greg wrote:dog balls on this thread.

tmidgett wrote:no one is claiming anyone is 'innocent,' LAD. but a lack of innocence on the part of the U.S. doesn't imply culpability.

i keep coming back to this--it's very long, but it goes down easy, and it is worth the read. marcus said so precisely what i had (and have) on my mind about this subject. i can't put it any better than he does.

Nothing New Under the Sun


By Greil Marcus



I came here tonight to talk about the response of American intellectuals to the events of September 11 -- and I use the neutral, meaningless term “events” to start off right where any intellectual response begins, with an attempt to name what took place, or to avoid naming it.

We are all familiar with the words that quickly turned into buzzwords, or evasions. Some of these I’ll take up later: “tragedy,” “crime against humanity,” “major atrocities.” Some are now just shorthand: “9-11,” “September 11.” “Terrorist attacks” was somehow too much of a mouthful. Some names that seem to me the most weighty—enormous words that force the speaker or the listener to confront what they mean, where they came from, what ground they share—have been used by a few and have then disappeared, never entering the common conversation at all: “massacres,” “mass murders.” Intellectuals are supposed to care about words, to respect them, to understand their power to deprive public talk of meaning, or their power to block clichés. But intellectuals are also afraid of words—afraid not only of what they can do, but of how they can make one who uses them appear. Who wants to look like a fool, unserious, as if one doesn't know what to say? The New York Times on September 12 caught me right in the throat with its headline, a headline, I realized the instant I saw it, that I been certain I would never see:
U.S. Attacked

The country itself. The idea of the country. Its territory. Its citizenry. Its past and its future. “U.S. Attacked.” But after that, use of language as a blunt object dissolved into logos, each one, you could imagine, immediately trademarked by whatever news organization was using it: “America Under Attack” on CNN; “America Strikes Back” on Fox News and MSNBC; “A Day of Terror” and “A Nation Challenged” in the New York Times. That sense of shock, of the sudden recognition of a truth, that I’d gotten from the first Times headline had somehow been returned to the conventional, to the predictable, to the manageable, until I saw the headline on the satirical weekly the Onion. It announced the truth, but in words intellectuals wouldn’t use as their last words: “Holy Fucking Shit.” Against this, my favorite certified intellectual attempt at naming, far beyond composer Karl Stockhausen’s “the greatest work of art ever . . . the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”: novelist Rick Moody, best known for The Ice Storm, beginning a mid-September essay by throwing his hands in the air—”The Attack—what else can I call it?”—and then proceeding to use his hands to smooth the paper before him: “‘The Attack,’” Moody said, “—is a web of narratives.”

Words used in that manner—that kind of naming, that kind of instinctive intellectual work—are an insult to whoever is unlucky enough to hear them. They laugh at your confusion. They mock your fear. They look down at you. They parade their confidence, their certainty that there is nothing that can’t be folded into the language of the day before, their refusal to entertain the possibility that something might have happened that never happened before.

The acknowledgment that something can take place in the world that never happened before might be the starting point of any real intellectual activity. Acts can be taken, events can occur, that demand a whole new way of being in the world, of looking at the world, of speaking about the world. It may be the most common instinct, in the face of the new, to flee to the old: to analogies, to precursors, to whatever old name can be used to cover up the need for a new one, anything to avoid having to say “I’ve never seen anything like this before”—”Holy Fucking Shit,” in other words—which means having to say, “I don’t know what to say.” So one says what one knows how to say. One says that this it not so new as it appears, not that surprising, not that shocking—and, doing that, one takes one’s place in Bob Dylan’s greatest protest song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” from 1963, with its saddened, angry chorus naming “those who philosophize disgrace, and criticize all fears.” Those who claim to know what to say in the face of something new precisely criticize the fears of those who sense in their bones that something new has taken place—and who realize that they no longer know precisely what their place in the world might be. “The Attack—what else can I call it?—is a web of narratives.”

My idea of an intellectual is Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who found her voice in the United States after the Second World War. As a scholar and a professor she was also always a student—a student of what she called the human condition. Her books—The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Violence, On Revolution, Men in Dark Times—were often attacked as ahistorical, or even anti-historical. That was because, to many, the stories she told—and she was most of all a storyteller, like a guide in the catacombs of history—were set less within a solid frame of reference, where every seemingly new event has its analogy, than they were anchored—anchored by the Athenians, the philosophers and the dramatists, more than anyone else. And Arendt was often condemned as antihistorical because she knew that sometimes anchors come loose, and the that the ships they were meant to hold to solid ground go adrift. “Thinking without a ground” is how one student of hers characterized her work. She is best known, certainly in the American Jewish community, for her 1961 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she wrote these lines which, to me, anyway, sum up her idea of what the human condition is made of.


It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past . . . Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.



This may seem like a truism, but in fact it goes directly against the grain of what, in most times and places, intellectual discourse takes itself to be—against what it most often takes its purpose to be. When confronted with what might seem like something new, most intellectual discourse says that what appears new is not: that to the contrary it fits into familiar categories, can be described, explained, and analyzed with familiar concepts, can be fixed with familiar words. Hannah Arendt was on the other side of the mirror. Between Past and Future was the title of one of her books, and the title spoke for her understanding of how the world works, what the human condition is. There can be a breach between past and future, and if there is such a breach, the future must be something new. It may be terrible, formless, incomprehensible, even mute, but it will be new—in truth, every time there is such a breach between past and future, a new event has taken place, for no such breach can be the same. “Originality,” Arendt wrote in 1953, “is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment.” The past floats away like an unmoored, unanchored ship. We remember it; like a Spanish galleon loaded with Peruvian gold, as it drops over the horizon it carries off our treasure, our memory. As the ship disappears, we can imagine ourselves on it. We can even name it: the Flying Dutchman.

Feeling herself living in the space between past and future—feeling herself, if not the philosopher of that space, its storyteller—Arendt actively sought what had never been before. Listen to her language: “Every act that has once made its appearance and been recorded in the history of mankind”—it is a philosophical assertion that an act that has not been made before can be made. What the Nazis did, she argued at the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem—and, really, everywhere in her work—was something new: they altered the limits on human action. Now, crimes that heretofore were literally unthinkable—for which the conceptual, philosophical, legitimating apparatus did not exist—were, by the very fact they now were facts, easy to think. More than easy: it was impossible not to think such crimes. It was impossible not to imagine what the Nazis had done to the Jews in Europe in the 1940s being done to anyone else, anywhere else, at any time.

Arendt looked for the new, for what was making its appearance in the history of mankind. She found it in totalitarianism; she found it in the American revolution. And she wrote with such grace, seductiveness, and force because in such an intellectual quest, so much was at stake: the chance, which might not come again, to identify, in that gap between past and future, what the particular opportunities and dangers were—the opportunities that had never come before, the dangers that had never come before. As she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:


Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence or submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.



Almost immediately after the fact, I found out that the mass murders perpetrated in the United States by Arab terrorists—that’s one of the things one can say instead of “the Attack”—might lead to very particular breaks between past and future: they could lead to breaks between friends. It came at a Yom Kippur dinner when I found myself shouting at an eighteen-year-old who had said that what had happened was more than anything “a cry for help.” It came when a friend said on the phone that he was trying to come to terms with “who was really culpable here,” by which he meant the degree to which the United States was culpable—“How about the people who hijacked the planes?” I almost yelled at him. It came when a British friend, a professor, said that “Anti-Americanism was a necessity” in any attempt to come to grips with “the Attack” and I instantly found myself on the far side of a great divide, in another country from the one we had both inhabited a second before, one in which I imagined that I was at home, and imagined that my friend was not, and didn’t want to be.

Friends aside, the recognition of such a breach can be liberating. The first premise of intellectual work, of thinking without a ground, is to trust your first response—and my first response to reading the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky’s first statement on the massacres was disgust. “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities,” he said on September 13, as if this was something that was in doubt—or a line that had to be laid down before what was really important could be said. “In scale,” Chomsky went on, “they may not reach the level of many others—for example, Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.”

What caused the bile to rise in my throat was not the formal accuracy or legitimacy of the particular things Chomsky was saying—Chomsky, an eloquent speaker in the movement against the war in Vietnam, a defender of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in the 1980s, today a relentless critic of American power everywhere at all times. It was the assumption of simplicity, of obviousness. It was the absolute denial of surprise.

Chomsky’s words were those of someone who had seen all the way around the major atrocities even before they happened. There was no possibility that they contained, that they signified, anything new. Rather, they were a confirmation that, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”

That Chomsky’s statement was an act of bad faith—less as a citizen of the United States, who has the right to say what he likes, than as an intellectual, who has an obligation to words and ideas—is borne out in the interviews he gave after September 13, and which he collected in a book he titled 9-11. The fact that, to impress upon people that he was appalled by the acts of terrorists, he did not bother to put his own thoughts in his own words, but again and again quoted the reporter Robert Fisk to that effect, meant, “Get this out of the way so we can talk about what matters.” “I mentioned,” Chomsky said on September 21, “that the toll of the ‘horrendous crime’ committed with ‘wickedness and awesome cruelty’ may be comparable to the consequences of Clinton’s bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in August 1998”—and so on. In other words, Chomsky’s earlier “major atrocities” was not serious. What he really meant was this: In the context of the world order as established by American power, what happened on September 11 was an ordinary and not even particularly egregious action by people resisting that power by those means left to them. It was of a piece with Robert Fisk’s own insistence, in his position as a veteran Middle East reporter who had himself interviewed Osama bin Laden several times, that the thousands of deaths were “a crime against humanity.” This sounds impressive—serious—until you find out what it means: “policemen, arrests, justice, a whole international court at the Hague if necessary.” In other words, the New York Times headline “U.S. Attacked” was hysterical. Rather, “Humanity” was offended. The United States has no right to respond. There was no war—except, as the book in which Fisk’s statement is collected titles it, September 11 and the U.S. War—a book which, with its cover, in four photos, demands that one acknowledge an idiot symmetry: smoke rising from the World Trade Center, smoke rising from a target in Afghanistan; Ground Zero in New York, a bomb site in Afghanistan.

I am not going to spend any time tonight taking apart Chomsky’s comparison of the New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania mass murders and Bill Clinton’s attempt to retaliate against Osama bin Laden’s bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Others have done it. What I want to talk about is the way in which American intellectuals have seized on the unprecedented acts of last year as an opportunity not to think—and I should say now that when I say “American intellectuals,” I mean left-wing intellectuals. That is because I think leftist intellectuals come out of, and must necessarily draw on, a tradition of open inquiry in which neither questions nor answers are fixed in advance. It doesn’t matter if the ancestors one chooses were, in some real sense, conservatives. In 1831, when he published Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville was a conservative intellectual. So was Hannah Arendt. Their sense of gravity drew them to the past, even if they knew it could never be recovered. As intellectuals they were Robinson Crusoes, scavenging whatever could be rescued from the shipwrecks of their place and time as they tried to navigate in an altogether unfamiliar world. But like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, or Edmund Wilson—all, in their way, deeply conservative thinkers—they understood that they were, in some significant sense, ignorant, deaf, blind, and mute. To make sense of a new world, or the gap between a past and a future, they would have to ask questions that had never been asked, and consider answers that to their ancestors would have made no sense at all. It may be that my inability to take right-wing intellectuals seriously as intellectuals is nothing more than my own lack of imagination—but as far as I can see, right-wing intellectuals in America today are propagandists before they are anything else. They speak and write not to ask, but to answer. They are literally bought and paid for—in so many cases, their titles awarded, their salaries paid, and their publications subsidized by the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the racist, eugenicist Bradley Foundation.

In the wake of the mass murders, leftist American intellectuals spoke again and again of the need to resist the attempts of the Bush administration and other right-wing powers in American life to use the excuse of war to do things they might otherwise not be able to do: to “highjack” the war, as people are beginning to put it, in favor of the curtailment of civil liberties, new tax cuts for corporations and rich Americans as part of an “Economic Security Act,” drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge as part of an “Energy Security Act,” and the like. But there is no chance to even begin to talk about what is right about a war and what is wrong about it, what is right about the United States and what is wrong about it, when leftist intellectuals no less than rightwing propagandists speak the same language—the language of flattery. If most right-wing intellectuals write to flatter those who pay them, so many left-wing intellectuals, who may be paid nothing to write, write to flatter themselves.

An international Gallup poll conducted in late February—”face to face interviews with 9,924 residents of Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia”—determined that “sixty-one percent did not believe Arab groups carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks.” The first I heard of such a notion came not from the Middle East, but from Berkeley, on September 12 or 13, when an anonymous e-mailer sent a leftwing thread my way: “Who has the most to gain?” one person asked, and immediately answered: “Mossad.” Though within a week it would be plain that it was George W. Bush who had the most to gain from the mass murders—and who has, as a skillful politician, gained the most—no one suggests that he carried out the massacres. But the confluence between Arab public opinion and leftist intellectual analysis is quite stunning. Arabs are often quoted to the effect that Arab terrorist groups are incapable of the acts of which they are accused—technically incapable, imaginatively incapable, of insufficient intelligence, it’s never spelled out. American intellectuals seem to procede from the assumption that Arabs are incapable of defining their own destinies or making sense of their own actions.

To read through the writings and interviews of Chomsky and so many like him is to be told that everyone and anything the United States was or might be attacked by is in fact the direct creation of the United States. The Taliban. Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda. The Pakistani secret service. Saddam Hussein. Leftist intellectuals from Chomsky to the scholar Michael Parenti to the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt to the social commentators Barbara Ehrenreich and Vivian Gornick to the historian Howard Zinn write as if to say, if America did not literally plan and carry out an attack upon itself, it might as well have. As Robert Fisk puts it, most crazily, if not really outside the boundaries of the common discourse: “Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy.” This tragedy—a terrible occurrence, in its formal definition, brought about by the arrogance, by the overweening pride, of he or she on whom the terrible occurrence is visited. A terrible occurrence, in its commonplace, everyday usage, that just happens, and for which no one can really be blamed. In either case, neither a crime nor an act of war.

It has been said by revolutionary theorists that it is the duty of every revolutionary to explain his or her actions. It was said by our own: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” But one of the many things that was new in the astonishingly successful, staggeringly symbolic, overwhelmingly physical act of war committed against the United States last September was that, as an act, it was without speech. There was no manifesto, statement, or justification addressed to the opinions of mankind, let alone those who were to be killed—implicitly, anyone and everyone within the borders of or holding any allegiance to the United States. It was as if the reason for the murders was, in the next phrase of the Declaration of Independence, “self-evident.”

But for so many American intellectuals, this was not sufficient. When one makes one’s living speaking in public, nothing can be self-evident; otherwise, some people would be out of a job. So one learned, again and again, that the acts taken against the United States were the result of crimes the United States had committed against others—against Guatemalans, Chileans, Nicaraguans, Philippines, Japanese, Angolans, Serbians, Sudanese, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, Saudis, and, most of all, most deeply and most hideously and most proximately, Palestinians. It was the United States, through its client state Israel, and the client state’s general Ariel Sharon, one read, who was responsible for the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982—and the death of every Palestinian man, woman, or child killed by Israelis since. That by the same logic one could say that the United States was responsible for the death of every Israeli man, woman, or child killed by a Palestinian was not remarked upon; that from a different logic one might wonder why it is only the United States, or Israel, that is held responsible for the 1982 Lebanon massacres, and not the Lebanese Christians who in fact carried them out, was as far as I know mentioned only by Fredric Smoler, a professor of literature and history at Sarah Lawrence, in the leftist New York tabloid First of the Month.

“Responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it,” the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote in 1990. He was speaking, most specifically, of the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini—the death sentence passed on him for his supposedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses. What he meant, I think, was that should he be murdered, as the leader of the faith had commanded that he be, the person who killed him should be held fully responsible. That person, Rushdie was saying, would have made a choice. He—for only a man would have been considered worthy of the act—would not have been impelled by, and could not be justified by, any religious belief or historical necessity. Men and women make their own decisions, and rightly suffer for them. The greater cause only exculpates; only the individual can take responsibility. But this was not a notion that one has much heard from American intellectuals. Not only had the United States, as a world power, or a military apparatus serving as the protector of American capitalism, created the attack on itself; as good Americans, American intellectuals were obligated to explain and justify it. And this was only one more of the many things about the beginning of the war that was new.

There were many exceptions, and they were drowned out, or appeared in relatively obscure or specialized publications. In First of the Month, co-editor Charles O’Brien wrote from the heart, condemning Noam Chomsky and others as “the Vichy left,” and saying, finally, more than anyone else was saying, right or left. The left always speaks in terms of its “task,” its “duty”; almost mockingly, knowing who he was up against—that is, most of those who might be reading a leftist New York tabloid—that was the language O’Brien took up.


It is the duty of the left in this time not only to be a party of war, but to be the maximalist party of war. Hostilities must extend not only to Iraq, Sudan, etc. but to the supposed friendlies, the darlings of so many on the domestic right: Saudi Arabia, the [United Arab Emirates], and Pakistan. We can do no better, to use Chomsky’s phrase, than, first to disregard Chomsky utterly (along with such organs of disinformation as Z and Counterpunch as well as the more genteel Harpers, [the London Review of Books] and the Nation). But more important, we can do no better than to emulate revolutionary France: which, with audacity, without indulgence, summoning up the people, carried the war, across whosever borders, to the enemies of the republic.



In Artforum, Homi Bhabha, a professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard, and as an intellectual most distinguished for his translation of the political concept of “plausible deniability” into literary discourse—putting every word of potential meaning in scare quotes, to indicate that he does not accept any meaning anyone might attribute to it—as in, “putting every ‘word’ of ‘potential’ ‘meaning’ in ‘scare’ quotes”—wrote a piece with only three such quotes: and rather than provide meaning, or explanation, simply merged himself with the event, which he somehow saw as a crowd of men and women climbing up and down on Jacob’s Ladder. With startling eloquence he spoke of something he called “the Unbuilt.” “Gardens of solace and towers of regeneration may heal the wound,” he wrote.


But the Unbuilt that haunts the space is the spirit of those, firefighters and rescue workers, who climbed an endless ladder, descending into the circle of death, to do their duty to those who had to escape. In that movement there is a sense of “making progress,” step by step, without a transcendent form of progress. And in that action there lies the un-utopian ethic of the Unbuilt. There are no available images of this act of ascent; progress here is a lateral or adjacent move toward the stranger as toward the neighbor.





But those were oddities. The insistence on America—which is to say Israel— which is to say Jews—as, on the level of deepest truth, the true author of the massacres, was so pervasive, and often so automatic, that when I read the following—”The attack on September 11 was certainly not about people hating our freedoms. It was purely in response to America’s foreign policy; and it was primarily about our monetary and military support of Israel”—I barely thought to look for the byline. It was American Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, but it could have been any number of people on the left.

All of this is summed up nowhere so well as in Susan Sontag’s instantly notorious short comment that ran in the “Talk of the Town” pages in the September 24 issue of the New Yorker.

Sontag, since the 1960s the most ambitious, respected, controversial, and politically engaged of New York intellectuals, was surrounded in those pages by many voices. There was the repulsive, epicene eyewitness account of the destruction of the World Trade Center by the novelist John Updike, watching from Brooklyn, searching for words that would divert attention from the event itself and toward his ability to gild it: “We clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling. Amid the glittering impassivity of the many buildings across the East River, an empty spot had appeared, as if by electronic command, beneath the sky that, but for the sulphorous cloud streaming south toward the ocean”—I can’t read any more. There was the novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, imagining, as a novelist is supposed to do, the possible contours of life and death: “the scene inside a plane one moment before impact. At the controls, a terrorist is raising a prayer to Allah in expectation of instant transport from this world to the next, where houris will presently reward him for his glorious success. At the back of the cabin, huddled Americans are trembling and moaning and, no doubt, in many cases, praying to God for a diametrically opposite outcome. And then, a moment later, for hijacker and hijacked alike, the world ends.” One of the bombs planted in Franzen’s sentences may not go off right away: “huddled Americans,” from the “huddled masses” emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty, in the moment reaching out to the huddled few flying over it, as if, somehow, huddling is an American condition, our version of dust to dust.

In this context, Sontag’s few words were imperious, unsurprised, impatient, and ice-cold. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before—not really. When Sarajevo was under siege, she had traveled there again and again, to direct a play; she was, as she wrote in 1995, “a veteran of dread and shock,” “comfortable,” after her experiences, only with “those who have been to Bosnia, too. Or to some other slaughter—El Salvador, Cambodia, Rwanda, Chechnya. Or who at least know, firsthand, what a war is.” She knew. So it was no problem for her to cut through the shock and dread of virgins—of those who, unlike her, had never seen anything like this before, who had never imagined anything like this before—who, even if they had imagined the destruction of the World Trade Center, which, since it was built, many people casually have, had never remotely experienced in their imagination the reality of what they imagined. Sontag had already been there and gone. She could speak like Ronald Reagan talking about redwoods: “Seen one war, seen them all.” What happened, Sontag said in her first sentence, was simply a “monstrous dose of reality”—and I think one can take the “monstrous” as a grace note. Like Chomsky’s “major atrocities,” it translates into “ordinary events,” and even more quickly: “dose of reality” takes you where she means to go. You have been living in a dream world, Sontag said; now, you have been forced to wake up. There is no mystery, there is nothing to wonder about.

Sontag wrote to close questions, not to open them—and as if hers was the only voice brave enough to say what had to be said: “Where is the acknowledgment,” she wrote, “that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

Again, the bile rose in my throat, and for the same reason as when I read Noam Chomsky’s first interview. “Specific American alliances and actions”—there was apparently no need to say what they were. It’s the language of the hipster: If you have to ask, you’ll never know. But certainly the writer, the thinker, did not have to ask. It had all happened before—that is, to those who understood, the event had happened even before it happened.

In a questionnaire Sontag responded to in 1997, she wrote that “You have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.” Forget what the response of Sontag, or anyone, would be if the government, or a rightwing propagandist, were to say the same thing: “You have no right to a public opinion unless.” There’s no unless in the Bill of Rights, anyone would say. But that is not the point; establishing one’s superiority to any event, and to any of one’s fellow citizens, by denying the existence of anything that one’s conceptual apparatus cannot enclose is the point.

Or rather the point is that real intellectuals admit that it is in the nature of the human condition that it will inevitably, at unpredictable times, in unpredictable ways, produce events that leave every conceptual apparatus in ruins, and that real intellectuals value nothing so much as the chance, which comes only to a few, to do their work there.

Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote:

LAD wrote:Correct, in that those who died, should not have. Correct, on that point, yes. I agree. From a geo-political, cause-effect perspective however, less correct, sadly.

I do not see that you state any real position here.

What's your point?

That someone somewhere deserved something, but just not them?

No offense, but that strikes me as both slight -- and, to the extent that it sounds like a tacit justification for violence, offensive.

Set me straight, LAD. Set me straight.

P.S. LAD, lefthander Mike Gallo is currently warming up in the Houston Astros bullpen.

To begin with, I want to emphasize that I intend no disrespect to the families and relatives of those killed on September 11 - far from it. What I will describe is the manner in which their personal sorrow - and public grief in a more general and abstract way - was used and perverted, both by political leaders and by the American MAVM, to create a volatile and dangerous alchemy of public emotion in the planned build-up to the attack on Iraq in March, 2003.

The war psychosis I describe is of course by no means limited to Americans. We have witnessed it time and time again during the past century - in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany before World War II, in Britain during the war with the Falklands, etc. The link - in each case - has been the considerable role played by the mass media in these tragic events.

One may argue that human beings have always had wars, even before the days of the mass media. But the point I am trying to make, is the way in which the mass audiovisual media nearly always incite and worsen situations which might otherwise have taken a more peaceful turn. The fact that politicians turn to the media to help create a war psychosis is not a valid reason for the MAVM to fulfil this role.

Prime American TV mass manipulators since September 11 include: CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Fox Network, and hundreds of local affiliate TV stations.

Their tools:

• MANIPULATION of GRIEF to develop a victim image, extreme and narrowly-focused nationalism, a need for heroes, fear of the other; and crude revenge. All, it should be noted, are central ingredients in the psychosis needed to prime a country preparing for war.

American television since September 11 has been a shocking experience: any pretence at codes of ‘objectivity' thrown to the wind, and every cheap Hollywood trick blatantly used to play on public emotion - with some of the imagery, and ideology, coming straight from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (the 1934 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Reifenstahl).

For example, during the commemoration at the ruined NY Trade Centre one year after the attack, CNN offered: endless pans of billowing American flags; repeated zooms and dissolves to and from tear-stained faces of relatives gathered at the site; interspersed scenes of simultaneous services in St. Paul's Cathedral in London and Bagrum airbase in Afghanistan; replays of scenes showing the attack on the World Trade Centre (accompanied by background narrative music); shots of relatives reading lists of the dead, with their names running at the foot of the screen, in the space usually reserved for CNN news-flashes and stock-market figures; the endless sound of massed pipe bands; references nearly every 30 seconds to the dead ‘heroes'; servile commentaries by CNN anchor-people in praise of President Bush (including: “It's been a year that's given him a purpose...”); etc.

Equally chilling were TV scenes from the reconstructed Pentagon, with President Bush and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld peering round, and up at a mammoth USA flag unfurled and creeping down the wall behind them, followed by the American General blessing the Pentagon with the words: “We hold the moral high-ground.”

• PERSONALIZATION of history. Notable in the manipulation of grief by the American media was the way in which every single person connected with the events of September 11 became an instant hero. The people who died were heroes, their surviving families were heroes. The heroes became TV icons, and the living were besieged by media cameras: the American MAVM transformed the event into a prolonged and cruel soap-opera, in which the families of victims were repeatedly prodded to tell how much they missed their dead son/daughter/brother/mother - accompanied by endless dissolves between their crying faces, and portraits of their deceased family members

On one occasion (I believe an Oprah Winfrey show), a grief sequence included a small group of September 11 widows. They were asked to watch a monitor showing a montage of photos of their dead relatives - in this case mostly husbands. The Oprah Winfrey producers constantly dissolved the cameras between the edited photos and the crying widows. Some minutes into this traumatic material, the faces had changed, and I slowly realized that I was watching a commercial for Paxil, a drug for generalized anxiety disorder. So adroit was this change, that I wasn't sure if the people were now talking about their ‘ailments' - or about their fear of the next terrorist attack.

Notable in this drawn-out process of grief manipulation, was the role of anchor-people and presenters: “How do you FEEL?”, “Where do you get the COURAGE from?”, “Do you MISS him/her?”. Constantly probing, prying, intruding, suggesting - and always, always dripping with sincerity. Throughout this disingenuous process, one knew that as long as the hapless families mourned their loved ones, or even participated in anecdotes (the dog waiting for his master beneath the bed), all was hunky-dory, for this was the collective image that TV - and government officials - wanted and needed: it conformed to the ideals of the Hollywood narrative, and tied in perfectly with the increasingly paranoid victim-role into which America was being immersed (and which was crucial for the military end-game).

Another in the legion of Oprah Winfrey look-alike programs (where the American public exhibit themselves, and gasp with horror at a 16-year-old who dares tell her father to “fuck off!”), is the Maury Show. In this case, during the days leading up to the first anniversary of September 11, the host announced: “We could think of no better way to honour the victims, than to show their names. Watch closely, these are heroes!”. The camera abruptly cut to a very rapidly rolling list of the 3,000 people killed, accompanied by the words of a crooning pop-singer: “In my heart there'll always be a place for you.”

There was no genuine intent here - the names passed much too quickly to read. One was left with the nagging thought that the names actually didn't matter - what did matter was having enough space for the next batch of commercials (which certainly gave one sufficient time to read the text). The fact that this swiftly moving list of ‘heroes' exactly replicated the credits following a TV cop-show or soap opera, hardly helped alleviate the feeling of phoniness which accompanied the entire exercise.

“Clearly you want to move on?” - was a typical question from the American anchor-people to the bereaved families. Yet it is clear that the last thing the American media (and the present administration) themselves wanted - was to move on! They knew they had a ‘good thing going' here: a controllable mass psychosis which could, if handled carefully, both sustain record viewing figures for TV and the commercial cinema, and assist the administration in furthering its militaristic and hegemonic ends. The entire nauseating exercise was a prelude - a crowd-teaser, if you like - for the big one to come.

And thus it went on, month after month: a cynical exercise in exploiting and manipulating the American people. Many of whom, sadly, seemed quite willing accomplices in the entire process.

Nowhere in this nightmare of theatrical media grief, was there the slightest mention of forgiveness, compassion for the oppressed and for countries less privileged than America, let alone any sense of understanding of the possible underlying geopolitical and historical reasons for which the USA had been attacked.

• REVENGE: Along with descriptions of the psychosis developing in their country, several courageous American journalists (including Lewis H. Lapham of Harpers' magazine) drew our attention to other important aspects of the post-September 11 crisis. Including the fact that the USA had had the opportunity to turn the attack on the World Trade Centre into a moral and political awakening for the country, into a deep reflection on America's global impact, on the effect of its militaristic and interventionist policies, and on its extreme levels of consumption. That the opportunity was there for national reflection on the need for compassion and understanding, rather than spiteful revenge.

Part of my thesis here, is that contemporary society had already been primed and environmentally prepared for the path chosen by President Bush. Much of the process I have described in the past (our relationship to violence, centralized authority, insecurity and the needs of a consumer society), stems primarily from the hyper-mediated environments we have occupied since World War II. Thus it was almost automatically accepted that the MAVM would slip out of ‘responsible mode' following September 11, into their traditional practices - reliance on fear, anxiety, conflict (its threat, or the promise of such) - in order to sell their newspapers and TV advertising space.

• SILENCE and DOUBLE-SPEAK: Some months ago, Canadian journalist Heather Mallick wrote critically in The Globe and Mail of the conformity following the September 11 attacks: “I have been silent for months now as we have all attended our American-run obedience school. Columnists wrote with a straight face that ‘we are all Americans now'... I don't agree with the assertion that we're all Americans. I am not. Even Americans are not. ...This stifled little Ceausescu life we led in the fall of 2001 was shameful. It did us no credit.”

The silencing of critical voices following Sept. 11, 2001, was reminiscent of McCarthy era witch-hunts. Nor was it limited to the United States and its media: in a program on the BBC World Service Radio during the bombing of Afghanistan, various (Western) reporters spoke about a choice for the world between “modernity and pluralism” on the one hand, and “terrorism” on the other. Alongside the typical media usage of polarity, we need to focus on the words here. Journalists spoke of “values we share”, pointing out that 90% of the American people agreed with the bombardment of Afghanistan, and that 53% thought that the level of the attack is “about right”.

- “choice”?

- “modernity” and bombing Afghanistan?

- “values”? “about right”?

There was also a typical declaration made by President Bush, during a visit to an American warship after September 11: “The terrorists are the heirs to fascism ... They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way.”

George Orwell said that if we cannot command the way we speak, we cannot command the way we think. It is probably just as well for Mr. Orwell, that he is not with us today, for these sorts of contradictions and ‘double-speak' are now daily occurrences - filtered into our subconscious by the MAVM.

Following on from this, the effect of the American MAVM on our relationship to history - our knowledge of the past, our realization of its meaning and importance, its connection to our lives - has been catastrophic.

It was chilling to watch American officials on TV, jaws clenched tight, when asked about the connection between history and the reasons for the attacks on September 11. Their consistent and cold reply was that, “There is no connection whatsoever!” Equally chilling was the total silence from the ‘objective' U.S. media throughout these denials.

September 11 was followed by endless commemorations in the USA, including a National Day of Remembrance service held at the National Cathedral in Washington. In London, Queen Elizabeth II attended a commemoration service at St. Paul's Cathedral. Across Europe, television screens went blank, flags flew at half-mast, hours-long queues formed at official condolence books, towns and cities observed moments of silence, churches were filled with mourners, blood banks were swamped, political contests toned down, concerts re-programmed, sporting events postponed to honour the dead.

Where are the commemoration services for the infinitely larger numbers of people who have been tortured and killed in Nicaragua, Greece, Colombia, Indonesia, Laos, etc.? For all those who have suffered as a direct result of British colonialism? Portuguese colonialism? etc. There have been countless human tragedies since World War II, often involving far more deaths than during September 2001, and resulting from direct intervention by the USA in the affairs of other countries. These evidently did not merit memorial concerts by Paul McCartney, or messages of love from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Millions of people world-wide did not stop working, or walking in the streets, for a silent gesture of solidarity, and neither did the British Parliament halt its ongoing debates.

Can this be due to severe memory loss on our part? A lack of knowledge about events outside of the USA and Western Europe? Mass hypocrisy and ethnocentrism? A complete vacation from history, which is now so (media) ingrained, that we've become unconscious? Do not the mass deaths of hundreds of thousands of other human beings, at different moments or periods in recent history merit commemoration, and recognition that they also are an indelible part of history?*

Whatever the motives and reasons behind this selective vision, we in the West unashamedly and amply demonstrated it to the full following the attack on the World Trade Centre, as the MAVM - artificially reverent in tone - recorded and thus ‘legitimised' this hypocrisy for posterity. It was a process of denial which enabled USA Secretary of State Colin Powell to comment on CNN: “There is not a country in the world where the U.S. has been and not left it better for us having been there.”

Marsupialized wrote:Please, stop using the word 'retard' it is offensive...and sexist and racist and homophobic

Marcus wrote:Chomsky’s words were those of someone who had seen all the way around the major atrocities even before they happened. There was no possibility that they contained, that they signified, anything new. Rather, they were a confirmation that, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”

The predominant reaction of European, but also American, Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the "feminist" point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed ("castrated"). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding one of the holocaust revisionism (what are the 6000 dead against millions in Ruanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that CIA (co)created Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument AGAINST attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely their duty to get us rid of the monster they created? The moment one thinks in the terms of "yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism," the ethical catastrophy is already here: the only appropriate stance is the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims. The ethical stance proper is here replaced with the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable. In short, let us make a simple mental experiment: if you detect in yourself any restraint to fully empathize with the victims of the WTC collapse, if you feel the urge to qualify your empathy with "yes, but what about the millions who suffer in Africa...", you are not demonstrating your Third World sympathy, but merely the mauvaise foi which bears witness to your implicit patronizing racist attitude towards the Third World victims. (More precisely, the problem with such comparative statements is that they are necessary and inadmissible: one HAS to make them, one HAS to make the point that much worse horrors are taken place around the world on a daily basis - but one has to do it without getting involved in the obscene mathematics of guilt.)

Another way in which the Left miserably failed is that, in the weeks after the bombing, it reverted to the old mantra "Give peace a chance! War does not stop violence!" - a true case of hysterical precipitation, reacting to something which will not even happen in the expected form. Instead of the concrete analysis of the new complex situation after the bombings, of the chances it gives to the Left to propose its own interpretation of the events, we got the blind ritualistic chant "No war!", which fails to address even the elementary fact, de facto acknowledged by the US government itself (through its postponing of the retaliatory action), that this is not a war like others, that the bombing of Afghanistan is not a solution. A sad situation, in which George Bush showed more power of reflection than most of the Left!

However, this notion of the "clash of civilizations" has to be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today are rather clashes WITHIN each civilization. Furthermore, a brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the "human rights record" of Islam (to use this anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in the past centuries, Islam was significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. NOW it is also the time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in the Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While in no way excusing today's horror acts, these facts nonetheless clearly demonstrate that we are not dealing with a feature inscribed into Islam "as such," but with the outcome of modern socio-political conditions.

Can one imagine a greater irony than the fact that the first codename for the US operation against terrorists was "Infinite Justice" (later changed in response to the reproach of the American Islam clerics that only God can exert infinite justice)? Taken seriously, this name is profoundly ambiguous: either it means that the Americans have the right to ruthlessly destroy not only all terrorists but also all who gave then material, moral, ideological etc. support (and this process will be by definition endless in the precise sense of the Hegelian "bad infinity" - the work will never be really accomplished, there will always remain some other terrorist threat...); or it means that the justice exerted must be truly infinite in the strict Hegelian sense, i.e., that, in relating to others, it has to relate to itself - in short, that it has to ask the question of how we ourselves who exert justice are involved in what we are fighting against. When, on September 22 2001, Derrida received the Theodor Adorno award, he referred in his speech to the WTC bombings: "My unconditional compassion, addressed at the victims of the September 11, does not prevent me to say it loudly: with regard to this crime, I do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless." This self-relating, this inclusion of oneself into the picture, is the only true "infinite justice."

(W)hat we feel are no longer our own feelings anymore but someone else’s, and indeed, if we are to believe the media, everybody else’s. This new inauthenticity casts no little doubt on all those theories of mourning and trauma that were recently so influential… I can still vividly remember the suggestion of a clinical psychologist on the radio, not only that the survivors needed therapy, but that all Americans should receive it! In any case the therapist will now have been reassured. All Americans are now receiving therapy, and it is called war

Even to get at the emotional reaction (to 9/11) one would have to make one’s way through its media orchestration and amplification. People don’t appreciate a theoretical discussion of their emotions (Are you questioning the sincerity of my feelings?). I suppose the answer has to be, No, not the sincerity of your feelings; rather, the sincerity of all feelings.