Postmodern Approach to the September 11 Attack - Essay Example

Postmodern Approach to the September 11 Attack 2006 There has been a spate of books released after the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers in New York. While some books have attempted to analyze the politics behind the incident, others have studied international relations and global policies of the United States that resulted in the hatred towards the nation provoking the act of terror. There is an overwhelming number of books written from all sorts of jingoistic, political and strategic points on the macabre 9/11 attack. Some books have also tried to supply the confidential stories of Al-Qaeda and the Bush-administration. These books generally stress on the motives behind the attack and the consequences thereafter (like ravaging Afghanistan and Iraq with aerial bombing), some placing it in the political context of post-Cold War era, some from the angle of Francis Fukuyama’s much debated “new world order” after the “end of history”. Postmodern analysts, however, have studied the incident from a sociological perspective. Analyzing the gruesome tragedy of 9/11 in the United States, Benjamin R. Barber in the book Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (2003), condemns rampant “globalization” as being responsible for the incident. According to him, globalization has exploited and ill-treated “children in war, pornography, poverty, and sex tourism”. Children have suffered and been picked in the “raging ethnic and religious wars”. Enduring the brunt of “poverty, disease and starvation”, children have become vulnerable to be turning up into terrorists. Books like Jihad vs. McWorld are an exception. None have so remarkably explained the incident as an aftermath of a war between two worlds. In many ways, Barber’s book, which was first published in 1995 serves as a forewarning to the attack makes us to question the apparently unavoidable march “of a secularized, free-market, commercialized and materialist McWorld “into a complacent postmodernity”. Barber’s major argument is that the modern response to the clash between Jihad and McWorld — a new stress on the conflict between the West and alien cultures pointed out by Samuel Huntington in his article “Clash of Civilizations”(1993) — cannot, be explained by techno-political expansion of globalization alone but “must entail a commitment to democracy and justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to cultural expansionism and global markets” (pp. xi-xii). Democracy, according to him is the means through which the clash between McWorld and the fanatical Jihads can be steer clear of (p. xiii). Commenting on the attack from a post-modern oulook, Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2002) defined the attack on WTO as an 'absolute event'. He has tried to assess the global terror evoked by al Qaeda not from the typical study from clash of value and mores but from “techno-political” growth of globalization. Accodring to him: “This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself. (p. 11). In the essay, Baudrillard in scathing language, says that the attack has now lost its symblic meaning. What lingers are those confused, “counter-phobic” attempt to expel the evil. Without such an intense involvement the upshots of 9/11 could not have been the way it has been, he ponders. The terrorists, he thinks, worked on such figurative tactics. On a second thought, Baudrillard doubts whether the terrorists at all predicted the crumple of the Twin Towers. Their protest was more of symbolic value—a protest against system, first by ruining it and then themselves as well. They wanted to show the world the defenselessness of a seemingly powerful system torn by its internal vulnerability. The more the system is globally focused as to function as the only point of authority the more it tends to be defenseless at that particular point. Baudrillard ites the earlier example of a Filipino hacker who could just stop the worldwide electronic, with his laptop, infecting with the “I love you” virus. In case of 9/11, there were eighteen kamikazes (the suicide attackers), who eventually succeeded in the perilous journey to stop the world with the help of sophisticated technology added - that is death multiplied by technological efficiency and the fearlessness of suicide. Here, he comes with a daring question that challenge the game called globalization. In an uni-polar world where the question of authority is settled by intense concentration of technology and total ideological dominion, how could one modify, shift and change the situation except in taking resort to terrorism? It is the system, he irreverently comments, that itself has resulted the grounds ready for this atrocious warp. It is an unfair game where majority of players are forbidden to change the rule and only one is left with options. The rest have to abide by the wild new rules since the stakes are violent. The excess from the part of a ruthless system, obstinately against any shift of position as caused the band of terrorists a way out to make the system answerable. Terrorism, the author says, is an act that makes a ruthless system to listen to, instead of bossing over global situations by an obstinate authority in a broad platform—either from an individual or from group/ generalize exchange system; any singularity (whether group, ethnicity, individual or traditions). For him, 9/11 is nothing but Terror against terror. It is not the question of religious ideology or basis, not even an Islamic one that is behind it. It does not dream of changing the world, it just wants to “radicalize” it through force and self- dedication. Terrorism is an all pervasive in the new world order, stresses Baudrillard. It can act as serving the purpose of the victim and the victimized like what happens in every control and nothing can define and demarcate it, being present in the very heart of the culture that combats it — the same as what happened in western societies today. The bioagents that produce it also make ways to fight against it by spontaneously killing it and the other way round. It’s an inevitability of its own power and that terrorism here acts as the shake of this noiseless setback. Whereas Baudrillard evaluates the inter-relation between myth and reality, the popular misconception and the hidden reality shrouding the events of 9/11, Paul Virilio in Ground Zero (2002) set the terror attacks within broader domain—from the recent techno savvy association to the depth of cultural lineage. Virilio has aversions to the high- handedness of American culture more intense than that is felt in Baudrillard. Virilio considers the history of western society since the Renaissance to be ruinous-- almost completely. Because of Protestantism and the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, he thinks brought about an "egocentric revolution" a kind of love for insanity pushing it to faster technological advance. Virilio considers modern reproductive technologies as advances showing revulsion of biological parenthood. He denounces the veneration of technology and liberal ideas of freedom. Virilio thinks that the cult of immortality enunciated by through technological advances has wiped out the social aspects of time and space. He applies his ideas on the issue of 9/1 to say these sorts of technology craze have developed in to militarizing all areas of life and regards 9/11 as a growth within already existing militarized zone in social values. Reality TV, to him, is a "direct successor" to the Gulf and Kosovo wars and a forerunner to 9/11. Virilo considers the fear of anthrax after Gulf war as state-of-the-art stage of a technological descent. Overall, he emphasizes the shift from total to occasional war against as an elongation of cause and effect relation in armed technology advances. Virilio finds that the terrorist attacks show the loss of closeness that both the image and the fear that can endanger anyone from anyplace at any time. Virilio's ideas point out that he, like Baudrillard, discards ideas implying that 9/11 was an attack from inside and that the USA had to endure the torments that it was responsible for the shaping up. For Virilio, the multinationals and rich leaders of Arab society are as much in love with technological destruction as the United States, and the suicide attacks show the same kind of technological obsession that is manifested in the western societies. Virilio also, avoids the so-called theories of McWorld but with a certain belief on class divisions. He contends that the "global subproletariat" is the maneuvered victims of Muslim bigotry (66). They are the targets either of bombs or of aid – the two extremes within which they are tied to. Just as terrorism and capitalism are the fall-outs of the same techno- flights to prosperity, so also are bombs and aid. They are identical upshots of the same ruined sense of liberal democracy. Virilio differs from Baudrillard in the sense that he does not think that 9/11 has made an opening of hope, but he banks on the world's dislodged proletariat as an priceless cue to the contra- reality of revolutionary fight (Spencer, Attacked from Within). John Gray (2003: 1-2.) in his study Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, says that Al Qaeda is a “by-product of globalization” and that the remarkable thing about the organization is the “projection of a privatized form of organized violence worldwide”. He thinks that contrary to the populist notion Al Qaeda does not emulate much the medieval hired guns but “the revolutionary anarchists of late-nineteenth century Europe”. He it not that thousnds of innocent civilians were wiped out by the terroist attack on WTO.. The enormous shape of the attack “destroyed the West’s ruling myth” that modernity is “a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign”. He says: As societies become more modern, so they become more alike. At the same time they become better. Being modern means realising our values—the values of the Enlightenment, as we like to think of them (p. 1). Gray maintains that such types of attacks are “a modern invention”(one can say, postmodern as well). According to his through and careful analysis “[t]here are many ways of being modern, some of them monstrous” and he tracks three modern projects—Positivism, Communism and Nazism. All three projects defined themselves as modern and as the basis of universal civilization”. He thinks “that only American-style ‘democratic capitalism’ is truly modern, and that it is destined to spread everywhere. As it does, a universal civilization will come into being, and history will come to an end” (p. 3). He believes that running parallel to this democratic capitalism’ is the movement Al-Qaeda stands for --- modern albeit branded as medieval by the west. It apparently poses to be anti-west albeit, shaped by very techniques of the West. Gray contends: “Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All are convinced they can remake the human condition. If there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it”. He also disparages the other modern myths like science and humanity discarding the later as “a dusty remnant of religious faith” (p. 4). The postmodern European system of governance claims to be rationally clear, jointly supervised and financially co-dependent to its seemingly forward march by democratic means. Likewise terrorism has also acquired its different hues and shades—assort of post-modern departure from its early modern forms. Logically the concept of an European state can not get into fighting against one another. But this is limited as long as these have to tackle problems within themselves, that is within the boundaries of” civilization”. Otherwise, things are to be settled in different ways, as those geo-political disorders originate, according to the western sense, from pre-modern domains of lawlessness --weak states run by mafia chiefs, drug lords or terrorists. There are people like Cooper who ask the help and intrusion of the modern or postmodern states. Facing post-modern terrorism the world order has tactfully created a new role for them –an old wine in a new bottle, that is (Laqueur, 1996). As it happens, postmodern terrorists are less dreamy and more sensible if one compares them to those who belonged to the flower power of the 1960s and 70s. While Marxist-Leninist revolutionary groups still exist in various parts of the world, their idea has shifted from anarchism of the extreme left to the anarchism of the extreme right, the passage from the left to the extreme right, the essentialists and also to the rather racial and nationalists yet at the same time sharing plans and strategies in a borderless world. It is intercontinental, sincerely global, extremely on the move, and techno-savvy. It makes the most use of information technology for plans and programs and to closely observe are “intelligent networks” able to conduct observation, deco others as well as the group members, it can intrude and hack into systems and databases. Cyber-terrorism is a reality one has to reckon with. Postmodern terrorism is also showy: the terrorists are well aware that viewers glued to the TV are watching them. They want to get the best coverage from media. During their attack they take resort to light weapons, but with the intention of attacking the nuclear instalments and in the same br Militarily, postmodern terrorism avails itself of the latest developments in light weaponry and at the same time poses a threat to state nuclear munitions . . They believe in being “high-tech” yet small, are also in the know of biotech and its use as weapons of mass destruction. Postmodern terrorism is susceptible to money matter and resource mobilization they often work as cohorts with drug mafias. Of all the post-modern traits, the most remarkable, perhaps is the division of labor in terrorism—running front office and back room services in most cases. While the front office activities are restricted within the realm of politics/business/educational and social services the more covert arms maintain the militant activities (Laqueur, 1996). Most of all, postmodern terrorism is multifaceted: sometimes stirs the vexed school boys’ complaints against their class friends; the Christian fundamentalist attacking an abortion clinic; the computer hacker nearby; and, worldwide, state- funded terrorism (Peters, 2004). Thus, global terrorism is nothing but the increasing divergence of the rich and the poor of the world, that of the east and the west. It is a fallout of globalization that has provoked hatred for the powerful. Particularly in a unipolar world, in which America rules the world’s economy and politics, a growing number of people in all parts of the world are antagonized. At the same time, technological advances and its accessibility has meant that there are more avenues in which the hatred can be released through acts of terrorism. Works Cited Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy. London, Corgi, 2003 Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, retrieved from http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html Baudrillard, J. The Spirit Of Terrorism And The Requiem For The Twin Towers, trans. C. Turner, London & New York: Verso, 2002 Gray, J., Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, London: Faber & Faber, 2003 Laqueur, W. “Postmodern Terrorism: New Rules for an Old Game” Foreign Affairs, September/October. Accessed 20 October, 2003, retrieved from http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1996/pomo-terror.htm Peters, Michael A. Postmodern Terror in a Globalized World, 2004, retrieved from http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v4.1/peters.html Spencer, Nick, Attacked from Within, book review of Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, retrieved from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/anniversary Virilio, Paul Ground Zero, Trans. Chris Turner Verso, 2002. Read More