. Nothing they said, did, or voted for mattered in the slightest for America's actions. There were abolitionists in the Confederacy and anti-war Germans in Nazi Germany but when we talk about these states we usually ignore them. We just talk about the states and what they did.
Your mom's pretty bad-ass.
You're right, it would be a deranged opinion to express in public. We're not in public though we're in a leftists space. "America deserved 9/11" is a thing we say to distinguish ourselves from the normal people that think 9/11 was the greatest tragedy in the entire world. It's also very difficult to make another short phrase that expresses our opinion on 9/11. Communication crushes nuance, you can refer to somebody that you've known for a few months as your "friend" and you could refer to somebody that you've known from high school in the same way. There's a massive gulf in how close you are but you the same word is used for both.
What do you call 2,000 dead businessmen? A good start.
More like a handful of businessmen and then hundreds of hourly wage employees sitting in front of computers or cleaning bathrooms and having no involvement in the operations of capital.
Did you forget that 1 wealthy person relies on the work of dozens to hundreds of proles? Or did you think they somehow didn't work in the WTC
This was not an office building in like iowa or something. This was the world trade center. It is safe to assume there were more evil business times there than average.
Even if you believe they deserved death, they deserved it through some sort of legal mechanism accountable to the people they harmed and not just one faction that also harms far more than the evil ones.
I mean, if I was bin laden I would have hit Disney World as well. Given how history has gone we can conclude that those actions have cut into the power of the american hegemony. So on a strictly mathematical sense it will be justified in history. I am not terribly interested as to how or why some magical hypothetical system we could create could have done it better.
If we were happy or not, why does that even matter? It doesn't change anything, we didn't contribute to it and America caused it through their foreign policy choices. Seems like kind of a pointless line of inquiry.
Only around 2-3k people died there, compared to millions from covid or millions we killed in Iraq and Syria, or tens of thousands dead annually in the US from lack of healthcare. Nobody freaks the fuck out and demands memorials for those deaths, so why are they deemed so much less important? Because it's not actually about the deaths, that's a smokescreen. It's about the wound to America's collective national ego, its self conception as untouchable master of the universe. That is the actual casualty of 9/11 that people mourn and cry about. Oh, and as another user pointed out, many of those 2-3k dead were cops and finance ghouls so of course we have to worship their sacrifice or whatever because Americans are bootlickers
I don't believe or agree with a perspective that treats human death like a numbers competition to see what the "real" or "actual" tragedy pr casualty is.
What is the threshold of human casualties that warrants public mourning? Why do you have to seperate out the ones who 'deserved' it in some way from the other people in that 3000 who were just IT workers, janitors, receptionists, etc?
Why should the tragedies of COVID or the millions of deaths in the war on terror cancel out the deaths of the people in the WTC?
Call me a simple person but I see or know about a traumatic experience being thrust upon bystanders and innocents, I am saddened. I don't start running some sort of mental calculus about how many people died vs other tragedies, or how the tragedy is being exploited in order to dismiss carnage.
In the real world, 9/11 lead to outpouring of sympathy in the short term. Iran and North Korea both condemned the attack. The US took that goodwill and spat in its face. If anything, that should be viewed as discrepctful to the citizens of several countries who died in the attack that their loss was used to justify the War on Terror.
It's pretty tragic for sure but what the usa did (and continues to do) afterwards is so fucking abhorrently evil and fucked up that I find it hard to care. It wasn't treated as a tragedy, it was another reason for imperialism with pretty much full support from everyone in the country. It just makes it really hard even give a small shit and it showed clearly how deeply unwell Americans are.
Everything that happened afterwards doesn't change what the trauma was like for the people who where in NYC when it happened. My emotions aren't as such that I can just dismiss how it must have felt to have actually seen the two planes hit the towers.
It's also not true that it had full support - it was like McCarthyism, you couldn't voice an opposing point lest you get branded a traitor and terrorist sympathiser, lose your job, and potentially make yourself or your family the target of the people going full Patriot Act.
It rubs me the wrong way when people bring up the ensuing war on terror whenever someone expresses sadness about 9/11, as if by mourning 3000 civilians in NYC takes away from a finite resource of emotions. I always feel like the implicit message that somshow 3000 dead Americans (and also citizens from like 100 other countries btw) are worth less than 3000 Iraqi lives out of the millions dead.
I get the US for what they deserved, but a lot of working class people died for the errors of the imperial military complex