Interesting Commentary on 9/11

["Mad" Miles]

https://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/s...869353,00.html


On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men

Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise

Slavoj Zizek
Monday September 11, 2006
The Guardian


Two Hollywood films mark 9/11's fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.
This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda". The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one's government: when under attack, one just has to do one's duty.

This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August's alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events - where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves - open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a "fire in the minds of men", the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." What Bush didn't grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire. · Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, [email protected]

[Hot Compost]

i'm surprised there is so little commentary about 9-11 here.

it is the pretext for a new Cold War, the reason cited for US involvement in Iraq & Afghanistan, the reason cited for the Patriot Act - and the reason for all the policies similar to the Patriot Act that we now live with in the US & around the world.

it is very clear that the US government had dozens of warnings that the week of 9-11 was a real bad time to get on an airplane. they could have done as they did in December 2002 - grounded the flights. (in December 2002, flights out of LAX to France were grounded because of concerns about an attempted hijacking of those planes.)

the SF Chronicle reported that Willie Brown received a phone call warning him not to fly that week. BBC media reported that Salman Rushdie received a similar notification. yet the official investigation into 9-11 called neither Willie Brown nor Salman Rushdie to ask them - who called you, how did they know, why didn't they tell the rest of us ?

an investigator named Paul Thompson dug into this subject and found dozens of such warnings were delivered (in the range of 50-100).

https://www.historycommons.org/proje...ct=911_project

see "Key warnings" (90+) and "Warning signs" (390+).

the US government has zero credibility when they say they didn't know about 9-11 beforehand.

Yes, the Bush-Cheney administration let 9-11 happen on purpose.

admittedly, the incident and its repercussions are so ugly that it's understandable to not want to think about it - there's nothing about it that makes anyone feel good.

for people that are willing to dig into it, these are the most reliable resource i have found, in addition to Paul Thompson's work linked to above -

Jim Hoffman's work on the demolition of the buildings. Simply, if you drop a piece of concrete 500 feet, it doesn't normally turn into concrete before it hits the ground. yet that's what happened when the World Trade Center buildings fell down or were demolished.

https://911research.wtc7.net/


Mark Rabinowitz is a historian in Oregon. His website ~

https://www.oilempire.us


Lork Voldemort - he who shall not be named - the journalist that some fear more than any other. the man who had the guts to investigate 9-11, came to the conclusion that the US government made it happen on purpose - and then dropped the subject after 2004 when it became clear that no one wanted to talk about it ... besides Cynthia McKinney.

Michael C. Ruppert.
https://www.fromthewilderness.com/

for people who are willing to confront one of the ugliest episodes in human history, i suggest Mike's book, "Crossing the Rubicon".