25 years on, we’ve forgotten 9/11, or at least what it could teach us.

You don’t need me to tell you that today is the quarter-century anniversary of the September 11 attacks. There will undoubtedly be memorials and remembrances today, probably a lot of crying bald eagles, American flags and silhouettes of the towers shared on social media, and tributes to firefighters and police officers. I guarantee that two words we’ll hear or see today in our in-person or online discourse will be the words, “Never forget.” It’s those words I want to talk about in this article. Unfortunately, my answer to them is, “It’s too late. We already have.” While the event of 9/11 is impossible to forget for anyone who lived through it—which makes the words doubly ironic—the meaning of the event, its historical context and what it can teach us about the world around us and ourselves, has pretty much gone down the memory hole. This goes far deeper than remembering the thousands of real people who died, which is entirely appropriate. But trying honestly to understand why they died is left glaringly out of our discourse. Our refusal to deal honestly and intellectually with September 11 has rendered it a hollow performative ritual of patriotic and jingoistic symbology that can teach us nothing about why it happened. This is what I mean when I say we’ve forgotten it, or perhaps we were, by design, never aware of it at all.

As a historian and a teacher of history I can tell you that in my professional judgment, September 11 is the least understood large-scale important event in our recent past. It’s not that people don’t know that it happened, but very few people seem to grasp particularly why it happened and what its historical significance is. Knowledge of the events usually begins and ends with what you might call the mechanics. Four planes were hijacked, two struck the World Trade Center towers, one the Pentagon, and one crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands died, including many first responders. The U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Most people know these things, but they are only the mechanics. While I perceive, 25 years on, that the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, still has at least some name recognition among the general public, it seems that understanding of his group, Al-Qaeda, is pretty nebulous, and understanding drops off a cliff the more fine-grained you get from there. Why did they attack us? If anyone can answer at all, usually it’s some variation of what President George W. Bush told us at the time: “They hate our freedoms.” That is completely incorrect. Our freedoms had nothing to do with it.

Nine-eleven is hard to understand because it was so complex, and because its roots lie so deeply in the history, culture, politics and theology of parts of the world that most Americans have never really cared much about. Islamism, the social and political belief system of which bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were particularly radical advocates, is less a coherent ideology than it is a reaction to the conditions of the modern Islamic world, and by “modern” I mean the last 200 or so years. Muslims have been struggling at least that long, and arguably far longer, with the basic questions of how their faith interfaces with others, with the secular political orders of the West, and with the economic and social conditions that have remade the world since the Industrial Revolution. You can’t really paint all Islamists with a single broad brush, but many, like bin Laden himself, wanted to retreat from modernity and find solace in the absolutism of the early medieval world in which the Muslim faith was born. Remaking the world of the 21st century to resemble what it looked like in the 7th is not a realistic proposition, but a doomed attempt at exactly that was at least part of the reason for the 9/11 attacks. There was, of course, more to it than that. It’s the “more to it” that we, as Americans, have been particularly disinterested in learning.

The subject is further complicated because bin Laden’s thinking was itself warped and distorted, and also highly irrational. Osama bin Laden was, at his core, a narcissist. Even more than in Islam, he believed in his own legend as a world-historical figure destined to be spoken of in the same breath as the prophet Muhammad. He believed that he and the private army he raised in the 1980s, which came to be the seed of Al-Qaeda, were instrumental to the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the bloody war of the 1980s. The September 11 attack was done, in part, to relive that old glory, to draw bin Laden’s even more hated enemy, the United States, into the same tar pit of war in Afghanistan that he believed had brought down the Soviet system. This was his motivation. The motivations of the actual men who carried out 9/11, such as Mohammed Atta, are even more complicated, and in many cases personal. September 11 was not a monocausal event.

President George W. Bush and the Republican Party in power at that time were grossly incompetent on almost all levels, but when 9/11 happened they were remarkably good at establishing the very narrow political channel within which it was acceptable to talk about the disaster and condemning as illegitimate and dangerous everything that fell outside of that channel. In this they had the help of a pliant and easy-manipulated media. Case in point: in late 2001, and long after, it was deemed beyond the pale to suggest that American policy of supporting Israel almost reflexively might have been one of the causes of 9/11. Bin Laden was explicit about that being a grievance he had against the United States. If anyone suggested, in say October or November 2001, that the U.S. might rethink its policies in the Middle East, and particularly towards Israel, they would be denounced as dishonoring the dead heroes, sympathizing with terrorists and deflecting blame for 9/11 from where it belonged. Today, 25 years later, as we have all watched the monstrous genocide being committed (with our help) by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza, the avoidance of that conversation at the time looks pretty indefensible. Similarly, U.S. support of the repressive theocratic regime of Saudi Arabia was another topic that was verboten after 9/11. Bin Laden chose Saudi nationals for many of the 9/11 hijackers specifically to highlight that issue. We didn’t want to face it, so we ignored it. A few bad apples, and all that.

Seriously questioning why 9/11 happened, and taking its grotesque perpetrators at their word as to why they did it—they told us, all along, repeatedly—is not the same as endorsing the views of bin Laden or those who served him. Yet we in the U.S. have had an extreme allergy to having those reflections. Bush famously told us that if you weren’t “with us,” meaning American policy as it existed at that time, you were with the terrorists. Few more moronic and asinine statements have ever been made by a President of the United States, at least until Trump, whose rantings and ravings are clearly that of an insane person, got into office. So many of us were so blinded by rage after 9/11 that we didn’t want to have any serious reflection. There will undoubtedly be talk today, probably from politicians, about recalling the “unity” that Americans supposedly felt in the days after 9/11, but that’s disingenuous too. If there was any unity, it was in the cause of vengeance, not conciliation. Muslim Americans, and even non-Muslims who were mistaken for Muslims, like Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh who was shot to death in Arizona on September 15, 2001, were targeted in vigilante hate crime attacks after the event. That is not “unity.” I didn’t blame fellow Americans or commit hate crimes of course, but I certainly felt a deep feeling of rage after 9/11 and mistrust of the rest of the world. It took me years to come out of it, but I did. Some never have.

Many Americans still act as if 9/11 happened last week. The whole nation is extraordinarily sensitive about it, as if even mentioning it—at least outside of a reverent remember-the-fallen type of context—is somehow dangerous and offensive. For example, on my YouTube channel, the “ad-friendly guidelines,” which control whether videos can be monetized, absolutely forbid any discussion, or even an errant mention, of 9/11 under any circumstances, however substantive, nuanced or respectful. It’s considered a “sensitive issue” that cannot be monetized, which means that the video will have limited reach. Given that I do a history channel where an event that’s central to modern global history does tend to come up from time to time, this is a bizarre and Draconian limitation. It’s also a unique one: no other historical event, even the Holocaust, is treated this way. September 11 is a special case. This is just one example of our societal-level brittleness regarding this topic.

Given the current political climate in the United States, it is now far too late to have any kind of societal reckoning about September 11. When the U.S. is now fighting actively on the side of a criminal state conducting a genocide in the Middle East, and when we’re involved in an abysmally stupid and ill-conceived war against Iran which has no political objective and not even any conception of what “victory” means, we’ve blown way past the point where any reasoned consideration of why 9/11 happened could have benefited us in making changes to our policy going forward. We’ve become exactly the cartoonish, stupid, boorish, unthinking and reckless country that bin Laden said we were. The September 11 attacks were an attempt to draw the U.S. into military conflicts that would sap its strength and dissipate its political currency in the world. Bin Laden has been dead 15 years, but it seemed that he largely succeeded. I say that not because I sympathize with his twisted beliefs, but because it’s undoubtedly true.

Thus, we’re left, probably forever, with a bumper-sticker level conception of September 11, which is divorced from historical context, devoid of reflective thought and incompatible with the real world. It’s now about—and exclusively about—American flags, crying bald eagles, and lionizing firefighters and police officers. There’s no susbtance there. September 11 may as well have been entirely erased from our past, because we’re incapable of learning anything from it.

In my 8th grade modern world history class, I teach the subject of 9/11 to my students. They’re all intensely curious about it, because they’ve heard of it, but know absolutely nothing about it—itself a telling sign. I talk about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, who Osama bin Laden was, who the Taliban are, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and various other subjects. That’s before we even get to planes striking towers and such. I also teach an in-depth online class on the subject, hosted on my website. I’m doing my best, but I feel like a tiny whispering voice trying to speak up over the loud blaring of a brass band playing patriotic anthems and nothing else. I’ll keep doing it, because I know that it’s one of the most important events in modern history, and no one who doesn’t understand it can have any hope of a clear reckoning with the complex geopolitics of our modern world. I agree that we must “never forget” 9/11. But I think the true meaning of that phrase goes a lot deeper than many of the people who are going to be using it today presume.

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