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Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume 2, Number 31 September 8 - 14, 2002 Quezon City, Philippines |
This
essay is adapted from The Clash
of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder,
to be published in November 2002 by Monthly Review Press. BY
GILBERT ACHCAR Back to Alternative Reader Index Every
attempt to explain the descent into terrorism that culminated in the suicide
attacks of September 11, 2001, as a consequence of the deplorable state of the
world we live in has run up against a barrage of vicious polemical artillery. In
a climate of intellectual intimidation bearing a certain resemblance to the dark
hours of the Cold War, the intimidation relied on two deliberate amalgams. Anti-Americanism
and ‘Values’ First,
according to the censors, any systematic critique of the U.S. government’s
actions is evidence of an ignominious “anti-Americanism.” The recrudescence
of the use of this term, particularly since the Kosovo War, in order to
discredit criticism of Washington’s policies inevitably evokes the memory of
the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which became notorious not that
many years ago in the run-up to McCarthyism. This “paranoid” logic always
ends up devouring its own children, as it did in the past when Republican
Senator Joe McCarthy went so far as to take on Republican President Dwight D.
Eisenhower.1
In keeping with this same logic, accusations of anti-Americanism have already
been leveled against Washington’s most loyal allies as soon as they dared
express the slightest reservation about the Bush Administration’s actions. Accordingly,
following criticisms of the treatment of the prisoners transferred to the U.S.
base at Guantánamo in Cuba, the European edition of the Wall Street Journal
opened its columns to a certain Stephen Pollard, who explained that the European
media’s “quite grotesque” commentaries showed that “European
anti-Americanism is not the exclusive preserve of the left, nor of
Continentals.”2
Naturally the European “left,” allegedly represented by the Guardian
and Le Monde, hates Americans, wrote Pollard; these two dailies “were
filled with articles protesting Je ne suis pas americain!” (Like
Hermione in Racine’s Andromaque, Le Monde could rightly complain in
this case of its “love repaid with black ingratitude.”) But the European
right and center are just as anti-American, Pollard continued, and include
“many of the real enemies—some might say the most vitriolic.” Besides,
“the anti-Americanism of the British establishment is as deep as that
elsewhere,” as the articles in the very conservative Daily Telegraph or
the Thatcherian Matthew Paris’ articles in the Times show. All these
anti-Americans had been concealing their perfidy, but the GuantE1namo affair
“revealed them in their true colors.” The
second amalgam that the censors have used to intimidate the U.S. government’s
critics amounts to dismissing any explanation of September 11 that mentions the
existence of injustice in the world as equivalent to a justification of mass
murder—as if it were inconceivable for one form of barbarism to engender
another, equally reprehensible form of barbarism. Salman
Rushdie himself—though he of all people ought to be particularly allergic to
anything resembling excommunication—joined the fray with all the zeal of a
neophyte. (He became a New Yorker himself quite recently.) In the Washington
Post he violently took on the “sanctimonious moral relativism” of those
who think that the United States ought to change its own conduct, accusing them
of carrying out a “bien-pensant anti-American onslaught.” He treated
them to this devastating and original moral lesson—without any sanctimony, of
course: “Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass
murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to
deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their
actions.”3
One quite simple idea did not occur to the author of the Satanic Verses:
that without in any way “excusing” mass terrorism, one can hold the
government of the United States responsible for its own actions and the hatred
that they call forth. It thus bears a share of the responsibility for what
happens to its citizens when they end up being used as targets by those who
commit the—unquestionably reprehensible and unjustifiable—crime of taking
revenge for oppression carried out from Washington by murdering U.S. civilians. In
any event, hasn’t the U.S. government indirectly acknowledged its own
responsibility by indemnifying the victims’ families, and asking them in
return to agree in writing to take no legal action against it for what happened
on September 11?4
A banker whose father died in a 1975 attack emphasized this same point in an
article in Wall Street Journal: “By creating a first-of-its-kind fund
with an estimated $4.6 billion of taxpayer money (in addition to providing full
federal tax amnesty for 2000 and 2001), the federal government is implicitly
accepting blame for the September attacks.”5
The author proceeded to cite many other attacks after which the government did
not compensate the victims’ families at all. This was the case for example
with all those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing who were not federal
employees: “cafeteria workers, parents of the children killed in the day-care
center, and those who died visiting the building received no federal benefits
whatsoever.”6
In
a country where everything has a price tag, we can in any case see a prosaic,
monetary motive in the government’s haggling with some of the September 11
victims’ families. This at least supplements the political motives that lead
the White House to deny categorically and virulently, in the teeth of the
evidence, any cause-and-effect relationship between the United States’ foreign
policy and the attacks that targeted it. Thus, whereas the forty-first
president, George H. W. Bush, tacitly acknowledged the link between “the
threat of terror” and injustice in the world in his speech of September 11,
1990, his son George W. Bush, the forty-third president, quickly exerted himself
to rule any explanation of the kind out of court. According to presidential
ukase, the crimes of September 11, 2001, could not be conceived of as a reaction
to any legitimately questionable aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East or
anywhere else. They could only be the product of a visceral rejection of the
noblest “values” of the United States and the West. According to Bush
junior—in his speech on September 20, 2001, delivered like his father’s to a
joint session of Congress—the terrorists had to have acted out of hatred of
democracy and freedom. Americans
are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this
chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed.
They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our
freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.7
Addressing
both the U.S. people and its elected representatives, George W. Bush thus took
them all for the kind of simpletons who could believe that the September 11
terrorist hijackers hated the United States enough to die killing as many people
as possible on its soil simply out of abhorrence for democratic institutions and
civil liberties. The argument is all the more mind-boggling inasmuch as it is
followed directly by the—in this case undeniable—statement that the
attackers aimed at overthrowing the governments of their own countries:
“They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.” Could Bush have thought that these three
countries have democratically elected governments too? As
if to illustrate the frankness that is the benefit of a certain degree of
“realism,” Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, countered
allegations of this kind with a good dose of common sense: Al-Qaeda
may have originated in the Wahhabi branch of radical Islam—which rejects
Western civilization—but it has not attacked targets in the Western world at
random. Nor has it concentrated its efforts against the most secular and
permissive Western nations, which are in Europe, not North America. On
the contrary, bin Laden’s terrorist network has been obsessively focused on
the United States. The reason is that specific U.S. policies are unacceptable to
Al-Qaeda and threaten its perceived core interests and beliefs.8
Absolute
and Relative Evil However,
the most effective and intimidating obstacle of all to critical thought about
the meaning of September 11 has been the tendency to treat the event itself as
something absolute and unparalleled. Is there anything that has not been
said or written about September 11, 2001?! Just one example among many,
admittedly a particularly grandiloquent one: “We will live, and our children
will live on, in a history in which the explosion of the Towers is redrawing the
map of the world and tracing the unreachable horizon of a terrorist twilight of
humanity.”9 In a somewhat more sober key, innumerable commentators
have proffered the supposed insight that September 11 was a major, historic
turning point in world history comparable to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
on December 7, 1941. The latter had been mythologized not long before the
attacks by a Hollywood mega production serving the cause, dear to George W.
Bush, of a missile shield. The “new Pearl Harbor” of September 11, which the
president declared the next day to be an act of “war” even more than of
“terrorism,” was immediately elevated to the rank of the opening shots of a
new war, baptized unhesitatingly by many “World War III.” The banner title
under CNN’s special broadcasts was quickly changed from “America Under
Attack” to “America at War.” The
1991 Gulf War in its day was already called a “CNN war.” But the September
11 attacks undeniably marked a new peak in media globalization. No event has
ever been watched by as many people as the attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers,
either live or in replay. It has been rebroadcast on television stations around
the world in continuous loops and made available in the form of videos and
stills on an incalculable number of websites, without even mentioning what are
now called “paper supports.” The corollary to this historic record is that
no event has ever been as massively, preeminently subject to the magnifying
effect of TV broadcasts on its perception. A magnifying effect which is also a
deforming effect, of course. As Naomi Klein wrote in a clever reaction,
“[V]iewed through the U.S. television networks, Tuesday’s [September 11]
attack seemed to come less from another country than another planet.”10
Yet
to the extent that September 11, and its aftermath are thought to be crucial
events with implications for the future of humanity, critical reflection on
their meaning should be considered all the more essential to the public
interest. A true critical effort is therefore called for, first of all so as to
dissipate the prevailing impressionism that has turned these horrible attacks
into an absolute incarnation of evil. As it happens, we are not dealing with a
simple metaphor. George W. Bush has invoked the metaphysical notion of
“evil” on several occasions, as we know too well, deliberately using the
term that Ronald Reagan once applied to the Soviet Union. At that time the
United States was backing today’s “evil,” the shock troops of Islamic
fundamentalism, against yesterday’s “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union. The
United States, as is only proper, still incarnates “good”—should it
perhaps be called “the Good Empire”?11
Washington
is calling on the imagery of the Second World War for the third time since the
end of the Cold War, after having resuscitated Hitler successively in the shape
of Saddam Hussein and then Slobodan Milosevic. Continuing down the road of these
playground ethics, George W. Bush has designated three of the “rogue states”
(as they are called in Washingtonese), Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, along with
their “terrorist allies,” as an “Axis of Evil.” The phrase originated in
his first State of the Union speech to Congress on January 29, 2002, in which
the president used the term “evil” five times. A study of all the
occurrences of this word and its various derivatives in public speeches in the
United States since September 11 would certainly come up with staggering
results. Evil,
in its metaphysical, absolute sense, is a notion common to the fundamentalist,
reactionary religious worldview that Bush and bin Laden share. To use the apt
formula of the celebrated German TV presenter Ulrich Wickert, the two men share
similar “mental structures” (“Denkstrukturen”).12 George W. Bush
actually stands today at the head of the Protestant fundamentalist movement in
the United States, as a recent Washington Post article explained: For
the first time since religious conservatives became a modern political movement,
the president of the United States has become the movement’s de facto
leader—a status even Ronald Reagan, though admired by religious conservatives,
never earned. Christian publications, radio and television shower Bush with
praise, while preachers from the pulpit treat his leadership as an act of
providence. A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to
his faith, while Web sites encourage people to fast and pray for the president.13
The
president’s speech, after the manner of all religious discourse, has even
become a topic of theological discussion. To top it off, there are even
criticisms of George W. Bush’s intransigence based on Christian forgiveness,
which parallel moderate Islamic criticisms of the religious exhortations by the
head of the al-Qaeda network. As the New York Times reported: “The
evil one”: Mr. Bush has regularly used this phrase to describe Osama bin
Laden. Among evangelical Christians, it is an obvious reference to Satan, and
appears throughout the Bible. (From Matthew, in the New American Standard
Bible: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand
it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.”) Mr.
Bush was raised an Episcopalian, became a Methodist after his marriage and then
in 1986 said he was recommitting his heart to Jesus Christ—a born-again
experience, at least in the words of evangelicals, although the president has
not used that term to describe himself. Still, evangelicals recognize the
terminology of “the evil one” as their own. But
some in the evangelical movement have questioned the phrase.“The problem with
‘the evil one’ is that in Christian thought, the only one who is totally,
hopelessly evil is Satan,” said Richard J. Mouw, the president of Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., the largest seminary in North America
for the mainstream evangelical movement. “We don’t really believe that
anybody is beyond redemption until their dying breath, if they reject Christ.”
Calling Mr. bin Laden “the evil one” supernaturalizes him, Dr. Mouw said. He
added that saying Mr. bin Laden was wanted dead or alive, as the president had
done, trivializes human life.14 The
Uniqueness of September 11 Criticizing
the way the terrorist horror of September 11 has been treated as an absolute is
all the more indispensable since the event has been buried under a particularly
dense layer of superlative epithets. It is thus necessary to put this event in
proportion, situating it in the context where it belongs, without giving in to
intimidating accusations that any such effort amounts to trivializing the
atrocity. No one has a monopoly on moral indignation. Putting a vile act in the
context of acts of the same kind does not trivialize it, still less justify it,
particularly since its authors or inspirers themselves evoked this same context
as their motivation, explicitly and from the beginning. Rather, to put the act
in context is to reject selective indignation. So
what was so truly extraordinary about the terrorism of mass destruction that
took about 3300 lives on September 11 (according to the last adjusted figure)?
On the scale of carnage for which the U.S. government is directly responsible,
and has never expressed the least regret for, it was all in all a pretty
ordinary massacre. Is it forbidden to mention the 200,000 civilian victims of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the pretext that Osama bin Laden himself has made
clever use of the argument? What about the three million Indochinese civilians
who were victims of U.S. aggression—whom bin Laden has mentioned much less, by
contrast, because as the good anticommunist fighter he was for so long he had to
approve of that war? Do we also need to keep silent, just because bin Laden has
constantly referred to them, about the 90,000 people—40,000 children under
five years old and 50,000 other civilians—who according to UN agency estimates
have died each year for the last ten years from the effects of the embargo
against Iraq? Even
in so prestigious a journal as Foreign Affairs, chief publication of the
U.S. foreign policy think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, the sanctions
imposed on Iraq have been called “sanctions of mass destruction.” In an
article in Foreign Affairs in 1999, two U.S. professors, John Mueller and
Karl Mueller, estimated that weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and
biological, not counting the Nazi gas chambers) have caused 400,000 deaths over
the course of history. They concluded—taking care to use the conditional tense
so as to soften the impact of their statement: If
the U.N. estimates of the human damage in Iraq are even roughly correct,
therefore, it would appear that—in a so far futile effort to remove Saddam
[Hussein] from power and a somewhat more successful effort to constrain him
militarily—economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the
deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of
mass destruction throughout history.15
In
a passage that is very relevant to our own topic, the Muellers continued: It
is interesting that this loss of human life has failed to make a great
impression in the United States. Americans clearly do not blame the people of
Iraq for that country’s actions: even at the height of the Gulf War, 60
percent said they held the Iraqi people innocent of responsibility for
Saddam’s policies. Yet the massive death toll among Iraqi civilians has
stirred little public protest, and hardly any notice. Some
of the inattention may derive from a lack of concern about foreign lives.
Although Americans are extremely sensitive to American casualties, they—like
others—often seem quite insensitive to casualties suffered by those on the
opposing side, whether military or civilian. Some of the inattention may also be
due to the fact that, in contrast to deaths caused by terrorist bombs, those
inflicted by sanctions are dispersed rather than concentrated, and statistical
rather than dramatic.16 Here
we have two fundamental factors that help explain what is unique about September
11. The first thing that was extraordinary about the mass murder in Manhattan
and Washington, in fact, was that it killed Americans in the heart of U.S.
metropolises. As Noam Chomsky rightly remarked, “the crimes of September 11
are indeed a historic turning point—but not because of the scale, rather
because of the choice of target.”17
To realize the singular impact of this particularly painful blow to “American
exceptionalism,” one need only pose the questions that one commentator,
remaining carefully objective, formulated on this point: Our
feelings are unleashed, not in proportion to the gravity of the facts, but in
proportion to the meaning that is assigned to them; not so much in function of
the real human cost, as of our sympathy for the victims. Would the (obviously
fully justified) emotions called forth by the attacks that destroyed the World
Trade Center towers in New York and part of the Pentagon in September 2001 have
been on such a scale if this murderous devastation had been perpetrated
somewhere in the Third World? Would the images of the disasters have received
quite so much attention in the media?18
What
in fact would have been the reaction around the world if a mass murder of
this kind had been committed in a country other than the U.S.—say an African
country—or if for example the targets of the attacks had been the two giant
Petrona Towers in Kuala Lumpur? We need only compare media coverage of the Twin
Towers razed to the ground in Manhattan with the coverage of Grozny, Chechnya,
an entire city that Russian army bombing reduced to the equivalent of “Ground
Zero.” The
fact that the September 11 attacks struck New York and Washington, the two
capitals of “globalization”—which means first and foremost
“Americanization,” in the sense of the spread of the U.S. socioeconomic and
cultural model—explains not only why Americans were so deeply shocked and
moved, but also why the rest of the world was as well to such a degree. Absolute
U.S. hegemony over the media universe of fiction and information results in a
strong tendency for consumers of images the world over to identify with U.S.
citizens. This is also why people identify above all with the metropolises of
the U.S. empire, since they are familiar to TV viewers and moviegoers around the
planet. In
this sense, attacks as deadly as the ones on September 11 would have generated
much less attention and emotion if they had happened anywhere else, not
just if they had hit some third world country. The same would hold true if
European or Japanese cities or even less central U.S. cities (like Oklahoma
City) had been hit. As a rule, the intensity of emotion is directly proportional
to the proximity of the scene of the crime to the nerve center of the world
system and the privileged stage of global spectacle. The perpetrators of
September 11 chose their targets very purposefully when they picked New York and
Washington. Globalization
and Narcissistic Compassion For
obvious reasons of affinity, those who identify the most with North Americans
either live in the Western world or belong to the transnational social layers
that share the same way of life, characteristic above all of New York yuppies.
We could call it the “cosmopolitan bourgeois way of life,” an elite,
updated, globalized version of the “American way of life” of the 1950s.
Thomas Friedman, well-known New York Times columnist and bard of
globalization/Americanization, is a prominent exponent of this way of life.19
In his characteristically swaggering and ingenuous style, he recounted how he
spent his weekend two weeks after September 11: I
went to the ballgame Friday night, took in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony
at the Kennedy Center Saturday, took my girls out to breakfast in Washington
Sunday morning, and then flew to the University of Michigan. Heck, I even went
out yesterday [Monday] and bought some stock. What a great country. I
wonder what Osama bin Laden did in his cave in Afghanistan yesterday?20 It
is a safe bet that many fewer people in the world are familiar with a schedule
like Thomas Friedman’s than with a life rather like bin Laden’s in his cave.
Striking the same note but in a more precious style, Peruvian writer and former
presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa was bent on singing the praises of the
elite cosmopolitanism of the age of globalization/Americanization by telling
everyone in the Madrid daily El PaEDs how exalting he always finds it to
be in New York: a city where he “always felt [he] was at the center of the
world,” where fortunately “the eggs Benedict and the Bloody Mary are still
delights in the brick shrine P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue.”21
Touched, the New York Times published an abridged translation of the
article. In
reality, the exceptional intensity of the emotions elicited worldwide by the
destruction of Manhattan’s Twin Towers is due primarily to what we can call
“narcissistic compassion.” It is a form of compassion evoked much more by
calamities striking “people like us,” much less by calamities affecting
people unlike us. The fate of New Yorkers (in this case) elicits far more of it
than the fate of Iraqis or Rwandans ever could, to say nothing of Afghans.
Located at the very heart of the premier metropolis of capitalist
cosmopolitanism, the towers of the World Trade Center constituted in a certain
sense the totem poles of the globalized category of adepts of the
“cosmopolitan bourgeois way of life”—a category that massively felt hurt
at their destruction. Only
this narcissistic compassion—going beyond legitimate compassion for any human
being victimized by a barbaric act—makes it possible to understand the
formidable, absolutely exceptional intensity of the emotions and passions that
seized hold of “public opinion,” beginning with opinion-makers, in Western
countries and the metropolises of the globalized economy in the wake of the
September 11 attacks. Only
this narcissistic compassion enables us to understand how in a country like
France, supposedly in the grip of virulent “anti-Americanism,” the most
prestigious daily newspaper could have gone so far as to headline its front-page
editorial the day after the attacks, “We are all Americans.”22
This phrase had a double meaning. On the one hand, it expressed compassion; on
the other hand, pride in showing solidarity with the dominant country, the
“godfather” of the family that Le Monde is very happy to belong to
(particularly at the moment when he is about to burst out in one of his rages)
and that not everyone is lucky enough to belong to. This is what Freud called
the “narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal,” which he
explained as follows: “No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts
and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has
one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws.”23
Admittedly,
narcissistic compassion is one of the most common features in the world. It is
far from restricted to the emotions felt in some countries and by some
categories of people about the victims of September 11. True; but the uniqueness
of the narcissistic compassion shown by opinion-makers and other “elites” in
Western metropolises is that they camouflage it as an oceanic humanism
indifferent to skin color or religion. Their pretension towers even above the
former World Trade Center towers themselves. From this exalted height Western
elites condescendingly summon other human groups and demand that they share the
elites’ own feelings, in the name of the humanism that they assume to be their
monopoly. Too often their “humanism” is nothing more than a masked
expression of their own ethnocentrism. This
narcissistic compassion, added to a servile desire to show its zealous
solidarity with its “godfather,” explains why the European Union decreed a
European-wide day of mourning and three minutes of silence for the 6,000 victims
in the United States (according to the then current estimates). This same
European Union did not observe a single minute of silence for the 7,000 people
massacred in Srebrenica, presumably “Europeans” all. It ended up finding a
silver lining in Russia’s dirty war in Chechnya. The hundreds of thousands of
people massacred in Rwanda scarcely troubled it, and the tens of thousands of
victims dying each year in Iraq hardly at all—restricting ourselves to
examples in Europe’s own geographical periphery. This
European Union, together with the United States and the other big powers, has
organized a veritable conspiracy of silence around another war in its former
colonial empire, which has led to a humanitarian catastrophe of genocidal
proportions. The number of deaths caused directly or indirectly by the war in
progress in Congo-Kinshasa since August 1998 was close to 3 million by spring
2001—yes, three million people in less than three years!—according to a
study carried out by a very credible source, the International Rescue Committee,
headquartered in New York.24 The
same European Union shares responsibility with the United States and the other
rich countries for failing to help populations threatened by one of the worst
“biogenocides” in history. The AIDS pandemic already affects more than 28
million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than one per 1,000 of whom are
receiving adequate treatment. The result was 2,300,000 deaths due to AIDS in
Sub-Saharan Africa during the course of the year 2001 alone, the first year of
the twenty-first century—meaning more than two September 11s each day! “At
current levels of intervention, the number of Africans dead of AIDS in 10 years
will probably surpass the population of France.”25
On a scale like this, failure to help the populations in danger constitutes in
itself an immense crime against humanity. How is it possible not to see
something deeply indecent, something deeply revolting, in the spectacle of the
white world thrown into convulsions of distress over the “6,000” victims in
the United States, while it hardly gives a thought to black Africa in its
horrible agony?26 The
Media and the Logic of War The
unavoidable consequence of this first way in which the attacks on Washington and
New York were unique, due to the very nature of their targets, is the
extraordinary media attention they received. This constitutes the second way in
which they were unique. Media attention was not just the natural result of the
“concentrated,” “dramatic” character of the mass murder in Manhattan, as
contrasted with the “dispersed,” “statistical” character of the scourges
that have struck Africa or the Iraqi victims of the U.N.-U.S. embargo, to use
the expressions from the Foreign Affairs article cited above.
Overdramatization of the September 11 attacks was also, and above all, the
result of deliberate action by the media in the society of the “world
spectacle,” a corollary of the world market recognized by Guy Debord.27 From
early on, a political logic—“the logic of war,” to use a well-worn
expression—dictated this media overdramatization. It was necessary to keep
imperial atrocities and global poverty under wraps, the better to highlight the
“absolute evil” that manifested itself on September 11, along the lines that
George W. Bush had laid out. Even after the historic record level of live media
coverage devoted to the attacks on New York and Washington, the attacks
continued to be referred to and broadcast incessantly, and will be for some time
to come, so as to cover up and justify new atrocities committed by the United
States and its allies in the guise of reprisals. Tony Blair reminded the media
of this rule at a moment when the polls were showing a clear reduction in
support for bombing Afghanistan on the part of British public opinion: “In
every part, we have justice and right on our side, and a strategy to deliver. It
is important we never forget why we are doing it. Important we never forget how
we felt watching the planes fly into the twin towers.”28 So
that no one can ever forget it, the media have massively joined the
“war effort.” Even a journalist supposedly carrying on his trade as a TV
critic on the French side of the Channel unashamedly hailed the “war
effort,” as if echoing the British prime minister. What
does taking part in the war effort mean for the media? Certainly not closing our
eyes to the mistakes, the groping about, the glitches in the U.S. reprisals. We
must keep our eyes open. But keep them open day-by-day, enduringly [sic],
without ever forgetting the original image of the September 11 aggression.29 Among
a plethora of other examples, we can also cite these, recounted in a Washington
Post article about the way in which inflated estimates of the number of
victims of September 11 continued to be used despite substantial downward
adjustments (at that point down to barely 4,000). The examples bear witness to a
vengeful logic that is much more serious than the simple exaggeration of figures
that the article was meant to be about: At
a news conference on Oct. 29, a reporter asked for the “tactical rationale”
for using cluster bombs, which human rights groups say can indiscriminately kill
large numbers of civilians. “Yes,
this is very simple,” replied Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. “On September 11, we lost over 5,000 people to an
intentional act. We are now prosecuting a global war on terrorism.” In
cautioning correspondents not to turn reports of civilian casualties in
Afghanistan into propaganda for the Taliban, CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson said:
“We must talk about how the Taliban85have harbored the terrorists responsible
for killing close to 5,000 innocent people.”30 The
prevalent code of ethics is more flexible than ever since Western warmongers
began to lay claim to “humanitarian” concerns. According to this twisted
morality it is thus highly immoral to try to put the crime of September 11 in
proportion by referring to the long list of crimes committed by the U.S.
government and cited in part by those who planned the attacks. Yet by contrast
it is supposed to be a moral imperative, according to the same code of ethics,
to put the criminal bombing of Afghanistan in proportion by incessantly
referring to the crime that it is supposedly a response to. A double standard is
at work here. This is the never-ending iniquity of every form of egocentrism,
whether ethnic or social. (GILBERT
ACHCAR teaches politics and international relations at the University of
Paris-VIII, and is a frequent contibutor to Le Monde Diplomatique. He is author
of several books on contemporary politics published in French, and editor of The
Legacy of Ernest Mande, Verso, 2000.) Bulatlat.com ============================================================== Notes See
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996). Stephen
Pollard, “America-Haters Revert to Type,” Wall Street Journal Europe,
January 25–26, 2002. Salman
Rushdie, “Fighting the Forces of Invisibility,” Washington Post,
October 2, 2001. Elissa
Gootman, “In Last Days for Comment, Victim’s Fund Is Under Fire,” New
York Times, January 7, 2002. Thomas
Connor, “Terror Victims Aren’t Entitled to Compensation,” Wall Street
Journal, January 6, 2002. Ibid.
“The families of federal employees received $100,000 approximately each.” George
W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,”
White House Office of the Press Secretary, Washington, September 20, 2001. Dimitri
Simes, “What War Means,” The National Interest, no. 65-S (special
issue), Thanksgiving 2001, pp. 35–36. AndrE9
Glucksmann, DostoEFevski E0 Manhattan (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002),
15–16. Naomi
Klein, “Game Over,” The Nation Online, September 15, 2001. Robert
Worth, “A Nation Defined by Its Enemies,” New York Times, February
24, 2002. Wickert
made the remark in an article published in early October 2001 in the magazine Max.
It brought down solemn reproofs on his head from the German “political
class,” and nearly cost him his job. He was obliged to give a humiliating
display of public contrition. Dana
Milbank, “Religious Right Finds Its Center in Oval Office,” Washington
Post, December 24, 2001. Elisabeth
Bumiller, “Recent Bushisms Call for a Primer,” New York Times,
January 7, 2002. John
Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign
Affairs 78, no. 3 (May/June 1999): 51. Ibid.,
51–52. Noam
Chomsky, “September 11 and Its Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?”
Public Lecture at the Music Academy, Chennai (Madras, India), November 10, 2001
<http://www.infoshop.org/news6/chomsky_india_lecture.html>. André
Versaille, “Retour sur le territoire des Autres,” foreword to GE9rard
Chaliand and Jean Lacouture, Voyage dans le demi-siE8cle: Entretiens croisE9s
avec AndrE9 Versaille (Brussels: Complexe, 2001), 12. The two last questions
are in parentheses in the original. Thomas
Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization,
revised and expanded edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Friedman,
“Terrorism Game Theory,” New York Times, September 25, 2001. Mario
Vargas Llosa, “Novelista en New York,” El PaEDs, November 25, 2001.
[“Out of Many, New York,” New York Times, December 11, 2001]. Editorial
by Jean-Marie Colombani, Le Monde, September 13, 2001 (actually published
on September 12). Sigmund
Freud, The Future of an Illusion, James Strachey trans. and ed., (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), 13. The
results of the study are available on the International Rescue Committee’s
website <www.theirc.org>. Barton
Gellman, “An Unequal Calculus of Life and Death,” Washington Post,
December 27, 2000. Glucksmann,
Dostoïevski à Manhattan, 184. Guy
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New
York: Zone, 1995), 145. Tony
Blair, “Prime Minister’s Speech on the Conflict in Afghanistan” to the
Welsh assembly, October 30, 2001. Daniel
Schneidermann, “Effort de guerre,” Le Monde, editorial in the TV
supplement, November 4–5, 2001. Shankar
Vedantam, “Discourse Does Not Match Falling Sept. 11 Death Toll,” Washington
Post, November 22, 2001. We want to know what you think of this article.
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