oddly, with the 9/11 anniversary coming up, I found myself re-reading a bunch of the more interesting books i have on the subject and i thought i’d share some of them and see what people thought.


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Slavoj Zizek -- Welcome to the Desert of the Real


http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpretations/desertreal.html


It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted for only against the background of the borderline which today separates the digitalized First World from the Third World "desert of the Real." It is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.


Gore Vidal -- The Enemy Within


http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/EnemyWithin.html

`Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended . . . and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people . . .' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.
Post 9/11, thanks to the `domination of the few', Congress and the media are silent while the executive, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently been invited to join TIPS, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or . . . who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?

Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001

groups.colgate.edu/aarislam/susan.htm

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid.  Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war.  But everything is not O.K.  And this was not Pearl Harbor.  We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall.  A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush.  A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense.  But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality.  The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible.  The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.   

Christopher Hitchens -- It’s a Good Time for War

http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/090802_hitchens_entire.htm

In several of his demented sermons, in the days before he achieved global notoriety, Osama bin Laden made his followers a sort of promise. Defeating the Red Army in Afghanistan and bringing down the Soviet Union, he said, had been the hard part. The easy part - the destruction of the United States of America - was still to come. That task would be easy because America was corrupt and cowardly and rotten. It would not fight (as the debacle in Somalia had shown); it was a slave of the Jewish conspiracy; it cared only for comfort and materialism.
It involves no exaggeration to say that everything depends, and has depended, on proving bin Laden wrong. And not merely in proving him wrong, but in demonstrating exactly how wrong he is. (Or how wrong he was: I am one of those who do not expect to hear from him in person again.)