by Andrew Kahn

14 years have passed and what has changed? That’s the question always asked and perhaps that is the wrong question – the implicit idea being that nothing has changed. In a way, nothing has really changed, while so much has changed.

It is easy for middle class US citizens to sit in front of the television and think “Nothing has changed.” For them, what has really changed is the temporary inconvenience of opening their bags in public places and having increased security wait times at airports. Yet this is an inconvenience that is dwarfed by the centuries-old attacks on minorities in the United States. For what is heightened screening for “security” if not a pale resemblance of racial profiling and its daily, continuous and unavoidable “security measure” for the crime of being a minority in a broken windows world?

Yet much has changed. The so-called “war on terror” – a clever term used for the justification of capitalist imperialism – has changed plenty…just not for those whose lives matter within the world. The imperial trajectory of capitalism has changed lives since the attacks of September 11, 2001 for those whose lives do not matter in this throwaway culture of capitalism.

Ask the young children in Afghanistan what this nearly decade-and-a-half long war waged by the United States superpower has meant for them. Indeed though, one can say nothing has changed in the grand historical context as Western attacks on Afghanistan are nothing new. But things have changed. For Afghanistan, the Soviet-allied government which spread domestic stability and rights for women and workers was toppled in a Western and Saudi-backed counter-revolution. As we know, our bastards – to borrow a phrase – came into power. Osama and the Taliban and what we called, after September 11, radical jihadis. They were our bastards. And then September 11, 2001 changed things. So we were told. They were now simply bastards. Things had changed.

Our boys become our enemies and bit the hand that had fed them…and would feed them again. 14 years later. Now that they can serve a purpose again. For little has changed. Nothing truly changes outside of the myopia of viewing history as beginning when we open our eyes in the morning.

Now, 14 years later, the same war hawks who called for the blood of Al Qaeda – Saudis no less, our bastards…the ones who are always our bastards – are speaking of a cold use of these bastards yet again. Now the enemy is ISIS – again, our bastards-turned-enemies – and it is Al Qaeda who may be our moderates today in our battle versus the Butcher Assad. For today, the enemy du jour is President Bashar al-Assad of the Syrian Arab Republic. And in the imperial push for hegemony, the United States – indeed, imperial capitalism in toto – needs to remove his presence in the Middle East. Cleverly, yesterday’s bastards – Al Qaeda – who once were our bastards in Afghanistan are now the bulwark, however sinister, against independent Syria. The descendants of the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, are once more the foot soldiers of imperialism. Everything has changed, yet nothing has changed.

As the towers lay in smoldering ruins and U.S. citizens thumped their breasts in patriotic fervor and Democrats outdid Republicans in reactionary calls for bombings – for liberals are the staunchest patriots in times of patriotism and rallying before the ribbons and flags – since we needed to massacre anyone in a turban or looking like an Afghan or an A-rab or dark skinned. Things had changed, but nothing changed.

Who would have imagined that these descendants of the September 11 killers would now be our bastards? Well, one can say, it was easy to script. For imperialism and capitalism, the former being the inevitable outgrowth of the latter, there is no ideals beyond expansion and oppression. Mercenaries of one day become enemies to become mercenaries again. And so it is. With Al Qaeda.

Things have changed, yet nothing has changed…historically.

Yet the bombs rained down on Afghanistan did change the lives of young Afghans. Their fathers were slaughtered, their mothers raped, their uncles tortured, their lives shattered. And imperialism changed their lives but remained immutable in its drive to achieve profits and control.

And what changed? Opium production returned with a vengeance to Afghanistan and the Taliban, our bastards against the Soviets, had their poppy eradication eradicated and they became mere bastards again. And our new bastards – Hamid Karzai and his concessionist puppet regime oversaw, but was in reality hopelessly incapable of stopping, the resurgence of Western-sanctioned opium production. And nothing changed. And everything did.

So as dumb U.S. citizens beat their tribal tom toms of war in trailer homes across Middle America, calling for blood revenge against allegedly bloodthirsty brown people, they turned from FoxNews only for a moment so they could shoot up Afghan heroin – brought to their drug den off the backs of dead Afghan children. Because our bastards had become mere bastards. And are now our bastards again. And nothing had changed except more Afghans were slaughtered and a generation of U.S. citizens enjoyed their red white and blue patriotic drug addiction.

And nothing changed. And everything changed.

A generation of children born in the short years before September 11 and in the years that followed will never know a time when you didn’t have to say something if you believed you saw something. So we inform on our fellow working class because we see every move as furtive and every action as unpatriotic. And everything has changed with Manning arrested and Snowden in exile. Yet nothing has changed. Myopia – fueled by capitalism – doesn’t let anyone realize that nothing has changed. The Palmer Raids and McCarthyism morphed into finding and hunting “terror”. And don’t forget the COINTELPRO or the earlier imprisonment of Eugene Debs for the crime of questioning World War 1 – a war of capitalism. For everything changed, yet nothing changed.

And as September 11 passed into the lexicon of iconism – a date that has become an existential identity for U.S. citizens and one that all must genuflect before – nothing even changed there. September 11, 1973 was the original terror attack in America. The date of the imperial coup in Chile when the socialist leader Salvador Allende was toppled in a coup after the bombing of the presidential palace. So not even September 11 itself is changed as a new time of terror.

Nothing has really changed.

Yet everything has changed after the lies of the government in the United States telling those who responded to the attacks that the air was safe. And fathers died of lung disease because the government lied about reality. And for their families, everything changed.

Yet lies to create working class heroes – deemed heroes by their oppressors as they use them to clean up imperial messes that are messes only for the working class itself – is nothing changed from the past. Yesterday it was the working class “hero” who died in invasion of the Philippines and Cuba during the imperial Spanish American War who was told that it was a war for freedom that he must engage in. After all, the Maine was sunk in a treacherous fashion. Was it not?

And everything changed and nothing changed.

And the bastards of September 11 are now our moderates. We need to end the rule of Assad who were used to torture a couple people after September 11. He was our bastard in a couple isolated renditions. Supposedly. But now he’s a bastard again. An independent bastard who won’t bow to imperialism. And everything changed and nothing changed.

And the Syrians uprooted, their nation blighted by a war which it has been revealed was plotted long ago by imperialism, now flee to Europe to escape death by imperialism. Death by the guns of “freedom fighters” against Assad. Moderates. Our bastards today. Al Qaeda bastards, but our bastards. Mere bastards on September 12, 2001. The day after everything changed but nothing really changed.

So Arabs flee yet again when imperialism uproots them. Recall Al Nakba when Palestinians were forced to flee by European Zionists. And imperialism reigned then as it does now. And everything changed for those Palestinians then and for Syrians today. And everything changed, but nothing really changed.

And the towers crashed and we sang God Bless America and French fries became freedom fries and patriotism became synonymous with rallying behind the national capitalist ruling class. Our bastards.

And everything has changed but nothing has changed. The towers fell and now they have returned.

And everything has changed but nothing has changed.

So genuflect before our bastards my working class comrades. Genuflect before them because they are our bastards. Just like Al Qaeda is once again. Terrorists all. Some wear turbans and fly the black flag of jihad. And some wear suits and American flag pins. But they are our bastards.

And everything has changed but nothing has changed.

Andrew Kahn lives in New York City. Unabashed Bolivarian socialist. A pharmacist by degree, a rebel by decision, he blogs at http://akahnnyc.blogspot.com/