This is only my speculation as a non-expert who grew up in the 9/11 era.
There will always be conspiracy theories about everything, in large part because people feel a need both to be smarter than everyone else and to have an explanation for why things happen. The world is a big, chaotic place and it’s scary to think about how few things are really under control by a small number of people because in reality they’re the result of the infinitely complex interactions that make up life and society on our planet.
America was a country that had really not been threatened on its home turf since Pearl Harbor and many living in the 90s truly believed that we were untouchable on our own continent. It was a rude awakening when we saw that we were not and that others could hurt us if they really wanted to.
As a leftist I’ve never really liked these conspiracy theories in large part because they reek of American exceptionalism, whether intentionally or not. America is too powerful so it had to be an inside job. Our engineering is too good so it had to be a controlled demolition.
No, we got punched in the face, and I think that a lot of people not being able to accept that is a big part of where the conspiracy theories come from.
spamfajitas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
One of the more convincing arguments I’ve seen isn’t necessarily that it was an inside job, rather that the people who could have prevented the disaster had motive to stand by and watch as it unfolded.
Lots of weird things in the years leading up to 9/11 don’t necessarily directly support this but they do add fuel to conspiracy theories…like the Project for the New American Century calling for a permanent US presence in the Middle East. Just a few years later and some of its signatories are handed the perfect casus belli allowing them to station troops in the Middle East.
Nothing concrete, just stuff that’s kinda weird enough for conspiracy theories.
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
So I’ve been on the inside of a small crisis while at work and can easily see how the mixture of hubris and mistakes and events out of our control and rushing to present the most positive picture in the aftermath and take advantage of the events.
I’m working on an internal project, a recognition platform, with a few others at work that hasn’t been put out there yet. We just finished setting it up on the technical side, set up a bunch of programs on the platform, got user data uploads and single sign on set up. We figured since nobody really knows about it yet or can find it anywhere, we didnt have to worry about people signing in and using it before the launch. Well, there was an automated email that went out to all the managers from a platform we haven’t announced yet and a few people start signing in and using it before we’re fully ready for launch. We scramble to shut everything down, and send out a message out to everyone who got the automated email basically doing our best to save face and after the dust settled, we discussed what went wrong, where our mistakes were, and what we learned, we did come out of the other side knowing the new platform did work and was very easy to use.
On the inside it was basically a comedy of errors that we gained some nice insights from. From the outside I can easily see a conspiracy minded person being like “they purposefully leaked the whole thing to test if they could get away with it and preplant the ideas in our heads.”
I really think my minor crisis experience is closer to what happened on 9/11 than some mustache twirling villainous conspiracy with secret cabals micromanaging the entire thing. I think not taking the initial reports seriously enough by 2 separate presidents, led to a major crisis unfolding, and the aftermath being a lot of useful consent manufacturing to pass a ton of draconian legislation.