9/11 And Covid-19 Have A Lot In Common

Protesters in Kabul December, 2021 demanding "Let us eat" and "Give us our frozen money" Source: Al Jazeera Photo: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

The demise of the U.S. empire is foretold by mass suffering in Afghanistan 20+ years after the unfortunate events of 9/11.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment.. 

-- Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coodinator, to the United Nations Security Council August, 2022 as reported in Al Jazeera.

$7,000,000,000 in Afghan government assets were frozen by the U.S. when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan amid a messy, embarrassing withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021. Now, in 2022, many nations have responded by going off the dollar, a process hastened by economic sanctions that have ramped up in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Sold as a humanitarian intervention, what was two decades of war in Afghanistan really about? 

Some things are best understood in retrospect.

That nearly 3,000 "Americans" (27 were actually foreign nationals) died in the World Trade Center was a fact repeated as often as the videos of both towers collapsing. Oh, and WTC Building 7 which collapsed 8 hours later. This magnitude of death was the pretext for going to war on Afghanistan which allegedly harbored the Saudi masterminds of the terrorist attack. Except it was Pakistan doing the harboring. But they have nuclear weapons, don't they?

The main things that 9/11 provided were an enormous spectacle to justify the endlessly profitable wars of imperial expansion for the U.S., sometimes doing business as NATO.

The other signficant thing that 9/11 provided cover for was the 300 page so-called Patriot Act which gutted constitutional rights of citizens and terrorists alike. Swiftly gutted them, and created the Department of Homeland Security and created ICE -- both of which we had gotten along without prior to 9/11.

A lot of torture happened after 9/11. No, not the torture of being an Afghan or Pakistani child trying to sleep while surveillance robots droned overhead 24/7 waiting to unleash their Hellfire missiles on your home. Torture in secret prisons and in the gulag known as Guantánamo which is on Cuba's territory without their consent.

Torture then led to persecution of torture whistleblowers. 

Persecution amounting torture of Chelsea Manning for refusing to reveal how she shared evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Persecution amounting to torture of Julian Assange for sharing evidence of U.S. and allied forces' war crimes and dirty financial dealings. 

Persecution of John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who blew the whistle on that agency's role in torture programs in 2007.

9/11 was used to justify war on Iraq via lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. Also bombing people in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. And justification to support Israel's brutalization of Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  

Source: Brown University, Watson Institute, Costs of War Project

9/11 was used to drive fossil fuel consumption and thus climate crisis.

Source: The Daily Times "Eagleton fifth-graders study 9/11" Sep. 10, 2016 

9/11 was used to produce a lot of canned curriculum that teachers are told they must use to inform kids that are not upset about 9/11. 

Becuase they were not even born when it happened.

And really, how much should they care about 9/11? Their young lives have been upended by a public health disaster, still rampaging out of control in the U.S. 

A disaster -- like 9/11 -- that many argue was at worst planned and at best allowed to happen. How has the Covid-19 disaster been used?

• To ramp up censorship and narrative management dramatically.
• To set groups in the U.S. against each other.
• To enrich the already wealthy.

Sound familiar?

Proxy War In Ukraine Has Unintended Consequences Corporate Press Are Hiding

Censored mural by Peter Seaton in Melbourne was immediately attacked by Ukranian officials in Australia for its message of shared humanity and the longing for peace. It used to depict Russian and Ukranian soldiers hugging, but has now been painted over.

I've written previously about the intense narrative control that is a key feature of the U.S./NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. As the military becomes an increasingly undesirable option for young people in the U.S. (currently only 9% would consider enlisting, according to Pentagon researchers) the pressure is on to make sure Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying in the imperial war to topple Russia.

This necessitates:

Lying about the progress of the war and repeatedly claiming Ukraine is "winning" when it is doing no such thing (former U.N. military expert Jacques Baud's current analysis of this is worth a read).

Promoting false claims about the Russian military shelling its own POW camp or the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Current headlines on Cold War propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe's website

Mischaracterizing the combatants, as Yale professor Timothy Snyder did recently in Foreign Affairs: "Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy." (Actually, Ukraine is resolutely undemocratic at this point in its history and maintains a "hit list" of everyone, including international rock stars, who doesn't support the official narrative -- while Putin's approval rating among Russians last month was over 80%.)

Coordinating messaging in corporate media internationally so that specific key words e.g. "unprovoked" are repeated ad nauseum without examination of copious evidence to the contrary.

Suppressing narratives in the alternative press and on social media (and, apparently, the sides of buildings) by canceling accounts, deleting archives, unleashing trolls, and shadow banning.

Intervening to squelch any attempt at peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

Source: TeleSUR "In Prague, 70,000 people took to the streets on Saturday [Sep 3] to protest against the sharp rise in energy prices and to demand a neutral position on the war in Ukraine. Photo: Twitter @oriolsabata"

Blaming Russia for the fact Europe is reeling from the effects of economic sanctions that cut off much of Europe's fuel supply -- for home heating, among other uses.

At a time when Russian pipeline gas supplies have been in free fall, the EU had no choice but to ramp up imports from the US at all costs, generating unprecedented profits for US gas suppliers, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Pushing the false claim that the Russian economy is in trouble after six months of war in Ukraine. In fact, the ruble has never been stronger while the nations of the world are abandoning the petrodollar like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And as of this week the € is trading below the US$, a two-decade low for that currency.

What's a U.S. taxpayer to do? 

Find some sources of reliable information (you can use many of the links above for that purpose), grow your own food, and diversify your heating fuels. Note that false narratives enrich weapons manufacturers, but will do little to keep you warm and fed this winter.