I have decided to stop lying to Americans about 9/11
9/11 and the immediate reactions to it has one of the biggest distortion fields of any topic in the English language. There is a polite fiction maintained when any Americans are present that everyone everywhere was sad about the incident. We shake our head, frown, and say that everyone shed a tear when we saw the towers fall on TV.
The truth is, there were celebrations around the world. I have talked to multiple Chinese people who were in the US at the time who told me some variant of “I was absolutely celebrating on the inside, and honestly kinda pissed that I had to pretend to be sad publicly”. I had a middle school teacher in China who told a story about how he was literally the only people in a room who wasn’t publically celebrating people burning to death in the towers. Something about the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia often gets brought up as justification. I’m absolutely certain there are many people on LessWrong with a similar experience.
Again, this is something that hundreds of millions of people witnessed in China. Almost every Chinese-American who has some contact with people in China knows about something like this. I’m sure there are similar stories in the former Soviet bloc, Serbia, Israel, ect. I’m not talking about some guy’s uncle who clapped. I’m talking about spontaneous gatherings of 20+ people cheering around public TVs.
It is very surprising to me then, that I could find exactly one article about this in English. This is blood-libel sounding stuff and absolutely fodder for anti-Chinese articles, and yet zero Americans have written about this? In fact, stories about 9/11 celebrations are often cast as racist conspiracy theories, “dancing Arabs” and “dancing Israelis” in particular. I would be shocked (Jeb Bush is a reptilian alien level shocked) if absolutely zero such celebrations happened in the United States. I don’t think it would say much about the nature of their cultural or ethnic group though.
This realization has made me seriously rethink how hard it is for millions of people to be aware of a conspiracy and just not talk about it for 20 years, but only around a specific group who might make things awkward. I guess if a large powerful group feel strongly enough about something, the entire world warps itself to fit their world-view.
IRL though, I’ll still frown and say that everyone was sad for the American people if anyone asks me about how China felt about 9/11 - it’ll be too awkward otherwise.
Author’s note: I have sometimes considered myself Chinese-American.
I am Chinese American, my parents are as pro-CCP as they come, and celebrate plenty of other “bad things happening to America,” and I know lots of Chinese Americans. As far as I recall, most of us were not particularly affected by the incident but I don’t recall a single person celebrating, or speaking positively of the event after the fact. I am sure they exist but skeptical that it is as widespread as you say.
Same here. I am Chinese Chinese who lives in the US. Never recall anyone celebrating (both in China and here).
I’m from Israel and I saw grief everywhere, zero evidence to what you describe.
and my mother honestly told me that Real communism has never been tried in one discussion (until that discussion I thought that a strawman, as i saw a lot of mocking of that position and zero people who actually hold it).
so I don’t think such people don’t exist, because I bet on existence. but my experience contradict claim you made with such high confidence, and I conclude from that that other things you claim with the same confidence are probably wrong, too.
I was a native-born, nth-generation white and white-bread American citizen in the US. My reaction was “Huh. They finally lucked into something impactful. Had to happen sometime.”. I was in no way happy about it, but it seemed like any other distant tragedy.
I didn’t expect or understand the extreme American reaction, let alone any worldwide reaction, to what seemed to me like just another terrorist attack, largely predictable and differing only in scale from what had happened before.
All of a sudden everybody was saying the World Had Changed, and I was like “In what way?”. I tend to attribute the whole mythos around those attacks mostly to the political class (which lives in a weird bubble) and the gullible.
I doubt I was alone, either, but once the tide starts on something like that, it’s all you’ll hear. The rest (including me) don’t waste “ammunition” on trying to convince people it’s not as big a deal as they think. Not really a conspiracy, just not fighting on a question that’s not that important and will actually lose you points with people.
People were using it, quite successfully, to dismantle the values and institutions they claimed they wanted to protect and strengthen, and policy was more important to talk about.
I don’t think it would quite fit the vibe. The mythos is all about the Ultimate Tragedy Ever. The Whole World was supposed to be Weeping, except for the Literal Demons actually responsible. To make the most extreme possible claim about how Universally Obviously Evil the attack is, you have to avoid broadening your Literal Demons to include the uninvolved.
Also, American anti-Chinese sentiment isn’t “blood-libelish”, or it doesn’t feel that way to me anyway. “The Chinese” are, mostly, perceived as human adversaries acting for comprehensible reasons—or maybe as a force of nature—but not as irrationally hateful, or as totally insane apostles of evil for evil’s sake. Maybe Chinese people were fully dehumanized in 1955, and definitely in 1915, but not now, I think. It probably helps that in the US there are very widely held, substantive, philsophically consistent political disagreements with the way China is run, as well as real ecomic fear. That means that if you want to make an “anti-China” argument, you don’t have to run to ethnic dehumanization right off the bat.
On the other hand, in the US, if you want to be anti-people-who-want-to-reestablish-the-Caliphate, you have to be careful not to offend those of your “allies” who may think the problem with the Caliphate was less about its policies and more about who was running it. Ethnic or religious attacks are in some sense safer, and those lend themselves to more blood-libelish themes. And such attacks are also useful for lumping in people who might not want to reestablish the Caliphate, but might have grievances against you that you’d prefer to ignore.
Scale is important
I don’t think the scale carried any actually new information that should have caused anybody to, um, update on anything. “Largely predictable” is the main issue.
I am Chinese; I grew up in China, moved to the US when I was 15. Nobody(Chinese) around me ever celebrated the event (including school teachers, elder adults) and usually talk about this as a tragedy. This includes both my friends and circles in China, and my Chinese circles in the US. I was still in China when 9/11 happened.
I also just asked my Chinese Canadian friend by my side (grew up in China, moved to Canada, now Canadian Citizen) if she ever recall any Chinese celebrating 9/11, or if this was a thing at all. I said the word celebrating in English. Initially she thought “celebrating” means taking this day as a Memorial Day to remember and mourn the loss. Then I explained by “celebrating” I meant being actually really happy about the event itself, and she seems to be really confused.
Since I was quite young (elementary school) when this happened, I also asked my mom if this was a thing. She said nobody she knows of felt happy about 9/11, and only saw once on a social media, which she was quite angry about.
One day in grade 8 for reasons forgotten, the Chinese teacher was talking about some things, and said that when the news of 9/11 came, she was in the teacher’s office, the general feeling in the teacher’s office among the teachers is that “Great! They deserved that.”
The timing was probably unfortunate. It happened during a period of heightened tensions due to the Hainan Island incident. Though when was there a period of lowered tensions between China and America after 2000?
How much that should constitute a Bayesian update, is left as an exercise for the reader. Notes: We were notified of this post by a twitter mutual, and we were not looking about 9/11 or reading LessWrong usually, so this might be considered a quite random sampling of the population.
Is this just people generally hating Americans or what?
My best guess is that the natural state of human beings is to celebrate when calamity befalls their enemy. Western cultures are unique in two ways. Firstly, they reserve viceral murderous hatred only for internal political enemies (Republican vs. Democrat). Secondly, it is incredibly crass to publicly celebrate the deaths of others, unless it’s someone as hated as Bin Laden or Thatcher. So people try to project a public image of being sad when someone they hate dies.
Basically, imagine if the average Chinese hated America as much as the average British leftist hates Thatcher and had zero reservations about displaying it, since no one they know would care.
I mean, when I ask myself what percentage of America would rejoice if a great disaster (say, 3 Gorges Dam just spontaneously collapses) were to befall China tomorrow, my gut says it is a reasonably substantial number.
People just like to rejoice at the misfortune of a person or nation or group seen as “in the lead” or with whom one is competing. I don’t think it’s a modern phenomena, or a “people hating America” phenomena, it’s a universal human phenomena. It’s one reason why AI foom could be safer than human foom ;-)
When I read that, the image made me choke. Dam breaks are terrifying things, and I wouldn’t wish that fate on my enemy. Fuck. That’s a whole lot of people drowning under terrifying circumstances. And the Chinese people are not my enemy. I also remember being heartbroken about the stories of families in Wuhan at the start of 2020.
I’m sure some people in the US would celebrate bad things happening to China, of course. We do have our fair share of assholes, just like everywhere else.
(Now, I’m not claiming to be a saint. If someone who abuses dogs gets bit by a dog, a part of me will be like, “Well, what did you expect?” But it would feel wildly unfair to generalize that attitude to large numbers of ordinary people just because they live in a certain country.)
I agree with Adam Smith’s view expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Scottish enlightenment, best enlightenment :)
This seems exaggerated, in the sense that many would react this way, but a substantial portion wouldn’t. Likely they would be labeled and mocked by some of the ones who recovered from it quickly. There would be unexpected connections, friends of friends who lost family, valued cultural themes whose presence wasn’t obviously imported but mysteriously fade after the vast decrease in cultural reservoir. One who is fully aware of the effects, even if sociopathic about it (which your quote argues is common), might be able to see enough to realize it was in fact a substantial practical impact. One who isn’t sociopathic about it would find tendrils of deep grief about it anywhere in the world by nature of second or third hand connections.
Of course, there would also be other effects. And for some the balance of effects may be positive. But the negative effects wouldn’t be entirely isolated from people who have many unfiltered connections to their local culture and society, which is a common though not universal way to live.
Especially if there are videos of it happening. I’ll bet Adam Smith didn’t use YouTube!
I think though celebrating the 3 Gorges Dam breaking would not be in the Overton window, while acc. to OP it seems to be in the Overton window for Chinese about the 9/11. So there’s still a strong social difference.
I guess that would be slightly different if an airplane crashed into some buildings famous for Chinese world influance or dominance, like the WTC may have been (or perceived during the 9/11 discussions) to some extent.
I don’t know if any/many Jews/Israelis actually celebrated, and if they did then why would that be; but the conspiratorial accusation towards Jews/Israelis in particular is that they caused or at least celebrated the attack because it would drag the US into fighting Israel’s enemies in the ME.
Separately, I could imagine [anyone who’s generally been a continual target of Islamic extremism] not exactly celebrating but (unwisely) seeing the upside “well at least now you get it”.
David and Goliath. It’s always easy to hate the the officially by far strongest one especially if it can easily be seen as a huge evil force in the world, and it is not a secret that many Chinese see the US as exactly that. And it is not as if a few random US peasants had been annihilated, but the World Trade Center, which I guess can easily be seen/spectated as a sort of symbol of US economic power and influence.
Good job saying a brave thing; on a US-based site with a plurality US membership, this was a risk. Well done.
Out of curiosity, how often do conversations about 9/11 come up? For the most part, we don’t discuss it that much among ourselves except during the anniversary, although I do make note that it was just a couple of weeks ago and indeed the traditional observance is literally just to talk about where we were and what we were doing at the time, which precisely when the observation about cheering would come up.
It may or may not surprise you that while there were basically no rooms cheering in the US, there was a substantial minority population that celebrated after the fact. Mostly these were people who hated finance and globalization (which the twin towers symbolized) or something about foreign policy (imperialism, colonialism, etc) or as some form of divine punishment (tolerating gay people or interracial marriage or what-have-you).
So, thank you for saying your piece. I appreciate the honesty.
Serbian here. I was in Novi Sad, the second biggest city in Serbia, when the attack happened. I didn’t hear about any celebrations, most people had “they got what they were asking for” sentiment while at the same time feeling sorry for victims.
For what it’s worth, the sentiment I recall at the time among Americans was not that (almost) everyone everywhere thought it was terrible, just that the official diplomatic stance from (almost) every government was that it was terrible (and also that those governments had better say it’s terrible or at least get out of the way while the US responds). I think I remember being under the impression that almost everyone in Europe thought it was obviously bad. To be fair, I didn’t think much at the time about what, e.g., the typical person in China or Brazil or Nigeria thought about it. Also, that was a long time ago, so probably some revision in my memory.
I’m not that surprised because this seems to have been the human state for pretty much all of humanity until the 20th century in the west? In places in which you do not have to wage war or fight (in the literal sense) to make your condition better, it seems to become normal for the schadenfreude to decrease?
In France at least it was seen as a terrible incident and I don’t know many people who rejoiced, although I have heard more about it in the last decade from some groups.