Twenty Five Years of Hate?

It's the twenty fifth anniversary of 9/11.  Or, if you are one of those crazy conspiracy theorists, the twenty fifth anniversary of either a 'false flag' operation by the US government, or a colossal hoax that fooled the world.  But, assuming that what we all saw on TV that day actually did happen and actually was a terror attack, what does it all mean a quarter of a century on?  Well, for one thing, it heralded twenty five years of global de-stabilisation, as the US thrashed around, blindly trying to strike back at nebulous enemies and gain some kind of 'revenge'.  Having never experienced large scale terror attacks on its territory, they had no idea how to respond and instead acted as if nobody had ever suffered this sort of thing before and that therefore nobody else had any advice to give.  Which meant that the measured sorts of response to terrorist attacks that the UK and Europe had employed up until then weren't even considered and instead we had ill advised and illogical invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Neither of which achieved much in the short term and in the long term have proven disastrous, both for the citizens of those countries and for global stability.  9/11 also ushered in a new age of xenophobia, the mistrust, hatred even, of 'the other' - be that 'otherness' cultural or simply having a different to skin tone to 'us'.   

It is this fear of 'the other' which lies at the heart of so many consequent disasters, from Brexit to the US' current literal war on immigrants.  It has fuelled the rise of the extreme right in the US and across Europe - if not for 9/11, I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't have had last weekend's disturbing scenes of black clad, masked, neo-Nazi thugs on our streets trying to harass and intimidate both immigrants and asylum seekers and branding the RNLI 'traitors' for simply doing their jobs.  The Twin Towers were the catalyst for legitimising this sort of hatred.  Or, if you prefer, it represented the lighting of a very long fuse that eventually led to normalisation of extremists like Farage and 'Tommy Robinson'.   Not to mention, in the US, Trump, in Germany the AfD, in France Le Pen and so on.  One could even argue that the US' actions in invading Afghanistan and Iraq of very flimsy 'self defence' pretexts, provided Russia with inspiration for its war in Ukraine, justified on similar grounds.  So, the bastards who flew those planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have a lot to answer for, except, of course, that by ensuring that theirs was a suicide mission, they've evaded any responsibility, with US instead wildly striking out at various proxy targets.  They're still at it today, pushing fuel prices to the point where I'm being forced to consider taking my car off of the road until sanity returns, with their continuing senseless war against 'the other', in thise, Iran.  Ironically, Saudi Arabia remains (just) a US ally, despite the fact that those 9/11cguys were, actually, Saudis, backed by Saudi money...