I read this really good book once. It was called The Looming Towers. See, I'm at the age where I was around to experience the 9/11 business. Not personally obviously, I wasn't in the plane or anything, but I remember it happening. I was a young man, I want to say around 12 or 13. I remember a pre-9/11 world, as a lot of other people do, but I was at that young age where I didn't really understand it. Why did it happen, what was going on, all of that. I assumed I didn't understand it because I was young and I didn't understand a lot of things. How does a television work etc. How can you take an entire albums worth of music and put it onto a big plastic disc with grooves cut out of it, and then spin it around fast enough for that music to come out of a big horn? That doesn't make any sense to me, and if that doesn't make sense then a bunch of terrorists hijacking some airplanes and flying them directly into two incredibly iconic American buildings didn't make sense either.
I mean, objectively it made sense. If you are terrorists and you wish to cause terror, then hijacking some planes and using them to cause an extreme amount of damage would fit that bill, and the repercussions of such a terror attack are still being felt today. Why did it happen, though? Like, why specifically would people want to do this to America? Nobody seemed to know, and I assumed that this was because all of the people I knew were also the same age I was, and thus had a similar knowledge level of how the world worked. They too did not have the life experiences necessary to be able to explain something like this.
As one gets older and looks back at this particularly dark part of history, however, one also realises that nobody at all really knew why this happened, regardless of age or experience. A common theory being bandied around was that the silly terrorists were from a country in 'the middle east' (many people failed to accurately describe exactly where they were from, because Geography is hard. There's like, more than 20 countries in the world, can you believe it?) and that they hated the western world and everything it represented, and THAT is why they attacked America. To send a message. A message that they liked things the way they liked it, and they would never fall into the kind of decadence and hedonism that America seemed to represent. This was the prevailing thought for a lot of people from 2001 to I would say roughly 2004 or 2005. It was a backwards society from somewhere in the middle east rallying against the more modern western world, and that part of the reason for the post 9/11 war was a fight between ideals. That we were defending our very way of life.
For reference, a common talking point that we still here today about immigrants from countries in 'the middle east' or more commonly 'muslim countries' is that if we let all of these people in, they will multiply more rapidly than the people who currently live here, and the immigrants will begin to outnumber the locals, they will bring their own customs and laws and ways with them, and we will all soon be living in some sort of bizarre backwards world where our ideals and our decadence is a thing of the past. If this sounds like bullshit, this is absolutely not. People will use this as an argument against immigration, and they have been doing it for a long time. A man showed me a video posted in 2016 about this very thing, about how given the trends and calculations the person in the video had made, in ten tears time Muslims and immigrants will significantly outnumber local residents. And here we are roughly ten years later and that has not turned out to be true, but lets forget this specific part of the argument for now.
My point was, the apparent argument for this tragedy happening was that there was a disagreement in ideals between the east and the west, but honestly that doesn't seem like a good reason to drive a bunch of planes into some buildings. I was still curious, and I am aware that a lot of the stuff that happened around 9/11 didn't add up, the following war for example. There was a big skirmish in Afghanistan, but was Afghanistan involved? There were a lot of questions, is my point, and there weren't a lot of answers.
So later on when I was supposed to be an adult, I read this book called The Looming Towers. This book explained a lot of what happened, and it has been a long time since I last read it and there is a lot of reading in there, so I can't remember every single specific thing, but there was one thing that did stand out to me about the whole thing. That thing is that this didn't just happen.
People thought that 9/11 happened because of a specific thing. An ideal, a command, whatever. It was not. It was YEARS of meddling by the United States into the middle east, not just in Afghanistan. The presence of the United States in the area was the problem. It wasn't just that America was trying to 'Americanize' the middle east (although in 2025 I am fed up of the Americanization of the world, McDonalds can fuck off. Just give me a regular ass burger restaurant), the problem was that America was meddling with affairs it had no business meddling with.
Post World War Two, the United States had a pretty consistent reputation of being fucking terrible when it comes to interfering in foreign affairs. Vietnam, Korea, Lebanon, the first Gulf War, there's a lot of mistakes, and there's a lot more that I haven't named. The United States, whether it knew it or not, was not building a lot of good faith with a lot of the world. There were a lot of issues and the United States were involved in all of them.
So why did 9/11 happen? In a roundabout way, it's because the United States of America got far too big for its boots, tried to overstretch itself and involve itself in issues it had no business being involved with, and over a long long period of time, this bad faith grew and festered and escalated to the point where some people thought they had to do something in response to the bullying and bumbling of the United States. So they hijacked some planes.
I'm not at all advocating for what happened on 9/11, obviously. It was a tragedy. My point is, it was avoidable. It didn't just happen, it didn't happen because some sort of perceived 'third world country' was jealous of the United States and wanted to bring them down a peg. This happened because the United States continually made this happened, and it was a matter of time before one or more of the countries it pissed off was going to do something about it.
As I was watching a news broadcast on the BBC about the United States idiotic bombing of Iran, someone asked the question 'How will Iran retaliate?'. I don't think that is the correct question to ask. The answer is obvious, to me. We know how they will react, with anger and resentment. They will react negatively to America once again puffing out its chest for no reason. The question to ask is 'WHEN will Iran retaliate', or more specifically 'WHEN will another country retaliate?'
9/11 caught people by surprise, and part of the reason it caught people by surprise was ignorance. They couldn't conceive why this would ever happen to their great nation. It's because they weren't paying attention to all the shit America was doing to the rest of the world. It wasn't a surprise to the people America had been bullying for decades. Either they didn't notice or they didn't know, but something like that was bound to happen, and it was completely avoidable.
So the reason I decided to write this very long rambly post was because I remember how history tends to repeat itself. 'How will Iran retaliate'? probably with a lot of anger, man. The world is watching, and people have long memories. There's only so much people can take before they fight back, especially when the person they are fighting back against is a blustery bully like Donald Trump. It is a matter of time, and the more enemies the United States makes the more tragic the next tragedy will be.
One final thing I would like to point out. Benjamin Netanyahu has been decrying Iran for their nuclear weapons. Israel and the United States retaliated against this, because of this threat. It should be noted that Netanyahu has been saying this for over a decade and Iran still hasn't made those nuclear weapons (see paragraph 4 of this ramble for reference. It's easy to say 'these guys are up to this bad thing!' and then to look back with hindsight and say determinately that they definitely aren't doing that. There is no evidence to say Iran was actually making nuclear weapons.). All that has happened is Netanyahu has played the easiest game of chess of all time by manipulating an idiot President in Donald Trump into doing something drastic under the pretence of doing something good.
Both the United States of America and Israel have access to and have built their own nuclear weapons, and both of these countries decided to attack another country under the pretence that they had nuclear weapons. Try to figure that out.
At the beginning of 2024 I remember staring out of the window, looking at the sunshine, and thinking what would happen if everything went wrong. I sat there, looking at the wonder of nature, and thought about what would happen if the United States were stupid enough to vote Donald Trump in for a second term. I sat there, watching the sun dance through the tree branches, and I comically thought to myself 'what if I only have a few of these days left?'.
It's less funny now that it's real.
