We’ve forgotten why 9/11 happened
Twenty years have passed since 9/11, and a new generation of Americans have grown up without any personal memories of that fateful day. Most young Americans know very little about what happened on 9/11, and why it happened.
Most American schools mark the day with solemn ceremonies in remembrance of the loss and suffering. Beyond that, few states have recommended 9/11 lesson plans, preferring to leave it up to the teachers. There also is typically some discussion of the consequences of 9/11 — the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars are also viewed through the prism of loss — the sacrifices of the men and women in uniform. But there is no consensus in American society over whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a mistake, or an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks.
As the years have passed, our own students have grown increasingly vague about what actually happened on 9/11, let alone the origins of the attack. This despite the availability of information — through the History Channel for example. They might have seen one of the movies about 9/11, such as “United 93.” Hopefully they will not have picked up the conspiracy theories circulating on social media — some of which, unbelievably, made it into the first cut of Spike Lee’s new documentary for HBO.
What seems missing from our collective memory is any attempt to discuss why 9/11 happened. Not much of the pre-history seems to be making it into school curricula, or into the way that families or national media discuss 9/11. Take for example the documentary “20 years after 9/11” on Connecticut Public Television. The film is sensitively done, focusing on loss and the need to move forward — not blaming all Muslims for 9/11, for example. But it does not spend any time trying to explain what happened, or why.
In the documentary, Yale
Prof. David Blight eloquently conveys the shock of the attack: “done on our own soil with our own technology.” He goes on to fold 9/11 into a broader account of the “American story” — a cycle of tragedy and recovery, of innocence betrayed and reborn. These are themes that he wrote about in his essay “Will it rise?” on the 10th anniversary.
But there is no place for foreigners in this story.
To form a fuller picture of 9/11, students must understand at least something about the conditions in the Middle East prior to the attack — frustrated Arab expectations, and a long history of U.S. backing oppressive regimes in the region. Students should read extracts from
Sayyid Qutb’s “Milestones,” and compare and contrast speeches by Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush. Islamist radicalism was rooted in resentment at Western colonialism, the threat Western influence posed to traditional Arab society, and the failure of ideologies such as pan-Arabism to improve living conditions or deliver political representation. Specifically, Bin Laden objected to the existence of Israel, and to the presence of U.S. troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.
We know a high school teacher who begins his 9/11 class with a quotation from Osama bin Laden: “Contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom, let him explain why we did not attack Sweden.” But that approach is the exception. These topics are just too politically explosive to be discussed in most classrooms.
Back in 1988, Vietnam vet and high school history teacher Bill McCloud wrote a book “What Should We Tell Our Children
About Vietnam?” based on the responses he received when he posed that question to a range of public figures and ordinary citizens. No one has written an equivalent book for 9/11. Unlike Vietnam, the “war on terror” is not over, so we are not able to distance ourselves from the events we are trying to understand in their historical context.
The fall of Kabul has led to a renewed bout of soul-searching and questions about what went wrong. But that debate is too heated, and too intense, to expect it to generate any easy answers that can be taught to grade schoolers. In the meantime, most teachers seem to prefer to avoid the topic and focus on the uncontroversial themes of loss and national unity.