A Shock to the Heart of the West

It's coming up to the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the worst terrorist incident in world history, and, together with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, it's got me thinking about a lot of comments people frequently make about terrorism, the War on Terror and Western overseas intervention as a whole.

I'm just old enough to vaguely remember 9/11, and although I didn't really understand it at the time, the idea of it being a world-stops-turning event was clear. And when I got old enough to understand it properly, I developed an interest in it, the events leading up to it and the events that followed. With nearly 3000 victims and imagery that cut straight into the heart of everyone watching it unfold, it is very easy to see why the attacks had such a massive impact on the West. It isn't suprising that the War on Terror and all subsequent conflict was a direct retaliation to what was essentially an attack on Western civilization. It's impossible to look at the image of the towers burning behind the Statue of Liberty and think anything else.

People will often point out, however, when discussing the impact of 9/11, that nearly a million people have died as a result of the actions of the West in the Middle East since 9/11, many of them of course innocent. And it's a fair point. It's a point that certain people continue to make after major terrorist attacks on the West since, and they don't always refer to attacks made by the West when making this point. There are countries in the world where innocents regularly fall victim to attacks from their own, and the logic always seems to be that this does not make the front page in Britain where as attacks on the American or European soil do. I saw a lot of this happening after the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 committed by the Islamic state. And I've always thought it's a fair point but I'm starting to realise what the difference is. I write, for example, for a local newspaper, and I try to make my articles relevant to the region. This is not to say that there are not plenty of other things that I want to write about, it's just that I try to cater to what the audience feels more connected to. And I think the point I'm trying to make is that it makes sense that attacks on Western civilization hit harder to people in that civilization than when a bomb kills more people in a war-torn country. It hits closer to home because it is. I don't think this equates to people having less sympathy for deaths elsewhere, and I agree that reporting in the media does have a bias and certain terrible atrocities, in particular those committed by our own governments, are not reported enough. I just think it's a natural human reaction to feel more of a shock when a concert in Manchester, for example, is bombed by terrorists. And, as it had such a high death toll, and unfolded in rush hour in New York City, widely accepted to be the most important city in the West, 9/11 was the epitome of this kind of shock. It was a bullet straight into the heart of the culture and civilization to which so many belong.

And maybe a cynic would say that such a metaphorical bullet serves as a reminder of what pain Western civilization has caused to others throughout history, but I prefer to think of it as a reminder of the positive aspects of the West that came under attack that day. Freedom. Democracy. Opportunity. Liberation. These are values that we should strive to protect. There is a reason why people from parts of the world that lack these values flock to the West. For all its flaws, of which there are many, we have in our culture a positive place for all. One just has to think about the harrowing recent footage of people scrambling to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban regained control.

The withdrawal on a whole is an example of the messy way countries, especially the US, attempt to assert their values on others, ultimately to no avail, but a Western influence on Afghanistan and the many positives it brought in terms of the values I mentioned shows how lucky we are to have been born into this culture. It's something we take for granted every day. And, to me, something like 9/11 is a harsh and brutal reminder of that fact. It takes something as horrible as that hitting us the way it did to make us realise what many less fortunate people go through every day. And that is how I choose to think about it. Of course it hit us harder than any other news story in living memory, but as a result it should lead us to value what we have and not take it for granted. Hope, and a desire to work together towards a better world for all, should be the principal message to take from it, and what we should reflect on when the anniversary falls.