My preteen nephew hates America at a college level and I am so proud of him

He's already learning maoist standard English we stan an emerging polyglot

He was asking if the hijackers on 9-11 were black people who were attacking us for being such a racist country

No, but... It's not an entirely unrelated scenario

This is one of those "sophomore" things.

Where a very basic answer, could be yes. The more complex and nuanced answer is no. But at the end of the day if you asked an expert they would say, in a nutshell, yeah.

See also, slavery in the civil War. Was the war fought to end slavery? yes.

If you want to be pedantic it didn't start off as a war of liberation and there's quite a bit to say about treatment of black people in the North, and the slave states that were still part of the Union during the war.

But the end of the day if you had to answer with yes or no, the answer is "yea"
should have just said to the kid "eh more or less"

there are two things middle school me wouldn't do

move my emo hair curtain out of my eyes
say the pledge of allegiance

Holy shit, me in the Bush era. I wasn't THIS good at it at the time, that was high school ish. Canadian but I recall being shown a documentary in the 9th grade that was clearly propaganda attempting to justify our military presence in Afghanistan simply by pointing out everything wrong with the Taliban (which kept autocorrecting on my phone to Italian and it made me laugh)which was of course bad but my family has collected national geographic magazine since they were first published and I was reading em and was aware of the Soviet Afghan war and the mujahadeen already and my folks kinda filled.in they were the same guys and holy fuck did I get yelled at for pointing it out. Also this post reminded me that collection has been sitting at my grandma's house, he's been dead for 5 years and she's not reading em, gives me an excuse to visit my grandma and I get literally every national geographic until like 2004

I remember arguing with someone In 2003 that there must be WMDs because George Bush wouldn't risk his re-election if he couldn't produce them.

I will never forget how incredibly stupid I felt in '04.
- I recall being scared because if Saddam DID have wmd as u thought the Bush administration legit may have believed, then wouldn't an invasion be exactly a great reason to use them? And wouldn't that put all of us at extreme risk? So if they think that's true why are they shaking the wmd hornets nest they say it was? Think g there could be a threat led me to think of how much these creeps are willing to sacrifice in terms of lives thar aren't there's
Yeah I wasn't nearly this cool at his age, I just remember feeling ambivalent about it and wondering why I was expected to care when no one seemed to give a shit when way more people had died in an earthquake in India earlier that year.
- I cam recall being so vehemently against the war on terror that my pre teen self broke down in tears about it on I think 3 or 4 different occasions. War being declared on Iraq and seeing the initial bombings on TV at my grandma's house after listening in on the way there whether it would happen being on an hour long road trip grandma's house between knowing the war was on and the first strikes occurring just in that time and the size of the explosions, they'd flatten the entire town we just got to, grandma and grandpa wouldn't stand a chance and this machine of devastating capacity to kll that I'd just seen weirded on live TV by the Bush administration that I saw steal an election with no opposition and the target Afghanistan who I knew had nothing o to with the attack at age 10 cause we had a solid 2 weeks where the news was blaming the saudis until Afghanistan became it for whatever reason. By the time Iraq came around a couple year later and probably aided by being Canadian and us doing he bare minimum to not seem French, which had to mean we needed to appease America more than the French and stuff got me where I am. I was gonna say too bad it took so many deaths to get me there, but that's kinda crap, if capitalism wasn't a death machine it wouldn't be a problem.