https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/09/how-9-11-exposed-the-depths-of-western-self-loathing/
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are being confronted once again, on news broadcasts, in documentaries and online, with that footage. With the images of those planes striking the Twin Towers, of survivors covered in blood and dust, of heroic first responders saving the lives they could amid unimaginable carnage. It still shakes us to this day. But amid all the acts of commemoration and remembrance one thing risks getting lost. That in the wake of that act of barbarism, an attack not just on New York and DC but on the West and what it stands for, there were many members of the British intelligentsia who, after the dust settled, were struck with more or less the same thought: maybe America brought this on itself.
Just two days after an attack that claimed almost 3,000 innocent lives, it fell to the Guardian’s Seumas Milne to say the quiet part out loud. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline. He laid blame for the carnage on the ills of American foreign policy, on its ‘unabashed national egotism and arrogance’. ‘If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming’, he thundered. ‘Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority [of Americans] might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.’
Veteran British leftist Tariq Ali, in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, continued in this vein. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back’, he wrote. 9/11 confirmed in his mind the ‘universal truth that… slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters’. As spiked’s Mick Hume noted at the time, the well-to-do, Western-educated Saudis who largely carried out 9/11 made for unlikely imperial subjects – and the firefighters and office workers who perished made for unlikely stand-ins for American imperialism. But Ali didn’t let these facts dent his analysis. He didn’t celebrate the attacks, of course, but he did suggest they were all but inevitable. If anything, we should expect more ‘blowback’.
In the London Review of Books a month after the Twin Towers fell, classicist Mary Beard captured what she saw as the prevailing mood. ‘[W]hen the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in’, she wrote. One of these reactions being that, ‘however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.’ There was an outcry in response to her comments, as many people, perhaps understandably, took this to mean that Beard herself thought America ‘had it coming’. She later clarified her point in a Guardian interview in 2007: ‘I wasn’t saying those people deserved to die, but simply that there was a connection, or people perceived a connection, between American geopolitics and what had happened.’
