"Για πρώτη φορά σε έναν πόλεμο, ο επιτιθέμενος εχθρός δεν διαθέτει επικράτεια και δεν έχει συγκεκριμένους στρατιωτικούς στόχους, την κατάκτηση εδάφους ή την καταστροφή της δύναμης του αντιπάλου. «Eπικράτεια της τρομοκρατίας» είναι δυνητικά ο υπόλοιπος πλανήτης που εκτείνεται σε απέραντες εκτάσεις φτώχειας, δυστυχίας και καταστροφής, έξω από την απειλούμενη Δύση."
"At the opening of the University of Salamanca, one General Millán Astray shouted Viva la Morte. Miguel de Unamuno, who was in charge of the occasion, was a conservative, the protégé of Franco’s wife, a philosopher of the right. He reproved the general for this impermissible, unacceptable statement, and added: “You, my general who has lost an eye in the war, are a handicapped man not because you have lost an eye but because you have shouted ‘Long live death’’’. It is precisely this slogan which you hear from Islamic suicide bombers".
Cyber-Jihad, by Charles Glass, London Review of Books, March 2006.
"The Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who spent three days with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, calls the al-Qaida leader’s use of modern communications ‘cyber-jihad’. Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised when bin Laden and al-Qaida detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.’ Why? As Scheuer notes in Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, and as the collected pronouncements in Messages to the World make clear, bin Laden will attack the United States again because he said he will. He is a man of his word".
Deadly Embrace, by Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books, 4/11/2004.
"One way of underscoring the precarious nature of such distinctions is to look back in time. Towards the end of Galoot (Exile), a remarkable documentary by the Israeli film-maker Asher Tlalim, Ariella Atzmon, a former lecturer in philosophy and education, recalls her life as the daughter of militant Jewish nationalists who arrived in Palestine in the late 1930s. She was named after Arie Itzhaki, who made bombs in his cellar. On the day she was born, he blew himself up, crying: ‘Death to the British’. He was about to be arrested. As a child she sang songs to Shlomo Ben Yosef, who had lobbed a grenade onto an Arab bus, killing women and children: ‘She will sit and weep, this woman who mourns for her son, so dear, so great.’ We did not want peace, she says. The Palestinians will want peace when they have a country".
"The Islamic prohibition on suicide was tougher to overcome, since the Prophet himself had foretold eternal damnation for one of his warriors after he killed himself rather than suffer the pain of battle wounds. Zawahiri reached back into distant history for the case of a group of Muslim martyrs who had been offered a choice by their idolatrous captors of renouncing their faith, or dying. They chose death. Their apparent breach of God’s word was accepted by other Muslims at the time as heroic martyrdom, because it was for the sake of God’s word that they died. ‘With such sophistry,’ Wright remarks, ‘Zawahiri reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder.’"
Κλείνουμε το αφιέρωμα στην 11η Σεπτεμβρίου με μία σκέψη. Το χτύπημα εκείνης της ημέρας ήταν "μοναδικό" στην εκτέλεση του, γι' αυτό και δεν επαναλείφθηκε ποτέ. Ίσως δεν το περίμεναν ούτε και οι τρομοκράτες αυτοκτονίας ότι θα είχε τέτοια κατάληξη. Η φιλολογία από τότε υπήρξε πλούσια. Εμείς να μείνουμε στην αυτονόητη διαπίστωση (την οποία είχε υπενθυμίσει και ο αείμνηστος Π. Κονδύλης), ότι όσο και να αναπτυχθεί η τεχνολογία, την κρίσιμη ώρα το πρωτόγονο μαχαίρι ή η ανθρώπινη ζωή θα είναι και πάλι τα πιο σημαντικά όπλα στην φαρέτρα των αντιμαχομένων...
"Όταν βρίσκονταν στην εξουσία παρομοίαζαν τις ανθρώπινες αναπαραστάσεις με την ειδωλολατρία. Τώρα γκρεμίζουν τα ταμπού γύρω από την « παραγωγή εικόνων » και μετατρέπονται σε αντάρτες της διαδικτυακής εποχής. Αποκορύφωμα της ειρωνείας ; Το κίνημα που απαγόρευε τα μουσικά όργανα τώρα προσλαμβάνει τραγουδιστές για προπαγανδιστικούς σκοπούς, μοιράζει κασέτες με τραγούδια που υμνούν τους μάρτυρες Ταλιμπάν, καταδικάζουν τους άπιστους και μιμούνται ακόμη και την αμερικανική ραπ".
Righteous and Wrong, by Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books, 19/8/2010.
"The most egregious example is a reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a notorious tsarist forgery adopted and circulated by the Nazis—in the charter of Hamas, the Islamist movement now controlling Gaza. Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading ideologue who was executed by Nasser in 1966, was an outspoken anti-Semite, with views as extreme as Hitler’s, an issue that Berman addressed with considerable insight in Terror and Liberalism (2003). As Berman sees it, the poison of European anti-Semitism was subsumed in the broader eddies of Muslim totalitarianisms—Nasserist, Baathist, and Islamist".
"This strategy is not original. In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Olivier Roy, one of France’s leading scholars of modern Islamism, notes striking parallels between today’s jihadists and Europe’s radical left of the 1960s and 1970s. The two movements have drawn from similar social pools of alienated, dislocated youth. They have chosen similar symbols (beards and guns and sanctified texts: the Koran substituting for Marx, Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian whose theories inspired the Muslim Brotherhood, for Gramsci) and targets (“imperialism,” “globalization,” “Americanization”). The jihadists’ notion of a pan-Islamic Ummah, or nation, says Roy, recalls the Trotskyists’ idea of the proletariat: “an imaginary and therefore silent community that gives legitimacy to the small groups pretending to speak in its name.” The triumph of Islam is held to be, as the triumph of socialism once was, “inevitable.”
"Sageman continues this line of argument in Leaderless Jihad. The gravest threat facing the United States and the West today, he maintains, is not a revived al Qaeda straddling the lawless border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rather, he contends, the true menace comes from loose-knit cells of Western-born Muslims or Muslim immigrants studying and working in the West. These disaffected "bunches of guys" are often friends, roommates, or classmates who undergo the process of radicalization together".
"But there is one issue even more important than all these factors and also more important than a common ideology, and this is the crucial role of social bonds at a time when such bonds in society have decreased ordisappeared. This refers to friendship, the role of street gangs, social cliques. (Sageman uses fashionable terms such as "networks", "nodes" and "hubs" rather too often in this context.) The author sees this activism as born in cliques of confused young people in need of a message, recruited at the periphery of radical mosques; in these circumstances very little brainwashing may be needed. But for his aversion to psychoanalysis he could have added that these are young people with a weak ego. He also notes in passing the growing impact of the internet in this context, but this is an operational technicality rather than a motive".
"The author describes how female suicide terrorists may choose to inflict violence upon themselves and others in order to restore their reputation within a socially conservative society that pities childless women and condemns extra-marital sex. Meanwhile, (male) commitment to the cause of groups that perpetrate suicide terrorism and to comrades within those groups may induce acts of suicide terrorism. Though Pedahzur mentions that such commitment is also observed amongst soldiers, he does not explore this insight – the factors shaping an individual’s desire to perpetrate violence within the organisational setting of a national military may be similar to those of a ‘terrorist,’ in that both organisations rely on notions of ‘militarised masculinity’".
"However, the tactics of suicide bombings cannot win wars, topple regimes, or influence the deep beliefs of local people. Nor can the bombers drive out US and NATO forces from Afghanistan or allied forces from Iraq. What they do achieve is to create, among an already bewildered populace, a sense of panic, uncertainty, and fear so pervasive that the battle by state authorities and Western forces to win them over is more and more futile. Suicide bombing does not lead to any victory for the insurgents, but creates a political limbo bordering on anarchy in which government forces cannot win and reconstruction cannot take place. The war can last as long as the terrorists don’t run out of suicide bombers".
"In Sageman’s view the appeal of jihad is not so much narrowly religious as broadly romantic and consonant with the aspirations of youth everywhere. The young Moroccans with whom he spoke outside the mosque where the Madrid bombers used to worship equated Osama bin Laden with the soccer superstars they most admired. Their utopian aspirations are inspired as much by iconography as ideology. The images of Sheikh Osama, the rich civil engineer, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, once a promising physician from an elite Cairo family—both of whom are seen to have sacrificed everything for the sake of their beliefs—send powerful messages to aspirants far removed from the grimy realities of tribal Waziristan".
The Suicide Bombers, by Avishai Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 16/1/2003.
"As I have said, the main motivating force for the suicide bombers seems to be the desire for spectacular revenge; what is important as well is the knowledge that the revenge will be recognized and celebrated by the community to which the suicide bomber belongs".
Did Osama Win?, by Andrew Sullivan, TheDailyBeast.com 04/09/2011
I remember watching the towers fall, and feeling something deeper fall as well. This was the end of American innocence, the end of the American century when the New World could really understand itself as immune to the theocratic barbarism of the Old. We saw an emblem of our entire civilization tumble to the ground in the middle of the city that had once brought the skyscraper confidently and brashly to the world. We also saw the mighty Pentagon violated by a few religious fanatics living in caves. The skies were silent. Nobody seemed to know if this was the end or just the beginning. But what we did know was that only one word really sufficed to define the scale and gravity of what had taken place: war.
And in that very formulation, in the depths of our psyches and souls, we took the bait.
The bait was meant to entice the United States into ruinous, polarizing religious warfare against the Muslim world, so that the Islamist fringe could seize power in failing Muslim and Arab dictatorships. The 9/11 attacks were conceived as a way to radicalize a young Muslim population through a ginned-up war of civilization against the Great Satan on the Islamist home turf of Afghanistan and, then, Iraq. It looks obvious now. It wasn’t then. We were seized with righteous rage, every ounce of which was justified. But the victim of a rape is not the best person to initiate the strategy to bring the rapist to justice. And we, alas, were all we had. Our president, meaning well, did his best, and it was more than good, at the beginning. But in retrospect, he never mastered the fear or the moment either. Instead of calming the populace over the coming months, he further terrified us with drastic measures that only seemed to confirm the unprecedented gravity of the threat.
(...)
Yes, I know many were not fooled. I tip my hat to them. I am ashamed my own panic overwhelmed my own judgment. But that is an explanation, not an excuse: I cannot imagine any other circumstance in which I would simply trust the government, period. But, as fear dominated my being, trust I did—as did a majority of Americans who supported the war that handed bin Laden exactly what he wanted.
What he wanted, it seems obvious now, was central relevance to the power shifts in the Middle East, and U.S. troops in lands they could never understand and never fully win over. History has proved him right on that. Even the finest soldiers in the world, with the finest leadership in the world, were not capable of miracles. And so Iraq is now a pseudo-democracy whose current regional stance is alignment with Iran and Syria, America’s direst enemies in the region. And the war in Afghanistan will, at best, have decimated the ranks of Al -Qaeda and killed bin Laden (after nearly 10 years of trying, thanks to Obama, not Bush). But the threat from radical Islamism in Pakistan remains real, and the Taliban can wait till our last troops leave. And that was always true.
The fiscal costs of our actions are one reason we find ourselves today in a lost, jobless, debt-driven decade. About $2.6 trillion was spent in a decade of war—approaching some of the most ambitious spending cuts now being proposed. The human cost—in lives, limbs, and loves—is incalculable. And not just for us. Millions of Iraqis lived through the closest human equivalent to hell for years as the incompetent occupation tore Iraq apart. That trauma, wrought in children as well as adults, will not end, and will reverberate for decades, rendering the country even more vulnerable to sectarian blandishments or a new dictatorship if civil war breaks out again.
From these polar realities—a thinning atmosphere of political fear, an expanding infrastructure of political fear—I draw two conclusions. First, the politics of fear is far less dependent upon the actual psychic experience of the public than analysts would have us think. While many believe that the individual emotions of the citizenry propel the policies the government pursues, I see little evidence of that. Even if we assume that each and every member of the public is experiencing fear, that experience still doesn’t explain the policies. A frightened population could just as easily inspire the government to pursue policies that would dampen rather than arouse fear. It is politics that produces policies, not fear.
In any event, the public’s putative experience of fear cannot explain the persistence, indeed the enhancement, of the kind of government policies and practices we’ve seen in the last five years or so. A combination of bureaucratic inertia and partisan interests, in which neither party has much incentive to do anything on behalf of a persecuted minority—the sorry stuff, in other words, of old-fashioned political science—explains far more than do speculation and experiments in social or cognitive psychology.
Second, journalists and scholars too often assume that the public is united in its fear because the objects of fear—terrorism, radical Islam, and so on—are equally threatening to each and every member of the public. But as Hobbes understood so well, men and women do argue about political threats—whether they exist, whom they threaten, whence they come, how to respond to them. They argue about political threats for the same reason they argue about other political matters: Perceptions of harm are dependent upon beliefs about good and evil, justice and injustice, and experiences of harm are mediated by material factors such as one’s standing in the world.
[Prefatory Note to the 2011 Rutgers Law Review Publication:
[As the team on the 9/11 Commission Staff responsible for reconstructing the facts of the day itself, Team 8 was scrupulous to heed the direction of Commission Chairman Kean and Vice-Chairman Hamilton that we present the facts as we found them as objectively as possible. In the closing days of our work, it became clear that the most objective way to present those facts – and to capture both the urgency with which decisions were being made that day and the level of command at which critical decision making was occurring – would be to allow, where possible, the various officials and others responsible for responding to the attacks to speak for themselves. Accordingly, the team prepared what we called an “audio monograph” of critical communications from the morning of 9/11, linked by narrative and graphics placing each audio clip in context. We believed that such a rendering would be the best way to enable the public to understand what happened on 9/11 – how the day was lived by those responding to the attacks.
In the lead editorial for their 9/11-themed issue, the Nation'seditors lament America's missed opportunity to take advantage of the national solidarity that followed the attacks:
Lost, too, was the chance for a politics built around the kind of social solidarity embodied by those first responders and expressed by the society so moved by their sacrifice. Instead, thanks largely to the administration of George W. Bush, we got a politics of fear that helped launch a long "war on terror," which in turn gave us a lost decade of American life.
Following on the editorial, the pieces in the issue mainly focus on critiquing U.S. overreach in the years following the attacks. Jonathan Schell writes that during the years of George W. Bush's administration, "the foreign policy as well as the domestic politics of the United States were revolving like a pinwheel around Al Qaeda and the global threat it allegedly posed." David K. Shiplercalls attention to the loss of civil liberties in the United States over the last decade. David Cole worries that justice has still not been done for victims of torture in the war on terror. Ariel Dorfman remembers another 9/11, the 1973 coup against Chile's left-wing government.
An interesting counterpoint to the Nation's coverage is Christopher Hitchens's latest column inSlate. On Sept. 11, 2001, Hitchens was a columnist at the Nation.But over the next few years, disillusioned by what he perceived as the left's inability to challenge radical Islam, Hitchens broke with the Nation and its fellow-travelers more generally. His new piece, which argues that the defining aspect of the attacks was their evil nature and that "attempts to introduce 'complexity' into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions" shows how deep that divide remains.
From the right:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD
In a somewhat uncharacteristically bipartisan move from the magazine that, more than any other, was identified with the Bush administration's neoconservative foreign policy, the Standard begins its 9/11 issue with a lengthy quotation from President Barack Obama along with Gen. David Petraeus, commemorating the sacrifice of "the 9/11 generation": the Americans who joined the armed forces since the attacks.
The issue's cover story, by Charlotte Allen, looks at how U.S. college campuses are remembering the anniversary:
Instead, the campus commemorations, many of which will be spaced out for days and even weeks this fall, will focus on, well, understanding it all, in the ponderous, ambiguity-laden, complexity-generating way that seems to be the hallmark of college professors faced with grim events about which they would rather not think in terms of morality: "Historical and political representations," whatever those are (Harvard), "How do we determine truth and reality?" (more Harvard), and "Imaging Atrocity: The Function of Pictures in Literary Narratives about 9/11" (St. John's University in New York).
And the topic that seems to demand the most understanding, at least in terms of the obsessive amounts of time and resources that college professors and administrators will be devoting to it, is Islam. There will be so many campus lectures, panel discussions, teach-ins, and photo exhibits devoted to the Muslim faith, Muslim communities in America, and the real or imagined violent acts against Muslims in the wake of 9/11 (there has actually been only one revenge-slaying since that date -- of a man who turned out not to be a Muslim -- and the perpetrator was convicted and executed) that if you had just rocketed in from Venus, you might think that Muslims had been the chief victims, not the sole perpetrators, of the massacre that day -- as well as an estimated 67 alleged terrorism incidents or attempts in the United States during the decade that followed.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Matthew Continetti remembers witnessing the attacks as a student at Columbia University.
In keeping with Allen's critique of efforts to "understand" the attacks or put them into context, theStandard seems to have largely taken a pass on providing a big-picture take of the political decisions of the last 10 years and avoids praise or criticism for Presidents Bush and Obama -- on this topic, anyway.
(...)
From the libertarians:
REASON
Libertarian monthly Reason's September issue largely eschews politics to look at 9/11 from the perspective of business and culture. Editor Matt Welch argues that the terrorists' biggest mistake was underestimating the dynamism of American capitalism:
On September 5, 2001, The New York Times described a new Kodak ad campaign emphasizing the great picture quality of high-end film. "Low-end film is a commodity," the president of the company's consumer imaging unit explained to the Times, "so we have to trade people up." The share price for Eastman Kodak, itself a two-time target of antitrust lawsuits, closed a bit more than $45 that day. Thirty-one months later the stock was down below $26, and Kodak was unceremoniously booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 74 years. At press time, Kodak's share price has not been north of $4 since January 2011, when the company, reeling from the disastrous consequences of trying to trade its unwilling customers up, ditched its onetime signature product, Kodachrome.
The business of America isn't necessarily business. It's change. Constant, creative, destructive,entertaining change. As we look back over the last 10 years since that awful, still-indigestible morning of September 11, 2001, it's tempting to make the counterintuitive claim that we're the same country as ever, gossiping about the sex lives of politicians, enforcing no-fly zones against Middle East dictators, tuning in to The Simpsons. Much of that is true. But on a daily basis we vastly underestimate how dynamic America is, particularly in comparison to the aims of the Islamic medievalists who turned commercial aircraft into flying death machines 10 years ago.
The issue also features two interesting pieces on post-9/11 art. Nick Gillespie argues that U.S. artists and entertainers failed to help Americans make sense of the attacks in the years that followed. Shikha Dalmia has a more optimistic piece, positing that Bollywood films may be a greater threat to the future of Islamic terrorism than U.S. military force.
"On Saturday 22, November 2002, Amiri Baraka, one of America's most distinguished poets delivered a lecture at Wellesley College. It caused a huge controversy on the campus because Baraka wrote "Somebody Blew Up America," a poem that dealt with the disastrous events of September 11, 2002 and his reaction towards it. In this article, Professor Selwyn Cudjoe contextualizes Baraka's poem and argues for its literariness rather than reducing it to a mere sociological document".
"In her paper "The Ambiguous Nature of Multiculturalism in Two Picture Books about 9/11," Jo Lampert looks at how some of the Western discourses of multiculturalism and cultural diversity have shifted since 11 September 2001 by discussing two exemplar picture books about 9/11. Lampert begins with a general discussion of children's books as significant cultural producers of knowledge and provides brief summaries of Patel's On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children and Carlson's There's a Big, Beautiful World Out There! Lampert discusses how the imagined readers of these books are positioned problematically in order to embrace racial tolerance, global harmony, and diversity while, at the same time, accepting white US-America as the symbol of goodness in the world. Lampert suggests that these texts are representative of the ways recent political agendas are present in texts that seem, as children's books, to be separate from politics".
"One of Germany's most influential post-war writers looks at what factors combine to create terrorists -- an isolated individual is taken in by a collective group, an turned into a new kind of loser".
"What motivated the suicide attackers of September 11? How did their group function? Who pulled the strings? Police records, accounts from onetime associates and numerous documents shed light on the inner workings of the Hamburg-based al-Qaida cell".
"Conspiracy theories such as those popularized in the Internet documentary Loose Change are all the rage. Yet they are easy to refute, using new evidence from video and audiotape recordings, statements of captured al Qaeda members and the reports of commissions investigating the events".
"In the weeks after 9/11, we could hardly erase the vision of the wreckage of the two towers, the twisted steel and sheets of glass, the images of men and women leaping from ninety-odd stories up, the knowledge that thousands lay beneath the ruined buildings. To live in, or near, a war zone was frighteningly new to all but the immigrants who had come here to escape such places. The sense of grief and shock, a terrible roaring in the mind of every American, made it impossible to assess the larger damage that Osama bin Laden and his fanatics had inflicted, the extent to which they had succeeded in shattering our self-possession. “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night,” Auden wrote, and his lines gained an awful sense of prescience. We watched our children absorb it all, the blood and the fear, and we wondered whether 9/11 would mark their lives and dream lives until the end".
"The stark reality is that in the very long run nothing will be remembered. This may be an unpalatable truth, but it still needs acknowledging. This is not to say that on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—which, after all, will be one of the historical high-water marks in the remembrance of the event—those who participate should forswear entirely the comforting illusion that we will always remember those who died. The alternative, which would be to state that sooner or later our descendants will forget about 9/11, just as we have largely forgotten about horrific events of the past, would be as unbearable as knowing well in advance the date of your own death".
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 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)".
"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 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".
"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."
"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".
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