Twitch suspends popular leftist streamer after controversial 9/11 comments

Yes, I'm from Turkey. I'm actually not a part of the discussion either, i.e. did not read the article and was only perusing; wanted to respond to papasquat because I did not agree with the connections and conclusions they made.

W.r.t. Piker, it looks like he's of Turkish origin, but I don't know much about him. But if I talk about terrorism, it is a beast that feeds off of resentment, true, just, understandable resentment. In Turkey the two main long-term terror organisations are ASALA and PKK. The former was an Armenian organisation that does not exist anymore, and it targeted Turkish diplomats. It, expectably, was born out of resentment for the genocide. Which is totally valid, the resentment, but it lead on to terrorist attacks, and that's not acceptable. But that result does not render the cause invalid. PKK is a Kurdish terrorist organisation, and it was born out of resentment for assimilatory and fascist policies against Kurds, especially intensified after the coup of '80 (which has fucked up Turkey in major ways and has planted the power structures and some of the societal mental illnesses that brought about the current ruling bloc to power). Again, totally valid reason, but totally unacceptable outcome. Southeastern Turkey is vastly underdevelopped region. Almost no industry. Education and other public services do not penetrate that area enough. On top of this, there is racist oppression with the goal of total assimilation since decades. It is basically our own mini-colonialism at play (Ottoman Empire was basically the huge colony of the Ottoman Dynasty, glory only existed in the palaces of sultans and high-rank officers of state and military). It is a vicious cycle that only produces corpses of innocent youth fooled by either the state or the PKK with mainly nationalistic narratives.

It is really hard to understand the opressed when you're born as part of the oppressors. It took me years of reading and some happy coincidences. For the average Turk, it requires lots of effort to come to learn, let alone break the prejudices---both nationalistic and religious---taught since childhood and sympathise with, the suffering of ethnic minorities of Turkey. Since time immemorial, up until 1923, this area has been ruled by empires. Everybody suffered. But for the last few centuries, Muslims were priviledged in everything, and non-(Sunni-)Muslims were opressed. That situation carried well into the Republic, with the added ethnic tensions with the introduction of the Turkish identity (which was blurred or absent up until the second half of XIXth century).

Almost all terrorism is born out of some oppressed group having no other means to express their discontent and also often of systematic statal abuse of such group. Colonialism was one such force. I can only imagine what it did to places it actively pillaged for centuries. Apart from some petrol-rich cities, the Muslim world is poor and is still trying to deal with Colonialism. There's resentment, again valid, against the West. The way it is expressed in terrorism stems from organisations that exploit such resentment, terrorist organisations. But it is the same thing: resentment, and divide between the groups terrorist recruit from and target: when you don't know the Other in person, it is easier to hate on it and dehumanise it.

It is not much different from Nazis: almost none of the commanders or SS were raging psychopaths, they were mostly normal people. It was quite easy to recruit people because Treaty of Versailles (or whatever it was after WWI, I'm not good at retaining names) brought a lot of humiliation, suffering, hunger and poverty, and consequentially resentment.

These people don't think of their actions as murders or against the individuals (maybe bar ISIS, which is not really a terrorist organisation but some kind of pirate army whose aim is to pillage the world and feed the leaders); they think of it in terms of some (obviously bullshit) methodology. The attack on the towers have two sides to it: yes, it is horrible, inhumane, unacceptable; but it is also an expression of something and an attack on the abstract existence of the US. That there is an ideological background to it does not lessen the crime against humanity it was, but if we delete in turn the situations and complex historical phenomena it feeds off of, we can't go further than killing terrorists and hating on immigrants of darker skin tones.

And in the end, it is just one incident. In this part of the world, literally thousands of lives has been lost to terrorism since decades. ISIS alone caused hundreds of deaths, in Reina in Istanbul, in Ankara, in Urfa. Almost all civilians. PKK has been killing low-ranking soldiers since decades. At some periods it was a daily occurrence that a few soldiers were killed. But of course it is not the USA, so it is invisible. The USA has one terrorist attack, and it leads on to a twenty year war on many countries in Southern Asia and Middle East fucking up lives of millions of people that had nothing to do with it.

That the "US deserves it" is a bit harsh, but what it wants to express is that the USA as an institution has done everything to bring it on to itself. Yes, innocent individuals had nothing to do with it, but neither those in these war-torn countries. Individuals get radicalised because of colonialist oppression and a constant presence of violence around them. But that's invisible to colonialist oppressors just like what Armenians and Kurds experience is totally invisible to your average Turk: they are marginalised, remote, and squished under governmental and military apparati that are almost invincible. There isn't much other way to express that resentment. That is unless the oppressors stop oppressing and try to sympathise with these peoples, communicate and deal with it as equals. Conflating what US did with the individual citizens' life or what terrorists did to individuals with what they wanted to do to the state itself blinds us more to it. I don't say any of this justifies the actual terrorist attacks, none of them anywhere in the world, but there are concrete reasons why they happen, and there is exploitation of resentment in how it happens. So we should see and understand the (often valid) resentment and treat it before exploited. Western colonialism fucked up the lives of millions, billions of people. The West needs to deal with it humanely (and sending troops don't do that), or terrorism will only grow. Similarly, in Turkey, if we don't deal with PKK and the newfangled religious orgs in humane ways, it'll only grow. When the state kills your brother, it becomes really hard to sympathise with the narrative it brings to the table. Turks or Americans don't deserve terrorism, but the systems we participate in have voluntarily created vicious in which violence, resentment and terror thrives. We should draw the fine lines the situation asks for, and build an exit for these people, for the fact that we built the tall walls around them.

What I wanted to get at was a rhetorical call to emotions to blur all those lines and brush under the carpet the human condition on the other side of things. It is a huge lack of nuance and genuinity when people take objective and constructive looks into these violent events as justification or condoning them. One can both sympathise with and be sorry for the victims of 9/11, and hold the view that the USA as the state has been involved in colonialism and creating environments in which terror thrives which was the reason 9/11 happened.