Jon Stewart On September 11th

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The 9/11 World And The Tentacles Of Neo-Liberalism

The Article: Global Executioner: Scales of Terror by Neil Smith by the Social Science Research Council.

The Text: The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre argued that insofar as human beings were constantly tempted to evil by their deepest passions, the maintenance of a peaceful social order ultimately depended on a single person, the executioner. It was much the same with nation states, according to Maistre, which “are born and die like individuals” and have a singular soul, a singular “race.” Reason was insufficient to combat passion, he believed, and the hiatus between them was inevitably colonized by power, whether between individuals or nations. The state takes on the role of executioner.

This conflation of scales – the assumption of a homology between individual and nation, a seamless continuity between individual and national behavior – Maistre shares with many Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thinkers alike, and it is foundational to the nation building project that accompanied the emergence of nation states in the eighteenth century. For want of a more sophisticated geography of global affairs, this ideological scale conflation retains a resonant appeal today in self-understandings of US foreign policy, whose justificatory discourse is full of recourse to nations as schoolyard bullies or “rogues.” It registers too in the defensive identification of individuals with government during times of conflict (“we should bomb Iraq”) in a country and a national culture that prides itself as anti-government.

This historical comparison is anything but idle. Maistre, a self-defined reactionary, was writing in the aftermath of the French revolution and reflecting on Robespierre’s self-defined role as executioner during the Reign of Terror, an episode that gave us the word “terrorism” to describe government rule by terror. As emerging bourgeois nation-states came to define themselves in opposition to the rule of terror, “terrorism” was increasingly redefined as non- governmental even anti-governmental, activity as in its routine epithetic use to describe postwar anti-colonial struggles, or the Red Brigade of the late 1960s. The more recent polemical discovery in the West of “state terrorism” has worked to isolate those states that combined two characteristics: domestically and perhaps internationally their governments were often (but not always) authoritarian, and economically they refused to be governed by the laws of the capitalist world market and its attendant political structures. Implicitly, however, the recognition of state terrorism reintroduces de Maistre’s sense of states as executioners.

Since September 11th when the World Trade Center was felled by hijacked commercial aircraft and a wing of the Pentagon similarly destroyed, and especially since October 7th when US retaliation against Afghanistan commenced (notwithstanding that none of the hijackers was Afghani), we have been living through a further dramatic evolution in the meaning of terrorism. Here too the question of conflated scales has been crucial. In one sense, the attack on the World Trade Center was strictly local insofar as the affected site itself measures no more than 16 acres. Yet this was obviously and equally a global event: the hijackers from several countries led multinational lives; victims were of 83 nationalities; the unfolding catastrophe was instantaneously broadcast on television screens around the world; the economic, political and cultural fallout has been global. It was not, however, a clearly defined national event in the moments immediately following the attacks. For all that they were on US soil, the targets were symbols of global as much as national economic and military power, and such obvious symbols of US national and cultural power as the Statue of Liberty, Hollywood and Disneyworld were not targeted. If indeed Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network are responsible, the perpetrators have no coherent national identity either.

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The Decade Of 9/11

The President ordered from Costco for the Osama Bin Laden watch party. Turkey pita sandwiches, cold shrimp, potato chips. The White House’s comfort food of choice to witness the end of the world’s most wanted man.

“Now entering Pakistan,” CIA director Leon Panetta narrated over the big screen. Joe Biden kneaded rosary beads. Hillary Clinton covered her face in shock. But President Obama looked on. Stone-faced.

“GERONIMO. EKIA.”

Geronimo. The code name for Osama Bin Laden.

EKIA. Enemy Killed In Action. Osama Bin Laden had been shot in the head.

A hushed silence. “We got him,” President Obama said finally, quietly. A pause. Then the backslapping, the high-fiving all around. “We got him.”

With that Obama grabbed a sandwich to go and marched upstairs to tell the nation.

Osama Bin Laden was irrelevant by 2011. Al Qaeda, decimated by Drone attacks from above, infighting from within, and reviled across most of the Muslim world. But the visceral joy was still there. That sneering, bearded mug of barbarity was shot in the head. By an American bullet.

The mystique died next. Turns out, Osama Bin Laden was not a hardened ascetic denouncing the West from a snow-capped mountain pass. Instead, he reclined on the third floor of a million dollar compound forty miles from Pakistan’s capital. He was a vainglorious media junkie who dyed his beard for his next video. He spent his time looking at a) himself on TV and b) porn.

Osama Bin Laden was protected not by legions of hardened Mujahideen fighters but two well-to-do Pakistanis and their children. A private family that kept to itself with no phone-lines. They burned their trash indoors lest anyone riffle through the refuse.

He spent his final days listening to the pitter patter of children’s feet. Buffalo crowning a yard over. And that cloudless night the incoming roar of four U.S. helicopters and then gunfire. He was shot once in the head, once in the back, before his body was unceremoniously dumped somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

A decade after September 11, Osama Bin Laden was not the savior of the Muslim world but its scourge. His name sneered, not chanted. A decade later, Osama Bin Laden was no longer the bearded totem of resistance to American imperialism. He was the crutch of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and the region’s other loathed strongman who argued they alone could safeguard against him.

A decade after 911, America rebuilt the World Trade Center taller than ever. It is the façade of Arab strongmen that tumbled. The rusted rebar and rubble expose depraved men clinging to fists full of petro-dollars. Their towering walls of brick and mortar no match for the pixellated Facebook walls of ones and zeroes. Social media did not topple Mubarack. The audacity of Tahrir Square did. But social media helped the rage go viral. Skyping, tweeting its way from Tunis to Hama. They were felled by students, lawyers, and bloggers who knew simply there must be another way.

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Guess What

I’m Not A Robot by Marina and the Diamonds.

Where Religion And Science Fly You

Just a carefully timed reminder.