Foreign Perspectives is a mix of free and paid content. Certain columns such as these are free for all subscribers, but other articles will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

Take 20% off all paid subscriptions to Foreign Perspectives via my end of summer sale here!

I was supposedly on my mother’s lap in front of the television watching the events of September 11, 2001 unfold. I would’ve been three years old and barely conscious of anything around me, so I have no direct memory of what happened. What I do remember shortly afterward is being constantly reminded that 9/11 was the worst day in American history. As a zillennial cusper (too young to be a core millennial, but too old to be a complete zoomer), I’m perhaps among the last generation of young people who grew up being fully aware that al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on U.S. soil opened the new century and changed the world forever.

Today is, unbelievably, the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is naturally a day of somber remembrance for the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered. The tragedy has continued with thousands more dying of related illnesses in the ensuing years. For the 24th anniversary, I visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. As I wrote last year, you will paradoxically never find a more peaceful location in all of New York City. Despite once being the horrific site of people being forced to jump out of the Twin Towers and those buildings ultimately collapsing into rubble, the utmost effort has been put into crafting a pensive space that honors the victims and tells their stories.

Anyone who travels to New York should take an afternoon to be where the One World Trade Center rises out of the ashes of its predecessor. And yet, it is difficult to ignore a painful truth: living memory of 9/11 is fading into history. America is already long past the milestone where everyone born before September 11, 2001 is now an adult. Young men and women who came into the world that year were old enough to serve in Afghanistan before the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops two decades later. According to Gallup, only 16 percent of Gen Z believes that their lives had changed because of 9/11, but that shouldn’t be surprising. How could they have a concept of life before it?

Important events will naturally become less relevant to later generations. What is unbelievable with 9/11 is the speed in which everything has become memory-holed. In 1966, most Americans still understood the gravity of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though it had taken place 25 years previously. World War II was baked into the cultural ether through novels, films, songs, and other media. Younger adults who did not fight overseas remembered growing up with the domestic war effort as part of their childhoods. WWII veterans were also around to remind everyone. The New York Times reported that hundreds of survivors traveled to Honolulu and that there was no shortage of commemoration. People were not going to forget anytime soon.

But perhaps the biggest difference between 1966 and 2026 is what kind of war Americans are living after. Afghanistan, which the United States initially invaded with good justification to eradicate the terrorist cells which trained al-Qaeda, ended in disarray because it turned into a failed nation-building enterprise. Iraq, while slowly improving since the removal of Saddam Hussein, has suffered through years of regional instability and civilian casualties. It was hardly a glorious win and veterans have very mixed feelings toward their role in the conflict. The decisive Allied victory over the Axis powers in 1945, on the other hand, was an essential part of what made Americans believe that their country was a great nation. There is no longer a WWII-like mythology for people of all generations to get behind.

The briefest moments after 9/11 probably marked the last time when such unity was still possible. George W. Bush saw a record-high 90 percent approval rating in early October amid his initial words of reassurance to the American people. Four years and one unpopular war later, however, and public sentiment turned against the president. I believe that this shift in national mood would have eventually happened even without Iraq. The last quarter of a century has been defined by rapid advancements in technology, which in turn has radically transformed how information is distributed.

There were no smartphones or social media when 9/11 happened. While it is often referred to as the most photographed event in American history, no public images inside the Twin Towers above the impact zone where the planes hit are known to exist. Relatively little footage of American Airlines Flight 77 smashing into the Pentagon was recorded and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, PA was essentially in the middle of nowhere. Most at the World Trade Center who shot footage of people jumping to their deaths made a conscious effort to not capture them hitting the ground. The Falling Man photograph was highly controversial upon its release despite its lack of explicit gore. The implication alone was gruesome enough.

I mention all this because 9/11 arguably marked the last time when there was restraint with how a major tragedy of this scale was covered, but also when traditional media still controlled what was shown to the public. News outlets and professional journalists largely stuck to the facts while respecting the dignity of the victims. The worst imagery of that day either remains locked away in private collections or was never put to film in the first place. If 9/11 happened today, nothing would be left to the imagination and there would be no shortage of endless carnage livestreamed to the internet.

For better or worse, we are all now cameramen and self-proclaimed reporters because of the supercomputers in our pockets. Virtually every moment of daily life is recorded and then discussed 24/7 on social media where there is simply too much information for our minds to adequately process. Human beings did not interact with each other on this scale in 2001. 9/11 conspiracy theories of course existed 25 years ago, but they were mostly relegated to niche circles of nuts who few took seriously. Today, the conspiracies quickly overtake the facts as the dominant narrative because they attract the mosts clicks and views.

At the same time, distrust of institutions and experts did not come out of nowhere. The dubious justifications for the Iraq War are why large swaths of the American public refused to ever trust their government again. And while the political right bears considerable responsibility for the erosion of the public’s confidence, it was not just their doing. Left-leaning journalists and academics have constantly downplayed the existential threat of radical Islam, instead choosing to frame all criticism of the Muslim world as racism or xenophobia. Even after 9/11, many privileged Westerners still cannot wrap their heads around the idea that certain religious beliefs are incompatible with Western society.

You cannot compel young people to “never forget” 9/11 when they are in no position to remember. Gen Z was raised in a environment far more politically polarized than during the Bush years. Their defining generational moment was not al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, but living through a pandemic which forced everyone indoors, upended their lives, destroyed their social interactions, and ruined their already shaky economic prospects. While worried if they’ll ever get onto the housing ladder or live as securely as their parents, a thousand things on social media are competing for their attention. Being terminally online has indoctrinated a worrying number of zoomers into antisemitic conspiracy theories and siding with the late Osama bin Laden himself.

25 years later, what truly is the legacy of 9/11? It must be accepted that the event has transitioned away from living memory and into old history much faster than any of us could have ever predicted. The best we can hope for now is that those who do care continue to prioritize educating others. Against my own expectations, many of the people online working to preserve the lost media around 9/11 are actually Gen Z users. The 9/11 archive on Reddit is an valuable treasure trove of crucial information. Its admins have reached out to survivors for their stories, and there are active efforts underway to recover unseen footage which is stuck on decaying analog media.

For as easy as it is to be pessimistic that 9/11 will be forgotten, I don’t think that all hope is lost. Young people in this age are no less capable of empathy and appreciating the past. It is only the new challenges of their generation which are preventing them from understanding the full context. A curious mind with a genuine drive to learn, however, has no limitations regardless of age. The amount of Gen Z archivists dedicated to documenting 9/11, even its most esoteric aspects like the muzak which played in the plaza of the Twin Towers before the very end, is proof of that. Perhaps “never forget” is no longer an adequate phrase. How we record history for those who read about 9/11 a century from now is the bigger problem to tackle.

Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Foreign Perspectives is a mix of free and paid content. Certain columns such as these are free for all subscribers, but other articles will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are nearly a quarter of a century behind us. Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst day in U.S. history, which is a bittersweet milestone that I don’t think enough people grasp the significance of. That is especially true with younger generations of Americans who have no memories of 9/11 and, increasingly, no understanding of how much those events shaped the current trajectory of the 21st century.

I wasn’t old enough to remember 9/11 itself as someone born toward the end of 1997, but I distinctly recall growing up in the 2000s with the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars as a constant backdrop of my childhood. With that said, I didn’t grasp the full context and significance of 9/11 until I seriously started studying international affairs much later. I eventually spent so much time researching the subject that I was able to write about 9/11 professionally for outlets like The Japan Times and bring attention to the lesser known aspects of it on social media.

It was with that background that I finally made an auspicious pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum yesterday, having booked a tour of the premises with my wife while we were visiting New York City this week. I would have gone today, but the area is largely closed to family members of victims for their own personal remembrance ceremony. Yet even on the day before 9/11, one immediately feels the weight of history in the air.

The main memorial site of two reflecting pools symbolizing where the Twin Towers once stood is easily the most peaceful location in New York City. Crashing sounds of water landing on the granite basins below create an aural effect that drowns out the noises of traffic and airplanes, while all those present know that they’re treading on sacred land. The 400 swamp white oak trees, native to New York, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, are planted throughout the grounds because they represent victims from all three locations of 9/11. Those are the kinds of careful details that went into the arduous process of creating this special place.

Here amid the hustle and bustle of the busiest metropolis on earth is a space dedicated entirely to solemn reflection. Every single victim’s name is written on the panels installed around the reflecting pools and grouped not by alphabetical order, but in careful consideration of the friends and colleagues they worked with every day in the towers. Those who were on board the hijacked planes, at the Pentagon, or even killed in the original 1993 World Trade Center bombing are also included. With their names physically carved out via hollow gaps in the metal, an endless supply of flowers and photographs from loved ones is always present.

The adjacent museum provides one of the most exhaustive overviews of 9/11 a person could ask for. It was set to close early in preparation of today’s memorial and the general admission line was completely packed with visitors, but we were able to gain instant access due to booking group tickets ahead of time. I’m glad things turned out this way because visiting will not be an experience I’ll easily forget. Despite knowing the general timeline of 9/11 pretty well at this point, little can really prepare you for how emotionally draining the exhibits are.

Everything from the largest steel beam to the smallest scrap of office paper is meticulously preserved and given a full explanation. You should plan to spend a full afternoon here due to the crowds, but also because there’s simply so much information to fully process. I was reminded of similar museums in Japan dedicated to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this one goes into even more extensive detail. It’s heavy stuff that many will find difficult to come to terms with, but not facing the gravity of what happened is how history becomes forgotten.

Indeed, precisely how the history of 9/11 should be remembered is itself a central theme of the entire site. The memorial was not established until 2011, while the museum finally opened to the public in 2014. With thousands of people affected and the family members of the deceased being a powerful lobbying force, creating a place that properly honored everyone connected to 9/11 was no easy task. I walked away with the impression that they did as good of a job as could be expected.

In my time researching 9/11, I’ve come across horrible photographs of “jumpers” — the colloquial term for people forced to make the impossible decision to leap from the World Trade Center and receive an instant death or be burned alive in the smoldering flames where they stood. I’ve seen other disturbing images of severed human limbs on the streets below and Pentagon victims reduced to literal ash. With 9/11 having taken place in a pre-smartphone, pre-social media world, those with cameras were very selective in what they shot and the most unsettling media was often cut for broadcast on television or print in newspapers.

You won’t find any explicit pictures of gore at the 9/11 museum, but there was obviously no way such material would ever be widely shown to the public. I’m of mixed feelings around this choice because while I understand the need to keep things to a certain level out of taste, it comes close to whitewashing just how bad things truly were on that day. In the years after 9/11, we’ve certainly seen some misguided attempts to make it more “palatable” to Americans.

For quite some time there was this frustrating post-9/11 trend to remove any depictions of the Twin Towers in pop culture. Movies like The Bourne Identity and video games like Metal Gear Solid 2 had their plots significantly altered, which made some sense given the sociopolitical climate of the time. Far more unacceptable was censors feeling the need to airbrush any World Trade Center references out of media that already existed such as in Home Alone 2 and The Simpsons. Considering that al-Qaeda’s goal was to morally weaken Americans and break their spirits, there’s an irony that in some ways they got their wish with how taboo the Twin Towers became.

Thankfully, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum largely succeeds in striking a balance between proper historical documentation and conveying the gravity of what happened without needing to resort to provocative imagery. There’s a time and a place for more shocking photographs, but those are probably best left to online archives that can be freely accessed. For a public-facing site that’s primarily intended for general education, I doubt much could be done better. You can’t teach people if you scare them off.

The 9/11 Archive on Reddit is the definitive online source for all things 9/11. It is run by mods who are dedicated toward covering it from all possible angles, and their tireless efforts have allowed for “lost media” around the events to be saved. Many videos that were taken on that day remain in government possession, stuck on aging analog tapes, or have remained forgotten in private collections. Some material is locked away behind layers of legal tape, but much of it only needs to be found and properly digitized. In 2024, an hour of new World Trade Center collapse footage was posted online by a Japanese tourist who was in New York City on September 11, 2001, but he never publicly released it until 23 years later. Who knows what else is out there?

Still, we also need physical places like the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to preserve history more than ever now. The current digital landscape of fake news is causing many to doubt their very eyes whenever new photographs or videos are posted online. Conspiracy theories around 9/11 have always existed of course, but the rapid evolution of AI will only make separating fact from fiction all the more difficult in the years and decades to come. There will come a time around the end of the century when the public remembers 9/11 like the sinking of the Titanic — a devastating tragedy in its time, but a distant memory after all those who survived it are no longer around. “Never Forget” can only have real meaning if the record is made now.

Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Foreign Perspectives is a mix of free and paid content. Certain columns such as these are free for all subscribers, but other articles will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

My grandmother was five years old when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria on Sept. 18, 1931. While the traditional start date of World War II is typically associated with Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, you really can trace the beginning of the overall global conflict to what was happening in Northeast Asia long before.

Hailing from Shenyang, my family lived under the Japanese occupation like millions of other Chinese. My grandmother’s father was the chauffeur for a high-ranking official, which gave her family a better living than most. She and her sister learned Japanese at a good school and even visited Tokyo during World War II to record music with the NHK Symphony Orchestra as a child singer. As all that was happening, my great-grandfather was apparently stealing gasoline to sell the black market. Somehow he didn’t get caught, and they were lucky enough to survive the war.

Emperor Hirohito’s official proclamation of surrender happened 80 years ago to this day on Aug. 15, 1945. The now defeated Japan would officially sign the official documents a few weeks later on Sept. 2, bringing an end to the bloodiest conflict in human history. My relatives were some of the lucky ones. Up to 20 million Chinese are estimated to have died in the conflict. Depending on the criteria used, the worldwide total deaths could have been as high as 75 million.

Grandmother lived to the ripe age of 96, passing away of COVID in 2022 surrounded by loved ones in the United States. She had not just survived World War II, but the Great Depression beforehand, the Cultural Revolution afterward, and practically all of the turbulent events that China went through in the middle of the 20th century. I had the privilege to hear her stories firsthand, which is something I will always be grateful for. When I look back on her life, the realization hits me that my generation will probably be the last to hold conscious memories of speaking to the World War II generation.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. Recent updates from 2024 reported that just about 66,100 WWII veterans were still alive in the United States out of the 16.4 million who participated in the conflict. The real number is assuredly lower now considering that about 131 die every week. It is unclear how many surviving vets there are worldwide, but the total number is somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000. I remember being in middle school when the last surviving American veteran of the First World War, Frank Buckles, passed away in 2011 at 110 years old. Florence Green, a British woman who was believed to be the last known service member of the entire conflict, followed in 2012.

As of this writing, Ilie Ciocan from Romania is the oldest living WWII veteran at the astounding age of 112. Considering that the youngest people who served are in their late 90s and the age patterns of veterans from WWI, we can probably expect the final WWII vets who achieve the greatest feats of maximum human longevity to pass away in the 2030s. The last men to tell their stories will be those who lied about their age to enlist or the ones from countries where teenagers were drafted to fight. Beyond soldiers, there are over 200,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust still alive. Many of them were children liberated from the camps. With their median age today being 87, a small portion will likely live into the 2040s or even 2050s. Regardless, 90% of all Holocaust survivors will pass away in the next 15 years.

Eight decades on from the end of WWII, we have reached a turning point when it comes to public memory and direct connections with the men and women who sacrificed everything to create the world we live in now. Those who participated in the war or are old enough to remember what life was like before, during, and immediately after it are literally a dying breed that will soon be gone forever. Being born in 1997 and growing up in the early 2000s, my default image of WWII vets for the longest time was people in their 70s and 80s. Elderly folks, but ones you felt would be around forever to offer pearls of wisdom and sage advice. The passage of time, unfortunately, does not work that way.

One should remember that this is a generation born when widespread radio was still a relatively new invention and the closest thing to a modern computer was a tabulating machine. After being raised on the economic struggles of the Great Depression, they were thrust into a world tearing itself apart through territorial invasions waged by empires, rapidly changing borders, mass slaughter, and eventually the invention of nuclear weapons. The sheer amount of people who were killed by the end of World War II is a staggering pile of corpses that hardly anyone today can comprehend. Those who lived through that era then witnessed the decades of profound historical and social shift which brought the 20th century into the 21st.

It would of course be ahistorical to idealize the WWII generation as uniquely better than those who came after them. They were human beings prone to the same follies and weaknesses which still exist today. The tyranny of the Nazis and the atrocities of the Holocaust were not solely due to Adolf Hitler, but the culmination of antisemitic attitudes and other social conditioning which had existed among Germans long before. Italian and Japanese fascism were similarly the result of destructive collectivist attitudes shared by enough people in their respective societies. Scholars have spent decades examining the underlying causes of WWII, but the era overall showed the best and worst parts of the human condition.

While many veterans on the Allied side have regaled the world with their stories, those on the Axis side are far less willing. For quite obvious reasons, German and Japanese veterans are reluctant to admit their part in being on the wrong side of a war which killed millions of people. Some were drafted and had simply had little choice, while others feel immense shame for being duped by their governments and the social climate around them at the time. Even so, what they have to say still matters. A recent piece published in The New York Times highlighted the rare perspectives of surviving Japanese veterans. None of the men interviewed glorified their time serving in the war and instead expressed hopes that future generations do not go down the same path.

My position as an American of Chinese descent living in Japan today would have certainly been unthinkable 80 years ago. This was a country that bombed Pearl Harbor and waged a completely unjustified war of aggression against its Asian neighbors, yet it is now a stalwart ally of the United States and among the best examples of liberal democracy in the world. No one in 1945 believed that Japan would be able to rise from the ashes of its utter destruction into the nation it is now, but it defied all the odds. As with modern Germany, that kind of transformation was not the result of happenstance. It could only have happened by learning from the mistakes of the past and actively wanting to build a better future.

When the last of the WWII generation departs from this world, we will only have the memories they leave behind in testimonies, photographs, and film. It is imperative that we preserve as much as possible before all of them fade into history. If you are fortunate enough to know anyone who served and they are still alive, treasure all the time you have with them. The experiences and stories they have to share will be invaluable long after they are gone.

Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

It may seem like just yesterday, but over two months have passed since Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to blows at the Oval Office. The explosive spat between what should have been stalwart allies was an embarrassing moment for the world to see and underscored the Trump administration’s frustrations with how to address the war in Ukraine. Well, most in Washington can probably agree at least that Vice President JD Vance should probably be kept as far away from Zelenskyy as possible.

This complete breakdown in communication was contrasted earlier late last month by a notably Vance-less meeting at Pope Francis’ funeral. While the 15-minute encounter was not pre-planned in advance, both men were photographed in deep conversation amid their solemn surroundings. As the next few weeks have shown, it seems that this got the ball rolling. Later reports suggested that Zelenskyy apparently was able to get Trump to admit that he may have to change his approach to Putin. Washington and Kyiv ultimately framed the talks as positive, which was likely a major factor in the long-awaited minerals deal finally being signed.

Vladimir Putin at the same time announced that there would be a unilateral three-day ceasefire beginning on May 8 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. Moscow’s supposed humanitarian generosity was unsurprisingly a sham. After all, the previous 30-hour “Easter truce” in April fizzled out as quickly as it started. Russia continued its launch of missiles on Ukrainian territory within the first six hours of that truce, according to Zelenskyy and even Trump himself issued a warning to Putin, curtly telling him to stop.

The next so-called ceasefire was just as meaningless. If Moscow was truly serious about ceasing hostilities, it would not have arbitrarily waited until May 8. Just days after Putin’s announcement, a Russian drone attack on May 1 killed one person and wounded 28 others in Zaporizhzhia. Fast forward to last week and Kyiv once again accused Moscow of violating the latest ceasefire. Make no mistake — the only reason Russia is even suggesting “ceasefires” is to make themselves look the party interested in peace and Ukraine the side that insists on continuing the bloodshed.

It is evident that Trump isn’t taking the bait — he most recently accused Putin of “tapping him along” and suggested that new actions such as sanctions may be in order. He re-affirmed this last week after a call with Zelenskyy, threatening more sanctions on Moscow if a full ceasefire was not implemented. The U.S. president has privately expressed his frustrations toward Russia “wanting the whole thing,” and even Vance is saying that Putin is “asking for too much.” Trump now finds himself at a crossroads of what to do with a conflict he previously boasted that he could end “in 24 hours.”

Read more

Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

A UFC commentator, a comedian, and a war correspondent walk into a studio. It sounds like the setup to some joke with an esoteric punchline — but no, it’s just your average episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. My non-podcast listening, non-political junkie readers may be confused, but bear with me for a moment. I’ve discussed in previous columns just how important Joe Rogan’s podcast has become for American discourse. He’s spoken to everyone from Robert Downey Jr. to Edward Snowden.

With over 14.5 million followers on Spotify, it really cannot be overstated: Rogan is a big deal, and the guests he invites help shape the viewpoints of a vast number of people. His podcast with Donald Trump arguably played at least some last-minute role in the man returning to the White House. Yet to quote Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In recent years, The Joe Rogan Experience has faced significant criticism for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and misinformation.

Some of this is overblown by mainstream media outlets who feel their influence is being threatened. But other moments — such as Australian radio presenter Josh Szeps making Rogan look foolish on camera about vaccines — highlight the limitations of the podcast. On topics like U.S. foreign policy and history, Rogan and some of his guests have repeated demonstrably false claims. Ukrainians have accused the show of pushing pro-Kremlin talking points, and recent controversy centered around Rogan inviting on Darryl Cooper — a podcaster with no real qualifications who engages in blatant historical revisionism, including downplaying Hitler’s public antisemitism and calling Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II.”

This long introduction is necessarily to contextualize an important episode of The Joe Rogan Experience posted last week. Over three hours of heated discussion, British journalist Douglas Murray and American comedian Dave Smith traded blows over the legitimacy of figures like Cooper, U.S. aid to Ukraine, and Israel’s war with Hamas. Their extreme disagreements reflect deepening fractures within the American political right — and suggest a stormy future is ahead.

Read more

Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns such as Bonus Perspectives and A Bit of Film and War will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

Here’s a first for Foreign Perspectives, a spur-of-the-moment column on a U.S. election. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, Donald Trump is now slated to be the 47th president of the United States and is only the second candidate in history to win two non-consecutive terms. Move over, Grover Cleveland. The one interesting factoid about your obscure presidencies is now irrelevant. Nice stache though.

Usually I reserve takes on political topics for my weekly column Bonus Perspectives, but there’s so much on my mind that I wanted to get out that I don’t think one segment in a four-part article would be enough. This deserves its own full piece, and while a lot will be said in the coming days, weeks, and even years, I thought it would be more important to get my initial thoughts out now while they’re still fresh.

Emotions are high on both sides, and I wanted to provide something a bit more nuanced from the unique perspective of an American living abroad who has watched this soap opera unfold for a long time. Many on the left are shocked that Trump could win again despite what we all know about him as a human being, but that only tells me that they’ve been living in a bubble for too long and need to get out of it.

I predicted that Trump would win a second term the moment that he announced his candidacy in 2022, but especially when Kamala Harris announced hers earlier this summer. You can read my column published in late July if you don’t believe me. Here’s what I wrote then:

I think Harris simply has too much against her with the general lack of enthusiasm for her campaign and the overall decline in Biden’s approval ratings. Even if neither of the options are good ones, Americans will historically choose change if they perceive the current party’s regime as ineffective. The real question is if Americans’ dissatisfaction with the establishment will outweigh dislike of Trump as it did in 2016. I don’t anticipate Trump to win in a landslide, but then again, neither did Nixon when he entered the White House in 1968.

Call me Nostradamus if you wish, but at the time I thought that these were rather trite observations. Even as someone who doesn’t reside in the United States anymore and has never had to live under the Biden administration, I could tell that most Americans, or at least enough of them for it to count at the ballot box, were not happy with how things were going. One of the most notable issues this election cycle was the rising costs of groceries. Even though actual prices have leveled off, they still feel high to most American consumers and simply trying to put food on the table is a far more expensive ordeal now than it was five years ago.

Is that directly Biden’s fault and can the president really change the prices of groceries? Probably not, but economic insecurity, real or perceived, is one the biggest reasons for political power shifting to a rival party in most democracies. Economists I greatly respect like my friend Noah Smith have made logical cases for why Biden was actually a good president, but hard numbers and data unfortunately don’t matter to a Pennsylvanian coal miner who needs to feed his family. Harris was largely perceived as being a continuation of Biden, which as the incoming popular vote numbers are currently showing, isn’t what the majority of the country wanted.

The votes are still coming in as of this writing, but Trump took in over 5 million votes more than Harris. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, Harris won roughly 14 million less votes than Joe Biden received in 2020. A Republican hasn’t won the popular vote in a U.S. presidential election since George W. Bush in 2004. That can probably be accounted for the post-9/11 high the country was feeling toward his administration, and even that was on its way out by then.

Something changed for this to have happened again after 20 years, and the only logical conclusion is that enough Americans are dissatisfied with the Democrat establishment. What the Biden administration especially represented as a tired system that was not working finally lead to such a major nationwide shift. As I predicted, Trump did not win in a landslide (see here for actual examples of one), but if I was wrong about one thing, it’s that I underestimated how much of the popular vote he would win. Harris didn’t even come close.

Read more

Note: This article does not contain any images or video featuring explicit gore, but it does link to external sites containing such content for the purposes of historical documentation. While not easy to see, I don’t think what happened on 9/11 should be sanitized or white-washed.

Arguably no event has affected American life in the 21st century more than the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The hijacking of four commercial planes by al-Qaeda and subsequent deaths of nearly 3,000 people rocked the United States to its very core, destroying in one day the post-Cold War confidence Americans had as the world’s top superpower.

Observers still intensely debate the legacy of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror and decisions made by subsequent administrations, but few would disagree that 9/11 has continued to leave a lasting impact on the world as a whole. And yet there is now an entire generation which has zero memory of 9/11, as well as decreasing understanding of how much it changed the fabric of American society.

In response to the “Barbenheimer” phenomena this summer, Japanese Twitter users attempted to mock 9/11, only for the attempt to completely backfire as late-gen millennial and zoomer Americans have long grown up on such memes. For these people, 9/11 may as well be little more than a meme itself as they are too far removed from the actual events.

Despite this, new discoveries and relevant stories related to 9/11 are happening on a regular basis. Remains from the World Trade Center are still being identified. The alleged true mastermind behind the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is not only alive, he’s still awaiting trial by U.S. authorities. Some believe there could have been a potential fifth plane that was meant to be hijacked, and a video that shows a new angle of the South Tower being hit only resurfaced in 2022.

While all of this is underway, there is an ongoing lost media search for an alleged shock video entitled “LOL SUPERMAN” which may contain graphic footage of victims falling from the World Trade Center and impacting on the pavement below in gruesome fashion. It and other pieces of 9/11 lost media raise ethical questions around what should be made available to the public.

An Impossible Choice

The collision of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower (1 WTC) at 8:46 a.m. left more than 800 people trapped on the 92nd to 110th floors. All those aboard were killed instantly and the heat of the jet fuel resulted in a surge of fires which spread throughout the building. The horrific scene is illustrated in the photograph Impending Death, which shows scores of office workers crowded near open windows unable to escape the intense heat and suffocating smoke.

What followed was a chilling succession of over 200 people falling, some accidentally pushed, but most having willing chosen to jump to an instant death rather than be burned alive. The unforgettable sounds of bodies hitting the roofs of lower buildings can be heard in the Naudet brothers’ 2002 documentary of the day’s events. It was a decision no human being should ever have to make, and later victim counts would classify the deaths as homicides rather than suicides in reflection of the impossible circumstances. While some jumpers have been identified, others such as the anonymous “Falling Man” remain unknown and represent how 9/11 was a tragedy for all Americans.

In contrast to the North Tower, the South Tower (2 WTC) only saw a total of three jumpers due to the impact angle of United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:03 a.m. leaving one stairway intact. This allowed for the seemingly miraculous survival of Canadian businessman Brian Clark and Guyana-born executive Stanley Praimnath, who were both present at or near the site of the plane’s entry point. But coincidences that saved lives happened just as often as those that ended them.

Among the three victims from the South Tower who jumped, one directly hit firefighter Danny Suhr on the street below, killing both instantly. He was the first FDNY casualty of 9/11, with a fellow colleague testifying that Suhr was found “in a circle about eight feet in diameter” and that “everything that used to be inside of him was now outside of him.” A paramedic who witnessed other jumpers stated that “a lot of bodies, bodies came out of the sky . . . We were hit with debris, which turned out to be human remains.”

Incredibly, one 9/11 jumper may have even temporarily survived her fall. Emergency medical specialist Ernest Armstead claims that while putting black tags on bodies that were dead or close to it, he came across one woman who was lucid the entire time and adamant that she was still alive despite being in an extremely mangled state. “Somehow, I guess it was an air draft or something, her fall had been cushioned enough so that she didn't splatter like the others,” Armstead said. “Her right lung, shoulder and head were intact, but from the diaphragm down she was unrecognizable.”

Such descriptions pique the minds of the morbidly curious, but while plenty of oral testimony exists from firemen, policemen, and medical professionals who saw hundreds of bodies firsthand, there is actually very little video footage of 9/11 jumpers hitting the ground.

What 9/11 Jumper Footage Exists

One needs to remember that 2001 was an entirely different landscape for personal video compared to the world we live in now. This was six years before the release of the iPhone, and cellphones in general were not widespread at the time. Those who captured footage of the day’s events did so via traditional camcorders and portable video cameras to varying degrees of quality.

Easily among the clearest and most fascinating footage of 9/11 comes from the aforementioned Naudet brothers. Originally intending to capture a day in the life of an ordinary NYC fireman, they by pure chance captured the only clear angle of the first plane hitting the North Tower. The culmination of their efforts was a documentary released the following year simply titled “9/11.” As men who were present in real time for virtually everything that happened, they risked their lives for the sake of recording history. I consider it to be one of the most important films ever made and among the finest examples of video journalism.

The Naudet brothers, however, appeared to have refrained from capturing the more gory details of 9/11 victims. Upon entering the North Tower, Jules Naudet mentions seeing people on fire due to the downstream of jet fuel, but deliberately chose not to film them, describing it as “something no one should see.” Similarly, while there is plenty of disturbing footage of people jumping, respecting the dignity of the victims was the mentality of most people with cameras.

More graphic is the footage Guy Rosbrook and his wife shot across the street while staying at the neighboring Millennium Hilton Hotel. The distressed couple captures the rapidly decaying state of the burning North Tower, while several people can be seen either jumping or falling from the 92nd and 93rd floors. After a cut, we later see the gruesome aftermath of splattered corpses in the adjacent Austin J. Tobin Plaza.

Rosbrook appears to have either shut his camera off or intentionally removed footage of the jumpers actually impacting below except for one victim hitting the stage. While hard to make out due to the relatively low resolution of the video, the victim is supposedly decapitated or dismembered due to the sheer force of the impact. Higher quality photos appear to confirm this, as the jumpers used the stage in a vain attempt to soften their landings.

Beyond that, the only other piece of jumper footage known to exist comes from when WABC-TV journalist N. J. Burkett was filming around the South Tower before its collapse. Known infamously as the “red mist” video, a jumper supposedly falls and hits a lamp post or other pole on the street below, literally disintegrating in an instant with the impact audible. Some debate whether this was actually a person or merely a piece of debris, but other video angles captured strongly suggest it was indeed a jumper.

Given the amount of people who were forced to jump and all those present near the World Trade Center on 9/11, the question naturally arises as to why there is so little graphic footage other than these two examples.

The first explanation is that there is indeed more footage, but that the FBI is currently keeping it as evidence for the trial of five men accused of being involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. There was certainly considerable security camera footage around the World Trade Center, much of which the public has yet to see. This also holds true with al-Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon, which famously only has one clear video of American Airlines Flight 77’s impact and a handful of lower quality ones.

The second explanation is the high probability of amateur videographers capturing footage which remains in private possession or potentially even lost forever. 9/11 was a traumatic event for everyone involved and it would not come as a surprise if someone with previously-unseen jumper footage chose to keep it offline out of respect for the victims. This was also long before video streaming websites like YouTube became widespread, which means that plenty of old video files are likely gone due to poor preservation and corrupted hard drives.

“LOL SUPERMAN” and Other (Supposed) 9/11 Shock Videos

And yet the search continues. On the 9/11 archive subreddit, the phrase “LOL Superman” frequently appears as a topic of discussion among morbidly curious lost media hunters.

The video allegedly took place sometime between the impact of the first plane on the North Tower and the collapse of the South Tower and features two cameramen walking up stairs toward the Austin J. Tobin Plaza. They then capture on footage at least one body from the North Tower landing in front of them, while more bodies supposedly can be seen falling to the side. There are other corpses of already-dead victims strewn about the area and the video itself only lasts for a couple of minutes before those behind the camera leave the plaza.

Those who claim to have seen the video assert that “LOL Superman” was uploaded to YouTube around 2006 when such graphic content with edgy titles was more permissible, while shock sites such as the defunct Ogrish also hosted it. Eyewitness testimony from 4chan and Reddit is where the majority of these details come from, but there are conflicting reports on what the video actually contains or if it even existed in the first place. Two people seen the background of this WABC-TV footage are alleged to have been those responsible for filming “LOL Superman,” but they have never come forward or been identified.

Some claim that “LOL Superman” depicts jumpers landing on cars, but this would not have been possible as there were no vehicles in the plaza at the time. Additionally, Guy Rosbrook’s footage does not contain anyone walking around the plaza, though this does not necessarily disprove the existence of “LOL Superman” as it is not entirely clear what angle the alleged video was shot from. Others, however, believe it to be unlikely that two civilians would have been able to get into the plaza at all due to the surrounding police and firemen.

In addition to “LOL Superman,” other rumored shock videos from the mid-2000s such as “Falling Angels” and “Skylight.mov” also featured graphic jumper footage. “Falling Angels” may be “LOL Superman” or it could be another video entirely, while “Skylight.mov” is supposedly jumpers hitting the WTC carport on West Street. We know even less about these, and any surviving details comes purely through eyewitness testimony. But is any of it actually real?

A Creation of the Mandela Effect?

In the mid-2000s, a considerable online audience existed for graphic content that showed people dying in horrific fashion. Whether out of morbid curiosity or due to the more edgy nature of the internet back then, it was practically the Wild West for shock videos. Many of those responsible for gore compilation sites like Rotten.com had grown up on mondo shockumentary fare like Faces of Death and the even more explicit Traces of Death, so this era was the natural evolution.

Those who claim to have seen videos like “LOL Superman” or “Skylight.mov” often remember things that would not have been consistent with the conditions of the collapsing World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 such as the previously-mentioned bodies landing on cars. An easy way to explain these discrepancies is through the Mandela Effect.

This phenomena describes an event that a large number of people recall seeing, but in actuality did not happen. The name comes from the belief held by many that South African President Nelson Mandela had died in the 1980s when he really did not pass away until 2013 at the advanced age of 95. A more famous example is with the Berenstain Bears book series, which everyone seems to remember as having been spelled as “Berenstein” and not “Berenstain.” I’m personally more creeped out at that the fact that Mr. Rogers always said “It’s a beautiful day in THIS neighborhood” and not “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”

With such minor details being misremembered by so many, it is not a stretch to believe that the same has happened with media around 9/11. By the time YouTube had become more widespread in 2006, there were already tons of shock videos floating around the internet of people jumping from burning buildings and landing on the ground. Much of these had nothing to do with 9/11, but were instead inserted into clip compilations not unlike the tricks used in Faces of Death to make the material more theatrical.

We see how easily memories can be distorted with an image that advocates of the existence of “LOL Superman” previously used. It features a man near the World Trade Center plaza and was argued to have been either the video’s thumbnail or a screenshot from the footage itself. The problem? It was actually from a Chinese tourist’s video taken months before the 9/11 attacks took place, debunking its connection.

My hypothesis is that “LOL Superman” itself does not exist and is instead the result of many people misremembering unrelated shock content. Previously unseen videos of 9/11 jumpers likely do exist, but whether or not they will ever see the light of day is another question. Lost media hunters have submitted FOIA requests to the FBI for the release of new footage, but the U.S. government’s replies suggest that any such unreleased material is being used in ongoing legal cases against the surviving terrorists. Similar requests to the 9/11 museum have proven just as fruitless.

An Ethical Dilemma

But let’s say that “LOL Superman” or something like it does exist. Is it in the public’s interest for such graphic videos to be released for all to see?

If a relative of yours happened to be one of the over 200 people who made the impossible choice to jump out of the towers on 9/11, chances are you would not want your last image of them to be splattered remains. Nor would you want the footage to be used inappropriately by online edgelords to fulfill a gorehound fetish.

Yet from an educational standpoint, one could also argue that young people need to be made aware of just how impactful 9/11 was both for the U.S. and the world as a whole. Educators are working hard to teach the event to new generations of students with no memory of the tragedy, and yet 9/11 is becoming more like Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination with each passing year — a faded part of history.

Does this mean that a graphic video like “LOL Superman” should be shown in the classroom? Certainly not. But one could argue that such content being made available to view either online or as another part of the 9/11 museum would be a visceral reminder of what happened. For the 20th anniversary, National Geographic assembled what is likely the definitive documentary on the subject, 9/11: One Day in America. It contained more explicit footage rarely seen in other 9/11 films, including the “red mist” jumper video. The result was something that managed to still be tasteful without sanitizing or white-washing.

If 9/11 happened today in the age of social media and livestreaming, one could only imagine how much more graphic content there would be. Those surrounding the World Trade Center would likely have not shied away from capturing high definition videos of victims hitting the ground via smartphones, and the footage would be available online in seconds. Furthermore, those inside the towers would be able to stream the worsening situation around them, up to and even including their own deaths.

And yet because 9/11 took place long before the advent of these technologies, much of it can only be left up to the imagination. Jules Naudet being at the right place at the right time means that footage from the lobby of the North Tower exists, but there are no available videos or photos of anything above the plane’s impact site owing to everyone having been trapped with no exit. Some believe that this man on the upper floors seen here was filming with a camcorder moments before his inevitable death, but the resolution is too blurry to make out. If there was anything recorded, it perished with him.

One man is known to have taken photos with a disposable camera before he jumped from the North Tower. The camera was discovered intact by police and the photos were later developed, but to this day they remain in government possession sealed away from the public. These are likely the only images of their kind taken on 9/11, but once again, we reach a dead end with a crucial document of history that may never be seen.

Less-studied aspects such as the destruction of hundreds of works of art in the towers or what plaza music played throughout the morning make 9/11 a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic in terms of how many areas it covers. Whether or not a video like “LOL Superman” actually exists remains up for debate, but it is merely one piece of lost media that people are trying to find. Despite having happened over 20 years ago, 9/11 continues to fascinate us with its plethora of rabbit holes and threads.

I was only three years old when 9/11 happened. While I have no memory of the event itself, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took up the entirety of my childhood and early years of adulthood. I distinctly remember growing up in Bush’s America and fully understood the importance of Osama bin Laden’s assassination during the Obama administration. I consider the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan to symbolize the culmination of some of our worst foreign policy decisions in the region, turning what should have been a short operation to remove al-Qaeda groups into a failed 20-year experiment of half-hearted empire-building.

Throughout the months of research I spent on this piece, I was reminded of Jules Naudet’s reluctance to film the last moments of 9/11 victims in viewing appalling imagery that most probably should never have to see. But beyond the blood and guts one inevitably sees when looking up anything to do with 9/11, a recurring theme I felt was a lack of closure.

The remaining terrorists responsible for 9/11 have yet to face justice and their long-term detention in Guantanamo Bay has essentially kept them in legal limbo over two decades since they ordered the attacks. Knowing that there is potentially a trove of lost media being hidden away from the public largely because of this case frustrates me to no end more than any desire to see videos of World Trade Center victims meeting a grisly end, and I imagine the same holds true for many others.

A poll on the 9/11 archive subreddit shows that the majority of its users are in their 20s or younger, meaning that just like me they have little to no memory of the terrorist attacks. And yet it is undoubtedly because of renewed online interest in lost media that more are researching 9/11. Even if new discoveries are scarce, the hunt ensures that “Never Forget” will not be an empty slogan.