Did America’s enemies win the war?

A reflection on the post 9/11 world

I awoke this morning as I did on the morning 21 years ago to this date—on the couch after falling asleep watching television the night before.

9/11 started out as any other morning for me, then I spent most of the next couple days on the couch trying to process it.

Today, the 9/11 tragedy turns legal adult drinking age, but what has America learned in the past score and one years?

Ever since that fateful day, we’ve been conditioned to believe that certain types of foreigners hate us for our freedom.

Consider some of the freedoms that exist in a post-9/11 America.

• A freedom granting one the specific inability to travel or become gainfully employed if he cannot produce documents stating that he was injected with an experimental serum, the duty of which was to ward off a mild sickness that nearly everyone would inevitably catch, regardless of the injection.

• An abstract concept of freedom championed by a regime that concomitantly advocated the Supreme Commandment: One must bear close resemblance to a surgical doctor (or nurse) to be allowed entry into public spaces.

Odd notions of freedom, certainly.

Practicing baseball in the backyard the other day, my five-year-old son asked me what freedom is. He may have secretly been watching Braveheart in his free time for all I know. He gave the Gibsonesque “Freedom!” yell after asking me.

I was a bit puzzled. Everyone knows about freedom…

“He should know about freedom too,” I thought. “After all, isn’t freedom built into human nature or into us as Americans or something like that?”

I had to look it up. Merriam-Webster defined it multiple ways.

Freedom — The quality or state of being free: such as

• the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action

• the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous

• unrestricted use

• the quality of being frank, open or outspoken

Of course, Americans are free. Our enemies hate us because of that freedom. And aren’t Americans the freest people in the history of the globe?

Over in the lands of some of our purported enemies, women cover their faces and bodies entirely as a matter of everyday practice. Defenders of freedom rally against the subjection of these women. In some circles today, such advocacy may render such a righteous American an “Islamophobe.” It’s an unwinnable war, so it seems.

But is it not out of the concern for freedom and equality—and for women specifically—that we must freely show our own faces in public without fear or shaming?

Something changed with the conception of freedom.

We’re free. They are not. They hate us for our freedom.

Our government stands for that freedom. It protects us. From threats both foreign and domestic. Americans are a free people.

On February 28, 2020, Anthony Fauci published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine to allay the public’s fear of an upcoming global pandemic.

“If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%.”

Two weeks later came “15 days to stop the curve,” which ended up lasting the better part of two years.

“This suggests that the overall clinical consequences,” of the deadly disease in question according to Fauci, “may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

Fauci pivoted in March.

The untimely maneuver proved thus: Now, an everyday American would soon bring dishonor upon himself—especially in the eyes of our governmental and societal betters in lockstep with the corporate media structure—if he refused to go along with the scientism pervading the country.

Look no further than Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers for one prominent example. Rodgers was pilloried by the corporate press for “lying” about his immunization status in the fall of 2021. Rodgers inevitably got his just desserts, claiming his second straight NFL Most Valuable Player award at season’s end, his fourth such award overall.

Yet throughout the season, Rodgers had to isolate himself from his team and other Packers personnel (other than on the practice or game field where, naturally, The Nineteen would magically disappear for several key hours at a time.)

There were no apologies from the corporate press when such scientism that had been foisted upon the global peoples ultimately proved, time and again, to be unreliable at best and, in most cases, wildly inaccurate.

Two-and-a-half years were robbed from the lives of Americans starting in March of 2020. We’re not entirely in the clear yet today, either.

Ironically, this plunder of human flourishing was by the hands of a “popular” government—of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Democracy in action. Freedom incarnate.

When “free and fair elections” are conducted, Americans get what they deserve. It is The American Way.

H.L. Mencken noted, “Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The results of our fair elections? Two presidents and their freedom-loving bureaucratic sycophants giddy to lock-down their countrymen. Also joining in this appreciation of freedom were a legion of cowardly governors, mayors, and local officials—with possible exceptions in the form of governorships in South Dakota and Florida and a few heroes in city and town governments scattered about the land who resisted the idiocy from on high, but who we are also never told about.

So, who exactly are the enemies?

Saudi hijackers? Fifteen of the 19 reported 9/11 hijackers came from the Saudi kingdom. These evil men plotted the attacks and then destroyed buildings, claiming the lives of thousands of Americans. But they all perished in the four plane crashes that day.

Two decades hence, if “America” were to now look in a mirror, perchance the enemy might be staring right back?

For what lesson has America realized, now that the tragedy has “come of age?”

That the hijackers ruined what was left of the collective American innocence, but instead of bowing the neck, the American ethos has been to submit?

It is the tendency of Americans to turn toward feckless “leaders” in the midst of crises—the selfsame folks who are dismissive of the average American.

Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in 1993’s A Few Good Men is indicative of what the cultural elites think about the hoi polloi.

When examined by Tom Cruise’s LTJG Daniel Kaffee, Col. Jessup responded:

I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather that you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a DAMN what you think you're entitled to!

While looking down his nose upon the common people, Jessup at least—albeit begrudgingly—conceded to an ugly truth of which he was a party to. Granted, this was the movies, not an admission that we will get in today’s reality.

For elites to acknowledge such conspiracy against the people is not the behavior that makes them “elites.”

Consult Psalm 145.

“Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.”

Has the great American experiment in democracy been built upon such trust in “princes”—namely those of the common sort rather than of the monarchical variety?

Has this once and perhaps future republic, now a global empire, served its people or its mission properly?

It might not even matter. Always, it’s on to the next thing.

The latest mission appears to be saving the freedom-loving populace of Ukraine from the despot Putin.

To wit: the Russophobia and rank cronyism of its ruling class has flung this nation back into another global conflict with no vital American interests at risk.

Wilsonian foreign policy continues on, unabated as it has for over a hundred years since the pox of Woodrow’s ideology began to spread across the western world in the form of the “war to end all wars.”

False claims to make the world “safe” for democracy permeated the 20th Century. It remains so today.

The Biden Administration’s latest foray into a regional conflict in Crimea—via proxy, naturally—does not auger well.

For is the administration actually supporting “democracy” in Ukraine?

Today’s regime cannot cotton an autocratic “ally”—it must be democratic.

Yet was not Chile’s Pinochet a better friend to America than the democratically elected Allende and his socialist rule?

Has history not proved the Shah more “pro-American” than the ayatollahs that Iran ended up with, alongside its current and peculiar status as the most “democratic” nation in the Gulf region—if one uses the regular chestnuts of popular support and voter approval as criteria for the efficacy of democracy?

Is, then, the ultimate concern of our regime really about democracy? Of freedom?

Occam’s Razor may suggest the regime is simply anti-Russia, full-stop. The reasons for its Russophobia, however, are a bit muddier.

For as a matter of agitprop, it was the “Crazy Ivan” of 2016 which brought that enemy of humanity, Donald J. Trump, into power.

Using history as a guide, Biden and his supporters may want to tread lightly when propping up the Zelenskyite version of democracy.

Just as with alcoholics, a great deal of democracies inevitably retrogress, given the gift of time.

As a result, the “teetotalers” in government will create the need to go in and “save” the innocent global peoples once again from the ravages brought about by “undemocratic” enemies of humanity. Again, and again.

Sounds a little bit like codependency or the enabling of destructive behavior, no?

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does like to rhyme.

Perhaps the enemies are amongst us and maybe those are the ultimate victors?

The psalmist continued, after cautioning the trust in princes:

“Blessed is he … whose hope is in the Lord his God: Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them. Who keepeth truth for ever: who executeth judgment for them that suffer wrong … the Lord loveth the just …  and the ways of sinners he will destroy. The Lord  shall reign for ever.”

There is hope.

Freedom does exist, but existeth in a realm other than what we currently inhabit.

Brian O’Leary