Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

Firefighting in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, New York City (2001) | Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in which I highlight how prominent left-wing intellectuals assessed 9/11.

—Jeremy Varon

For a swath of dissenting opinion, the 9/11 attacks were a prompt to think also about American violence. Their relation was the key to understanding 9/11 and how the United States might best respond. The uneven effort spanned whole orders of analysis, from geopolitics to philosophy. It yielded penetrating insights but also tenuously severe judgments.

For some on the political left, 9/11 delivered a blow to an illusory American innocence, rooted in the county’s myth of exceptionalism. That myth holds that America was established through its voluntary separation from a European world burdened by sectarian strife, persecution, and the dead weight of tradition. In that separation the country enjoyed the blessings of both safety and unequaled virtue, serving as a beacon to the world. (As the myth evolved, taints like slavery could be redeemed through episodes of moral regeneration within a steady arc of progress.) In more modern times, Pearl Harbor, participation in another world war, Cold War entanglements, and the schisms of the 1960s challenged American innocence. But it was substantially reborn in a post–Cold War world in which US security and supremacy, enhanced by a globally expanding capitalism, went largely unchallenged.

September 11 changed all that. Harper’s Magazine publisher John MacArthur wrote that “‘the City Upon The Hill’” imagined by the Puritans was “supposed to be an impregnable citadel of Christian morality, once protected by God and now by the atomic bomb. Thousands of innocent people died on Tuesday in part because of a naive belief in that moral impregnability.” “Our Puritan citadel,” he concluded, is “badly cracked. I hope our false belief in our own essential goodness has cracked as well.” The British novelist and essayist Martin Amis saw the message of September 11 as this: “America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at her innocence.”

Both commentaries suggest that 9/11 should have led to a redemptive American reckoning. The country now knew something of the devastation felt in much of the world. Its conceit of virtue had suffered too in an act of payback for the military and economic domination underwriting its prestige. The evil that America must now fight was not only that of an alien enemy but also its own.

Others turned to contemporary metaphors. Naomi Klein felt that 9/11 should “mark the end of the shameful era of the video game war.” By that she meant the bloodless sport of watching footage of American bombs vaporizing hapless targets, as debuted in the 1991 Gulf War. The spectacle was lightened by the knowledge that few Americans would die in the conflict. The fiction of the “safe war” is, of course, believable only if the pain caused by one’s violence is invisible. Largely ignored by the US media, that devastation is surely known to the victims. Klein therefore saw 9/11 as the eruption of a “blinding rage” at the “asymmetry of suffering.” As “twisted revenge- seekers,” its perpetrators, she said, “make no other demand than that US citizens share in their pain.”

The most probing meditation on innocence came from the Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek. Within a week of 9/11 he penned his reflections, which circulated widely on the web. His starting point is the common perception that the 9/11 attacks were a bolt from the blue, unimaginable and somehow unreal. Distant and near witnesses felt like they were watching—or were themselves inside—a movie. But America, Žižek points out, was familiar with the image of apocalyptic destruction. “The shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes” in disaster films. Like a movie indeed.

Such views were hardly confined to non-Americans and the foreign press. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don’t want to see…. Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt in this new way. This is such a large lesson, so hatefully, wrongfully taught, but many people before us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths.” Margaret Chrome urged in a Wisconsin newspaper that America move past the “denial” phase of grief and acknowledge that the country is “viewed as the enemy by millions around the globe.”

For Žižek, another genre of American film provides the deepest clues about 9/11. Typified by The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999), it stages the anxiety that life in “late capitalist consumerist society” has the quality of a “staged fake,” or even a dematerialized, virtual reality. Behind this worry lies the sense that there lurks somewhere an earthy wasteland upon which the bubble of prosperity depends. Borrowing from The Matrix, Žižek terms this space—imagined in cinematic scenes of desolation—the “desert of the real.” The 9/11 attacks, then, were the invasion of the “digitized First World,” represented by the World Trade Center as the center of global finance, by the “Third World ‘Desert of the Real.’” The intrusion was engineered by a distant, evil Other—Osama bin Laden, foreshadowed by scores of shadowy movie villains. Žižek concludes:

It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening…. In this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the “civilized” West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the “barbarian” Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo…. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis…. Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE.

Žižek all but says that al-Qaeda hijacked a disturbing American fantasy to bring to life its deepest fears. In his own moral fantasy, 9/11 issues a near-cosmic mandate: that the United States not merely right particular policy wrongs but also work to rid the whole world of its ills—to banish all “deserts of the real” and the madmen they spawn.

In The Guardian, the Indian intellectual Arundhati Roy brought a sharper edge to similar points. “Could it be,” she asked, “that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things…? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference.” Rather than indifference, it was “the tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.”

Ward Churchill, a radical Native American scholar and University of Colorado professor, took a giant step further than other critics. In a September 12 essay, he fully justified the 9/11 attacks as payback for US aggression. Those killed in the Pentagon, he believed, were fair game as military targets. Those in the World Trade Center were scarcely less guilty, given their alleged complicity in murderous economic policies. He caustically asked, “If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.” Here Churchill likens today’s finance professionals to the “desk killers” who, in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, did the bureaucratic work of the Holocaust.

Published on an obscure anarchist website, Churchill’s incendiary essay had negligible public impact at the time. It caused a firestorm only years later, when it was dug up prior to his giving a public lecture. Its gross insensitivity to the 9/11 dead and extreme claim of collective guilt were well beyond what other critics of US foreign policy would conceive or utter.

Together, this critical commentary answered an influential take on 9/11 by the conservative pundit George F. Will. On September 12 in The Washington Post, Will wrote that 9/11 ended the United States’ “holiday from history.” Since the end of the Cold War the country had largely withdrawn from global leadership. But if it felt done with the world, the world was not done with it. In the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, al-Qaeda hit targets representing the “vigor of American civilization” and its “ability to project and defend democratic values.” Americans’ “proper anger,” Will felt, “should be alloyed with pride,” as the country rejoins the global fight for its values.

With Will, Žižek and other critics share the premise that 9/11 ended America’s deceptive separation from the world. But there the similarities end. To the critics, the myth of exceptional virtue collapsed with the towers, revealing the likeness between America’s violence and that of its enemies. However stinging, their point was not to proclaim the moral equivalence of tit-for-tat violence. Instead, it was to present existing global conflicts as the essential context for 9/11 and to recommend humility—not martial pride—as the response.