Σάββατο 10/09/2011

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ΑΦΙΕΡΩΜΑ ΣΤΗΝ 11η ΣΕΠΤΕΜΒΡΙΟΥ-10 ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΜΕΤΑ

So, where were you? A memory

by Serafeim Makris for www.democracycrisis.com

London. London it was. Where I was. 11 September 2001, a colleague rushed into the room “an airplane hit the Twin Towers in New York”. The coffee in the cup smelled nicely, the office was already busy. “A piper?” I asked. “What an idiot” I thought of the pilot. I started browsing. I have spotted that piece of the news (was it on cnn.com? Perhaps) I have tried a second click, trying to find out more. Did not respond, page refused to load. In minutes the web news pages were getting inaccessible. Then someone rushed again into the room: it was a carrier full of passengers. History was on the making. Then it became apparent, it was a terrorist attack on New York…Attack on America. The company let us went. People were already gathering in front of television sets. The scale of the event invaded our small lives…

I sent some messages back home. “What are the local media say?” I was asking (very strange question don’t you think?). But people in the periphery were not able to realize the magnitude of the thing, yet… “Pff, my pizza is full of debris” someone answered by mail.

But I can recall that the faces of Londoners were serious and some attractive horses of the police have started parading in the streets of London.

Three days later I travelled back to Athens, I used Heathrow airport. And I remember the scenery: control after control we reached the checking area. In one of the coffee shops a new era had arrived: a bunch of Middle Easterners, about to travel, were sitting in the  centre of the coffee shop space. Then it was a “tafros”, a ditch, surrounding them, empty seats but no crocodiles and the rest of us creating a circle around them at a safe distance.

It was a full Huntingtonian moment…

ΣΤΟΧΑΣΜΟΙ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ 11η ΣΕΠΤΕΜΒΡΙΟΥ

The Flames of New York, by Mike Davis, New Left Review, November-December 2001 (σε ελληνική μετάφραση στο περιοδικό futura, τεύχος 8, Άνοιξη-Καλοκαίρι 2002).

"Although many surprises undoubtedly lurk down river, it is already clear that the advent of ‘catastrophic terrorism’ in tandem with what may likely be the worst recession since 1938 will produce major mutations in the American city. There is little doubt, for instance, that bin Laden et al have put a silver stake in the heart of the ‘downtown revival’ in New York and elsewhere. The traditional central city where buildings and land values soar toward the sky is not yet dead, but the pulse is weakening. The current globalization of fear will accelerate the high-tech dispersal of centralized organizations, including banks, securities firms, government offices, and telecommunications centres, into regional multi-site networks. Terror, in effect, has become the business partner of technology providers like Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems, who have long argued that distributed processing (sprawling PC networks) mandates a ‘distributed workplace’. In this spatial model (of which the Al-Qaeda network might be an exemplar), satellite offices, telecommuting and, if the need be, comfortable bunkers will replace most of the functions of that obsolete behemoth, the skyscraper. Very tall buildings have long been fundamentally uneconomical; indeed the absurdly overbuilt World Trade Centre—a classic Rockefeller boondoggle—was massively subsidized by public-sector tenants. [23] (Will the hijacked airliners someday be seen as having played the same role in the extinction of skyscrapers as the Chixulub asteroid in the demise of dinosaurs?)".

The Art of the Accident: Paul Virilio and Accelerated Modernity, by Steve Redhead, Fast Capitalism, 2.1 (2006).

"The 9/11 event has been cited by Virilio as an example of his theory of the 'accident of accidents', a generalized accident occurring everywhere at the same time, live on global television and the internet. He admitted to Sylvere Lotringer shortly after the attacks on New York and Washington that 'the door is open' with what he called 'the great attack' and furthermore that he saw New York as 'what Sarajevo was' when 'Sarajevo triggered the First World War' (Virilio and Lotringer 2002). On September 11, 2001, Virilio's earlier prophecy in his work of the 1990s about a generalized accident or total accident seemingly came tragically true as a small, tightly knit group of men, armed only with Stanley knives, were seen to have taken over the cockpits of the hijacked planes and flew jet airliners with masses of fuel into the highly populated buildings of the World Trade Center with the loss of nearly 3,000 lives and the destruction of several buildings (including the twin towers) in the heart of the financial center of American (and arguably world) capitalism. The beginning of this post-Cold War age of imbalance as Virilio has called it, was as he said at the time of the first, 1993 attack on the twin towers (after which, bizarrely, he was called on as a consultant) seen in a new form of warfare - the accident of accidents, or the 'Great Accident'. The 1993 attack was precipitous for Virilio (2000):
In the manner of a massive aerial bombardment, this single bomb, made of several hundred kilos of explosives placed at the building's very foundations, could have caused the collapse of a tower four hundred metres high. So it is not a simple remake of the film Towering Inferno, as the age-conscious media like to keep saying, but much more of a strategic event confirming for us all The Change In The Military Order Of This Fin-De-Siecle. As the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in their day, signaled a new era for war, the explosive van in New York illustrates the mutation of terrorism. (P. 18)
Virilio (2000) noted at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center attack by another small group of terrorists that the perpetrators of such acts 'are determined not merely to settle the argument with guns' but will 'try to devastate the major cities of the world marketplace.' Within eight years a slightly larger group of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists had indeed apparently done so (Ruthen 2002). Many of the features of what Virilio (2000) sets out in a contemporaneous essay on the 1993 World Trade Center attack being on the cards for the future of humanity, were to be put into practice with exactly the predicted effect of the devastation of a world city on September 11, 2001. In fact, ironically, 'Towering Inferno' images probably were rife in the minds of many of the watchers of the 9/11 'accident'. In Virilio's (2002) own book length musings after September 2001, implicitly about the 9/11 attack, entitled [5] Ground Zero, he has explicitly claimed that as the September 11 twin towers attack was being 'broadcast live many TV viewers believed they were watching one of those disaster movies that proliferate endlessly on our TV screens' and that it was only 'by switching channels and finding the same pictures on all the stations that they finally understood that it was true'.
Aesthetically 9/11 was taken as an 'art of terrorism' in some quarters. Virilio (2002) quotes the avant-garde electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen as saying it was 'the greatest work of art there has ever been'. Seemingly unknown to Virilio, the Brit-artist Damien Hirst, too, claimed, in the British media, that those responsible for September 11 should indeed be congratulated because they achieved 'something which nobody would ever have thought possible' on an artistic level. The event was in 'bad boy' Damien Hirst's view "kind of like an artwork in its own right…wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact" and "was devised visually" (Guardian September 20, 2001)".

An excerpt from Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori, 2003.

"Habermas: The monstrous act itself was new. And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with their hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck".

In the shadow of the twin towers, by Adam Kirsch, Prospect, 25/5/2011.

"In Falling Man, for instance, Don DeLillo makes his attempt at a bravura description of the towers’ fall: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night… The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now.” But style defeats itself in these cool, hypnotic sentences, precisely because DeLillo knows that he is wagering everything on style. It is his only justification for writing about an event that he experienced in the same way as his readers—by watching it on television. This is even more obvious when DeLillo describes the bodies falling from the towers: “the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all.” The mannered prose is irreconcilable with the dread and compassion it means to evoke".

“Twilight of the Superheroes”, by Deborah Eisenberg, www.sparknotes.com

"On September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center buildings in downtown Manhattan, New York City. While hijackers also crashed a plane into the Pentagon and another into a field in rural Pennsylvania, the attacks on the World Trade Center produced the most casualties and elicited the most significant public response. Published in the spring of 2006, Deborah Eisenberg’s “Twilight of the Superheroes” was one of the first fictionalizations of the attacks, along with Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Frederic Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2006), and Dear Zoe (2006) by Philip Beard. While each of these authors interprets September 11 differently, all have found it difficult to personalize the tragedy and make sense of it."

From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb, by André Glucksmann, City, Autumn 2007.

"We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks—just a few minutes—the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.  The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize—so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem. The less the terrorist’s restraint, the more he causes fear and the sooner you will yield in tears, or so he believes. Recall the cries of hostage Nick Berg, agonizing as his torturers persisted laboriously over his bent body. “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it,” one of them informs us. “We did not kidnap to frighten those we hold,” another corrects him, “but to put pressure on the countries that help or might help the Americans. . . . It is not a good thing to decapitate, but it is a method that works. In a fight, Americans tremble. . . . Besides, I tried to negotiate an exchange of prisoners for Nick Berg. It was the Americans who refused. They are the ones truly responsible for his death.” Terrorist hubris bases its arguments on uncontrollable drives: I can’t help myself—give up! A similar strategy shows up on playgrounds: Stop me or I’ll do something terrible! The terrorist refines this rationale; he draws out his pleasure, prolongs death, cuts the throat slowly, goes beyond physical torture. To resurrect the dead, if only by video, in order to execute them a second time: this compulsion prolongs war infinitely from the other side of life. It is pure hatred. A traditional war, however savage, comes to an end. Terrorist war, given over to limitless fury, knows no cease-fire. For the demonstration of force it substitutes the demonstration of hatred, which, nourished by its own atrocities, becomes inextinguishable. Nowhere is this demonstration more visible than in Iraq. For a long time, the mental sin of Western armies was to dive into a new conflict as if they were fighting the previous war. This weakness now affects pundits and politicians, who reproach the U.S. for getting bogged down in “another Vietnam.” But Zarqawi was not Ho Chi Minh. No geopolitical fact permits us to impose the framework of the last great hot war of the cold war on the current situation in Iraq. Every month, thousands of Iraqis fall, indiscriminate victims of terror—over 500 peaceful Iraqi Yezidis on August 14 of this year, in the deadliest terrorist attack since September 11—while the total number of American soldiers killed in four years is approximately 3,600. In Iraq, then, what rages is a war of terror against civilians, not a war of independence against an occupying foreign army and its indigenous military supporters. Vietnam is far away; those who miss Woodstock forget that the world has changed in 40 years. What threatens Iraqi society is not Vietnamization but Somalization. Recall Operation Restore Hope, in which an international force, led by Americans, disembarked in Mogadishu in 1993, seeking to ensure the survival of a population that was starving and being massacred by rival clans. After losing 19 in a horrific trap, the GIs left. The rest is well known. An angry President Clinton swore “never again,” and a year later refused to intervene in Rwanda, where 5,000 blue helmets would have been enough to interrupt the genocide that wiped out as many as 1 million Tutsi in three months".