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U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and "solutions," was deemed "unpatriotic" and even "treasonous" by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.
Our pandemic of fear
Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.
The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn't begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.
In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over "invisible enemies," fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.
The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom before losing that freedom entirely.
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