Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers and Washington D.C. and where we are today.

 

Today will be widely marked as the 25th Anniversary of Al Queda's attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and attempted attack on the White House and Pentagon.

This blog existed at the time, but it was very inactive.  Indeed, most of the posts that are found in the 2001 section of this blog were posted, actually, in 2026 and then moved back to that date as they track historical events in sequence.  At that time my computer time was devoted to a forum on cavalry topics.

I'm not going to go into huge depth on the topic.  It's 25 years ago but seems like yesterday in a lot of ways to me, but at the same time it must be noted how much time has passed. The country really rose to the occasion, and then starting in the 2010s betrayed itself massively, showing that history isn't written at the onset, but the conclusion.  I've written a prior partial introspection on the event here:

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

Al-Qaeda is of course the entity that made the assault.  It was, and remains, a radical Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization who seek to restore an Islamic Caliphate.  Various caliphates have existed since Muhammed, but the last anyone could claim that one existed was in 1924. That year the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the caliphate that was claimed by the Ottomans dissolved with it.  Like all such larger empires, it'd had grown fairly icky, and nobody would want to restore an empire of that type.  Al-Qaeda has more of a hardcore Sunni empire in mind.

The organization was founded in 1988 with that goal in mind and the intent to use violence to bring it about.  Contrary to what some people like to claim, forcing a goal such as this is common in Islam.  Islam itself was forced upon the Middle East by violent expansion. At the time of Muhammed, the Middle East was well in the process of becoming an entirely Catholic region of the globe, although large populations of pagans and Jews lived throughout the region.  The extent to which Muhammed founded a religion that would mirror Islam today is quite debated, and frankly there are quite strong reasons to believe his original religious views were significantly different from modern Islam's.  It seems fairly evident that Muhammed was influenced by his first wife, Khadija, who was either Catholic or Coptic.  While Muslims hate the idea, and therefore reject it, his much older wife (she was 40, he was 25, when they married) had one daughter who clearly was Catholic and was married to a Catholic..  Muhammed also was influenced by an uncle of hers who seems to have been a Nestorian priest as well as Catholic monks.

Like a lot of would be religious reformers, he seems to have started off pretty conventional, to the extent we can tell, and then basically justified his own vices through his claim to be a prophet.  He'd adopt polygamy and clearly had an eye for women.  This extended right down to minors as the youngest female he married, Aisha, was only six years old at the time and was nine when he first had sex with her.  Fully sanctioning armed expansion of his faith by that time, he seems to have justified taking sex slaves in order to satiate the lust of his troops who were complaining about being away from their wives.

All this sounds gross, and it is, but it's not really unique.  Other would be Christian leaders have gone off the rails along these lines as well, sort of, with Joseph Smith perhaps being the best example of a conventional American lay preacher who founded his own religion.

Anyhow, in Islam there's no separation really between the faith and government. There's also no one real head, and the divisions within the faith are gigantic.  It's never been the case that all Muslims have accepted one religious or secular ruler, but Al Qaeda would force that, which is why, in spite of American confusion on the issue, Al Qaeda has no support in Shi'a cultures, including the one we're presenting loosing a war to.

The rise of Al Qaeda in general reflects an odd event that the end of the Cold War helped bring about.  In 1992 Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History arguing that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

He was way off the mark.

Indeed, what Fukuyama, and darned near everyone else, failed to realize that that the Cold War had resulted in the suppression, some voluntary, some not, of hardcore, non liberal, conservatism, everywhere.  In the Middle East much of the regions underground, and above ground, political forces had been completely secular.  Communist parties and movements were strong. The Baath Party was a fascist party.  There wasn't a single country in the Middle East that took the took the thought of an Islamic state seriously until the Islamic Revolution installed a theocracy, to everyone's surprise, in Iran in 1979, which was thought to be a freakish exception attributable to Shia, which is a minority millennialism branch of the faith.

But the end of the Cold Wat took the lid off of such forces everywhere. They were there all along, but with the threat of Communism gone, and the support of the USSR ended, very conservative religious forces emerged and began to threaten the stability of Islamic states, and for that matter non Islamic ones.  Indeed, the US is going through such a struggle right now with millennialist Evangelical conservatism.

Al Qaeda's complaint with the United States is and has always been significantly different than Iran's.  What Al Qaeda objected to was the presence of U.S. military forces in the region, which it regarded as intolerable and a sort of religious defilement.  

On February 26, 1993 Islamic terrorists, some with connections to Al Qaeda, attempted to blow down the World Trade Center, something that seems to now be completely forgotten.  In October 2000 Al Qaeda itself attacked the USS Cole. After that action, it was ready to try something more bold.

By that time the organization was hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan, having effectively been driven out of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was ruled then, as it once again is due to Trump's surrender, by the Sunni Taliban, which was at that time engaged in a civil war against more moderate forces.

The concept, which was inept, was that attacking the towers (again) would destroy the U.S. economy and attacking the Pentagon and the White House would decapitate the U.S. government.

Of course, that didn't occur.

We could play out the conventional history from there, but we'll large omit it.  The US and its Allies went to war in Afghanistan, and mistakenly in Iraq.  The Baath government was defeated in Iraq, which now has a shaky democracy.  A long war in Afghanistan more or less defeated Al Qaeda there, but the American people grew tired of the long protracted was there and betrayed the Afghanis, with Donald Trump surrendering to the Taliban.

A budding civil war is developing there.  As we've often stated here, wars change everything, and the wars this sparked are no exception.  

The US overreacted to what was effectively a criminal assault on the US by converting it into sort of a global war.  Domestically the US government consolidated agencies into the Naziesque named Department of Homeland Defense, creating a sort of permanent war time footing where it did not need to exist.  It acclimated itself to the use of the military, and intelligence organizations, in extra legal operations.  "First Responders", in the form of firemen and policemen, were regarded as heros, legitimately, with their occupations, along with that of veterans, to go on and receive hagiographic treatment, which is not good at all.

An entire generation of Americans have grown up thinking this is normal.  First 

And the structure and atmosphere that created set up a condition in which a rogue President could use that force in a way that no Cold War era President ever could.

After World War One strong empires ruled by hereditary families supported by ultra conservative forces fell.  In some countries, the war brought about more liberal governments, which an expansion of democracy.  In others, it brought about radical right and left wing governments.  

Al Qaeda did not bring about a caliphate as a result of September 11, 2001.  It did succeed, however, in making the world worse.  The US can pull out of its own descent into fundamentalism, but the question is whether it will or not.

Friday, July 5, 1946. Introduction of the bikini.

French engineer and fashion designer Louis Réard revealed the first modern bikini, modeled by Micheline Bernardini, at a the Piscine Molitor in Paris. 

Louis Réard had been unable to find a fashion model to wear the two piece barely there swimwear, which he'd renamed for the location of the American atomic tests earlier that week, so he hired Bernardini, who was an 18 year old nude dancer.  She later moved to Australia, but reprised the photo shoot at age 58.

The scandalous nature of the swimsuit is somewhat misunderstood. Two piece women's swimsuits had been on the market since the 1930s.  The popular thesis that the scandal had something to do with merely being two piece is in error, as is the myth that the upper garment, not the lower, created the scandal.  It was actually the latter, as the waste line of the bikini was dropped down so that the naval was exposed, which was not the case with earlier two piece suits.  Réard received thousands of supporting letters, mostly from men.

Regarding the pool, the title character of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi is named after the Piscine Molitor.

While we have often died the decline into sexual immorality in the west to the December 1953 introduction of Playboy, this does demonstrate that the antecedents of that had been going on for some time, and were accelerating post World War Two.  Even the very first bikini, worn on this day, effectively left nothing for the imagination.  Current ones are effectively being nude in public without getting arrested.

July 5 is National Bikini Day.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 4, 1946. Philippine Independence.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Concentration camps, Harry S. Truman, India, It was because of World War Two, Judaism, Philippines, Poland, Racism, The Holocaust, Truman Administration, War Crimes

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 132nd Edition. Voting with their feet

For the first time in US history, more Americans are moving to Europe than the other way around.

Indeed, European immigration to the US is at historic lows.  US emigration is at historic highs.

Why?

Simple, the US has become a dumpster fire.  It's no longer really a democracy but a semi democracy presently ruled by an insane (if we don't assume worst) megalomaniac who is destroying the economy.  We look like uneducated morons, which a lot of us actually seem to be.  There are absolutely no positive indicators which the US tops the charts at.  We are the 23d happiest country on the planet.  Finland, Iceland, and Denmark are the first three.  We cling to obsolete signs of greatness, such as refusing to have a national health care system and having a tax system that grossly under taxes Americans and funds a government that benefits us little, while people like Reid Rasner campaign for even lower taxes.  We've gone from being a country that had nearly no military to having one that has a bloated military that serves an insane President.

What's not to love?

Well, there is the country, but that involves being realistic, which will get you accused of being a left winger (which should not in and of itself be regarded as an insult) by insufferable twat waffles like Chuck Gray.

We are really due for an overhaul.

Ironically, the orange buffoon destroying the White House probably helps show us the way on this.  He's shown us where we have massive institutional defects.  And he's taken us off the global map as a great power and made us a second rate one.  Part of our descent into ignorance was a legacy of what was then a noble Cold War response to things, including a big military and governments that meddled bigly.  

Now we are going to have to dance to the tune of others, but the good thing is that the others are adults.

To progress at all, which doesn't mean a return to high immigration or anything of that sort, we're really going to have to get back into education, which people like the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and other right wing zealots hate.  Better to be dumb is their default position.

Better to be smart, and educated, and face our problems honestly.

And the sooner the better.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 131st Edition. Ballroom Blitz

Labels: 2020s, 2025 White House Vandalization, 2026, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, The Second Trump Administration, White House Correspondence Dinner Assassination Attempt 2020s, Zeitgeist

A 2025 Independence Day reflection.

I wasn't going to post a July 4th item this year, as I frankly feel pretty pessimistic about the state of the country.  But after reading some, I thought I ought to.

Independence Day marks, of course, the day 249 years ago when the Continental Congress declared the United States to be independent of the United Kingdom, which had founded the colonies.  It took over a year of pitched combat for Congress to reach that point.  What's really important about it, however, is not so much that the United Colonies declared independence from the mother country, but that it did it democratically and formed a democratic republic immediately.  Indeed, the country was acting as a democratic republic before it actually formed one officially.

From the very onset, the United States was a democracy.  I'll occasionally hear somebody who doesn't grasp that or understand it say "we're not a democracy, we're a republic".  That statements, which indeed was made by our serving Congress woman, shows a lack of understanding on what a democracy and a republic are.  We most definitely are a democracy, and always have been.

The initial structure of the country that was arrived upon by the founders of the country featured a very strong congress and a phenomenally weak president.  The US Constitution, it should be noted, is the country's second, not first, constitution.  The first one that featured that structure was the Articles of Confederation  It was John Hanson, not George Washington, who fulfilled the role of President at first.

The Articles didn't work well, but notable in them is that right from the onset the country was that, a country.  Some people will also occasionally claim that at first we were thirteen countries. That's nonsense.  We were, in fact, a putative country even before the Declaration of Independence, with the initial hope being that the country would be a union of fourteen, not thirteen, colonies.  The reluctance of the Quebecois to throw in with the virulently protestant colonies to their sound quashed that dream, with it setting the continuing tone that Canada wants nothing to do with being in the United States of America.  Nothing.

The Constitution of the US set us on an ongoing path which gives real concern to conservatives such as myself.  Right from the debate on the document there was a struggle between those who wanted to retain a weak national government and strong state governments.  States were, in fact, amazingly unrestrained in their powers early on.  In contrast, there were those who wanted a strong federal government and weak state governments.  The Federalist position, which was the more practical and realistic, ultimately won out, and it would have no matter what.  Even those who opposed Federalism found that they used its powers by necessity when they were in power.

That created, however, a structure in which the country converted the President of the Congress into the President of the United States.  Lacking a king, but remembering the model, the President occupied a position that vaguely recalled the monarch, in contrast to the British example in which the chief executive of the nation was and is a member of Parliament.  This worked well for a very long time, but it did put the US in a situation in which there existed a real possibility of a slow transfer of power to an executive divorced of the legislature.  

Indeed, expansion of executive power occurred nearly immediately.  It took a big jump during the Civil War, again by necessity, and it jumped again in the 20th Century.  Theodore Roosevelt expanded it as it suited his vigorous mindset.  Woodrow Wilson expanded it due to the Great War.  Franklin Roosevelt expanded it due to the emergency of the Great Depression and then World War Two.  Following World War Two the powers already expanded were thought normal, and again the Cold War seemed to make their retention necessary.  A President commited the country to a largescale war for the first time in the nation's history without a declaration of war when Truman sent forces into Korea.  This repeated itself when Johnson did the same with Vietnam.

Indeed, the disaster of the Vietnam War and the legacy of the Korean War caused Congress to attempt to claw back power with the War Powers Act.  The corruption of Richard Nixon resulted in Congress asserting its power as well.  But by the late 1960s the Democratic Party has also accommodated itself to revision of the national organic document, the Constitution, by a Supreme Court that simply made stuff up.  That accomodation started the development of the Democratic Party simply sitting on its hands and letting the courts rule to a large degree.  The Court became sort of an odd co chief executive, with the most egregious example being the absurd decision of Roe v. Wade, at least up until its progeny, Obergefell v. Hodges.

Abuses in the law, with Obergefell being the final example, and a Congress that simply accommodated itself to not really doing anything gave rise to the angered muddled populist far right, and the angry intellectual National Conservatives, the latter of which realised that the former was a plow mule that it could do its work with.  National Conservatives basically abandoned the concept of an expansive democracy in favor of a much more limited culturally correct one and took advantage of, and are taking advantage of, a chief executive whose mind is mush but whose ego is titanic.  They see him, effectively, as a "Red Caesar".

In the meantime, Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court began to hurl back to Congress the powers that it had dumped on the courts like city people dumping kittens on farms.  A Congress used to yapping but not doing anything was not prepared to exercise power once again, and very obviously still is not.  Much of what the Roberts Supreme Court has done in recent years really isn't radical at all, but its suddenly getting there, making decisions which are difficult not to view as seeking to empower the chief executive.

We can't tell where this will end up, and hence the pessimism. We may very well be in an era in which, when we look back a decade more hence, we will see a revived Congress that resumed its proper role, and a diminished Presidency, that's returned to its, even if that looks like something from, perhaps, the 1960s or 1970s.  Or we may seen an ineffective Congress and a nation ruled by a successor Red Ceasar who has more in common with Victor Orban than George Washington.

Perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that the country has weathered previous existential threads to its democratic nature.  The War of 1812 presented one when a large portion of the country wanted nothing to do with the declared war and thought about leaving the infant nation.  The Mexican War saw something similar, and the Civil War, in which half the territory of the country attempted to leave in order to keep a large percentage of its population in chains.  World War One sparked further crises when it became unclear what the President's powers were in regard to a foreign war, and following the war the country acted wholly illegally towards those on the radical left.  During the Depression a right wing threat to the nation caused a putative coup to develop, the news of which was then suppressed.  Deep Communist penetration of the government in the 1930s and 1940s, was covered up in the 1950s and the reputation of the Congressman exposing it forever trashed, something his lack of restraint aided in.  The disaster of the Vietnam War and the following horror of Watergate caused many to feel that democracy in the US was dying.

Of course, we've never had a figure like Trump  before make it into the Oval Office.  The closest we've ever had to that was Jefferson Davis, in the Confederate White House, who at least was more genteel.  Huey Long was much like Trump, but of course he did not replace Franklin Roosevelt.

Still, there is reason for optimism.  Trump is not a popular figure.  He's wrecking conservatism which conservatives will have a hard time overcoming in the remainder of my lifetime, but there are signs that his bolt is now shot, in spite of his budget bill.  So much political capital was spent on that that it will bring the Democrats into power in Congress in 2026. They'll have to act like a Congress at that time.  Repairing the damage will take time, but perhaps not as much time as might be feared.  The populists may have done the country a favor by peeling back the lazy ineffectiveness of the pre 2016 Congress, and the National Conservatives may be doing the country a favor by restoring some of the basic elements of conservatism. They're both damaging the country enormously by being inhumane.

When the reign of the Red Ceasar ends, and I think that will be by this time next year, maybe  Congress will go back to its proper role and the gutless cowards of the GOP who have allowed this to occur will be retired in disgrace.  The country got over the Civil War.  There's hope it can get over this.