Fear remains the classic, most perfect tool with which to manipulate the masses. Get them afraid, and you’ll get them willing to do and consent to just about anything to keep that fear at bay. Even, you know, supporting the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Because, in case anyone forgot, that was what America got behind when George W. Bush and his cronies kept insisting Saddam Hussein was not only harboring terrorists from al-Qaeda, but also in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Neither was true, but, as American government so loves to say, “Oops, my bad.”
This constant insistence about Iraq was all happening by 2003, when the U.S. was still fresh from its trauma, still willing to do whatever it took for the capture of Osama bin Laden and the ousting of any offshoot terrorists and organizations related to the atrocities that decimated the World Trade Center and maimed the Pentagon (as we know, United 93 didn’t make it to whatever target it was aiming for, which many speculate to be the White House itself). So when Bush told them Saddam held the key, even though the war in Afghanistan was far from over, the American public said, essentially, “Sure. Go smoke ‘em out.” A phrase Bush was particularly fond of at this time.
To help the Bush administration’s cause, these extraordinary circumstances allowed for the swift passage of some highly dubious bills into law. Bills that were not reviewed with much consideration by Congress, largely also willing to do whatever was necessary to “stop the evil” and retaliate against any enemy to “U.S. freedom.” A term that, of course, has become an increasing oxymoron with each passing decade. Only one member from Congress, Democrat Barbara Lee, voted against authorizing unbridled military force by commenting, only three days after the dust had settled, “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” Naturally, that’s precisely what we did, and have done for centuries whenever a “threat” is positioned in such a way by politicians as to make their constituents willing to do whatever they’re told it takes to fight the sinister forces signaling danger to their way of life. In 9/11’s case, that way of life was gone the instant the first plane “kissed” the North Tower. It signaled not only a sweeping change in how we would fly, a process that became almost likenable to entering prison with the pat-downs and other assorted degradations, but what privacies we were forced to give up—often without even being told.
In an episode of Gilmore Girls from 2006, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), casually notes of her dog, “He’s totally fine having his personal freedom slowly stripped away, as long as he’s completely unaware that it’s happening. Just like a true American.” And yes, that was the truth. Most Americans were perfectly fine with having their freedoms stripped because they weren’t really made aware of just how invasive the ludicrously-named Patriot Act could be. Called as such because it was an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” The “Appropriate Tools,” as far as the Bush administration was concerned, consisted of spying on civilians in manifold ways ranging from the collection of phone data to infiltrating organizations deemed “suspect.”
The rapid passing into law of The Patriot Act, the most sweeping and alarming piece of legislation regarding surveillance of ordinary citizens in U.S. history, included something as 1984 as the government being permitted to see what books a person was checking out from the library (in that sense, one supposes the continued phase-out of book borrowing is positive only in this respect). Then there was Stellar Wind, a wiretapping operation that would have made Nixon positively erect. The government even entered into secret contracts with various telecommunications companies, including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, to be able to collect endless amounts of “data” that would track people and their conversation logs. It was, in short, everything Orwell warned us about. And all because of that key tactic: fear.
Let us not forget, either, that the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security was a direct consequence of 9/11. Per history.com, “In the wake of security fears raised by 9/11 and the mailing of letters containing anthrax that killed two and infected seventeen, The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security. It was signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 25, 2002. Today, the Department of Homeland Security is a cabinet responsible for preventing terror attacks, border security, immigrations and customs and disaster relief and prevention.” But mainly “border security”—a polite euphemism, as we all know, for hostile detentions.
And, speaking of anthrax, after the scare of the spore-filled letters that were sent in 2001, archive news footage shows a woman telling her interviewer, “You just feel so vulnerable now because you don’t know what’s gonna happen, where it’s gonna happen.” This was the logic that fueled so much liberty to be summarily stripped by government. How cute to think that we were ever in control though. That it took these types of cataclysmic events to show us that we control nothing, least of all hatred or the formation of novel viruses. Ah yes, which brings us to that other recent extraordinary circumstance (that some conspiracy theorists do believe was a product of terrorism): COVID-19.
Vastly different, obviously, from 9/11, what links the two phenomena together is the license it has given government to restrict and bind its public. This isn’t to say one is joining in on the anti-vax (therefore often conservative) rhetoric. Vaccines are absolutely necessary to mitigating the contagion. But it is to say that governments around the world have used coronavirus as the rare opportunity it is to manipulate fear on a mass level as a means to puppeteer the public. To constrict and confine, limit and subjugate. This also goes for the increasingly impossible act of flying as an average (read: non-celebrity) person, least of all in anything resembling comfort. The border restrictions, most especially in the U.S., that have flared up as a result of COVID are almost surprisingly more stringent than one would have expected of 9/11, when fear was truly at an even greater fever pitch. Possibly because, in 2001, the current generation was still naïve enough to be shocked by calamity. In the present, everyone appears far more blasé about chaos perhaps because at least they have the gentle pacifier of their screens in a way that was far less pervasive at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Like coronavirus, one has to wonder how much the people of the government “on the inside” allowed the “mishap” to perpetuate “undetected” (another word for undisclosed) for long enough to get so out of hand. Information regarding just how many times the U.S. government ignored the warning signs about bin Laden is far more available than anything the Chinese government, which will never reveal the whole story, might have to offer on the initial timeline of COVID’s propagation. The known terrorists allowed entry into the U.S. to attend flight school at the outset of 2001 mirror a period of casual concern. One when short-bladed knives were, somehow, allowed through security checkpoints, still sending off no alarms to stop the hijackers as they breezed through the TSA’s potential clutches on the day that was to change the course of history.
Other claims regarding the reasons why U.S. government didn’t do more to prevent the attacks stemmed from the excuse that the CIA and FBI communication systems were even less synergistic at that time, with both government agencies concerned with their own separate (yet connected) pursuits. The almost willful ignoring of all the very clear alarm bells going off for the past decade up to 2001, ranging from the U.S. Embassy bombings in 1998 to the first attack on the WTC in 1993, is too upsetting to ruminate on. It almost makes one believe that the U.S. government wanted to bring the threat of terrorists into the U.S. for their own diabolical purposes of control… but then, that would be the logic of a nutball conspiracy theorist, wouldn’t it? Because how could anyone possibly deign to question their government—who obviously just wants to protect them—in such an insurgent manner?
Anyway, the Bush administration certainly got what it secretly wanted: more approval, ergo more power. The ramped-up lawlessness of men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld under the guise of passing “essential laws” to “U.S. protection” from foreign enemies (which meant basically anyone the U.S. government felt like) opened the floodgates to entities like Guantanamo Bay for torturing captures from Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib for torturing Iraqis.
The military, with no clear goal in Afghanistan, simply did their best not to die, turning a blind eye to atrocities like the chai boys—basically underage male geishas to be abused by anyone who wanted to. The horrors that unfolded throughout this “War on Terror” in both Afghanistan and Iraq provided video after video of the most egregious conduct on the part of American soldiers, including urinating on the dead corpses of Afghans.
As the memory of 9/11 gave way to a new presidency and a new post-00s era, people seemed to forget about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan altogether. Or how the Authorization to Use Military Force sets the stage for war to go on endlessly in any country, so long as the U.S. sees fit to bomb a nation they feel harbors terrorists. It wasn’t even really until this year that the general public outside of New York started to reflect, once again, more seriously on 9/11 and Afghanistan thanks to it being not only the twentieth anniversary of the day that catalyzed this war, but the year that Joe Biden sanctioned such a botched pullout from the nation. Surrendering it, in the end, back to the Taliban. Proving that the battle between West and East is nothing more than an ouroboros of futility, namely when it comes to trying to change one another’s ideology.
With people having so many other fears on their mind these past several years, starting with the Reign of Orange Terror in 2016 and continuing with the unleashing of COVID at the outset of 2020, it’s important to look back on this historical moment. Not just because of how significant a shift it caused in our collective lack of faith in being able to count on anything—least of all reason—but because it marks a very clear pattern of how government is able to wage our vulnerabilities and phobias to their advantage.
