Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)

rugsofwar.wordpress.com

182 pointssamirillian32 comments

These sort of artifacts are fascinating. It reminds me of a t-shirt I saw a man wearing in Thailand in 2012. I was in rural Isan and spotted a Thai man wearing a t-shirt with an image of the falling towers, above the towers were portraits of Bush and Bin Laden with text like "Bush VS Bin Laden".

I never saw a copy of this shirt again in Thailand (which was strange because Bangkok has many, many t-shirt stalls filled with shirts that would be controversial in the west). I googled it and discovered that there were actually many variations on this shirt[0], but I never saw the same design as the one the man was wearing.

Weirdly, this mystery was sorta solved for me this year. A Rudy Giuliani parody account I follow on Instagram posted an image of this controversial handheld game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laden_VS_USA

The image featured on the game is the exact same one I saw on the shirt. And yes, several people on YouTube have acquired and played copies of this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XNJM_Kamyg&t=142s

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=bin+laden+vs+bush+shirt&tbm=...

> controversial handheld game

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, an unlicensed Game Boy Color game called "Terrifying 9/11" was released, which uses the attack as a central plot point, despite the game essentially being a port of Metal Slug. The quality of the port is actually quite good which leads some to speculate that it's based on an unreleased port by SNK.

It actually has perhaps one of the most impressive examples of video (or something close to it) I've ever seen on the Game Boy. I get the feeling that the game creators didn't mean to cause offense but simply wanted to use the attacks to add context or "plot" in other words.

More info: https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/Terrifying_911

Full gameplay (Chinese version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7Vlk2r-eo

A similar phenomenon happened in Brazil in the extremely polarized 2018 presidential elections: https://store.steampowered.com/app/930460/BOLSOMITO/

It would be similar if the game was about the (fake) stabbing.

Off Khao San Road, one or two streets across there was one seller of Bin Laden t-shirts and masks in 2003. He was kinda famous. Got shutdown some point later. Neutral shirts. Just had a nice picture of Bin Laden with his name, might have had the Vs. Not sure if you are saying there were a lot of "controversial in the West" T-Shirts in Thailand about 9-11 or in general, but by end of 2003 he was the only one I could find for 9-11.

Pic, I don't wear them out much - https://imgur.com/a/NK8P9ot

There's a comment on the bottom that links to various psy-ops leaflets the US dropped around Afghanistan that's also pretty interesting: http://www.psywarrior.com/Herbafghan02.html

Edit: Also, more war rug photos: https://warrug.com/warrugs/styles.php?ids=37

I'd thought that these were related to the 9/11 quilts (though reading the article they turned out to be quite unrelated), at least one of which is still on display at the Pentagon. I've never found a good explanation of the quilt phenomenon - unlike the Afghan carpets which were driven by a mixture of anti-Taliban sentiment and good-old-fashioned commercialism, the 9/11 quilts seemed to motivated by a return to traditional values in the aftermath of tragedy.

Quilting is a very Americana mode of remembrance. The African American community has a rich history of story quilting. Also see the AIDS quilt.

Given the history of quilts and infectious disease in the Americas (re: smallpox blankets), I always felt aids quilts were accidentally tasteless and, due to the sincerity of the good intentions behind them, kind of hilarious in a subtle dark humour way.

1. The only documented case of blankets being intentionally used to spread smallpox was recorded simply as "blankets"; there is no indication they were specifically quilts.

2. Quilting as a tradition in WASP culture is so long and dense that any association with smallpox is far from the first; quilts with squares commemorating deaths are very very common.

It’s also unclear whether the gifting of smallpox blankets had any practical effect. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_...

It would be less of a stretch to say that wearing pants is offensive because the conquistadores wore them.

They did however ruin a few forms of head wear.

There are many varieties of these carpets available for purchase on Etsy [1] including the design in this article [2]

They’re quite fascinating but I can’t picture myself displaying it in my home, not sure who’s the target market

[1] https://www.etsy.com/search?q=afghan+war+rug

[2] https://www.etsy.com/listing/1040160135/303-beautifully-hand...

I'm planning to buy one. Afghanistan and the war has been a constant element in my life since I was a child. They are interesting artefacts connected to the war, but not from the viewpoint of the west. A good reminder of the cruelty and folly of imperialism.

My mum brought a war carpet back from Peshawar for me. At first it looks abstract, you have to stare at it for a while to see the AK 47s, grenade launcher and bullets round the side. "Oh no ma'am", said the seller in response to her not entirely innocent question, "it is not a prayer rug."

https://imgur.com/a/UC1EX1V

This is absolutely amazing, thanks for sharing.

The second example is almost haunting in its abstractness. While I understand the “copies of copies” nature of its existence, it nevertheless could be easily interpreted as a reflection of the “lost” nature of the retaliatory war effort, and the way the original attacks had been weaponized into ways that caused America and its values to erode and turn on itself.

It's like GANN output but without the "artificial" part.

I would probably buy the second carpet. I thought the rockets were poppies at first. Which is basically accidental poetry.

The way in which the design reverts to the norm is so profound in a way, even though it's the product of "mistakes". Entropy, evolution, and economies follow parallel patterns.

It’s like watching an image being compressed back and forth between two different lossy formats.

Content-aware fill

Reminds me of Jean Baudrillard's progression of simulacra, starting from a faithful, sincere image of the events and ending in stage of pure simulacrum, having no relationship to any reality of the events

This is utterly fascinating.

This game of telephone took 10 years and used a medium that can be copied with high accuracy. Makes me wonder how much of the original is still left in older literature which was told by word of mouth.

> they could not be seen as other than opportunistic and exploitative

I find this a bit hypocritical considering the incredible opportunism and exploitation represented by the WTC, as well as Bush's immediate command to spend money. They're moralizing other people for holding the very same values that America upholds.

These were being exhibited at the Penn Museum around the time of the blogpost. I have a photo of one with some nicely rendered B-52s dropping bombs.

I searched for the Penn Museum and found this link https://www.penn.museum/collections/videos/video/1014, but the video seems to have conveniently left out examples of anti-American rugs.

None of them I saw were anti-American. The one I snapped a pic of is at 1:35.

The derived version looks not unlike something a Markov chain or neural network might generate, when trained on the original.

(2011)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com