Hatred Still

[Valin]

City Journal:

André Glucksmann

Autumn 2011

 

At first, 9/11 seemed impossible. Witnesses couldn’t believe their eyes; officials were bewildered; wild tales swirled of conspiracies involving the CIA, the Jews, real-estate speculators. Yet the impossible happened, and the site of its occurrence in Manhattan fittingly became known as Ground Zero, recalling the devastated landscapes left in the past by atomic experiments.

 

Now that the general alarm has dissipated, however, we can see that the attack on New York was not unprecedented in its inspiration, its actors, or even its method. The strategy of causing panic by burning cities and terrorizing populations was theorized a century and a half ago by Russian nihilists such as Bakunin and Nechayev, as Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons described. The indiscriminate targeting of civilians wasn’t new: fanatical ideologies both profane and religious have done it since Guernica. Neither were the operational tactics: the World Trade Center was attacked by Islamists in 1993, and the means of destruction—a hijacked airplane—was anticipated in 1994, when an Airbus, commandeered by a jihadist group in Algeria, was supposed to crash in Paris. As for the suicidal dimension, professional martyrs have abounded among Bolsheviks, Nazis, and all true believers determined to give their lives for the cause. The pieces were thus already in place; all that was missing was the plan necessary to put the unthinkable into action.

 

(Snip)

 

Bin Laden is dead, but the force that struck Manhattan remains. In order for a little band armed with box cutters to strike at the heart of the world’s greatest power, all that was needed were a few lawless regions and some unscrupulous “sponsors,” all of which remain in ample supply. The old paradigm is obsolete: great states no longer hold a monopoly on the capacity for historical devastation. Anyone might take advantage of this new situation. “Once the limits of the possible have been overturned, it is difficult to bring them back,” Clausewitz observed, announcing that the era of massively murderous battles had not ended with Napoleon. The belle epoque cheerfully forgot Clausewitz’s warning, but the following century confirmed it. Bin Laden is gone, not the radical and merciless hatred that he represented.