What Do You Tell Your Children About 9/11?

Detail from the graphic novel I Survived the attacks of September 11, 2001

The empire never stops churning out soft propaganda to make sure that the next generations in the U.S. are as confused about their government's wrongdoings as their forebears were. When do you tell your own children the truth? And how do you present it in terms they are able to understand?

I've previously mentioned the publishing company Scholastic which does a lot of the heavy lifting around selling pro-war, pro-imperialism narratives to young children. One of their mechanisms for infiltrating public schools is through book fairs, thoroughly commercial enterprises that reach right into publicly funded school time to sell kids on militarism with books that come with their own set of dog tags. Never too young to start thinking about being cannon fodder for the empire!

A Scholastic series that is very popular with a first grader I love is the I Survived series. Among historical fiction about a character who survives the great molasses flood in Boston or the shark attacks of 1916 we find the title: I SURVIVED THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

Consuming stories about peril like fairy tales or historical fiction is a way to process our fears as fragile human beings. Preying on this tendency in order to sell imperial narratives is a way to make money while serving the power structures that can make our lives prosperous or miserable.

But what to tell the children?

Australian mom Caitlin Johnstone wrote today: 

Humans have two adulthoods: the first is physical maturity, the second is intellectual maturity. The second adulthood is the process of learning that everything you were taught about the world in childhood is false, and discovering the truth of what’s really going on. The first adulthood is thrust upon us by nature and time, while the second is a conscious and deliberate process we choose for ourselves. All humans reach the first adulthood if they live long enough. Very few reach the second.

I prefer the discovery method of education but what is a reasonable response to the barrage of misinformation visited upon a typical American 1st grader?

Well friends, I came right out and said in response to many questions about the details of the 9/11 attack in New York City: Your own government caused 9/11. This news was received with skepticism (hooray!) and then I faced the fundamental pedagogical question, how best to support my claim for this audience?

I went with the amazing coincidence between what the event would come to be called and the three digit emergency services number that all in the U.S. had known for years: dial 911.

Still skeptical (hooray!).

Then I felt it only fair to protect my loved one who is still quite an innocent child by adding: If you say this at school, some people might get mad at you.

You may disagree with my choices. I had the benefit of a father who told me the hard truth about political realities long before most children were thought old enough to handle it. I think this accelerated what Johnstone calls the second adulthood. It's been a benefit in my life, not a curse.

What do you tell the children about 9/11?

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?