what was it like to experience it firsthand?

> what was it like to experience it firsthand?

There was a terrorist attack that changed the New York City skyline. There was consequently a certain national mood. Then the institutions that are supposed to be ours, the government and the media, told the public a lie. But questioning authority? That's not patriotism and solidarity.

You might have believed them, because you were outraged and wanted someone to fight about it, and dissenting voices were not appreciated. The act of doubting the narrative was put off until after it was already too late. Not by men with guns but by social pressure and human nature.

The important thing to understand about this is that when people rally around the flag -- don't pretend it matters which one -- Moloch is aroused.

but what about the many years after? the sobering up? bottom up consequences?

i'm part Ukranian. Raised in Germany. My family's social circle is huge. Almost none of the Ukrainians left Ukraine.

And almost none of those live in the east. Some fled to the country side but are already back in what the German media portrait as war zones.

my elders gave up. They say that if the higher classes don't care, nothing can be done.

and their German friends believe the news instead of calls between brothers and sisters who've been talking almost weekly for the last 30 years.

the same with the Russian side. And only few hardliners support the war. their logic is shared by a majority of the Ukrainians.

and i can't make up my freaking mind.

did they sell out their country? many Ukrainians say people votes for Selensky because they knew he would bring the war. Amd when I checked the data, Selensky got only 30 something % of Ukrainians on his side, which is standard given how many people don't vote at all.

then you check the news and studies and humanitarian reports dating back into the nineties and you think you realize what the hell is going on but the media turn everything 100 degrees and the voices that advocated for the truth suddenly switch sides. WHAT.

and it seems even worse with Israel-Palestine.

i don't know how to deal with how well-doing people like hackers and engineers and scientists deal with how the media and politicians treat the truth.

and it hurts

> the voices that advocated for the truth suddenly switch sides. WHAT.

The media is people. Bias is the default. Sometimes the bias of one organization aligns with the truth, on some issue. That doesn't mean it will on every issue, or will tomorrow if it did yesterday.

Objective reporting is rare. And the reason for that is that it's hard to distinguish. The reason you're watching it on a screen is that you aren't there and you don't know what the truth is, so you're trusting someone else to faithfully convey what's happening. How do you know if they don't?

Sometimes it's more obvious than others. The truth is always logically consistent with reality. It's possible because it happened. Whereas lies have no such constraint. So you can detect lies -- sometimes -- because they contradict themselves. It's the same reason authors publish a novel and then get letters from readers telling them all the mistakes they made -- fiction is inconsistent with reality because otherwise it wouldn't be fiction. And so the more inconsistencies you detect with someone's reporting, the less you trust them.

But that's just a heuristic. Someone tells the truth 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is a lie. Someone lies 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is the truth.

We want to pretend we can know for sure, but that's not how it is. Then nihilists want to claim that you can't know anything so you might as well give up, but that's not how it is either. Being 95% sure isn't the same as being 40% sure.

Partly like this: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8BMFYB9/

But it doesn’t capture the nuance of the feeling.

There was this great unification in America that I haven’t seen since. Everyone shared a common feeling: we were attacked, and we needed to make sure it never happened again.

I was in gradeschool at the time, and I remember my 8th grade teacher turning off the TV because he didn’t feel kids should be watching the towers fall.

Months and years after that, no one questioned that we had to put a stop to terrorism. These were the bad guys, and we were the good guys. Go get ‘em.

I don’t think it’s even possible to replicate the stranglehold that mainstream media had on us. The internet was around, but social media was not. Nowadays you can get contrarian opinions at the speed of light. Back then, you’d be ostracized for voicing that our troops weren’t doing the right thing.

Funny how the same thing is happening now. But it’s way less effective in 2023 than 2003.

this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway.

i was wondering about the firsthand experience of realizing it's all fake in the many years after 9/11.

especially from educated professionals and financially well doing professionals.

i only know working class accounts

> this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway.

Its not only not well-documented, its inaccurate self-justification that has been constructed after people realized how they had been deluded in their bloodthirst (or, at least, for people like Matt Yglesias who had rocketed from a college blogger to a major media figure largely through his pro-Iraq War blogging, as means of protecting their reputation once public opinion turned.)

It wasn't a major media stranglehold; while, yes, things like Judith Miller’s war pimping occurred, so did extensive major media debunkings of the lies and exposes of the methods being used to manufacture them. People will tell you they watched the UNSC meeting live and remember how chilled they were when Powell presented the fake evidence, but they don't seem to recall as prominently their feeling when many of those claims were debunked by UN inspectors in that same meeting.

A major media failing would have been easier to deal with, to accept: we were lied to, the truth wasn't avaialable, and naturally the public made the sensible stand based on what was available to them. Horrifying in its result, but not at all damaging to one’s fellow humans, but for a small cadre of evil warmongering propagabdists.

But when the whole narrative was debunked and that debunking was widely reported in major media, etc., abd yet the mass of the public still cheerleads for death and destruction that is being sold with the debunked narrative, living through that as someone who didn’t buy into was horrifying on a level that is hard to describe (as has been witnessing the retroactive denial narrative after the bloodthirst subsided a bit0, since not facing what actually happened, makes it a lot more likely to happen again.)

As someone who protested the 2003 war while living in Texas, what you're wanting to hear about never happened.

A lot of us at the time knew the run up to the war was bullshit because it was logically incoherent, which is an easy metric for that kind of thing. So on one side we never generally had a moment of "it's all fake"- we knew it was fake.

At best we had moments of "all these assholes who made me question if I was dumb /immature /irrational /misinformed were clearly incorrect". If you're around enough folks who think you're an insane idiot, eventually you question yourself. But since we on the anti-war left were wholly correct on so many counts it's been helpful to have some occasional reckonings- the folks running the US have not gotten "more correct" and the voices who shout down those of us who question it haven't gotten quieter so that has been useful to remember when I feel dumb for my political dissent.

On the other side, still, what you're looking for did not happen.

In my experience, none of the people who were pro-war in 2003 never really figured out how fake and wrong all of that was.

Most I have asked think one of two things. One group is convinced that "knowing what they knew at the time" they were correct. It's easy to fudge a bunch of facts to make that feel like an okay position, even if it's just wrong.

The best I can manage with the other subgroup of folks is a metaphor. We used to have to set our clocks forward and so people were conscious of time changes. At some point, most of us rely on phones, and as such the time changes happen but are only noticeable when we see that the clock on the stove needs to be adjusted.

At some point around 2012 a group of folks woke up thinking that they'd always known that the Iraq war stuff was all fake. That just became the "received opinion" and their thoughts from 2003 were all so murky, no need to look into anything, But, of course, US foreign interactions were probably well motivated and just so why would all that stuff from a decade ago matter, and besides that war criminal Bush was out of office (but was he really a war criminal? these folks might disagree with such strong wording).

Anyhow, that's my view as a 45-year-old on-the-fringe-of-the-Professional-Managerial-Class worker in tech and education: no pro-war adults in the PMC who I know had an experience of learning that they were wrong.

Maddening. The war planners expected everyone to be completely credulous. It was watching your country go to war on unverifiable "evidence" collected through a game of whisper-down-the-ally. If you expressed doubt, you were unpatriotic and wanted another 9/11. If you wanted to cut the losses and end it, you wanted to 'cut and run' and wanted another 9/11.

If you presented everything to a smart 8 year old, they would said it sounded dubious.

Meh, it wasn't so clearcut. You have to remember that Hussein himself deliberately encouraged the belief that he had chemical weapons (perhaps thinking it would be a deterrent) and that he did, in fact, use chemical weapons against the Kurds in previous years.

The information was bad, but it certainly wasn't clear to an 8 year old and probably wasn't even clear to Bush & Co. Given the incredible effort that the US military spent trying to hunt down WMDs after the war, it's clear the belief was genuine. That doesn't make their decisions good, but it makes them somewhat understandable.

I was 30 when the Iraq war started. I had mixed feelings then and to be honest, I still have mixed feelings. I cry not one single tear for Saddam Hussein, though the population of Iraq deserved a better outcome.

It was pretty clear cut to the point that France, Germany, Russia and China voted against Resolution 1441 in the UN, and there was unprecedented demonstrations across the globe against it.

The only reason that we suspected he had chemical war systems is that the US sold him those chemical war systems in the 1980s to use against Iran. I'm not sure how ready or what level of disrepair they were in 20 years later.

Removing Saddam absolutely was wrong strategically, and lead to about a million people dying.

Brazilian here.

Around here, comedians were just repeating the evidence to get people to laugh. It was so clear cut that it didn't need explanation.

But then it stopped being funny when the US actually acted on it.

Infuriating having to watch as a country go to war and a large chunk of people think it's a great idea.

You literally whiteness-ed how the white house manufactured public consent to go to war.

I recall the aluminum tubes that supposedly where for uranium enrichment but were not even close to be what you would need for such a centrifuge. but people believed it.

Also bonkers was Bush and Chaney said before going in. The US cannot wait for final proof "in the form of a mushroom cloud" before taking action against Saddam Hussein, the US president, George Bush, warned overnight.

So many other things like:

- "Shock and Awe" which was basically watching mass murder on television while the media cheered on the forces.

- You also had embedded reporters" which was a way for the military to control the flow of information.

- George Bush landing on an aircraft carrier (he supposedly took the wheel on an aircraft and landed) and claiming "Mission Accomplished" way before the end and before the horrific insurgency that killed tons of American troops.

- The looting of the museums and anarchy afterwards. Complete unpreparedness of the US of what to do after the topple they Iraq Government.

and many other things.