You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive
1 it was one of the largest terror attacks ever and so many people died. So just on the scale deaths was crazy. It also came and went in an instant, so although the death count was nothing like covid, covid slow boiled people building up over time as the new normal.
2 Americans thought they were untouchable and separated from the rest of the world. So all the worlds problems were a problem far away with nothing to do with them. With the cold war recently won this idea they were untouchable was extremely reinforced and when the bubble burst in a single day and they did not take it well at all.
I think more importantly there is a 3rd factor - it was live and televised, and so many of us watched it unfold, utterly powerless to stop it, not realizing just how bad it was going to be but it was already past the point of no return.
To speak to your point we watched it unfold live. News coverage picked it up after the first plane hit. So a lot of people were watching. Meaning a lot of people were watching live as the second plane hit and then the towers fell.
German here, It was the first day of School/Kindergarten for me an my brother. Must have been sometime in the afternoon when our mother had turned on the TV to a news channel. I did not understand why or what has happened. My mother just told us something terrible has happened and it is important that she watches. That's one of my oldest memories, likely because of the emotions my mother showed.
I don't know about Poland, but here in Germany it was far from boring evening news. It is not exclusive to America
In the Netherlands I remember hearing the news, initially there was confusion. Single plane, dual planes, accident, and so on. When I got home I switched on the news (we had CNN Europe ) and was glued to the screen. I think most people here remember remember that day.
Not really true. It was main news everywhere in Europe for many days, I'm pretty sure, international flights where a mess globally for a couple of days and that directly affected travel. I watched it all live on tv in Finland, starting from the first plane.
In The Netherlands it was a big event. I remember coming home from school and the news was on and seeing it all. And later the same 5-10 min news fragment was repeated over and over.
This and the 2004 tsunami left a really big impression on me as a kid. I was 10 when 9/11 happened.
Also, it took a long even after the second plane hit for it to fall. We watched doomed people in the upper floors waving for help. To get the full experience, you would have to show the entire ordeal in real time.
Watching a plane-shape hole in one skyscraper was shocking and horrifying in an abstract way, but watching the second one slapping into the other tower like a Michael Bay movie shocked me to the core.
That... coordinated suicide at that scale, live on TV is something we've never seen before, and thankfully, not since.
The only thing I can suggest for younger generations is the intro of the movie Bird Box, watching that gave me the same existential horror watching a mass suicide unfolding in front of your eyes.
And a lot of people's response after was rage, someone or something had to be punished for this. Al Qaida took credit pretty quickly, everyone knew Bin Laden was behind the attacks and that they were muslim terrorists.
That made muslims everywhere at least suspicious and to a lot of people outright evil merely for having the same belief as the terrorists. It instantly created an outgroup in most of the western world that many people were ready to hate and where anyone defending them could be accused of defending terrorists. We can see the effects of that all over America and Europe where fascists have used islamophobia (later on turned into hatred of all immigrants) to gain power.
From my European perspective, it was also impressive how many Americans had no clue whatsoever what their government and armed forces were doing overseas.
The second one is a big one. It was in my experience, in those days, always a major divide between Americans and Europeans, with the latter often being far more aware of the geopolitical role the US has always played.
Given recent developments, it should also be noted that the US called for aid, and the NATO members answered.
I feel you’ve hit the nail on the head. It was most of all about the visibility of it all. 3000 isn’t much in grand total in terms of civilian deaths compared to anything going on at the time.
But Americans everywhere saw it, and since it was in such a huge business junction tons of people knew a friend of a friend who was affected.
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u/Norway643 14h ago
You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive