Comment by kelnos
3 days ago
It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
3 days ago
It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
"Letting the terrorists win" is an expression from not long after 9/11 using a combination of the following logic. First, the Bush administration said something along the lines of "they hate us for our freedom" about the 9/11 terrorists, and if the terrorists hate freedom then enacting freedom-reducing policies in response to an act of terrorism is playing into their hands. Second, a common definition of terrorism is using fear to achieve political ends, so anyone who uses an act of violence to justify oppressive policies is sadistically taking political advantage of a tragedy at best and even meets that definition of a terrorist. Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
> Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
Completely agree. Terrorists destroyed the USA by destroying all of its freedoms and values. They happily gave up freedom for security in spite of the warnings of their founders. All it took was two aircraft.
9/11 is nowhere near the beginning nor end of the process.
They had the Patriot Act ready to go prior to 9/11. Some minor text changes, and everyone is voting for it.
It's my favorite thing about "Inside Job" conspiracies. Whether authority has covertly orchestrated an event behind the scenes or if they were quietly and deliberately lax in preventing the event, if they were just incompetent, or simply failed through no fault of their own: the event has now happened, so the important bit is that they have overtly capitalized on it to create policies with harmful consequences.