The Upcoming Class on my Website: “The Origins of 9/11.”

I’m pleased to announce that, beginning in two weeks (November 11, 2024), I will be conducting my largest and most in-depth online history course to date—The Origins of 9/11. Some of you may already be aware that the class is coming; as of today I’ve released two videos about it on my YouTube channel (they are embedded here in this email). This is a big project and has been a long time in the making. I’ve wanted to do something based on September 11 for quite some time now, but my YouTube channel is not the place to do it, thanks to the ad-friendly guidelines that make it difficult to monetize anything related to 9/11, which is classified as a “Sensitive Event.” Sensitive or not, this is a topic that’s vitally important to understand in recent world history, and not enough people understand it.

Here are all the basics. The Origins of 9/11 will be a video-based course, hosted on my website, SeanMunger.com. There are over 50 video lessons, each about a different subject, and each building on the previous ones. There are also suggested reading lists, collateral documents that you’ll be able to read, and the course will enable you to interact with me and ask questions, via my Discord server. The course launches on November 11, and all parts of it will be available at that time—while I suggest you proceed through it in order, it won’t be a staged or “drip” roll-out, everything will be on the site (provided I can get it all finished). The cost to join the course is $397. I know that’s expensive, but this is a great deal of material that’s taken me months to compile, and given the response so far, at least on YouTube, there does appear to be significant interest in the course.

Here’s the thing. There are a limited number of seats (50) available at one time. Thus, there’s a wait list for the course. Click here to enter your email to get on it. Registration will open Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 12PM Pacific Time. At that time, it’s first-come, first-serve for sign-ups, though those who sign up on the waiting list will get an email prompting them to sign up. Once I fill up the course beyond 50, I will eventually offer another round of registration, though I can’t say for sure exactly when. I want to keep the cohort that’s active in the class at any one time fairly limited so I can be sure to be able to respond to questions in a timely manner.

If you’re a member of the Garden of Memory blog at the paid tier, you can receive a $100 discount on the cost of the course. Shortly before Nov. 10, I will send an email to all paid tier members with a coupon code they can use at checkout. But again, you’ll need to act fast on Nov. 10 to register.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 represent a sea change in modern geopolitical history. They also sprang from a fabulously complex background of politics, ideology, theology, and even psychology, particularly that of their chief executor, Saudi-born terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Having immersed myself for several months now in the deep background of this event, I can tell you it only gets more complicated, not less, the farther you get into it. In the United States, there was never a really robust public discussion post-9/11 as to why bin Laden had attacked us. In his address to Congress shortly after the event, President George W. Bush famously said that al-Qaeda had attacked because “they hate our freedoms.” That reductive characterization did much to short-circuit analysis of the event in people’s minds.

So too did a phenomenon I call “9/11 fragility.” As a culture and a society, we have treated the attacks, which are now nearly 25 years in the past, as an event of such trauma and solemnity that we’re afraid to discuss or even reference it. In the first months after the event in 2001, Hollywood studios excised images of the now-destroyed World Trade Center towers from movies that had already been shot before 9/11 but were scheduled to come out after it. Our reluctance to engage with the subject has rendered it largely a matter of symbology. Police officers and firefighters are the “main characters” of 9/11. On the anniversary of the attacks every year we see a lot of American flags, images of the towers and bald eagles with tears running down their faces on social media, and the curious words “Never Forget.” The truth is, we have forgotten—few Americans now have much deep understanding of the event, why it happened or what it means. For those who take my class, I hope this is the blind spot it will fill in for them.

Again, the link to sign up on the waiting list is here. I think this class is going to be terrific and I hope you choose to take it. I’ll probably have at least one more update here on this blog before it goes live.

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