NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Strangely, both the media and the public rarely mention some of the most important aftershocks in the decade since 9/11. Here are some representative examples of landmark events that to this day remain mostly undiscussed.

1. No more falling skyscrapers? Few imagined that the United States could go an entire decade without another major terrorist attack — other than freelancing jihadists’ killing members of the American armed forces. Almost monthly, U.S. authorities have thwarted serial attempts to cause mayhem on airliners, bridges, city squares, shopping malls, and high-rises. It was almost as if the more we caricatured the often silly security measures at the airport, blasted Guantanamo Bay, and ridiculed renditions, the more we assumed that our security, initially thought permanently imperiled (“not if, but when”), was once again our birthright. Someone somewhere did something that kept us safe, but we were strangely afraid to acknowledge that there was any utility in the very protocols and foreign operations that had weakened our enemies to the point of an inability to replicate 9/11. If immediately after the attacks in New York and Washington we accepted that the old security was no longer possible, soon thereafter we started assuming not only that it was natural, but that, in organic fashion, it had reappeared through spontaneous regeneration.

2. The greatest political turnabout of the age. If one had collated everything candidate Obama declaimed about the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies from autumn of 2007 to November 2008, then one would have expected a President Obama to dismantle the entire Bush-Cheney national-security apparatus upon entering office, to pull out of Iraq (he originally said this should be done by March 2008, no less), and to keep our military out of the Middle East. Instead, Obama retained Secretary of Defense Gates, stuck to the Bush-Petraeus withdrawal plan in Iraq, expanded Predator-drone attacks in Waziristan, surged into Afghanistan, bombed Libya, and embraced everything from Guantanamo to renditions. That about-face, I think, was the most radical political development of the last quarter-century, and was treated with near silence by the media. It was as if Moveon.org, Code Pink, and Michael Moore had simply vanished from the face of the earth sometime around January 2009. The notion today that a canonized Michael Moore would be invited to a lookout perch at the 2012 Democratic Convention or that Moveon.org would run another “General Betray Us” ad is surreal. A cynic would say that the anti–War on Terror movement did its job in helping to elect Barack Obama, and then moved on, so to speak, when Barack Obama likewise did his job in continuing his predecessor’s anti-terrorism policies....

Steve Krause is the Director of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Matthew Paull retired from the CFO position at McDonald's Corporation in early 2008 and now serves on several boards.

In his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw paid homage to the generation that emerged from the Great Depression to fight Hitler and other forms of tyranny. Their efforts were all about sacrifice so that their children could enjoy a better life. They sacrificed on the front lines of battle and back home in the factories that produced what was needed to wage war.

We, on the other hand, are members of the Baby Boom generation (the authors are both 60 years old)—a cohort that is hardly known for its selflessness—and we can’t help but wonder: What, exactly, happened to the children of the “Greatest Generation?” Where is our willingness to sacrifice so that our children can enjoy a life even better than ours?

So how did the Greatest Generation, known for its sacrifices, produce a generation so focused on economic self-interest and so seemingly unwilling to sacrifice for the good of the country? That is a bit of a mystery, but we will put forth two theories.

First, our generation generally avoided military service. As we baby boomers became adults, less than 1 percent of the population served in the military. In WWII, that figure was over 10 percent. Two of the great lessons of military service are one, country before self and two, trust in leadership and authority. With relatively few of us sharing the bonds, lessons, and sacrifices of military service, perhaps there is little widespread experiential counterbalance to each of us pursuing only our self-interest.  

The second theory, on the other hand, goes deeper into our country’s structural economic problems—those that have precipitated the decline of a middle-class majority and the ascent of more powerful, but divergent self-interest groups....

Richard Landes, a professor of history at Boston University, blogs at The Augean Stables. His new book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience treats a variety of apocalyptic movements, including global jihad.

When I first heard in the mid-1990s about the dreams of some jihadis and Islamists to have the green flag of Islam waving over the White House and the queen of England wearing a burka, I, like so many other Western liberals, thought that these were ludicrous fantasies. But as a student of apocalyptic millennialism, I understood that however silly such beliefs might sound to outsiders, they can have devastating consequences.

Millennialists, from stone-age cargo cults to the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution in Egypt around 1350 BCE to modern secular movements including the French Revolution, Marxism, Communism, and Nazism, all imagine that in the future the world will transform from a society in which evil, corruption, and oppression flourish and the good suffer into a world without suffering and pain. The term “apocalyptic” refers to the experiences and behavior of those who believe that this millennial transformation is imminent. In my new book, Heaven on Earth, I focus on two major developments in apocalyptic movements: The first concerns those rare moments when a previously low-volume apocalyptic discourse successfully enters the public sphere and, despite its outlandish claims, wins zealous, open, converts, and the second concerns the inevitable disappointment that greets all such movements, including those that succeed in taking power and implementing their plans for perfecting the world. Of the most dangerous such movements to jell are those I call “active cataclysmic” ones that believe that only vast destruction can pave the way to the new world, and that they are the agents of that violence. Such movements have killed tens of millions of people (often their own people) before their raging fires burned out.

Two key laws of apocalyptic dynamics became relevant in assessing Muslim apocalyptic expectations, even the most curious ones attached to the advent of the year 2000: First, one person’s messiah is another’s antichrist; and, second, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Muslims observing messianic Christians and Jews who wanted to rebuild the Temple where the Dome of the Rock stands in the year 2000 predicted the Dajjal, the Muslim version of the antichrist, for that year. And given the active cataclysmic fantasy involved—“We, Allah’s agents, must destroy much of the word to save it”—I understood how devastating it might be if this movement spread, no matter how wrong it might seem to secular people in the West....

Judith Stein is a professor of history and the author of Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale University Press, 2010).

In his speech on jobs Thursday, President Obama will offer tax credits for new hiring, extension of the payroll tax cut, and other small items, his aides hinted. These measure may be helpful at the margins, but the only way they, and much needed larger ones, will get people's attention is if they are attached to a narrative that makes jobs the centerpiece of a new economy that produces more of the goods that Americans consume.

In 2009, the president seemed to agree when he told CNN, "We can't go back to the era where the Chinese or the Germans or other countries just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them."...

Despite Obama's words, the tax cuts and spending in his $787 billion stimulus did not encourage the investment and growth we needed. Most of it was saved or used for consumption. The unemployed obviously needed income support. But some of the increased buying went for imports, providing jobs for foreign, not American workers. The low interest rates and quantitative easing of the Federal Reserve Bank aided the global as much as the American economy. Banks and multinationals used cheap money to invest in emerging markets, not in the United States. The wealth effect of the rising stock market encouraged upper-class consumption, not investment. The telltale trade deficit has been rising again, meaning that the United States is consuming more than it is producing again....

Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the simmering tea-partying Islamophobic mindset of the "Land of the Free" has come up with a memorial coloring book for children. The publisher's press release says it all:

To the American people and all others who may read this child’s coloring book, We Shall Never Forget is designed to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11. This book also describes basic freedoms in America. We suggest parental guidance. As the 9/11 events are shown countless times on national media, this book will help children understand the meaning of these events. The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth. In this book you will see what happens to a terrorist who orders others to bomb our peace loving wonderful nation.

Here is propaganda so blatant and smiley gross that it deserves a place alongside the insidious emulation of Lenin by the Soviets and idolization of dictators the world over. The cover image is an interesting spin on the separation of church and state in our land of the free: here we see the tattered American flag flying above a cross illuminated by a beam of light from above, at the feet of which lie a firefighter’s helmet and police hat. To label the libel in this colorfully designed “Kid’s Book of Freedom” a “Graphic Coloring Novel” strikes me as a misspelling; is it not more aptly named a “Pornographic Coloring Novel,” to be rated so for the sensational violence mongering rather than any out-of-place showing of body parts?

The most offensive image in the book is one in which an American soldier is shown aiming a rifle at Bin Laden, who is cowering behind a woman in hijab. The caption for this is:

“Being the elusive character that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden,” runs the text accompanying the picture. “Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.”

Free to be bigoted and hateful with no sense of civil decency. Yes, our society is free for books like this to be published and sway young minds with the rhetoric of spite. But the value of freedom is in proportion to civility rather than age-old distrust feeding on willful ignorance. There was precious little freedom for African slaves, who were blamed with a Hamitic biblical bias for their own destiny of servitude, nor for the native inhabitants of the Americas, who were demonized so the white man could rid his New World of the red man. For far too long in our country freedom has been in the eyes of the beholder of power. At least our founding fathers had the sense not to invoke the prevailing sectarian views of a vengeful God and elevated the Deity to a position that anyone of any sincere religious conviction could appreciate.

Children, the truth is that the act of terrorism on September 9, 2011 was done by a politically motivated individual who no more speaks for the religion and vast majority of Muslims worldwide, especially in our free country, than Torquemada did for the entire sweep of Christianity or even Catholicism. It was not our freedom that is hated, but our interference. The United States has an imperialist history, against the native inhabitants, Mexico and Spain (all before the last century). Hawaii did not become a state, nor Puerto Rico a territory, nor the Philippines a nation of American English speakers because they were nearby the original thirteen colonies. We went to war with Spain and these were the spoils; spoiled these lands were for the commercial benefit of the missionizing Americans. If you want to truly love this country, and it is worth loving, then do not deny its faults but change them: make freedom more than a slogan slicked up with religious rhetoric.

Adults, as all of us parents should have learned, there is a world out there of lies, distortions and self-serving propaganda that blinds us from appreciating the values that freedom should involve. This coloring book only pours salt on the wounds of those who suffered the 9/11 bombing, including the scores of Muslims who were in the Twin Towers that day. Ironically, there is no passage in the book of “what would Jesus do,” although the author may think he knows what to do better than Jesus. There is a passage in the Gospels (Mark 10:14) where Jesus says “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Not “make them suffer” more hate speech, but rather be like children who love naturally and can of course learn to hate when so taught or treated or given coloring books like this. I do not think the Jesus of the Gospels would have handed out this coloring book to the children he met. I suspect, rather, he would have dashed it to the ground as he did the hypocritical moneygrabbers at the gates of the Temple.