Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

Remembering Sept. 11

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The West was guilty, less of anti-Islamism, but more of propping up, through its patronage and arms flows, the very regimes that could spawn Al-Qaeda.

THE MEANING of the astonishing events of September 11, 2001, remains profoundly indeterminate. The attack on the most glaringly conspicuous symbol of American capitalism, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and on the most potent emblem of the impenetrable recesses of its military might, the Pentagon, seemed replete with meaning: a foreboding of a new world at work. Non-state actors could unleash such massive violence, with such great precision to make even a superpower vulnerable. A world, comfortable with the idea that all that was left after 1989 was a mere clash of interests and the end of history, was awakened to a shock by the power of apocalyptic fundamentalisms. The event unfolded live around the world: bodies falling from the towers, trapped men and women frantically calling relatives on cell phones before they plunged to their horrible deaths, the spectacular collapse of the towers themselves, all seemed to make life itself at once puny and helpless.

September 11 seems to escape each attempt to fix its meaning. If this was an assault on America, the victims came from over 70 countries. If this was rage against American power, the presence of these victims only testified to the attraction of American ideals. For a moment, at least, many in the rest of the world did become Americans. If the idea was to diminish human agency by unleashing the will of god, the event only showed how powerful human beings are. A few determined men, who admittedly thought god was on their side, could produce a disaster of such massive proportions. And passengers in the fourth plane, heading towards an uncertain target in Washington, showed the potential of human action even in the face of disaster by causing their plane to crash before it inflicted more damage. If the intent was to bring a clash of civilisations to fruition it hardly succeeded. Yes, for a moment, there were glimpses of pan-Islamic solidarity. But soon the realisation dawned that the claim that Al-Qaeda was driven to its actions by some deep sense of empathy with the plight of the suffering Palestinians and Iraqis was the kind of ridiculous thinking that only those in the grip of fantasy could conjure up.

If anything, the real conflict that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 was not the conflict between the West and Islam. It was rather the realisation that authoritarian regimes and failing states, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, were propitious grounds for breeding chiliastic fantasies. The West was guilty, less of anti-Islamism, but more of propping up, through its patronage and arms flows, the very regimes that could spawn Al-Qaeda. The astonishing thing in retrospect was not how much pan-Islamic solidarity there was with Al-Qaeda, but how little effect it had.

But still we struggle to define the meaning of those events. We face a dilemma that we have not quite overcome. To keep calling the events of September 11 simply evil seemed to shed little light on them. Worse still, a single-minded focus on the collapsed twin towers seemed to many to risk removing from view the many complex forms of suffering which the application of American power itself had often produced. Yet, not to call the events evil, not to acknowledge without reservation that the attacks were a form of mass murder, prompted by hatred of a way of life, risked relativising them. In the guise of "explaining" the events we risked justifying them. Both impulses were tempting. On the one hand we wanted to resist seeing the world as being neatly divided between forces of darkness and beacons of light. On the other, we were trying to "explain" the events so that we could better understand the world. But both impulses could easily turn into ways of denying that what happened was evil. That other evils exist as well did nothing to detract from the fact that this was mass murder. And while injustice around the world may have provided a propitious ground for breeding terrorists, that injustice did not justify this attack; indeed, it scarcely explained it.

The trends that September 11 crystallised are old and familiar. The discourse of sovereignty remerged with a vengeance. The application of state power in matters of defence acquired new intensity. From the United States to Russia, "reason of state" became the rallying cry against assorted fundamentalisms and movements for self-determination alike. This is why the fight against terrorism could never quite take on the universal dimensions many hoped it would. The terrorists one named and defined were still largely governed by national imperatives as India rapidly found out. The Americans, with world approval, got rid of the Taliban inflicting serious and yet unaccounted for casualties in the process. And the Americans will, soon enough, turn their attention to Osama bin Laden's real target: Saudi Arabia. Pakistan had to overnight change its stripes, but the net result was familiar: a military dictatorship propped up by American dollars to suit American ends. But it is important not to over-attribute power to September 11.

The war on Afghanistan may have given the green light to Israel's unconscionable conduct in Palestine, but Ariel Sharon was entirely a home-grown phenomenon. India sought to gain recognition for its own war on terrorism but both its causes and consequences are decidedly sub-continental in origin.

Ironically, the event that was supposed to have changed the world changed America the most. Its carefree conduct of internal security gave way to a methodical anxiety that is still palpable. The land where civil liberty was a religion began to have departments such as "homeland security". Its Attorney-General began to act more as a commandant fighting a war than as a custodian of the liberties enshrined in the Constitution. In a comparative perspective, this means mostly that America is catching up with the rest of the world. But how enduring these changes will be remain to be seen. In the short run, however, the Bush Administration is making exactly the mistake that most genuine admirers of American ideals hoped it would not. It is trying to compensate for America's vulnerability by trying to reassert the myth of American invincibility. This means unilateral policing of the entire globe, a deep suspicion of multilateral institutions and a great belief in America's power to control the world. To conduct a foreign policy on this premise is to re-inscribe the one illusion that September 11 effectively shattered forever. This was the illusion that any power could make itself militarily invulnerable to the ravages of a determined, but possessed small group of people.

If, in the name of combating terrorism, America overreaches its power to the point where its mere being becomes a threat, a self-defeating cycle of violence will no longer be far away. If September 11 was meant to be an assault on civilisation, an assault on a way of life, it is all the more important for the civilised to preserve the distinction between civilisation and barbarism in their responses. The real meaning of September 11 will become apparent only when it becomes clear whether America will live up to its ideals, or whether it will let the arrogance of power, as has happened in the past, get the better of both an enlarged prudence and its finest aspirations. The signs are not good. But then, as Chou -En-Lai said of the French Revolution, it might still be too soon to tell.

(The writer is Professor of Philosophy and of Law and Governance, JNU.)

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News: Front Page | National | Southern States | Other States | International | Opinion | Business | Sport | Miscellaneous |
Advts: Classifieds | Employment | Obituary |

Stories in this Section

• No end to the wrangle
• Modi's sinister designs
• Remembering Sept. 11
• Crisis in the handloom sector
• The normalisation of America
• Bailing out UTI
• Why Thackeray?
• Dispute and mediation
• Rats as companions
• Unnumbered coaches

Copyright © 2002, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu