I am writing this on September 11th, though you will read it on the 12th. Twenty-five years ago, I was watching the midday news at my parents’ house, as the attacks coincided exactly with the lunchtime broadcast in Spain. The rapid television coverage allowed my generation to witness live, for the first time, the onset of a war, a shift in eras, the horror of terrorism, and the end of the innocence of that triumphant West.
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The news anchor shifted between raw human fear and journalistic adrenaline. We went down to the local bar, which had a satellite dish offering a host of international channels, and spent the afternoon glued to the screen, gripped by a growing, unsettling realization: the free world we had known had just been flushed down the drain of history.
As a Spaniard who grew up seeing daily press reports on the savage attacks carried out by ETA, the most cowardly terrorist group in history, I was all too familiar with the horror of the attack on the Twin Towers. I could fully grasp the fear, the bewilderment, the acts of heroism, the charity of decent people, the glee of vile monsters, and the rage of so many innocents. Yet, this was on a different scale entirely; the symbolism was truly colossal. It was as if the Devil himself had conspired to deal a lethal blow to the heart of the Christian West, to the United States of America. (RELATED: What We Must ‘Never Forget’ 25 Years After 9/11)
The legacy of 9/11 has consumed the ruins of the West.
Twenty-five years later, the legacy of 9/11 has consumed the ruins of the West. Terrorist attacks have proliferated, especially in Europe, and most politicians, both in the Old Continent and in the United States, have failed to rise to the challenge.
Terrorism has evolved far beyond Al-Qaeda; it has gone global, fueling a repugnant trade in innocent blood that uses Quranic verses as a smokescreen. All of that, too, feels all too familiar to me. Whenever ETA murdered a police officer or a Civil Guard, almost always with a shot to the back of the head, there was invariably some idiot who would disrupt the general public outrage by insinuating that the victim might have done something to deserve it.
I later saw Socialists doing the same thing that Democrats are now attempting with Islamic movements: suggesting that we need to engage in dialogue with terrorists and integrate them. This mirrors the time when, after ETA committed its cruelest murder, the kidnapping and slow-motion execution of young politician Miguel Ángel Blanco, Socialists decided that, in the face of such grief, the moment had come to capitulate to the gang of murderers, negotiate with them, and yield to their demands, thereby trampling upon the memory of hundreds of innocent victims. (RELATED: The Marxist-Islamist Alliance Feeds On DSA Naïveté)
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The United States, of course, did not surrender after 9/11; in fact, it emerged even stronger. Consequently, the American Left’s betrayal of Western values has been more subtle and protracted, yet no less perverse: before Mamdani came Obama, and in the interim, Democrats have steadily moved toward normalizing Islamic culture, as if Europe’s multicultural laboratory, rife with terrorist attacks and entire neighborhoods dominated by Sharia law, did not serve as a sufficient warning.
The West is like a rope constantly on the verge of snapping: on one side, there is a powerful tug from those who wish to integrate Islamic culture into nations founded and built upon Christian values; on the other, a powerful pull from laicists whose true aim is simply to banish Christianity. These two currents, seemingly opposed, feed off one another, ultimately shattering what was once our greatest strength: our shared culture, identity, faith, tradition, freedom, and values. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))
I am deeply pessimistic about the world to come, precisely because I saw the sun shine upon the West for many decades, witnessed the nightmare of the 9/11 attacks, and now see what has become of that entire amalgam of cheap rhetoric and the childish, unreflective arguments of progressives, along with the pernicious, suicidal drift of the Left, which, after all, almost always represents half of a country’s population.
The Right has not always done its job either, sometimes out of stupidity, at other times due to misguided benevolence or naivety. Yet, at this point, it matters little whose fault all this ruin is. Denying it is not an option, either. Perhaps the only sensible path forward is to consider that, as the old reactionaries of the 19th century used to say, everything the revolution destroys can be rebuilt.
Twenty-five years later: God bless the United States of America.
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