John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11"
Host: John Armenta
Guest: John Bodnar (Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Indiana University)
Date: November 22, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features historian John Bodnar discussing his book Divided by Terror: American Patriotism After 9/11. The conversation explores how the attacks of September 11, 2001, not only shaped America's "War on Terror" but also ignited deep national debates over the meaning and expression of patriotism. Bodnar's analysis distinguishes between "war-based" (belligerent) and "empathetic" forms of patriotism, examining how these competing visions played out in public discourse, media, memorialization, family responses, and political rhetoric from 2001 to the present.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. John Bodnar’s Scholarly Background and Book Genesis

[03:06 – 13:39]

• Bodnar’s previous works on WWII and Vietnam memory sparked his interest in how the U.S. commemorates war and violence.

• He emphasizes that collective memory is contested; not all veterans or citizens share the same patriotic narrative.

• Notable Quote:
  “Clearly we were debating issues about the memory of war, about our encounters with violence, and about war and patriotism itself that I thought had never really been sufficiently addressed by academic scholarship.”
  — John Bodnar [05:25]

• Bodnar describes how historical myth-making often sanitizes war, focusing on nobility and sacrifice while glossing over trauma, dissent, and the capacity for violence within the U.S. itself.

2. Defining Patriotism & Competing Forms

[13:39 – 20:39]

• Patriotism is presented as a cultural idea—one with variable definitions and applications.
• Bodnar distinguishes between:
  • War-based (Belligerent) Patriotism: Willingness to defend the nation through aggressive or violent means, sometimes directed even at internal "others."
  • Empathetic Patriotism: Emphasis on compassion, shared suffering, and a commitment to national tolerance and reflection.
• Notable Quote:
  “It wasn't only about love, but it could be about aggression and hate… people who felt they loved their country and were quite patriotic were more than willing to turn aggression toward people in the country.”
  — John Bodnar [15:45]

3. The Role of Myth in Shaping Patriotism

[22:09 – 26:34]

• Myths help societies simplify complex, painful realities—such as idealizing WWII as “the good war.”
• These myths overlook internal dissent, trauma, and the dark side of wartime actions.
• Bodnar notes the power of leaders like Lincoln and FDR to reframe sacrifice as a means toward greater democracy, but observes how this justification is often diluted in popular memory.
• Notable Quote:
  “Myth is a way to make convoluted and harsh realities and complex situations more understandable… It’s easier to accept, but it leaves a lot out.”
  — John Bodnar [22:49]

4. Immediate Post-9/11 Patriotism: Public Response and Sources

[26:34 – 33:25]

• After 9/11, there was a surge in public, war-based patriotism—flag-waving and demands for retaliation.
• The Library of Congress collected a wide array of public and private reactions, including emails and reminiscences, which Bodnar deeply mined.
• Initial confusion and trauma led to a need for cultural coherence—filled by government rhetoric and the "war on terror."
• Notable Quote:
  “There was fear, there was panic, there was anxiety, there was confusion… it sort of set the ground for a president to come up with an answer to all this confusion and uncertainty and anger.”
  — John Bodnar [30:41]

5. Debates Over Memorialization and the Meaning of Sacrifice

[33:25 – 40:42]

• The design and ethos of 9/11 memorials (such as at Ground Zero and Shanksville) largely focus on serene remembrance rather than confronting trauma or causality.
• Families of victims were divided—some wanting personal suffering recognized rather than default patriotic honors, others embracing the patriotic narrative.
• Notable Quote:
  “There were those who saw their husband’s actions as highly patriotic … and those who resented the fact that you were turning these people, their dead spouses, into honorable patriots because they said that's not what they signed up for.”
  — John Bodnar [37:42]

6. The Iraq War: Patriotism, Protest, and Gold Star Families

[40:42 – 45:17]

• The Iraq War, less directly connected to 9/11, quickly became contested.
• Atrocities like Abu Ghraib undermined the myth of virtuous American violence.
• Gold Star mothers—such as Cindy Sheehan—mobilized against the war, clashing with others who felt antiwar activism dishonored the troops.
• Notable Quote:
  “There’s plenty of stuff in the book about families … who will not accept patriotic honor as an explanation of why their sons had to die.”
  — John Bodnar [43:46]

7. The Politics and Power of Visual Imagery

[46:25 – 50:46]

• Government efforts censored images of flag-draped coffins to reduce public opposition.
• Artists and activists used visual memorials—white crosses, dog tags, photographs—to foreground war's human cost and challenge sanitized patriotism.
• Notable Quote:
  “By putting up reminders of how many were dying, you were undermining both the President’s agenda and the idea that this was a justified sacrifice.”
  — John Bodnar [49:14]

8. Veterans’ Experiences and Divided Patriotisms

[50:46 – 56:38]

• Memoirs and fiction by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans reveal deep splits: some embrace the narrative of noble sacrifice (e.g., Chris Kyle’s American Sniper), others reject patriotic explanations for trauma and loss (e.g., Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds).
• Notable Quote:
  “The point of the chapter is even the soldiers were divided over this point.”
  — John Bodnar [55:53]

9. Patriotism as a Tool for Internal Policing and Xenophobia

[56:38 – 61:41]

• 9/11 unleashed hostility not just at external enemies but at Muslim and immigrant communities inside the U.S.
• The Patriot Act and related policies justified mass detentions and surveillance—later mirrored in anti-immigrant campaigns on the Mexico border.
• Notable Quote:
  “The war on terror led to this sort of anti-immigrant sentiment that justified treating immigrants in unlawful ways.”
  — John Bodnar [58:10]

10. Contemporary Politics: War-Based Patriotism and Authoritarianism

[61:41 – 66:47]

• Bodnar sees today’s right-wing, belligerent patriotism—exemplified by Trump and allies—as a direct legacy of post-9/11 patterns.
• Empathetic patriotism is alive in religious and civic challenges to anti-immigrant policies, but is embattled.
• Notable Quote:
  “By using a war-based patriotism and this militarization of the border… you’re using a myth that our aggression… any violence is justified.”
  — John Bodnar [64:05]
• He warns that prior xenophobic episodes lacked today’s push towards authoritarian rule.

11. Bodnar’s Current Work

[66:47 – 67:54]

• Exploring the link between harsh immigration policies, authoritarianism, and aggressive patriotism in contemporary America.

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Memorable Quotes with Timestamps

• “We were debating issues about the memory of war, about our encounters with violence, and about war and patriotism itself…” — John Bodnar [05:25]
• “It wasn’t only about love, but it could be about aggression and hate… people who felt they loved their country and were quite patriotic were more than willing to turn aggression toward people in the country.” — John Bodnar [15:45]
• “Myth is a way to make convoluted and harsh realities and complex situations more understandable… It’s easier to accept, but it leaves a lot out.” — John Bodnar [22:49]
• “There was fear, there was panic… it set the ground for a president to come up with an answer to all this confusion and uncertainty and anger.” — John Bodnar [30:41]
• “There were those who saw their husband’s actions as highly patriotic… others who resented the fact you were turning their dead spouses into honorable patriots…” — John Bodnar [37:42]
• “There’s plenty of stuff in the book about families… who will not accept patriotic honor as an explanation of why their sons had to die.” — John Bodnar [43:46]
• “By putting up reminders of how many were dying, you were undermining both the President’s agenda and the idea that this was a justified sacrifice.” — John Bodnar [49:14]
• “The point of the chapter is even the soldiers were divided over this point.” — John Bodnar [55:53]
• “The war on terror led to this sort of anti-immigrant sentiment that justified treating immigrants in unlawful ways.” — John Bodnar [58:10]
• “By using a war-based patriotism and this militarization of the border… you’re using a myth that… any violence is justified.” — John Bodnar [64:05]

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

• Introduction to Bodnar’s background and interest in patriotism [03:06]
• Belligerent versus empathetic patriotism definition [14:04]
• Why myths shape public memory of war [22:09]
• How 9/11 correspondences and emails were archived [29:18]
• Memorial debates: families vs. politicians [34:33]
• Split among veterans in their memoirs and public narratives [51:17]
• Cindy Sheehan’s protest and Gold Star family divides [43:46]
• The linkage of post-9/11 xenophobia to ongoing immigration policy [57:35]
• Connection to Trump-era and modern right-wing authoritarianism [62:32]

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Conclusion

John Bodnar’s Divided by Terror illustrates how American patriotism since 9/11 has been marked not by unity, but by deep and enduring division. The book reveals the struggle between martial, exclusionary nationalism and a more empathetic, self-critical view of nationhood—one that continues today in political rhetoric, public memory, and grassroots activism. Bodnar’s insights bridge past and present, encouraging history to inform our understanding of the evolving stakes of patriotism and democracy in America.

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Hello and welcome to New Books Network. My name is John Armenta, your host for this episode. September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of the so called war on Terror. But the attacks of that day also reignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror, American Patriotism After 9 11, published in 2021, Professor John Bodnar argues that the nature of patriotism as being war based or empathet, divided the nation as much as the responses to the 911 attacks. Using a variety of public media and private correspondence, Dr. Bodnar explores the different ways Americans tried to understand and remember 9 11, their disagreements over the government responses to it, and how patriotism itself was also part of the debate. Dr. Bodnar shows how people on all the various sides to the national security debates use patriotism as a motivating factor for their positions. Divided by Terror shows how patriotism and how it is practiced was contested and fought over as much as the policies that it inspired. Dr. Bodnar is a distinguished Emeritus professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. He's the author of eight academic books in addition to numerous journal articles. John welcome to New Books Network.

[A]

It's great to be here.

[C]

All right, so I really enjoyed this book. But before we get started about the book, can you briefly Talk about your previous work. So you have written about patriotism before. Before. So talk about your previous work and how it led to Divided by Terror.

[A]

There's no doubt that the issues that I addressed in Divided by Terror have sort of deep roots in my own work and previous things that I've done and been thinking about. I published a book in 1992 called Remaking America. And I was kind of motivated to do that because I was really intrigued by the debates that were going on at that time, and that's now in the 1980s on how to commemorate the Vietnam War. And those of you who were alive then or can remember those debates. It resulted in a sort of dramatic, different and very popular memorial in Washington, D.C. which is still visited heavily today. And it was controversial because it contained the names of all the American dead. And so while there were many veterans and others who welcome that acknowledgement of their sacrifice and really the pain that they endured, both the veterans that died and their families and friends, there are many who criticized it because they felt it took away from the more traditional view of American wars, which was focused more on ideas of victory, on ideas of the nobleness of the American war effort, and the sort of idea that sacrifice for the nation was an honorable thing to do. Now, I have no qualms with those arguments in and of themselves. What interested me was that clearly we were debating issues about the memory of war, about our encounters with violence, and about war and patriotism itself that I thought had never really been sufficiently addressed by academic scholarship. But certainly in the fields of modern history, US History, that I worked, I eventually, because I was doing a lot of other things, wrote a book years later on the way Americans remember World War II. And again, I was sort of tied to this idea that, hey, it's interesting here that you don't. We can't assume that one particular narrative and one particular version, as popular as it may be, is the only one. And again, for those of you who remember, in the 1990s, there was a tremendous celebration in this country over World War II. And that was centered on this idea of Tom Brokaw's famous book, the Greatest Generation.

[C]

Right, right.

[A]

And any historian would have to admire Brokaw for publishing a book that attracted so much attention. Most academics don't do that, but I did remind me so much about the issues that I had thought about regarding earlier versions of how Americans decided to look at their past. And this whole idea of, what is it about violence? What is it about state sponsored warfare? What is it about our sorry this will be. What is it about our encounters with violent, tragic episodes that produces such a strong effort to turn them into something that's rather glorious and noble? Because, in fact, it doesn't take much reading to see that many people who encountered these episodes didn't see it that way, that they left encounters with war, encounters with sexual abuse, encounters with slavery, not with very positive attitude. So it got me thinking, and this was one of my key animating motives. I think that there is an awful lot of effort expended in our culture and in most cultures of most nations. I don't think the United States is unique here. There's a tremendous amount of effort expended toward the goal of not coming face to face with all the painful realities that tragic and violent episodes bring. Now, it's easy for me to say that, and most people could agree with it in theory, or if they had a loved one who was wounded in warfare, came home from Iraq, was suffering from ptsd, they would understand that. But by and large, the public has expended substantial dollars and tremendous effort not to talk about the war this way. And so when I got into the book on World War II, I saw that this celebration of the Greatest Generation was not something that characterized the way Americans talked about the war just after it was finished. I mean, if you were going to back. If you were going to go back and read, and those of you who've got the motivation, I highly suggest you do so. The books that the soldiers from World War II wrote, I don't mean about the celebrations of the 1990s and people loving the Greatest Generation, I have no interest in denigrating that generation. My interest is sort of getting an accurate historical account of how we deal with these issues. And after World War II, there was a sort of a rash of memoirs, novels, like there was after Vietnam, like there was after the War on Terror, which I talk about in Divided by Terror. And they were highly critical. They were highly critical of the war on a number of grounds. I mean, they saw that the war, in many respects, was justified. There weren't too many people saying that the. The effort to take out Adolf Hitler was. Was a bad idea. In fact, most people agreed it was a good idea. If and if there was ever a version of a war that was good, it was World War II in our culture and society. But before it became sort of frozen into that good war metaphor, if you will, it was highly debated. The pain, the suffering that people experienced was widely publicized. There's more I can say about this. We're not talking about that book right now, but I would just want to mention a couple of novels or works on the war written by soldiers who participated in the war. I mean, that's always interested me. We can say all we want, but I want to hear from the people who participated in these events. And many of them, not everybody, of course, are more than willing at some point to sit down and write about it. Late 1940s, Norman Mailer's famous novel the Naked and the Dead, or the various novels of James Jones, who wrote three novels on World War II. And I could go on, but I won't. That suggested a range of discontent and misgivings in the minds of these people coming out of their experience. Mailer walked through Nagasaki right after it was six weeks or something like that, after we dropped the atomic bomb there. So it's hard to say he didn't see some trauma and some death. And so, I mean, that's enough said. Jones, too, fought in the South Pacific. And to summarize their various points, one, hey, I'm glad we beat Hitler. But we also showed that we were capable. We had tremendous capacity ourselves as Americans, to inflict violence. We were good at it. Now, you could say, well, you had to do it. Okay, fine, you had to do it. But there was this debate that surfaced after World War II, even in public, about doesn't the war. We're glad we won. We're glad the guys are home. But doesn't this show that we, too, have a capacity for violence? That maybe we were not as moral or noble as we thought we were, are as good as we thought, were Jones. There was also a tremendous undercurrent in these books, in World War II Books of dissatisfaction with military life. But that's another story, because the military, you know, was. The military, it was. It was. Had rules, had commands, and you weren't free to do just what we. You wanted. But the point is that I was struck by the. The undercurrent of critique about our potential for violence. And there's a great fear right after World War II that because we're. Because all human humankind is violent. Us, the Nazis, the Japanese, at some level, there's going to be another war pretty soon now we can say, well, that never happened. No, it didn't happen in that way. And we can say that we fought a good war and these men were noble in doing it. Okay, say that. But remember that among the people who fought it in its immediate aftermath, there were a lot of cross currents, mixed givings, and they weren't so willingly buying into what became in the 1990s, a highly patriotic myth of a great generation willing to do anything they want or could to help the nation win this thing. And if you read the, the materials coming out of the 1990s, that the experience of going to war, whether it was the discipline, the encounters with violence, made them better men. So war becomes. And again, I'm relying mostly on what the soldier said or the people at the time said it. You could say, well, I'm saying this, I'm trying to be their voice and carry forth the idea that they saw war as sort of a, an identity building, image building, making you a better person than you were than going in because you'll learn to discipline and learn to deal with difficult realities. So it was hard for me. I'll stop in a minute, but this is background. But it was hard for me not to see what happened after 9, 11 and not think of all that I just said.

[C]

Right, thank you for that. So let's dive into Divided by Terror a bit. But first, I mean, let's have some basic definitions, like what is patriotism? Just as broad, you know, as a broad idea. And then what is the, the difference between these, these two versions that you, you pick apart the war based and the empathetic patriotism?

[A]

If you ask that question to 20 different people, you get 20 different answers. So this is mine. I think patriotism is a cultural idea. It's an idea that's important to nations and political communities because it offers an explanation of why you should be loyal to the political community of which you are a part. And it is generally centered on the ethic or the ideal of love, loving your nation and being loyal to it and willing to sacrifice for it. But in reality, the idea, the cultural idea, which is supposed to spell out the terms by which we are attached to our country, I call the terms of agreement, so to speak. Sometimes it's the terms of endearment, sometimes it's not so endearing. But they're terms by which we as citizens are meant to think about why we are attached, why we care about this political community of which we are a part. So in the work I've done, I would. I came to feel that this idea was not only complicated, it was sort of. It had a couple of different sides to it. In other words, it wasn't clear cut, I mean, in the popular notion, love your country. But I saw that it was not only about love, but it could be about aggression and hate. And so from normal versions of Scholarship, reading research, et cetera. I begin to look for ways to talk about its variation or its variability of how it can be articulated and incorporated in a fairly sort of. In a way that is expresses not only care for the nation, but caring for other people in the nation as a. Because in some instances it clearly was about well, if you care for the nation, you will commit violence for the nation. You say, well, it's always about violence toward enemies. Well, in Divided by Terror I saw evidence that people who felt they loved their country and were quite patriotic were more than willing to turn aggression toward people in the country. And that might come up later in the book, for example, in terms of the violence that was unleashed towards Muslims after 9, 11, et cetera. I didn't want to digress. But if we were to go back into the history, for example of the xenophobia and Americans receptions to immigration not all illegal, there were people who felt they were patriotic by trying to stem or send them deport These people make America. The America they love is one that didn't have so much racial diversity in it or there's who were more accepting of diversity and different people. So in Divided by Terror I constructed a sort of research design, a conceptual framework that saw patriotism in two ways. And in the book, if you've read it, so you know this one version was a war based patriotism or what I would, which I use the term in the book today, I might, I just, I would probably call it a belligerent patriotism which is certainly about loving your country, but willing to sort of defend it in very aggressive ways, willing to unleash state sponsored violence on behalf of the love that you feel. The other, contrary to that is a more empathic or patriotism more willing to temper the aggression in the belligerent version and emphasize the fact that your terms of agreement to be part of this nation and express your commitment and your loyalty to it requires in return that the nation be more tolerant and sensitive to the sufferings than others and less willing to simply define patriotism to terms of aggression belligerence. So there's a lot of different scholarship that I'm drawing from here and a lot of this comes from political science and others who think about patriotism in an abstract way. But as a historian I always found that interesting to take that and apply it to life as I saw it lived. And what people said back to my point about I want to know what people were saying when they were saying it by a war about the violence. And so that is, I took that conceptual frame and tried to write a book divided by terror that looked at those who saw the 911 attacks as a reason to express their patriotism to highly belligerent in highly belligerent ways. In the book the Global War, the global war we launched and the aggression we launched against Muslims in America and those who refused to accept that version of our patriotic response and wanted a patriotic response that was more, less violent and more willing to try to temper that sort of aggression with renditions of the war that expressed pain over why somebody had to suffer. And so there's a lot of, I think a fair amount of stuff in the book about people who are trying to criticize basically what was the dominant response to 911 from the Bush administration and most Americans. And that was let's go to war and beat the hell out of these people. And then so then you unleash aggression, which bothered a lot of people. So it's that sort of tension between belligerence and sort of human and this concern for human suffering that I think lies at the heart of my definition of patriotism. Great.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

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[C]

I have a Couple other big picture questions before we get into some of the chapters, but what is the role of myth in understanding patriotism?

[A]

You know, it's a great question and assuming we're not going to have launch a seminar here for several days, Myths. There are anthropologists and political scientists who can talk better about this maybe than I can. But myth is a way to make convoluted and harsh realities and complex situations more understandable. So I mean, if we say World War II was the good war, it's a myth. Because while there may be an argument that it's a good war fought by the greatest generation who would do anything for their country, the reality is it was far from that. I mean, I could produce books and studies in the 1940s showing how guys were working their tails off not to get into the army. I mean, you're not surprised with that. But that's not what the myth allows for. Or I can, I can talk. There's just, you know, interesting stories about when the men come home after World War II. I'm just using this as example on myth. And you know, there's all these great family reunions and then there's stories from women living down the block whose husbands are not coming home, watching the people who are, they're devastated, they're traumatized, et cetera. Even the veterans after World War II can't agree. I mean, you've got veterans on the who, American Legion, for example, who move into a right wing form politics and they feel that defending the country again takes more aggression and at least their strong support of anti communism. And there are those who are on the other side said, wait a minute, we fought the war for the four freedoms to spread democracy throughout our country, throughout the world. That was what Roosevelt told us. And when you go just simply anti communism, you're showing violence, you're showing in some cases, unfortunately, racism in America. And therefore this is not the aggressive community or nation that we fought for. We fought for. I mean, I'll just say this, but there's two great moments in American history when somebody, a president, connects the idea of dying for your country, entering the fray of violence. And the only justification for it is that you work harder after it's over to create a more democratic society or tolerant society. And their famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln looks around the field of bailout. Thousands of people just died. And he said, what's to justify this slaughter? Because it's, you can't call it noble. It's slaughter on both sides. And Lincoln, of course, famous words. The only Justification is that they died for. So that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish in the face of the earth. It's repeated just on the beginning and the eve of our entry into World War II, when Roosevelt stands up and says, hey, look, you know, I'm paraphrasing fdr, but look, things are, we're probably going to get into this thing. There's going to be problems, we're going to suffer. There's going to be. I mean, he's not saying those words, but that's what he's saying. And he said, how, how can this be justified? And basically said, only if we work harder to institute the four freedoms so that we, everyone has freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom from want. And by the way, I love this point. He was also inferring in the details all this stuff. Everyone had access to health care, but nobody wants to talk about that now as part of our Democrat. So the point is that that myth reduces complexity. It's easier to sell, it's easier to accept, but it leaves a lot out. And if you don't want to remember the violence of war as a basis for making things better and maybe even launching a peace crusade and this will never happen again, then you want to go with myths that are just more noble and heroic because it's, it sort of tamps down and people just aren't confronted with the realities and the harsh realities that somebody faced.

[C]

Great, thank you. Actually, let's get into some of the chapters right now. And I wanted to ask you about your sources, but we can do that chapter by chapter. And starting with the first chapter, you begin with the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. So how was patriotism expressed in the early days of the 911 and attacks, and how is it used by those both supporting military action and those opposed to it?

[A]

Well, I think it's pretty clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9 11, most Americans are ready to strike back. I mean, their patriotism was, I mean, I've lived through that. You probably lived through it, you remember it. And I'm not saying they're wrong. And, and I'm not saying I didn't feel some of that myself. I, I'm not, these are not. It's not easy to figure everything out as it's happening in the worlds we live in, but there was a overwhelming response to wave the flag. And those of you again who can remember those times, flags were popping up everywhere. I mean, I was remember going through some rural areas where Flags were painted on the side of barns, there were flags flying in front of houses. So it was a very patriotic flag waving response to 9 11. And that was part of a sense that we're not getting over the shock of what just happened. We're going to fight back. And of course George Bush's decision therefore to launch a war on terror, and there's a lot to say about what, about that. But without getting into the debates over the decision so much, it clearly represented, I believe the majority of Americans feeling that we wanted to strike back. Now the devil's in the details. Are you going to go to Afghanistan? I think most Americans said, yeah, we're going. That's the Al Qaeda sort of base, so to speak. And then the real controversy comes when you extend that into Iraq. Because now the situation is where's the evidence? And Bush administration suggests we've got the evidence. And then over time, of course they don't. So those are famous points. But the point is that in divided by terror, the first response is the one of belligerent patriotism. And I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think that's the best way to describe our initial response.

[C]

And in that chapter you were examining not just popular media, but also, it seemed like personal correspondence. Can you say something about the sources you were using?

[A]

Yeah, I really, I have to say this was fun when I was doing it because, because it was such a traumatic dramatic event all of a sudden. I mean, I mean, who's going to work that day and think of that, right? And I'll boom. You get, I was in, I was in California at the time actually. And it was. So I was asleep because it was like five o' clock in the morning or in California, but it was in New York. So people are calling me from east coast saying, did you hear what happened? I didn't know. But at the TV there's a tower falling. I said, you know, we were all shocked. I mean we, you know, we were trying to get, get a sense of what was going on and because it was so dramatic and, and the Library of Congress, for instance, sent out word, library sent out word people. There was a widespread feeling in a lot of places, hey, we better record the reminiscent. This is historic. This isn't like, I won't refer to current events so much right now, but it wasn't a normal issue on the news. This was like, this was Pearl Harbor. In fact, there's a lot of people, you read editorials at this time, America thought it was Pearl Harbor. So but the good news for a person like me is that therefore, they paid more attention to trying to keep or collect or archive the feelings and responses. So the Library of Congress was doing this. I walk in the Library of Congress and there are emails. They put out a call to librarians all over the country to send them in. There's extensive collections today there of emails of people's reminiscences. I mean, it's like they were telling somebody like me, hey, here it is. Write about it. You know, I mean, it was just. It was beautiful and beautiful in the sense of so extensive. And if. And in the first chapter, those. If you read it, you'll find about, you know, what a lady cleaning her house in Iowa thought, or you'll find out about what a schoolroom thought down in Georgia, or, I mean, it's. Or people in California. I mean, you really get a lot of voices from the ground. And the ultimate collective response is there's confusion. I mean, what the hell's going on? I mean, there's some stuff in the book about a guy standing not far from where the towers are going. It was on a business trip to New York, and he just. And they thought, oh, my God, the world's falling apart. We're going to get attacked again. The. The President's. I mean, in the White House. People in the White House were headed for bunkers because they thought, this is just the beginning. There's going to be another attack right away. So there was fear, there was panic, there was anxiety, there was confusion. And the. The. It just there, it sort of set the ground for a. A president to come up with an answer to all this confusion and uncertainty and anger. And I believe that the war on terror and Bush's dis. Decision to do that is not just a normal response. We got to tap we're going to fight back. But I think it was. It had a cultural impulse to bring coherence to something that was confusing, angry, and something we didn't understand. And so it was very simple. Now, you need myths to reduce the confusion and justify the response. And he does it by saying, and Bush's language is very clear, they're evil in the world. He dictates sort of a religious dichotomy. There's evil in the world. Al Qaeda, and these people are evil. We are not. We are the good people who fought the good war, who are capable. And because we are morally good, we have the capacity to inflict violence, to beat the hell out of people or bomb them, and still retain our Moral standings. That's the essence of belligerent patriotism. Justify the violence and don't. And don't let it change your high esteem of who you think you are as a people.

[C]

Yeah. Thank you. The. Yeah, I remember one of Bush's lines, like, they hate us for our freedom. And just like you said, myth reduces complexity and just takes all of that, all of that away. So turning to memorialization, which I really enjoyed this chapter, I managed the whole book, but I found this one really interesting about how the debates over. I'm sorry, the debates over how to memorialize the attacks reflected some of the debates about the wars that had been going on for several years at that time. And so could you talk a bit about the different actors that were involved. Involved in memorializing the 911 attacks? You discussed families of victims, politicians, religious groups. And so how did patriotism come in to the debates over 911 memorials and how the wars were inflected in those debates?

[A]

Most people are aware of the grand memorials of 9 11. The Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Perhaps you've been there, and there's actually quite interesting museum. Underground. Under ground zero is a huge pool, waterfalls going into a pool, has the names of the dead. So that we got the legacy of Vietnam remembering some of the tragedy. When you go to the memorial at 9 11, it doesn't tell you why those names are there. It doesn't give you the reason of what happened. You're just there to see that these people apparently are lost and they're sort of in this serene place where the final resting place. Okay, you can get more detail if you go underground to the museum. And I always thought that was sort of symbolic that you took the most. For example, if you go to the underground museum, there's a fire truck that's crushed because part of the building was fallen on the damn thing. These buildings collapsed with people in, was horrible. And so that sort of carnage and that sort of trauma is underground. And the above ground is the more acceptable response. That cleanses the harshness of it all. There's another famous memorial at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. If you remember, there was three planes that crashed. One of the planes was brought down by American passengers. They were somewhere between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, as I remember, who decided that they had their phones that people are calling, telling what happened. So they felt they had to take the plane back. And they tried to break down the door and reclaim the plane. And it crashed in the field in Pennsylvania. There's a memorial there today. Again, the names of the dead. It's a serene place. It's scenically pretty. In other words, it's rolling hills now and it's another one of these sort of final resting places like a cemetery as opposed to a harsh confrontation of what happened there. We don't see much of the fact the plane mostly disintegrated in Shanksville, where this is. And there's a. You can stand by the names of the dead. You look to your left and there's signage and you'll see a clump of just debris and that's all that was left of the crash. So again, the, the worst of that episode, if you will, which is the, the loss of all those people and, and the terrorists that were flying the plane is rendered to the side but is not allowed to overshadow. Honoring the dead and the heroic acts. The. In looking at the debates over how to commemorate it, I found sort of what I thought I would find that it was debated, it wasn't automatic, that this more this sort of sanitized version, if you will, and, and more of, of the. The memory of the war was contested by a lot of people. For example, there were many survivors, I'm sorry, relatives and friends who lost loved ones at flight at Flight 93 or in the towers themselves, who formed organizations saying, this is terrible. We are beyond hurt and destroyed by this. But we don't want a war started in our name. We want us to try to understand why this happened. Some people say, look, this is a crime treater. It's a crime. Creators of the crime scene get the criminals. That's not the same as bombing Iraq. Identify the criminal. I mean, these are just arguments. These are not my arguments. They're arguments that people making. At the time I was struck, I read a number of books by widows, women who lost men in the ground Zero, the World Trade Towers or on Flight 93. And they reacted again in a different manner. There were those that saw their husband's actions as highly patriotic. They were proud of them. I'm not saying they shouldn't be. They felt that they were more than ready to serve their country. And there were those who resented the fact that you were turning these people, their dead spouses, into honorable patriots because they said that's not what they signed up for. I mean, one of the ladies who lost a person, a husband on Flight 93 said he wasn't trying to be a patriot, he was trying to get home to his family. So there, there. And there was, there's more of this. I mean, there's a lady in New York, a widow whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center. And I think he was a fireman, New York fireman. And when Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York at the time, America's mayor, the wanted to. He was going around to funerals saying basically patriotic, honorable things about why these people had to die, et cetera. And I'm not, again, I'm not criticizing what I think people, a lot of people wanted this. I'm not saying he's all wrong. But she stood up and says she told not to come. She didn't want a. And others too. She didn't want a politician politicizing her personal pain and suffering, because that's what it was. It wasn't patriotic, absurd. It was suffering. It was traumatic. I can't get over it. She goes to. She's. Bush invites her to the White House. She's in the galley, and he's giving a State of Union address or something like that right after 9, 11, whatever the next State of the Union was, and he mentions her husband's name in that sort of patriotic vein. And while she didn't say anything that she resented it, again, they're back to their points. And there were others. This debate went on. This is our personal pain. This is our trauma. Don't turn it into a patriotic honor. And those who love the fact that it was turned into an honorable patriotic act.

[C]

This is a great segue to the next point I wanted to raise about the debates over the Iraq war. And you also mentioned gold star mothers, Gold star families, I should say. So how is patriotism used as part of the debates over both going into Iraq, which you've already pointed out was not directly related to the September 11 attacks. But then as the Iraq war started to sour and became not the quick victory that was promised, how families of the soldiers reacted in terms of their patriotic motivations.

[A]

Yeah, as you may remember, there were public protests against going into Iraq before we went that were huge international. I mean, there were large crowds in American cities and European cities. Okay. So there was a lot of public questioning about this. Nevertheless. So we're going in there. And over time, of course, we don't find weapons of mass destruction. We're losing more and more of our own troops, and there's nothing tangible to show for it. But what really happens in Iraq, too, is it's a couple of things. One is there's a number of things that happen that really upset this initial concept of the war on Terror, that we are good people threatened by evil in the world. Because when you started to see photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad, where's the moral standing there? I mean, that's attacking. Not in the war. It's attacking the premise that we are virtuous. And if we're virtuous, this sanctions our violence. We can do this because we're doing it in the name of virtue or in the name of God in the religion. All right, fine. But you can't then start showing photos like the ones that came out of Abu Ghrab. Now, Abu Ghraib, there are. There's enough. There's plenty of stuff in the book about families, Gold Star mothers who will not accept patriotism, patriotic honor, as an explanation of why their sons had to die. And of course, the classic one, which many might remember from the news and it's in the book, is the protest that is mounted by Cindy Sheehan, who was a mother from California whose son died very quickly after he got. I can't remember the exact. Maybe a month. It was very quick after he got to Iraq. And she went around the country speaking against it. She attracted other Gold Star mothers. These are mothers who paid the price of losing their children, and they rallied her. They go down to Texas and they set up this sort of protest near Bush's ranch in Texas. So they. It attracts people who share their view, but it also attracts people who detest their view. We're saying you're dishonoring the American servicemen who fought there. And that's a real battle. I mean, they are yelling at each other in this field in near Waco, Texas. And to me, it was like, my God, it's like finding all this stuff. The Library of Congress. You're giving me. Exactly. There's my paradigm. Patriotism is justified. We can be belligerent. We have to be. Or it's not. We're not going to accept the personal pain and trauma that it brings, et cetera. And they planted white crosses in the ground to identify each of the American deaths. And one night, a guy from Waco comes up with his pickup truck, puts a big iron bar behind it and runs over the crosses. Is he desecrating the. These symbols of graves? No, he doesn't like it that this. They're. They're dishonoring his view of the patriotic war and patriotic sacrifice. And I remember reading the Waco newspapers at the time, the letters to the editor. And, you know, there was some differences, but mostly there was a sizable critique in the Waco newspapers about what the she and those people were doing because they wanted to hold on to this more virtuous view of patriotism, justifying the belligerence and not wanting to really come to grips with the pain and suffering that the war brought. There's other episodes, but that's one of them this holiday.

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[C]

Let'S this is a good transition to talking about the visual imagery of war. You've already mentioned the photos from Abu Ghraib, but you also mentioned in the book about there being a ban from the government on images of flag draped coffins flying back from Iraq to do what was the role of visual imagery in this patriots debate?

[A]

Well, I mean the government isn't keen on having a lot of photographs of the flag draped coffins of dead American servicemen. They're coming back to Dover Air Base in Delaware being widely circulated because they know that the more you expose the trauma and the death, the harder it is to sell the war or to sell the honorable notion of honorable patriot. It doesn't undermine it completely. Some people will see the death and say what a noble, honorable sacrifice is. Okay? And. But the more you see that it's like Vietnam, I mean the more we I'm old enough to remember watching television as a younger person and seeing American guys shut up on your nightly news for God's sake. So that certainly is going to drive some of the anti war protests and the same thing here. Even though it was more, you know, it was cleansed more and sanitized and men were Giving the honor and the respect that certainly some of they earned. But I started to look for. I don't know how I started. Stumbled into this, but I started to look at artists who wanted to make renditions of the war, et cetera. And by and large, and maybe this because they're artists. The artists I found really took the side of empathy toward those who suffered and wanted to feature death and not in anything else or setbacks or traumatic experiences. So the memories of the war, the artistic renditions, there's probably a dozen in the book. Maybe I could have done. You could probably do a whole book on this. But these people aren't lined up to be found. You got to find them. I mean, they're. They're everywhere, you know, but you have to. Anyhow, without getting into all the nuances of how you track this stuff down, I found a photographer example, who would only wanted to photograph men in the service, but in a prone position where their heads are sideways so that it shown that somehow their service was. They were not able to stand tall anymore. I mean, she was trying to show that this was. Was. Was hurting them in some way. I found a guy who did renditions of the American flag with bullet holes all through it. So again, tempering the glory and. And the honor of. Of defending the country in that he's not saying it's dishonorable. He's saying it's also very. It's also something else. There are photos in there of citizens who start putting up white crosses on their own. There's one in California, near Lafayette, California. There was where I actually interviewed some of the people who put those crosses up, and it created a lot of controversy. They had city council meetings at Lafayette whether we should recognize the dead this way or not, because it was by putting up reminders of how many were dying, you were undermining both the President's agenda and the idea that this was a justified sacrifice. So I found it interesting, and there are works in there of. There's a photo of a memorial there in Boston where they decided to commemorate the Iraq war by just having lines of dog tags, meaning just like the names of the dead of Vietnam. So they're keeping alive that Vietnam legacy of whitewashed, the suffering and the death we experience with sort of high language of noble patriotism.

[C]

Yeah, I've seen that one in Boston, and it is very moving. And especially when there's a breeze coming through, the dog tags act almost as wind chimes. It's so. But on that note, how did the veterans of the wars themselves respond, you know, like, what was the debate among soldiers about patriotism and their service in these wars?

[A]

Yeah, that may have been my favorite chapter to write because I found it so interesting. I read a lot of memoirs and autobiographies from again, just like it did with World War II book. I wanted to know how the men decided to remember the war and write about it. Not everybody writes about it. I'm not saying it's the most complete account of how veterans remember it, but I have to say that there was, in my opinion, almost a literary explosion with the war on terror, because there was a lot. I mean, I probably didn't read everything, but I'm sure I read a hundred or more memoirs. I mean, at some point you got to stop reading and write, et cetera, but. So you can say, well, you should have read another 100. Well, maybe. But the point is that they were split. I will say this categorically. The war on terror to some extent led to a rebirth and resurgence of war based honorable patriotism, the honor and sacrificing for your nation, the nobility of our soldiers, our virtuous violence, that we are virtuous people who had to do this. And we did it for the right reasons. Sometimes the reasons were we were defending Christianity against Muslim religion. Sometimes we're defending the nation against evil people. Okay, that's fine. But the key to sort of countering the legacy of Vietnam, which the war on terror partly does, and by the way, the celebration of the good war in the 1990s counters the legacy of Vietnam. Now, the world war, War on terror does it again, but only partially, but it does restore a lot of public interest in celebration of the heroic deeds of these men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. So that, for example, in the book, the highly popular reminiscence of. Of American sniper Chris Kyle, he's a. An American sniper who reportedly in the book was the greatest, killed the most of any sniper in American history. That was later refuted, but he killed a lot of people. He did well in that regard in terms of his assignment. And it led to a very popular movie, maybe the most popular movie coming out of the war on terror, which is Clint Eastwood's American Sniper. I mean, whatever you think of it one way or the other, it was highly popular at the time. And in his book, I thought it was interesting. Kyle didn't talk about the fact that he had some PTSD after the war. He talked about how. What an efficient soldier he was and how honored he felt to defend his country and defend his fellow soldiers and defend Christianity. Okay, but in the movie, he. Eastwood, who was more prone to do this, revealed that he also suffered greatly from ptsd. And then there's other soldiers who just were totally critical of the war and couldn't get past the suffering. So there are movies and novels and books that talk about ptsd. We know that now the men who served in Iraq had a high incidence of traumatic brain injuries because the enemy would put explosive devices under their Humvees and it would get blown up and be bouncing around their heads with inside the Humvees. I mean, it's a horrible thing. And so the two great counter opposites of the soldiers who see the war as noble and those that see it as ignoble and terrifying are American Sniper on the one hand, and a book called the Yellow Birds. And it's a novel, Yellow Birds, by a soldier who served in Iraq. And there's this. In the story, one of his friends is so disillusioned by the war and the suffering that he sees all around him that he walks into an Iraqi village at night knowing he's not going to come out alive from his base. It's suicide. And when his friends find him, his American soldier friends and his buddies find him, they take his body and they put it in a river in Iraq and let it be washed down the river. Now, it sounds like a strange thing to do, but the whole point of doing that in the novel was they didn't want the suffering that this man had in terms of seeing suffering all around him and his disillusionment with the war to be covered over by returning the body home with a flag draped coffin and receiving patriotic honors. Because these were soldiers who couldn't accept patriotic honors as an explanation of why they had to fight. Just like the women like Cindy Sheehan back in Waco couldn't accept that point about why her son had to die. Many did accept it. Many saw it as a noble enterprise. The point of the chapter is even the soldiers were divided over this point.

[C]

Great. And yeah, the Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, this great book. So I think one last question before we close is I wanted to talk about. The enforcement of patriotism internally and how, especially in the early days after the September 11th attacks. You mentioned this at the top about the attacks on Muslim Americans or anybody that might look from the Middle east and how patriotism was used to justify the. The, I mean, horrid, I mean, xenophobic treatment of anybody that did not look American or express American patriotism the way, the way people Thought they ought to.

[A]

Let me say that one of the legacies of the war on terror, and I do get at this a little bit at the end of my book in the last chapter, but there's obviously much more to say is the fact that the 911 unleashed a lot of violence toward Muslim Americans. And by the way, some of these people were not Muslims. But if they look like the men who flew the plane or they wore a turban and by the way, the people who wore turbans are Sikhs and they're not Muslims. But nevertheless they had the wrong look. So we have murders, we had bombings of mosques. I won't go into numbers, there's reports on all this. And it unleashed a sort of anti immigrant wave that led to, and to me this is important, it led to the Patriot Act 2001, meaning it looks like this person looks like a Muslim or looks like an Arab or Arabic. You can pick them up, you can break down their doors, you can pull them out of their house, you can detain them, you don't have to give them due process of law and you're going to kick them out of the country. Now I'm simplifying something that was more complicated than that. But I'm not simplifying the fact that the war on terror led to this sort of anti immigrant sentiment that justified treating immigrants in unlawful ways. Now that's important for Abe because at the same time in this country we had already seen in the beginnings of the 1990s a very strong anti immigrant movement that was percolating and we could do another seminar on this, but was percolating in the west and then spreading, it'll spread through the whole country. And these of course are mostly against people from Mexico and Central America. So without getting into all those details, they're to me, 9 11's anti immigrant, anti Muslim wave reinforced the anti Mexican Central American wave that had already been going. And you go after you start to move past 911 and you not only see the debate I talked about, you see now more citizen attacks against immigrants from Mexico crossing the southern border. For example, there was a group formed in Arizona in 2003, four or five, and they're called admitted men. And they decided they're former servicemen. They decided we have to go guard the border because our job is to guard the nation just like we did against terrorists. And so they go into Arizona border desert and they are either trying to force immigrants back, sometimes it's violence towards immigrants trying to cry. I mean these are poor people who don't know what the hell is going to hit them. And you got evidence of law enforcement in, say, Arizona border regions just arresting people because they look like they could be illegal immigrants. Just as there were men in various parts of the country who shot and killed Muslims after 9, 11 because they look like the guys who flew the plane. And so to me, what's going on today with the harshness and the aggressive nature of our deportations is another example of this belligerent patriotism. And it's a patriotism that justifies violence toward others if you don't feel they fit for one reason or another. And in general, that sort of patriotism moves our politics to the right and not to the left, which would have taken a more tolerant view of people's differences and a greater reluctance not to make violence and take away due process and legal rights of people without some much more careful consideration of who they were.

[C]

Yeah, this is a great way to kind of wrap up. I mean, if you could just continue along that line and talk about how you're seeing this patriots debate going on right now, especially with the very belligerent rhetoric of President Trump. Then also, of course, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, or as he likes to call himself, the Secretary of War, and patriotism is of course, a big part of his own identity. How are you seeing this war based patriotism playing out in current politics? But also how is the empathetic patriotism trying to push back against some of these excesses of the current Trump administration?

[A]

Well, anybody who doesn't see that the immigration policies of the Trump administration is aversion, I mean, they think they're defending the country. And in fact, the rationale that Trump has offered. And here goes somebody else saying critical about Trump. So let's just say what we just talked about, the rationale for what they offered in creating these deportations which are sending troops in American cities, taking people off the streets, and by the way, there were people, vigilantes doing that against the immigrants 20 years ago. I mean, the Trump deportation immigration policies are born out of this climate of anti immigrant, anti Muslim that we just talked about over the last 20 years. And now these people are dehumanized and Trump's can send troops into American cities because he's now tried to create. Here we go. A myth that these people are invaders who will criminals who will come and slit your throat. Those are their words, not mine. So here we go. And that myth is designed to again, just as the war myths to cover over the complicated nature of what's going on. For example, sure. There are people crossing the border who are dire economic circumstances. They want to request asylum, they have a right to asylum, which has now been taken away from them by Trump. I mean executive orders. He has an executive order out there. I don't know what will happen to it. Where you deny a child born in America of immigrant mother birthright citizenship, which is we've had forever. Okay, so by using a war based patriotism and this, this militarization of the border and this weaponization of deportations with people going, you know, ICE officers going in or national Guard going with guns, et cetera, you are, you're using a myth that our aggression, this is the classic war based myth that whatever we have to do, defend our nation against invasion, we can do and any violence is justified. That's assume, you assume that the immigrants are invaders. Now is there a pushback to this? Big time. Right now I just not to just read this paper this morning, but I saw it 10 years ago. National Council of Catholic Bishops are saying these are not invaders. I'm not taking a side here in religion or anything else. I'm just saying they're saying, wait a minute, whoa. These people are not invaders. They are families trying to deal with dire economic circumstances. Now that would call for empathy and that sort of empathy, that sort of who do you want to be as an American? Do you want to be a tough guy that's going to go in there and do 20 push ups and become secretary of war? Or do you want to be somebody like the mothers in Chicago neighborhoods now who are going around and demanding that they see the conditions that some of these people that have just been picked up in Chicago in, which apparently are not very good. So there's a popular pushback for a more empathetic approach to immigration and a restoration of some of our old a sense of who we thought we were. We used to think we were a nation of immigrants. The modern scholarship on that says, well, not so fast. We were a nation of xenophobes and nativists. Yes, true as well. It's now playing itself out, but now it's playing itself up. We're used to the xenophobes and the nativists who didn't want immigrants were not necessarily part of a larger project to create an authoritarian government and diminish our democracy. They just had hatred in their hearts or they felt that it was changing America in terms of its racial complexions in ways they didn't want. Now it's crystallized after 9, 11. And this long term anti immigrant movement into an outright grab for an authoritarian power structure Institute an authoritarian power structure. One that will have no room for empathetic patriots.

[C]

Thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go, is there anything else that you're working on now?

[A]

I just told you I'm writing an article on the origins of this harsh immigration policy and its links to authoritarianism, which to me makes it different than our previous examples of simply nativism or xenophobia or racism. I mean, you could be a racist and not necessarily want to take away rights to people of different sexual orientations, or you could be a racist and not necessarily want to gut the federal government of workers, not even considering what cost that may have. So that's another discussion. But we're seeing something that is about more than simply anti immigration right now. And it's a broader sort of aggressive patriotism used to put in really tear down, I would imagine, a lot of the rule of law and a lot of democratic institutions at an extent we've never seen before.

[C]

Okay, yeah, sounds, I mean, definitely timely and very important and not something that I want to read, but probably something I should read. Thank you. John Bodner, thank you so much for writing this book and thank you for taking the time to talk with New Books Network today. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

[A]

Nice to be here. Thank you very much.