André Wiesner: Professional Writer • Editor  • Media Developer

Firebreak Studios

On September 11 the myth of American invincibility was toppled with inconceivable speed. Stirring in the after-shock is another myth: the end-times notion that history is heading for catastrophe. Andre Wiesner thinks about unthinkability.

 

Originally published: WorldOnline Tiscali, 2001

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Web of trust, Good versus Evil

 

By its nature, democracy creates vulnerability. Democracy says: We may disagree with one another, but we're not going to kill each other, this is not the pre-social state, envisaged by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, of war of each against all; I won't try to kill you if you don't try to kill me, and, in fact, I will assume that your intentions are honourable, because human nature is intrinsically good.

Democracy is predicated on a web of mutual trust, and it is in this web, this social fabric, that the unprecedented enormity of September 11 has left an unthinkable hole. It was, in part, for reasons of trust that those towers stood erect in the open, rather than being inverted and bunkered into the depths of a mining shaft, the only place, according to experts, where buildings could be invulnerable to attacks such as those of September 11.

             The attack, likened to Pearl Harbour (and we are still exploring the deficiency of this comparison), has thus also been described as an attack on democracy and civilization. Additionally, it has been called a war of good against evil. While it would remiss under the circumstances to begin querying America's unqualified claim to the status of goodness, it is clear that those responsible deserve the most extreme punishment and that theirs is an abomination against the tenets of every civilized creed.

             Nevertheless, such absolute, metaphysical categories should be used with caution - not because of the extremity of moral condemnation they express, but by virtue of the pitfalls to which their use may lead. Evil is a total, superhuman concept and the epithet runs the risk of both aggrandising the terrorists with powers in excess of what, as finite humans, they actually possess as well as instigating a witch-hunting mentality for which the presence of evil-doers multiplies without end, over and beyond the number of perpetrators originally involved.

             This establishes a formula for accomplishing the broader objectives of what the terrorists conceivably have had in mind from the start. Evil is seen everywhere, and total evil, as everyone knows, demands a total response; it is, however, in the nature of aggressive conflict for a mirror-effect to take place between the protagonists and antagonists, an insidious process well-described by the Greek concept "enantiodromia": the turning of each thing into its opposite. In such a perspective, good, through its struggle, corrupts into evil, while evil mutates into a thing seen as good, comes to enjoy the moral high-ground of victimhood.

             The terrorists are evil, yes, perhaps from one culturally conditioned view, but they are not superhuman beings. Unthinkably, they are people of flesh and blood, people operating from an internally coherent, if unthinkable, ideological scheme - it was certainly compelling enough to them to warrant their martyrdom and the deaths of thousands of other people. One ignores this dimension at one's peril: what is was they thought they were doing.

 

Ambushing the American bear

 

For it is hard to shake the sense that the attack was not a raid but an ambush, the laying of a trap further down the line into which the furious American bear would come blindly lumbering. The attack came in waves; the terrorists may well have been gibbering fanatics, but they were certainly highly rational in their execution of a sophisticated assault on multiple fronts. So surely it is likely that the inevitability of American retaliation would have been anticipated, not only as a fact of nature but perhaps as the pivotal moment of their strategy - and that this would be, in a sense, the next wave of their act of war?

Unlike Pearl Harbour, September 11 saw American infrastructure and freedom being used against itself - ultimately all the terrorists reportedly held in their hands in their attack on the super-power were mere knives. Is it unthinkable, then, that the very weight of American reprisals could similarly be turned against it in a kind of jiu jitsu?

             This is not to attribute divinely predictive powers to the attackers. It is to suggest that perhaps the intention was to throw fuel on the fire with no clear idea as to how exactly matters would proceed but with an assuredness that their gamble with their own and others' lives would pay off. It is to speculate that the aim has been to trigger off a chain of tit-for-tat events, to create certain exploitable conditions, to foment national coalitions and counter-alliances into being mobilised, to sow discord internationally and domestically among nations, pitting together races, religions, and ethnicities, hawks and doves - to bring matters to the boil, perhaps to the point of world war. Everyone loves a victim, and right now the world has thrown its arms around America in pity; the pattern of sympathies will look very different once America initiates reprisals.

             Is it alarmist and irresponsible to say these things? Is it unthinkable, in the feverish climate of the new millennium and in view of the Middle East powder-keg, to read into the attack omens and portents of a millenarian agenda at work - an agenda according to which one seeks to precipitate a purifying war, a fire from the sky that will burn away the Other and bring on the dawn of a new era?

 

Hostages in the sky

 

             We are all Americans, but when America decides its actions it goes behind closed doors and leaves us outside waiting anxiously, our fate uncertain. If the theory that the attack was motivated by mythical end-time millenarianism is correct, it follows that the terrorists were acting on a certain stereotype about America - the enraged redneck who rides out guns blazing, shooting first, asking questions later. Will the stereotype prove true and play into their hands? Will the angry victim become as irrational, as fanatical, as its aggressor is deemed to be? And is there an alternative to retaliation, which honour demands? A dilemma.

The terrorists aboard the hijacked planes presumably did not see their terrified hostages as innocent victims. For an end-times mindset the moral dichotomies are stark: none of the victims were innocent, all had blood on their hands. America itself has said that it will draw no distinction between terrorists and the host countries in which they harbour: no one is innocent, all are involved. This is a symptom of the mirror-effect between aggressors, and one can only trust that the mirror is not writ large, such that we come to know for ourselves what the last, unthinkable sensations of the passengers aboard those airliners were: America at the controls, all of us hostage, the world centre flashing inexorably into view.

 

* Being at war

 

This is but one future possibility among an infinity of others, all shapeable by human hands; one possibility that has taken flight from the hole in reality. For myself, I, too, am at war. Events are unfolding way above my head, I am one man, powerless. But I am at war. Yes, otherness has infiltrated normality, putting it strangely in question. What of my plans, my aspirations ... what if, what if? But I am at war, in the only arena I can hope to control: my personal circumstances.

             If the attack of September 11 was an attack on civilization, it was an attack by the forces of unmaking against the made world, against the infinity of practices that together constitute the ongoing evolution of civilization. Therefore, my every despondency, my every joyless foreboding, my every lapse from the projects I have chosen for myself is a concession to unmaking, to a hole in reality that wants to widen and engulf things. And therefore my every step down the road I am on, my every human encounter, is a victory against nothingness, driving it back inch by inch. I will not turn, I will not deviate. If perchance there is a fire in the sky, I am ready for it with a fire of my own.