Started August 29th, finished September 2nd 2021, a day before a terrorist attack in New Zealand and a week before the 20 years marking 9/11.

In the Shadow of the Towers

By Zac Langridge

On March 15th, 2019, many oblivious citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand were awoken from our dream of an all inclusive, culturally accepting and innocent society, displaying a rot within our nation that had always been there but had passed under our very noses. Ever since the shell-shock of the Christchurch mosque attacks, Prime Minister Jacinda Adern and her government have turned her eye towards the now very real threat of terrorism aboard our own shores, cultivated by the cesspool that is the internet. Within a world where opinions are everywhere and are amplified by social media, our interconnected digital age has provided a way of home-breeding potential terrorists within any nation for whatever cause they deem fit. The Christchurch Call and movements have united world leaders in holding social media companies accountable for spreading misinformation and hate speech, hoping never to have something like it happen again.
However, even before the events of March 15th, I’d personally always wondered if New Zealand would experience an event like this... something which would radically reshape our view of home, for better or worse. And as soon as I’d heard about the terrorist attack in Christchurch and listened to news anchors break the reality to a dumbfounded public - that this man is one of us, and he is part of a shadowy reality that our society has failed to acknowledge - all I could think about was this:
This was our 9/11.

Now forgive me for making such a bold statement, but think about it. With the obvious differences in size and political power aside, were we really any different to America before the infamous attacks of September 11th, 2001? Both the US and NZ told themselves the same thing; horrific events seen and heard about on television just didn’t happen in our beloved homelands, that we were isolated from a world gone mad. Even I, before March 15th, knew that if any event resembling the fanatical terrorism seen in countries around the world ended up taking place in our seemingly safe and secure world, it would greatly shake our country to the core, alter views of our national identity, and burst a bubble of innocence that had grown since the Springbok Tour and bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in the 1980s, and the 1990 Aramoana massacre (the biggest act of gun violence in NZ up until 2019). Like us, America was on a high at the end of the 1990s, a relatively peaceful end to a tumultuous 20th century. With the Cold War won (though whether America actually ‘won’ it or not us up for debate), they were rocking to Britney Spears and inviting a future that seemed secure and optimistic. 9/11 would prove, like March 15th for us, to be a huge wakeup call.
It sounds strange, but I’ve always felt an ethereal connection to 9/11. As someone born less than a year after the attacks, I’ve always felt a personal obligation to learn as much about them as possible. My parents found out about my conception in October of 2001, a month after it happened, and I would’ve been almost three months old by the time the one year anniversary rolled around. I can only begin to imagine what would've been going through my parents’ heads at the time, whether they’d managed to comprehend it all by then, even one year later. Did parents of the time like mine contemplate it all, wondering what world they were bringing up their children into? Did they worry about the approaching wars, what it could mean for the future? Did my Mum or Dad wonder if I would ever understand what had changed, what this new reality meant for history, or whether I would ever care about 102 minutes that woke up a superpower and altered the path of world history?

Well 20 years later, I do know about 9/11, and while I’m not part of the Millennials (the so-called ‘9/11 generation’), I was born into a world greatly influenced by one cloudless, sunny, blue-skied day in September of 2001. 102 minutes was all it took. Within not even two hours the course of history was changed, realties and lives were altered, and a superpower was temporarily cut off from the rest of the world, all flights grounded in a desperate attempt to stop more jets from hurtling out of the sky and creating more death and destruction. “I feel like we’re under siege!” were a woman’s words after witnessing the second plane hit the second tower from her apartment window in New York. I can only imagine. Reality was under siege, the world hijacked as much those jets had been by nineteen extremists and a seemingly simple plan which had transformed an everyday form of mass transportation into weapons of mass destruction. So many things changed on that day. Any plane could be a hijack, a missile, a death trap for those onboard. Anybody could be a suspect. Nowhere was safe, not even the most revered cities. Buildings had become symbols of nations and potential targets of hate crimes on an apocalyptic scale. Skyscrapers could no longer be seen as the safe, sentinel-like monoliths that could be unbudged from their foundations. No longer could scenes of cities crumbling be assigned purely as fiction from disaster movies produced in the safe confines of Hollywood.
This was the world I was born into along with many of my peers. And now, 20 years later, the legacy of 9/11 seems to have faded in the wake of Covid19, however it still feels so prominent. The causes and consequences of the attacks on America should be, if anything, a precursor of the times we live in right now and the new challenges that we face in a world that has no choice but to forge ahead into the uncharted territories of globalism. Be it September 11th or March 15th, these are the products of a world having shrunk. As the 20th century progressed, travelling became easier and more affordable, technology becoming better and better, breaking borders separating cultures, religions and ideologies. With so many people and so many views crammed into such a little planet, the early 21st century has been shaped by cultural, political and religious clashes, the consequences of a once segregated world speeding up at a pace it can’t keep up with. 9/11 became the defining moment of the 21st century in that it showcased the product of a new war; a war in our backyards, where anyone with a differing view could become a fanatic and murder thousands of people without warning, with it all being broadcasted as graphically and publicly as possible on live television. This was the new reality and it’s one that hasn’t changed today, even as times and concerns have shifted and technology has shrunk the world even more.

I’m captivated by the legacy of 9/11 because it was an eerie precursor to what dominates world events right now. Sure, Osama bin-Laden is long gone and the War on Terror has (supposedly) ended, but now there are new figures who are hated and admired, new wars being fought. Figures like Donald Trump were born out of a fear of globalism, fear of the consequences of mingling with the ‘other.’ It’s no coincidence that the former US president claimed that he supposedly saw Saudi Arabians celebrating when the Twin Towers came down during his rallies. Why do we think he kept stressing his intent to “keep America safe”? Trump, a New Yorker, watched with the world as radicals plowed those jets into the World Trade Center. He saw his home robbed of its symbolic skyline of financial prosperity, and, a product of a time where the white man were aloof and far removed from the very real struggles of the Middle East, he determined that the best bet to “make America great again” was to further alienate Muslims and people of a darker complexion than him. Add social media to the mix, and you have a new type of war. Multiple ones. The war on truth. The war on Fake News. The battles are now being fought in the comment sections of Youtube videos, or in Twitter threads. Liberals versus Conservatives. Republicans versus Democrats. Incels versus Feminists. Scientists versus Anti-Vaccers. Disney versus The Fandom Menace. Men versus Women. The soldiers are the trolls. The bullets are the words, the threats and the lies. And crucially, the wounds are the depression, the suicides, the self-harm, the growing hatred and resentment, division, and of course, the extremism. Men like Brentan Tarrant were crafted by the Internet and social media. Disillusioned minds groomed and cultivated by echo-chambers and algorithms, warping truths and bending the line between reality and digital fictions. Opinion becomes fact, fact becomes opinion, and when the world seems to be spiralling out of control within the digital hemisphere, hating you and your ‘facts,’ then something will give.
Nowadays, the risk of airplane hijackings and bin-Laden’s ‘Holy War’ seem as distant as my first words, literally, but the rapid spread of Coronavirus and the scramble for a world to unite in isolation rings eerily familiar in the grand scheme of things. Here’s an event that has altered the course of history yet again, called world leaders to unite in solidarity even as our countries isolate, yet creating more division and paranoia as the conspiracy theories ring out and the blame game is pointed to China, all initiated by the chaotic mix of cultural practices and clashes gone wrong (think wet markets and Communism-enforced secrecy) and the consequences of which spreading rife throughout the world. It’s become clear that Covid19 will stand alongside 9/11 as a dominating feature of the early 21st century, and presents another stumbling block for the idealized globalist society that the world strives for. That’s not to say that globalism can’t work, but as we’ve seen change takes a very long time, and like the War on Terror lingered onward throughout the years even after Obama proclaimed it over in 2011, the effects of Covid will likely remain for years to come, segregating the world even further. It’s a rather gloomy outlook on life, but we shouldn’t despair. There is always light at the end of the tunnel, but we have to navigate that tunnel first, no matter how long or how cold it might be.

They say we should never forget 9/11. We shouldn’t, but for more reasons than purely honouring the innocents murdered on that horrific day. We need to remember how it defined a new state of world affairs, how it set a precedent for a shrinking world and how it dealt with the aftermath of the consequences of such, for better or worse. We need to learn from it in order to shape a path for a better future, for a globalist future that can work. While the chapter of 9/11 might have closed, it needs to be re-read. The fact that my generation and Generation Alpha below me have no recollection of the events of 2001 has been noted by many, and the need for education on the subject is necessary. No it’s not exactly New Zealand history, but it was a precursor to what would happen to us in 2019, and to understand the challenges that our generations and younger ones face can only help us confront the causes and prevent these atrocities from ever happening again.
New Zealand was left shell-shocked on 15/03/19, and the country has seen a definite tonal change since. We’re more aware of extremism and racism in our midst, and the Christchurch Call may as well be Jacinda’s War on Terror for the digital generation. Protests about ‘freedom of speech’ rights and further evasiveness from tech giants will inevitably follow, increasing division. While on an undeniably smaller scale, all of this mirrors the effects 11/09/01 had on the United States. I was fortunate enough to educate myself on the subject back in 2014, watching documentary after documentary online, however it’s clear that not all my generation are aware of just how relevant 9/11’s legacy still is. And as if in a cruel irony, some - either ironically or not - seem to play around in the sandbox of such a legacy, regurgitating misinformed conspiracy theories (“jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” anyone?) and poisoning the internet with their popularity, while only learning about the atrocities by memes about things that shouldn’t be made a mockery of. It’s interesting to me that many of the 9/11 conspiracy ‘documentaries’ circulating on the Internet have now been blocked by Youtube’s algorithms, yet now the sources of misinformation itself come from hate manifestos and livestreams like those of March 15th. It’s as though 9/11 really did set the bar for the age of the internet, but now instead of the misinformation being the spinoff of terrorism, it’s now the misinformation being the cause of, and at times, even the terrorism itself.

Sometimes I look at pictures of those black clouds of jet-fueled smoke pouring through that vivid blue sky that defined September 11th, wondering if it really did become a rip in time. Many of those photographs were shot on film, a light grain infused within the fabric of the images, as if sealing the atrocities into the pages of history by painting them into celluloid, capping off the end of an analogue era and entering a digital age full of clutter and imperfection. For the photographs of Ground Zero are most often grey, pixelated and digital, the product of a new reality. Maybe in that sense, 9/11 really did foreshadow the wars of our time.
I have to wonder just what really changed on that September day, nine months before I was born…

THE END