Ron Unz | Unz Review
The twenty-fourth anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks passed with virtually no media attention this year, and that hardly surprised me.
However, I did discuss it to a limited extent in my own article last week, and in a couple of paragraphs I briefly summarized the enormous historic impact of those 2001 terrorist attacks:
During the last quarter-century, those attacks and their aftermath have entirely reshaped American society and our place in the world. Not only were they the greatest terrorist attack in all of human history, but they might have been greater in magnitude than the combined total of all such other terrorist attacks. Even that may severely understate their historic significance, given how dramatically they changed America and the rest of the world.
Three thousand Americans died that day and many billions of dollars of property were destroyed, but under Neocon influence the long series of American foreign wars set into motion cost our country many trillions of dollars and destroyed much of the Middle East, killing or displacing many millions of innocent civilians. The Patriot Act and other legislation severely restricted our own domestic civil liberties in ways that would have previously been considered unimaginable, and even something as simple as boarding a travel flight was completely transformed. Few events of the last one hundred years have had such a traumatic impact upon American society.
The passage of almost a full generation can easily reduce once huge stories to nearly forgotten ones, and I had originally expected media coverage to be minimal even under the best of circumstances. But this year, the sudden September 10th assassination of Charlie Kirk, the youthful 31-year-old CEO of Turning Point USA and one of America’s most influential conservative leaders, completely swept aside all other news stories during the days that followed.
Although I had only been minimally aware of Kirk and his activities, I soon learned that his popularity and stature had been enormous and he had been regarded as one of President Donald Trump’s most important political supporters. According to journalist Max Blumenthal, Kirk had been widely expected to eventually run for president, perhaps even as soon as the 2028 election. So in some respects his shocking, sudden death supposedly at the hands of a deranged lone gunman firing a rifle from a distance seemed to strongly echo aspects of the 1963 death of President John F. Kennedy, another charismatic, popular young political leader who had reached the White House at the age of 43, thus becoming the youngest president in American history.
As the 9/11 anniversary date approached, I’d originally expected it to be largely ignored by the media, and had planned to publish an article describing and bemoaning that situation.
Within a few years after the original 2001 attacks, the extremely suspicious aspects of the official 9/11 story presented by our government had inspired the creation of a large and energetic 9/11 Truth movement, which strongly challenged that narrative. But faced with the determined resistance of a bipartisan establishment and always ridiculed or ignored by the still overwhelmingly dominant mainstream media, that movement had gradually faded away over time, receiving less and less public attention, with its leading figures eventually departing the scene.
During the first decade or so after those 2001 events, I’d barely even been aware that anyone seriously disputed the official 9/11 narrative, and I’d paid little attention to the issue. But after eventually stumbling across a few anomalous items that suddenly kindled my suspicions, I had gradually discovered the strange, subterranean world of the 9/11 Truthers, whose extensive research findings I’d scarcely suspected. I later undertook an investigation of the topic, reading quite a number of the major books and convincing myself that those activists and researchers had made a strong, perhaps even a very compelling case that the story presented by the government was largely fraudulent.
No comments:
Post a Comment