[MannoFr]

Five years after 9/11: the search for meaning goes on

More than anything, the attacks on New York and Washington exposed the moral disorientation and bewilderment of the West.

Frank Furedi

The day after 9/11, a writer for the Los Angeles Times predicted that the ‘next big thing’ would not be ‘some new technological innovation or medical breakthrough’ but ‘is likely to be fear’ (1). Others said 9/11 marked the beginning of a New Age of Terror. Many insisted that 9/11 changed everything. ‘America will never be the same again’, observed Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the Senate, adding that ‘the changes are visceral and they are real’ (2). There is a sense in Britain too that terrorism has changed people’s lives. A recent BBC poll found that one important reason why many people think Britain is a worse place to live now than it was 20 years ago is because of terrorism.


And yet, although something very important clearly happened on 11 September 2001, it is far from clear what has changed as a result. Most people in the West have not directly experienced the past five years as a New Age of Terror. In the US, for example, there have been many terror alerts but no one has died in a known terrorist incident since September 2001. Nor does anxiety about terrorism monopolise people’s fearful imaginations. As was the case before 9/11, we continue to live in a culture concerned with a multitude of fears. Anxiety about terror competes with fear of crime, incivility, global warming and various other routine, ambient worries. For most people, everyday routine has changed very little, if at all.

Nonetheless, the perception that 9/11 represented an historical turning point is significant. It is also striking that people find it difficult to give a coherent and plausible explanation for this watershed event. It is this inability to account for apparently historical changes that is the most noteworthy thing about our post-9/11 world. In fact, what really marks out the post-9/11 era is not so much that it represents a new phase of global violence, but rather the palpable sense of moral disorientation and bewilderment in the Western cultural imagination. This sense of confusion was strikingly expressed in US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s warning in 2002 about ‘unknown unknowns’: terrorist threats we don’t even know about. His speculation about the ones ‘we don’t know we don’t know’ represented a rarely expressed acknowledgement that Western leaders find it difficult to give a name to what we fear.


This idea that the world faces ‘unknown’ problems is not confined to Washington. The UK Intelligence and Security Committee’s Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 contains a section titled ‘Reassessing “the unknown”’. It cites a leading British security official who notes that, ‘[As we] have said before July, there are probably groups out there that we do not know anything about, and because we do not know anything about them we do not know how many there are’ (3). Time and again, the report emphasises just how little is known about the threat to Britain. It openly admits that the security services lack the basic capacity to interpret or make sense of today’s terror threat.


Often, ‘unknown unknowns’ are said to be the outcome of a failure of intelligence or lack of information about global threats. ‘You can’t analyse intelligence that you don’t have – and our case studies resoundingly demonstrate how little we know about some of our highest priority intelligence targets’, concluded an official report into the intelligence capability of the US (4). However, the problem of ‘unknown unknowns’ is not so much a failure of intelligence as a profound inability to interpret or make sense of the problems facing society. Western societies do not know less than they knew before 9/11 – but knowledge, past and present, cannot be used effectively without a framework of meaning. That is why Western elites seem unconfident that the existing stock of human knowledge can help to interpret events and throw light on the problems we face.


Some of the questions raised in the post-9/11 era – such as ‘why do they hate us?’ or ‘what do they want?’ or ‘how can they be so evil?’ – expose a certain cultural naivety. But they also highlight the difficulty we have in endowing contemporary events with meaning. From the standpoint of the traditional vocabulary of public life, many events today do not make sense.

The real unknown


The most important unknown is what society stands for. Many have noted that Western governments are not very good at spelling out who is the enemy in the war on terror. But what is often overlooked is that public officials also seem at a loss to explain who we are. That is why the ‘unknown’ threats posed by an unimaginable enemy have not helped to forge a strong sense of common identity or resistance. Whatever US president George W Bush has done, he has not succeeded in mobilising a powerful base of support for the war on terror. His critics, who habitually accuse him of manipulating the politics of fear, often fail to realise that there is very little substance behind his periodic outbursts of flag-waving.

The absence of any genuine enthusiasm for the war on terror in the US is not simply symptomatic of war weariness; it also shows up the lack of meaning the conflict has for the general public. In such circumstances, it’s not surprising that there is not even any consensus on the facts about what happened on 9/11. A significant section of the American public even questions who bears responsibility for the atrocity. In August 2006, a survey of 1,010 adults found that 36 per cent of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted the 9/11 attacks, or took no action to stop them, so that the US could justify going to war in the Middle East.

According to this Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, a significant number of respondents refuse to believe the official version of events (5).

That more than a third of the American public buys into various conspiracy theories about 9/11 illustrates the crisis of meaning afflicting the West in the post-9/11 world. Today, as in the past, the embrace of conspiracy theories is motivated by a sense of incomprehension towards the workings of the world. Typically, the rise of conspiracy theories mirrors the decline of any sense of causality regarding who is responsible for what; it also signifies the erosion of official authority.


This lack of clarity about what the West stands for also influences events in Iraq and Afghanistan. If soldiers are successfully to pursue their campaign they need to know what they are fighting for and against. If this is ‘unknown’, a military campaign can become fatally flawed. So it isn’t surprising to discover that coalition troops in Iraq will now get ‘values training’ in ‘core warrior’ values. Peter Chiarelli, the No2 US general in Iraq, argued that troops must take ‘time to reflect on the values that separate us from our enemies’ (6).


If the experience of the past three decades is anything to go by, it is unlikely that training courses will do very much to enlighten coalition troops about their core values. Indeed, ‘diversity training’, ‘the citizenship curriculum’, ‘sensitivity courses’ and other values-oriented schemes that flourish in institutions across the West are entirely symbolic and ritualistic. They symbolise the absence of any common purpose or value, and advertise the fact that in Western societies people gain their values through training courses rather than through the experience of life.

Struggle for ideas


Probably the most significant and unexpected legacy of 9/11 is the decline of the moral authority of the West. Since 9/11, the West has felt self-consciously defensive and discredited. In contrast to the experience of the Cold War, it has not been able to establish itself on the moral high ground. Instead, it feels internally insecure and increasingly lacks domestic legitimacy for its action.


As one report on the state of British public diplomacy noted, ‘Effective policies for dealing with these new security challenges are quite different from those of the Cold War, and publics require much more active persuasion’. It added that ‘responses to the threat of nuclear war or Russian invasion had much broader and less questioning support than do responses to the threat of terrorist attack, which are coloured by deep popular scepticism about pre-emptive wars and about the principle of regime change for “terrorism-sponsoring” states’ (7). The relatively weak public support for the war on terror suggests that, for a variety of reasons, the short-term legacy of 9/11 is a decline in social capital. If Washington and London are indeed pursuing a self-conscious strategy of the ‘politics of fear’, it’s not working.

[tgs]

The inability of the Western elites to give meaning to their global policies means they are losing the battle of ideas with their own publics. This is most evident in Western governments’ estrangement from the Muslim populations in their societies. Surveys continually reveal that secular and liberal values have a feeble influence on Europe’s Muslim communities. Despite numerous initiatives built around ‘dialogue’ and ‘multiculturalism’, a recent survey suggested that Muslims in Britain are the most anti-Western in Europe (8). Blair’s critics claim that this is a result of Britain’s involvement in Iraq. However, such a criticism overlooks the wider mood of animosity towards the West that prevails throughout most of the Islamic world.


For a brief moment, many observers believed that 9/11 would represent a rallying point and provide the West with a sense of mission. However, in the absence of a coherent system of meaning, the West struggles to promote its own values; instead, it relies on tawdry advertising and marketing. In October 2001, advertising executive Charlotte Beer was appointed US secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her mission was to gain the assistance of Madison Avenue public relations firms to help rebrand and sell the US to a hostile Muslim world. This focus on improving ‘the image’ indicated that the US was not prepared to engage in a serious battle of ideas.


In Britain, too, impression management is the order of the day. British public diplomacy relies on loyal moderate Muslim leaders to curb the extremists. According to one British foreign minister, Lord Triesman, ‘international Islamic scholars are undertaking a series of roadshows to towns and cities with important Muslim communities to counter the extremist message’ (9). This outsourcing of the fight against the extremists springs from the idea that there is little point in promoting a positive vision of Western society. In February 2003, Donald Rumsfeld asked ‘are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists everyday than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?’ (10) The evidence strongly suggests that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘No’. Experience shows that, without a clear message, the kind of advertising techniques currently being used by Western officials will prove ineffective.


Catastrophes, wars and major historical events have important material, geopolitical and economic consequences. They also challenge a society’s capacity to make sense of the unexpected, and its belief in its own way of life. In material terms, 9/11 was a minor incident: economic disruption soon gave way to an upturn, and in terms of daily routine people showed that they possessed the resilience to carry on. For most of us, it was business as usual. However, 9/11 exposed and brought to the surface the difficulty Western society has in giving meaning to its way of life. Ever since the end of the Cold War, this problem was bound to force the West to account for itself in positive terms; it took 9/11 to force Western elites to acknowledge that they regard their futures as an ‘unknown unknown’. As a result, little today can be taken for granted. That is probably what people really mean when they claim that 9/11 changed everything.

The debate continues:


Read Nadine Strossen on liberty after 9/11, Michael Fitzpatrick on why al-Qaeda are spoilt rich kids, Fasial Devji on how 9/11 came to us from the future and much more exclusively on spiked here.

Frank Furedi is the author of The Politics of Fear. Visit his website here.


(1) David Rieff, ‘Fear and Fragility Sound a Wake-up Call’, Los Angeles Times, 12 September 2001
(2) A Speech Delivered by Senator Dianne Feinstein on the floor of the Senate, 11 September 2003
(3) HMSO (2006), Intelligence and Security Committee Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005, Cm 6785, HMSO: London
(4) ‘The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Report to the President of the United States, 31 March 2005, Washington DC
(5) See ‘A third of US public believe 9/11 conspiracy theory’, Scripps Howard News Service, 2 August 2006
(6) ‘Troops will get “values training”’, USA Today, 2 June 2006
(7) Leonard, M and Small, A, with Rose, M (2005), British Public Diplomacy in the ‘Age of Schisms’, The Foreign Policy Centre: London, p11
(8) See ‘Poll shows Muslims in Britain are most anti-western in Europe’, Guardian, 23 June 2006
(9) See speech by British Foreign Minister Lord Triesman, ‘Britain’s New Approach to Public Diplomacy: Promoting a Vision’, FCO 7 June 2006-08-21
(10) Cited in Joseph S Nye, ‘The Decline of America’s Soft Power’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004, vol.83, issue 3, p17

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/1603/

[tgs]

See also

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/1602/

spiked has invited writers, thinkers and activists to outline what they think has been the most enduring legacy – if any – of the attacks on New York and Washington five years ago. We want to hear your views, too. This page will be updated over the next week; to contribute, email Brendan O’Neill at Brendan.ONeill@spiked-online.com.
John Ralston Saul
Julian Baggini
Neil Davenport
James Woudhuysen
Brendan O’Neill
Nadine Strossen
Michael Fitzpatrick
Faisal Devji
Jeffrey Rosen
Michael Bentley
Norman Levitt
Daniel Ben-Ami
Richard Koch
Wendy Kaminer
Michael Baum
Ceri Dingle
Bill Durodie
Phillip Blond

[Drugmachine]

Tuesday 5 September 2006

These theories are 'plane stupid' – but popular

At first, conspiracy-mongering about 9/11 was the preserve of isolated fantasists. Now, five years later, it is positively in vogue.
Emily Hill

As soon as there is a new flashpoint spark in the war on terror, someone somewhere will claim that said flashpoint was an ‘inside job’ and it’s all a big conspiracy. The more 9/11 recedes into history, the more speculation there is about what happened on that day. After the initial shock and awe of the attacks on New York and Washington, there was a handful of websites and cranky magazines that indulged the witterings of isolated fantastists. Yet now conspiracy-mongering about 9/11 is in vogue. If conspiracy theories can take the temperature of society, then it seems we’re all afflicted with anxiety sickness, flaring to paranoia in sections.


A 2003 poll for the German newspaper Die Zeit found that 19 per cent of those surveyed believed the American government might have ‘commissioned’ the 9/11 attacks, rising to a third among those aged under 30. A recent article in The Times (London) – which argued that ‘you don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to see that the official account published by the 9/11 Commission is full of gaps’ – rehearsed a list of fishy things about 9/11: ‘the absence of Mayday distress signals, the failure to find the black-box flight recorders for the WTC aircraft, the apparent disappearance of the wreckage, the failure to carry out a full engineering investigation into why the towers collapsed so fast, and the failure to scramble military aircraft to intercept the hijacked aircraft.’


Books including Thierry Meyssan’s The Horrifying Fraud and Mathias Brockers’ Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories and the Secrets of 9/11 have become worldwide bestsellers. Meyssan’s book propagated the increasingly popular notion that an aeroplane did not plough into the Pentagon, and thus the building must have been attacked by a missile or something similar. As the Times writer asked: how could a ‘jetliner with a 124ft wingspan…leave a hole only 14ft wide in the outer wall?’


Yet if you want a truly comprehensive account of how 9/11 was all a big conspiracy, trawl the internet. Here, among the many thousands of 9/11 conspiracists, you will frequently come across the argument that ‘all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as self-evident….’


Most of these ‘truths’, however, are still stuck at point ridiculous. The conspiracy website Killtown has an itemised list of 231 problems with the official account of 9/11. At number 14 is the apparently telltale sign that Salman Rushdie was banned from US airspace on 3 September 2001. At number 36 it is explained that the ‘Twin Towers were hated, poorly designed money-losers subsidised by the State and weren’t torn down before because of expensive asbestos removal’; so apparently ‘9/11 benefited the owners by efficiently destroying the complex in a way that they didn’t have to pay for’.


In a section titled ‘Fundamentalist Muslims “gone wild”’, Killtown argues that in May 2001, ‘Several alleged hijackers [were] seen at Las Vegas Strip clubs; several also patronised Nardone’s Go-Go Bar; Flight 77 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi hang out at Cheetah’s nude bar; Sept 10 – Atta and two Arab men allegedly spend hundreds [of dollars] on drinks and lap dances at FL strip club the Pink Pony.’ On the evening before the attacks, ‘Four alleged hijackers spend the night looking for prostitutes in Boston’ while ‘Hamza Alghamdi watched a porno in his hotel’. Here, speculation about what the hijackers got up to in their final few days bizarrely turns into speculation about whether they could have carried out the attacks, which then, of course, turns into speculation about who did carry out the attacks. One piece of speculation leads to another and another….


Other theories are stuck at point ‘here we go again’. Various websites claim that ‘Jews control the world’ and ‘America has become the Zionists’ whore’. Killtown claims that, shortly after 9/11, Mossad agents were ‘caught celebrating while filming themselves with the WTC burning in the background and [were] later arrested and found with boxcutters, multiple foreign passports, maps linking them to the attack’. Apparently they were also found with ‘explosives’ and a ‘large amount of cash in their white van’. There is, of course, no evidence for any of this. But who needs evidence when you have bright red headlines and lots of exclamation marks?!!!! With such colorful, capitalised emphasis, it must be true.


Some conspiracy theorists claim there weren’t any hijackers at all. Carol A Valentine, describing herself as the curator of the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum, tries to prove that ‘the planes were being controlled by Global Hawk technology’ by applying what she considers to be a bit of common sense:


‘We are asked to believe that the culprits took four jet airliners, with four sets of crew and four sets of passengers – armed with (depending on the news reports you read) “knives”, “plastic knives” and boxcutters. Given the crazy and unpredictable nature of humans, why would they try this bold plan when they were so poorly armed? A lady’s handbag – given the weight of the contents most women insist on packing – is an awesome weapon. I know, I have used mine in self-defence. Are we to believe that none of the women had the testosterone to knock those flimsy little weapons out of the hijackers’ hands…? Your ordinary everyday New York mugger would never take the chances that our culprits took.’


Some go so far as to claim that the phone messages made by the flight passengers on 9/11 to their families were faked to make it seem like hijackings had taken place. A conspiracy-theory film titled Loose Change suggests that voice-morphing technology was used to create the voices of the passengers. It claims that the fact that one of the passengers said to his mother, ‘I’m on a plane that has been hijacked….you do believe me, don’t you mom?’, shows that these were not the real passengers speaking, but someone else. Er, okay. That raises so many new questions – Where did the real passengers disappear to, then? Who faked their voices and where did they do it? – that it’s enough to drive anyone crazy.


There is also the more ‘respectable’ conspiracy theory – the one that says, okay, Bush might not have made 9/11 happen, but he probably knew it was going to happen and let it go ahead so that he could subsequently benefit from it. This kind of claim is widespread, among journalists, left-wing activists and even respectable politicians in America and Europe.


Essentially, there are two brands of conspiracy theories about the Bush administration’s apparent foreknowledge of 9/11. Carol A Valentine typifies the first approach, which says that Bush and his friends at the Project for a New American Century actually orchestrated the attacks in order to enact a state of Orwellian total war. To put it another way, 9/11 proved as timely for Bush as the Reichstag fire was for Hitler. Other more moderate conspiracists, such as British Labour MP Michael Meacher, claim that although 9/11 was not planned by the Bushies, they knew it was coming and allowed it to happen. In other words, 9/11 was the twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor. Strikingly, even Osama Bin Laden seems to share this kind of view. He stated in a message on 15 April 2004: ‘This war is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoots and sister companies…It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war, the bloodsuckers who direct world policy from behind the scenes. President Bush and other leaders like him, the big media institutions, the United Nations….’


So, why are conspiracy theories about 9/11 exerting such influence over both leftfield and mainstream thinking? Alasdair Spark, head of American Studies at King’s College, Winchester, argues that conspiracy theories ‘are more about the moment than about a sort of long-term understanding’, and claims that they have become ways of getting to grips with an uncertain world. ‘What is more noticeable is the sort of constant stream of conspiracy thinking, and conspiracy interest… The individual answers aren’t really the point. What’s more the point is that people seem constantly to require the sort of succour or the salvation [of] believing that there are forces out there that control things’, says Spark.


Blaming previously unimaginable events on a sinister world elite somehow allows people to make sense of events, and to fill in a great void of doubt and uncertainty. Scepticism can be a good thing. But when it comes to the mad mythmaking about 9/11, it is worth remembering the words of the late American scientist Carl Sagan: ‘If your mind is too open, your brains fall out.’

Emily Hill works at spiked. reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p.../article/1604/