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The Handsome Face of Terror Apologia

  • Writer: Gianna Mao  毛佳娜
    Gianna Mao 毛佳娜
  • Apr 29
  • 2 min read

“America Deserved 9/11, Dude”: A Statement of Imperial Blowback

In 2019, Piker said:

“America deserved 9/11, dude. F*** it, I'm saying it.”

This was widely condemned, but the reaction revealed more about hegemonic ideology than about the material reality behind the statement. In context, Piker was articulating a truth: imperialist aggression generates resistance. The U.S. has engaged in decades of economic plunder, coups, and war across the Global South. To expect no response is historically naive.

Rather than a moral provocation, the statement highlights a material reality—empire breeds counter-violence. The bourgeois media’s outrage conceals this logic, reducing anti-imperialist critique to emotional offense. What unnerves the ruling class isn’t just his visibility—it’s that he channels Marxist analysis into mass media, with direct support for resistance movements, especially in Palestine.


Palestine and the Question of Legitimate Violence

Piker’s support for Palestinian resistance breaks with the dominant framework that moralizes armed struggle as “terrorism” unless it’s state-sanctioned. He refuses to draw artificial lines between “peaceful” and “illegitimate” resistance, a distinction rooted in imperial ideology.


From a Marxist standpoint, the Palestinian struggle is not a cultural or religious conflict—it’s a national liberation movement against settler-colonial capitalism backed by U.S. military and economic power. His position affirms the right of the oppressed to use force when peaceful mechanisms are foreclosed by military domination.


Disruption of the Spectacle

Part of why Piker provokes such outrage is that he violates the expected script. He brings anti-imperialist politics into a space usually reserved for depoliticized entertainment. That he does so with charisma, wealth, and fluency in digital culture makes him a disruption to the ideological production of consensus.


The ruling class prefers its radicals marginal or toothless. Piker’s mass appeal and refusal to defer to liberal respectability politics allow class critique and anti-imperialist messaging to circulate in unexpected places. In this way, he operates as a fissure in the cultural superstructure, introducing contradictions into a media landscape designed to obscure them.

A Role Within the Class Struggle

Hasan Piker is not a revolutionary in the classical sense—he does not organize the working class, nor does he build parties. But he functions as a conduit, translating anti-imperialist and historical materialist analysis to a mass audience that has been largely depoliticized. This role, while limited, is not insignificant.

In a moment of global realignment—where the U.S. backs open genocide in Gaza and shields Israeli capital from accountability—voices that clearly articulate the material roots of conflict and name the imperial core’s role are crucial. Piker’s critiques, including the infamous 9/11 remark are deeply based in material reality. His willingness to break with liberal equivocation on Palestine, and to affirm the right of the colonized to resist, places him in the anti-imperialist tradition—if not as a theorist, then as a communicator.

1 Comment


robotition
Apr 30

trvth nvke

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