Some Notes on 9/11
Apart from the existence of the World Trade Center and thousands of people, nothing will be different.
Twenty-two years later, only conservatives commemorate 9/11. The day of unexplained evil for North Americans and Western Europeans. A day of constant vigilance for East Asians. The day of vengeance for Islamists. The day of nefarious setups for conspiracy theorists.
For the rest, the day is fading with time. Al Qaeda is history. New Yorkers have other 99 other problems. It’s been two decades. Bin Laden himself supposedly picked 11th September to avenge the Ottoman’s defeat in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, an event lost in history even for the average Viennese.
For the Left, it’s wrong to commemorate 9/11. The day was the beginning of violence and racism against Muslims and even South Asians, mistaken as Arabs for their beards and outfits. It was the beginning of American neo-imperialism, not just against Afghanistan and Iraq but also against the whole Islamic world. More innocents died in Iraq than in New York City.
Even in a few years after 2001, the Left had invoked another September 11, the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. The memory of 1973 works two ways: One, it’s more important for the activist Left than for everyone else, despite global awareness of the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in October 1998. Second, there’s an implication that 11 September 2001 is a karma payback for 11 September 1973. Obviously, Osama bin Laden killed communists in Afghanistan, but the real villain here is American imperialism, whether its opponent was a South American socialist or a Saudi warlord.
When Osama Alive
In the 20th century, I grew up worrying about Islamism, Islam as a conservative political ideology. Not just other Christians or Chinese Indonesians worried about it, many Muslims did too. Indonesian Islamism had evolved from an anti-communist force in the 1980s into a post-Cold War moral force in three ways: Islamism proved that Muslim natives could be as smart, hardworking, and cosmopolitan as the Christian Chinese. Islamism safeguarded society against Western and Oriental vices – gambling, alcoholism, pornography, and secularism. Finally, Islamism foiled ethnic Chinese (to this day, many Islamists are Japanophiles) and American capitalism.
Osama bin Laden supposedly hated the Americans, his former allies in Afghanistan, after Riyadh picked them to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein instead of his warriors. He had declared war against the United States throughout the 1990s, but neither he nor anyone else could stop American domination in everything. The Pacific became a new Silk Road, connecting Western and Eastern wealth and cultures, hence why Al Qaeda intended to bomb a dozen airlines over the Pacific, besides killing both Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, Islamism also couldn’t stop neoliberalism in Southeast Asia. Our governments weren’t free, but we had access to everything: ESPN, MTV, the World Wide Web, and visas to Australia and France. It was a party until 2 July 1997, the day the Asian Financial Crisis began.
Six months later, the party continued in the West, while Asia struggled with unemployment, suicides, bankruptcy, and social breakdown. In Indonesia, anti-Chinese riots had begun years earlier and culminated in May 1998. In the worst scenario, Islamist generals and politicians would replace Suharto as the new regime, and a copy of Bosnia or Rwanda in Indonesia wasn’t out of the question. Al Qaeda, after failing to prompt the Algerian GIA to strike terror during the football World Cup in France, resorted to bombing American embassies in eastern Africa.
But the worst had passed in 1999. The crisis was decelerating, Indonesia became a liberal democracy, and Islamism couldn’t convert its influence into political power. Religious conflicts appeared just in poorer eastern Indonesia, the Wallacean Line of Islamic and Christian trade routes.
Then came 2000, when Al Qaeda struck again in Yemen and then bombed dozens of churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve. To this day the Christmas Eve Bombings are still understudied, even in Singapore and Australia. But for Al Qaeda, it’s a smaller scope compared to the failed Bojinka plot. Bin Laden and his Pakistani lieutenants never expressed their hate for Asians, but they certainly wanted Asian blood in their hands. Interestingly, in 1997 Ramzi Yousef even mentioned American bombings in Japan and Vietnam as justifications for his bombing plans.
I went to Australia with the grudges of May 98 and the Christmas Eve Bombings. I wanted to know what drove Al Qaeda to mass murders and pure hatred. Meanwhile, on 11 September 2000, I encountered a major protest unthinkable in Southeast Asia, an anti-globalisation protest. White affluent students spoke up against labour exploitation in Asia, against international institutions (especially the World Economic Forum), and everything else, likely while carrying the Australian Aboriginal flag too. I watched Asian employees of McDonald’s sweeping glasses cracked by white Australians richer than they were.
When the morning of 12 September 2001 arrived, I woke up hoping it was just a nightmare. Everybody did. But it was real life. Thousands died, and all global cities were on high alert. The New York City of Friends and You’ve Got Mail would never be the same again. The world would never be the same again.
The United States brought back the Taliban regime just in a month but as feared, bin Laden escaped to Pakistan. Salman Rushdie told Americans and Westerners to keep eating bacon and kissing in public. Some suburban dumbasses abused a Sikh bus driver or a Hindu matron. Japanese singers wanted to know the meaning of peace. Christmas 2001 was a sombre one worldwide.
Order seemed to return in 2002. Russia had its own terrorism problems, the Indonesian crises were over, and everyone begrudgingly accepted the extra security checks when traveling. Al Qaeda’s ally Jemaah Islamiyah bombed Bali in 2002, killing more Australians than Americans.
Then in March 2003, the United States inexplicably invaded Iraq, with support from the United Kingdom and Australia. Only a few people respect the American neoconservatives today, including Republicans. They failed to renew the American century, but ironically by toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq, they fulfilled bin Laden’s demand to leave Saudi Arabia.
Iraq would become the dying place for almost five thousand Americans, but it is no longer a security threat to its neighbours – Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the decade of bombings went on, even without the master plan of bin Laden. All the suicide bombers, whether in London or Casablanca, were the same: young men seeking a meaningful end to their self-hate and chronic hatred for the Europeans.
Amy Chua, a Chinese-American lawyer, got her big break with her book World on Fire, arguing that hatred for the market-dominant minority is responsible for the murder of her aunt in Manila, the May 98 riots, and all the way to 9/11, as the Americans are the world’s market-dominant minority. For years I held my paperback copy as a bible. This sister saw me, and this sister explained what happened.
After Osama
Ten years after 9/11, the United States pinpointed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani military town and killed him. Amy Chua had become the infamous Tiger Mom. If China had beaten America in economy and social cohesion, would Chinese American mothers like her also top European American mothers? Whose children would run Harvard and Kaiser Permanente?
And yet the spectre of terrorism went on in the 2010s, from the Islamic State in the Syrian Desert to senseless attacks in Sydney, Paris, and Jakarta. Knives and guns had replaced bombs as the instrument of death. America never recovered from 9/11.
How could Al Qaeda end the American Peace in a day? What happened after 12 September 2001 wasn’t bin Laden’s plan. Supposedly he wished to provoke the United States to invade Afghanistan and repeat his mujaheddin glory. But he’s not responsible for the invasion of Iraq, for the Iraqi militia who were poised to kill everyone outside their clans, for the rise of the Islamic State, for the failure of an HRC presidency, and for the current culture wars.
What would have happened had 9/11 been foiled? Had the CIA and FBI cooperated better, or had alarms been raised in the airports before the departures (an Airplane! joke from 1980 says securities will get a white elderly woman first before some Arab men strapped with bombs and guns)?
The World Trade Center would still stand, and thousands were still alive, but how would the Bush administration respond? Launching some Tomahawk missiles or invading Afghanistan? Would the invasion of Iraq go ahead in 2003? If so, the path of history would remain the same, in a world without “9/11”. The Taliban still rules Afghanistan whatever happens, and the United States and China are still in a cold war, beset with their own problems.
Now millions of Westerners share the same hatred for Jews, for America, and for Christianity the way bin Laden did. He is nobody’s martyr, and yet he opened the 21st century into the anti-American century. 22 years later, commemorating 9/11 doesn’t bring Americans together, but like everything else, is a political statement.