Volume 54, Number 4

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Harry Magdoff, John Bellamy
Foster, Robert W. McChesney, Paul Sweezy

September 2002

The Clash of Barbarisms
by
Gilbert Achcar

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ANNOUNCING A UNIQUE MONTHLY
REVIEW TOUR

Notes From
the
Editors

I. Capitalism’s Twin Crises:
Economic and Environmental
by Fred Magdoff

II. Capitalism and
Ecology:
The Nature of the Contradiction
by John Bellamy
Foster

A Student-Worker Alliance is
Born
by
Michael D. Yates

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.

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.

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.

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 Mandel (Verso,
2000).

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