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Nazia Kazi: What We Forget (On 9/11 & Year-Round)
Uploaded September 12. Anthropologist Dr. Nazia Kazi recently wrote What We Forget, a piece commemorating the global aftermath of 9/11 illustrated by Anuj Shrestha; Sam Goldman interviews Dr. Kazi about the US empire and related root causes of the fascist stew that is politics today. Follow Dr. Kazi on Twitter at @NaziaKaziTweets and read her book Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics.
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Sam Goldman: As we mark 20 years of
the so-called war on terror, we need to put special emphasis on putting
humanity first, not America first. We need to cut through the American
chauvinism amnesia that permeates society that so insidiously without
question or apology, leaves absent from our collective memory the
screams of the millions killed or made refugees as whole villages were
erased, the orphaned children, crushed lives of widows, the terror that
reigned across over seven countries over the course of 20 years of the
“War on Terror”, and the domestic terror felt by Muslims or those that
“looked” Muslim.
Nazia Kazi: It’s interesting that even the US government itself acknowledges that the War on Terror is a never-ending forever war… We’ve got to remember the geopolitics that led to 9/11 to begin with… 37 million people displaced by the US led war on terror… US-created a network of secret prisons, so-called black sites around the world… The notion of empire, the notion of imperialism is so absent from American discourse… To think about American Empire allows us to begin to understand not just the War on Terror, but the global economic system...
What we really need to
underscore if we want a more nuanced and more appropriate history is to
remember what came after September 11th. One of the things I talk to my
students about is I ask them to guess how many people were displaced,
forced from their homes because of the US led war on terror. They will
throw some big numbers out there: 200,000, half a million. Actually, the
number is so much larger than that: 37 million people displaced by the
US led War on Terror. This is a number that is so hard to wrap our heads
around. It’s also responsible for the wave of refugee crises we’ve seen
since the launching of the War on Terror. I think we forget that the
US- created a network of sort of secret prisons, so-called black sites,
around the world since September 11th. Not just Guantanamo Bay, which is
not a secret one — but clearly, many secret and really covert actions
took place there. But around the world, there’s sort of this archipelago
of carceral sites that are off the record. Where what the US military
or US intelligence apparatus does, is unknown, and unrecorded. These are
the things we really ought to remember.
Image from What We Forget: The True Legacy of 9/11 by Nazia Kazi and Anuj Strestha
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