Researched: 5/5
What I learned: 2/5
Writing: 3/5
Recommend to a friend: 1/5
Relevance: 3/5
Overall: 3/5
“We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.”
One tiny little book filled to the brim with information. The question is…. Did I understand all the information?
Nope.
It’s hard for me to ever question Chomsky’s word. He’s already proven how well researched all of his information is - just take a quick gander at the back of one of his books and you’ll be greeted with a long list of references. Or what I like to call, further reading. But this book is choked with information. A collection of interviews, Chomsky answers the interviewers’ questions in a concise way, never going into further detail as he’s done in his other books. And since 9-11 happened almost 20 years ago, it’s hard to remember the finer details of the early 2000s, especially when I was only ten.
So is this book worth reading today?
If you want to have more reasons to despise the US’s political structure, then yes. If you want to know how vile of a country we are, then yes. If you want to know how we fueled the very hatred that resulted in 9-11, then yes. If you want to see a glimmer of what we could have done instead, then yes. Essentially, the book asks all the questions, gave all the answers, that the US wasn’t delivering right after 9-11. If you’ve seen the movie Vice, you can see how US citizen’s didn’t even understand what was going on at the time.
And like Vice, the only way to get the most out of this book is to know the players and what was going on at the time. My friends, that was not me, and I was very, very bored.
“These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops.”
9-11 isn’t a book about 9-11 conspiracy theories (shocker). In fact, Chomsky barely talks about the event itself. He spends his time on the US’s options going forward, foreign affairs. Who knew bombing a Middle East pharmacy plant could cause so much unrest? I didn’t. I didn’t know stopping production to lifesaving medication that was saving hundreds of thousands of lives was going to make people so upset. These are the things never talked about in mainstream media. The things that our government is doing in the US’s name and why books like this are so important…. They tell readers the truth.
How do people like Chomsky know all of this?
It’s in the unclassified documents, someone just needs to take the time to read them. We can thank Obama and Ford for that.
In the end, I don’t regret spending my time reading 9-11. It was so small it felt like a blip in my reading time. I just wish I could have gotten more out of it. And because I struggled, I’m not going to rush off and recommend it to my friends. I think for the novice political activist, this wouldn’t be the best book to start with.
Happy Reading
Love Kait
Reading Challenge: 49/100