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September 11th [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-11
This is a really brief note in remembrance of the tragic events on this day in 2001. In the swirl of horrific news this week, I notice that what we called “9/11” seems to have slipped well past the first page.
On September 11th, 2001, I was in London with my girlfriend and her cousin. We had just emerged from Buckingham Palace after a standard tour and walked down the nearby street looking for food. It was around 4:00 PM in London, which means it was still early morning in New York City.
We went into one of the few places open, which turned out to be a sort of sports bar, and sat down to order food. I looked around and there were large TV sets, presumably for showing games.
On them, I could see an airliner strike one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
I thought it was odd that anyone happened to be taking video when this unusual event happened. Then I realized that this wasn’t the first hit. This was the second.
Earlier that day, we toured Westminster Abbey. It’s likely that the first strike occurred while we were there. In Westminster Abbey there are a lot of memorials, and one of those memorials is to the unknown victims of war.
When I think about 9/11, I think about the unknown victims of war. We have a lot of memorials to soldiers and others killed in war. In the U.S. we even have a tomb for the unknown soldier. But the unknown victims of war are, in their own way, even more tragic than that. These are people erased from history that we will never know. We won’t know their stories. We won’t know what life meant to them. We won’t know the suffering of their loved ones, the ones who knew who they were and that they were victims of war. The unknown victims of war weren’t fighting for any cause, even the useless causes of the vain.
A massive attack like this could not be ignored. I don’t think we made the proper response to the 9/11 attacks. But that doesn’t detract from the service of anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. They have my respect. And I’m also thinking about them.
I used to belong to an organization called Beyond War. It wasn’t successful at stopping wars. But we need to rededicate ourselves to that goal.
The attack on 9/11 caused, directly, a lot of death. It also caused indirectly a lot of death. Nonprofits estimate that just the U.S. attacks on Iraq cause over 100,000 deaths, and the vast majority of them were non-combatants. Most of those deaths were people we will never hear about. They are the unknown victims of that war.
They deserve a silent moment in our busy lives as we contemplate the tragedy of that September day in 2001.
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