A book; and a area for discuss about all problems and events after 11/09/2001

 

Life is about survival.
We, as living beings among other living beings, find ourselves continually surrounded by threats to our continued existence: a virus, a serious illness, an unexpected climate-changing meteorite falling silently from the sky, a rock or tree crashing down as we drive along the road, or even one of our fellow humans, that “wolf for man”, inexplicably enraged, his or her face clouded with criminal hate. Threats such as this are ever-present and fundamentally invisible. Living, then, is the process of passing between the drops of this rain of constant aggression, of appreciating the fragile miracle of life, of navigating around or through these dangers, perceived or not. Survivors of catastrophes relate that each second of life is a second stolen from death, a simple pleasure, as if the near escape from their own demise had awoken them to the life that transfixes and defines them. I exist. But can we accept to be nothing more than simple survivors? Can we stand, infused with the intensity forced upon us by a mind having become conscious of the difference between being and non-being, at the edge of life and death at each second of our existence? The power of the will within us refuses to give in to this tendency and our intelligence argues in favor of the satisfaction to be found in security, in forgetting our hierarchized conditionality (I am if the world exists; I am if my body exists; I am if others exist.) We desire and work at obtaining a worry-free existence; and yet, life regularly offers us the exact opposite. It obstructs our natural inclination to amusement and the absence of anything serious.
Being conscious of September 11, 2001, thinking and talking about these massive terrorist attacks, proves that I survived them. I wasn’t present in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon or the fourth airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania. But being alive to read or write – right here, right now – also proves that I have escaped hundreds or even thousands of accidents. When one of these misfortunes occurs, when an airplane crashes by accident and the subsequent list of victims is published, most of us feel a mixture of sadness, pity and sometimes even anger. Members of the human “substance” were destroyed in a brutal, violent way, having left this life in a helpless state of suffering, fear and anguish. Thousands of accidents and deaths punctuate the ebb and flow of humanity, and yet life goes on. The feelings evoked by such events are sufficient for us and we press on with our daily lives, secretly praying to be protected from such accidents, to be permitted to pass between the stitches of chance and enigmatic destiny sown into the fabric of our existence.
Most of the inhabitants of our planet viewed the events of September 11, 2001 with disbelief, moved by the unfortunate lot of those unable to escape the effects of this collective crime. And why not? With the means available to them, the Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked large, civil airplanes and sought to cause a maximum of destruction, to kill a maximum of people completely unknown to them. It was a mini-genocide, the assassination of US citizens simply because of their nationality, and for one basic reason: the identification of the United States with Evil. These racist crimes shocked us because they proved that others like us were so devoid of any human feeling as to be capable of laying the framework for large-scale Machiavellian acts in a coldly practical, intellectual way. This even after the events of the Second World War proved to us that we should all be aware that, occasionally, members of the human community identify a mass of living beings as deserving of bloodshed that can reach dizzying heights without immediately shocking the conscience of the masses. The fifty million dead from this war, whether they were soldiers or civilians, form a macabre mausoleum of striking and terrifying proportions. We still have lessons to learn.
At the same time, we can associate 9/11 with no specific, openly-declared military conflict. Indeed, the terrorists might have struck at American military forces, but instead innocent civilians were targeted and assassinated. The men and women who had assembled in the two tall towers that day were only there to accomplish their respective tasks, and just as the sunny day was breaking, they suddenly found themselves the target of flying bombs, two civil airliners with tanks full of jet fuel. The towers were struck partway up and eventually crumbled, becoming a gigantic tomb for individuals of many different nationalities and ethnic origins who weren’t lucky enough to find a way out.
Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re an employee in one of the businesses on the 50th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and let’s give this person the fictitious name of John Mitchell.
John gets up early the morning of September 11 to enjoy the sunrise and gorgeous morning predicted by the weather forecaster. Like thousands of New Yorkers, he stops off at a fitness center to get in a brief, early morning run. An hour later he returns home for a quick shower, after which he dresses and checks to make sure he has all the paperwork he needs for his day as a business analyst. Being single, he’s one of the only company employees who can afford to live in New York itself, close to where he works, and he regularly walks to his office. Once he enters the tower, he takes an elevator to get to the 50th floor. By 8:30 John is seated at his desk and turns on his computer. His company’s website appears, welcomes him and displays his email. He begins reading when suddenly a great shockwave traverses the building. It’s 8:45 and the force nearly knocks him out of his chair. Right away he can tell that something serious is taking place within the tower. Slowly and cautiously he approaches the window and sees large flames and an ever-growing cloud of smoke spewing up from lower floors. He wonders if he’ll be able to get out of the building and runs from his office. People are beginning to panic as everyone wonders what’s going on. ‘Didn’t you see? There are flames coming up from the lower floors!’ And then John realizes that the same thing is occurring at the other side of the tower. He begins to fear that the floors beneath them are totally engulfed in fire. He returns to his office, grabs his cell phone and dials his parents’ number. There’s no answer so he leaves a message on the machine, relating to them what’s happening exactly as he’s just seen it. He tells them not to worry, that he’s going to get out just fine. But John is beginning to wonder how he and everyone else here are going to do exactly that.
In fact, he won’t escape this trap, but he doesn’t know it yet.
When he opens the door to the stairwell a rush of smoke from the lower floors immediately takes his breath away. He can hear the crackling of the flames that burn nearby. Making it to the ground floor is starting to appear more and more unlikely. He returns to his office. He doesn’t speak much with those around him, many of whom are crying or seem paralyzed by what’s happening. But John reflects, thinking that if he can’t reach the ground floor, perhaps the roof will provide an escape route. “Up the stairs!” he cries to the others. Some follow him, others don’t move, and he notices that there are even some men and women who have opened windows and are straddling them as if preparing to throw themselves into the emptiness below. The image floors John as he begins to mount the steps mechanically, one by one. When he reaches the roof he takes in a great breath of air, but also notices growing amounts of smoke rising from all around the building. If it grows too thick no one will see the little group and no helicopter will be able to land on the emergency pad without it becoming trapped as well. And now John understands. Unless there’s a miracle, he’s going to die here. So he prays to the God of the Bible so venerated by Americans as the smoke continues to thicken, forcing its way into everyone’s throat and lungs. But John won’t die from asphyxiation. As he thinks about those he holds dear – his parents, his sister, the woman he met only a few days ago and might love already – the “ground” literally falls out from under his feet. The first tower of the World Trade Center crumbles.
John is already dead.
Everyone that perished in the fall of the World Trade Center experienced, with only minor differences, the same catastrophe, the same violent death among the dust, steel and concrete that had only moments ago seemed indestructibly solid. To attempt to understand, to even begin to understand, what the death of John Mitchell and others who perished in the World Trade Center was like, we must put ourselves in their place, either through pure imagination or by drawing on relevant personal experience (an accident or tragedy of some sort, perhaps). If the attacks of September 11, 2001 struck us in ways that made us feel such pain and anger, it’s because those in the towers who were targeted and assassinated represented humanity in its diverse biological and organizational “normalcy.” These were human beings caught by surprise in the workplace, condemned to a violent death, stolen away in a callous, impersonal way from the ones they loved. The spiritual foundations of the most cosmopolitan city in the world were wounded: the capitalist symbol at the center of world commerce and its servants who had come from all over the world were dealt a horrifying blow. If we’re still alive and well, it’s because we escaped from or avoided this particular drama, and many others as well. But as we think about September 11 in particular, we’ve become used to projecting ourselves into the events and thinking about how lucky we are not to have been a brilliant trader or one of the firefighters who risked and lost a life in order to save a few others. It’s not always like this. Often when we think about other dramatic events, we don’t necessarily imagine ourselves there and don’t, therefore, feel directly concerned, even though an unforeseen sequence of circumstances might very well have thrown us into one of these tragedies. Any airplane accident, even if it’s exceptionally serious, is for us part of the everyday order of things. There are necessarily airplane accidents, we think, and for the people transported in these fragile fuselages, it’s a simple question of not being unlucky. On the other hand, the attacks against the Towers and personnel of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were not part of the same everyday order of things, those material realities that we’re more or less powerless to prevent, because these attacks were the result of the pure and simple determination of a few men bent on the destruction of other people not in their own image.
And if to live is to survive, we’re also used to forgetting, and as the weeks and months pass, the events of September 11, 2001 will undergo the same effects of time. Time makes us forget, and a host of solemn commemorations, books, seminars and eyewitness accounts will attempt to help the power of memory overcome forgetfulness. And yet, the intensity felt on the first day of the unfolding drama, the horror at being confronted by the thought and effects of actions designed to inflict the greatest violence possible, have already lessened and will continue to lessen. Contrary to some of the oft-repeated affirmations of the days following the attacks, it’s clear enough that the world hasn’t changed. Everything is nearly as it was before except, perhaps, in the geopolitical and geostrategical realms where, after the gelling of tensions resulting from the disappearance of the USSR, the continents have begun once more to move around a Middle Eastern axis. Life has exercised its rights over us. Fading memory spreads through minds that have begun to return to their favorite forms of entertainment, even if the form of Western entertainment par excellence, the cinema, offers up fictions that pale in comparison to the scenario of the September 11 terrorist attacks, for the expectations and possibilities associated with the historical reality now playing itself out far outpace even the grittiest Hollywood scenario.
And yet, let us consider the Second World War, which ended in Europe on May 8, 1945 with the surrender of the remaining German military apparatus to the Allied steamroller. The figures are dizzying. Fifty million people died a violent death, a record that has never been surpassed. Twenty million died in the USSR alone, and five million perished in concentration and extermination camps. The Al-Qaeda terrorists seem like choirboys beside the groups of thousands of soldiers who participated in this way, each trained for all-out obliteration. Even if the terrorists were able to use the limited means available to them to bring about the greatest degree of destruction possible, the havoc they brought about seems small when compared to the massive destruction wrought by the Allied and Axis armies. Note, however, that the Second World War played itself out openly, in the ultimate criminal frankness, and the relationship of might to might was direct and occurred within the classic framework of war between opposing armies: airplanes against airplanes, tanks against tanks, even if, one might add, the large-scale hunting of civilians was one of the more original priories of this conflict. The attacks of September 11, 2001 confront us with a new situation. Now the mighty American superpower, the greatest military, scientific, technical and human power in history, must track small groups of individuals forming an international network scattered over the surface of the planet, groups inspired by a radical anti-Western and anti-American sentiment and whose means and objectives are not easily discernible to the US and other Western countries, who, logically, fear the worst (chemical or biological attacks, small-scale nuclear bombs, dirty bombs). And it is not a simple question of an “understandable” paranoia among military-minded individuals whose natural inclination is to fear or desire the worst, nor is it the fantasizing of people too caught up in books by Jim Fleming or Tom Clancy. Rather, this fear is based upon volumes of documents, testimonials, speeches, and evidence from other elements tied to the terrorist organizations who seem to be engaged in an epic conflict of the humble, the “good guys,” of course, against the mighty, necessarily the “bad guy”. If Hitler thought huge armies were needed to destroy the Allied forces and realize his objectives, the “miniaturization” of their armies permits the terrorists to believe that they will be able to accomplish large-scale criminal acts without being noticed by any international network of surveillance. In order to make such necessarily constant surveillance successful, Western secret services have understood that they must enter into frank and honest cooperation with each other, even among different services within the same nation. In the United States, especially, the CIA, NSA and FBI, all agencies with diverse prerogatives but each charged with defending national security, have naturally tended to protect their terrain without sharing information – even in the Internet age! – for fear of having to share the spotlight. Western countries are fortunate, however, that the elaborate design and construction of this type of arm seems to be beyond the means and abilities possessed by the terrorists, with the possible exception of some the of the states “friendly” to these groups. But has not this “evil-minded nature” (if this is how we might, at this stage, designate the desire to destroy for pleasure) already proven its ingenuity, leaving us no choice but to fear the worst? For those who inhabit this world in a generally honest and respectable way, the potential actions of these clandestine groups and their trophy hunters inspire fear and anxiety, if only because of the powerlessness the majority feels before the insanity of one or another tiny minority. Civilians have understood that because of the worldwide presence of these terrorist groups, because civilians must travel, they have become the favorite target of such actions as the taking of hostages or exemplary murders like that of journalist Daniel Pearl in early 2002. Warriors for their cause, whether they be Islamist, Basque, Irish, Philippino, Columbian, Palestinian, etc., take aim at civilians as if they represented an easier and more impressive target than soldiers or officials who, by nature of their status, tend to be armed or otherwise protected. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a vague unease is ever-present in our minds, whether overtly or nearly imperceptibly, for it seems that wherever one goes, the presence of risk is measured everywhere. Before the attacks, such risks were associated only with foreign countries or regions to be avoided, or perhaps with certain means of transport.
Interestingly, sales of the Koran have increased since these events took place, almost as if Western citizens needed to know for themselves whether or not the word revealed to the prophet Mohammed invites its followers to lead all-out war against their enemies, a Jihad, as both convinced fanatics and experts like to say. Religion, it would seem, has made a thunderous return onto the world stage, and in its worst caricature or form: fanaticism. The servants of National Socialism fought for five years to impose Hitler’s eugenic legal code upon the world. The members of Al-Qaeda struck like a bolt of lightning in the name of Allah, someone they’ve never seen and who apparently only spoke through the intermediary of the prophet Mohammed, sole and definitive receptacle of divine thought. In one of his numerous, narcissistic, media-style declarations, the billionaire son Osama declared the following a few years ago in the newspaper Al Qods al Arabi: “I fight, and therefore I may die as a martyr and go to paradise to meet God. Our struggle now is against the Americans,” for there are troops of “infidels on the sacred soil of Arabia, which harbors the two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.” As a prelude to this struggle, he declared at a large meeting of Islamic activists held at Peshwar, Pakistan in the spring of 2001: “I call upon the young generation to be ready for the Holy War and to prepare themselves for it in Afghanistan, for the Jihad, in these moments of crisis for Muslims, is an obligation.” Humanity “marginalized” by the course of History, a community of believers, Islam has come to remind the “dominant” civilization, the capitalist Occident, that it won’t be shoved into a corner. And if statistics on religious numbers are reliable, the diffusion of a “practical atheism” seems, as prophesied for Christianity by Nietzsche, to dominate in the great majority of lives and consciences around the world, as if God, or anything else divine, didn’t exist at all. It was as if the sign, the name of God, should no longer resound in the ears of humanity, leaving tranquil consciences in its wake. September 11, 2001 represents, then, the shock of impact between a civilization that, by the very fact that it has rid itself of its repressive ideological tutors, is advancing, and a civilization fixed in place by the satisfaction of existence, by the presence and direction of “God”, a collision between an atheistic and a religious civilization. A certain segment of Islam joyfully and consciously attacked an important American symbol in the same measure in which it felt its own existence threatened and intimidated by this very symbol, a representation of the Western mental war machine that has targeted, among other things, religion (given that Western countries have tended to marginalize authorities of the major monotheistic religions, as well as the intensity with which these religious officials can express themselves publicly). But this is only the most obvious expression of this tendency. The American leader, the President of the USA, even if he swore on the Bible to protect and enforce the Constitution, is not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word. On the other hand, Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, is always extremely careful that his personal appearance and that of his officials are in agreement with the dictates of Muslim tradition for religious chiefs, though the faithful of Mohammed have not yet begun to regard him as such (God or whomever else be praised!). But if the United States and Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Mohammed and Bin Laden, claim to be founded on “sacred” bases, and if the leaders of these countries seem to be in competition to see who can make the best public expression of their personal “faith” and their respect for the prevailing religions in their respective countries, how well does the articulation of actual social and political life correspond to the religious narrative? Does the businesslike appearance of President Bush demonstrate a distancing from God while the semantics of Bin Laden’s appearance make him a true believer? Is this an apparently systematic and rigorous articulation of the fusion of political law and religious law, as with the Sharia? And does this fusion provide sufficient proof that the nation and its members are “believers” or of the “faith” called for by Mohammed? Does it require no more than the simple following of a negative judicial code (don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t worship idols…) or repetitive acts (prayers toward Mecca, giving to the poor, pilgrimages to Mecca…)? Western historical experience has proven to us that there exists a veritable gulf between the appearance of faith through the expressions of religious signs worthy of a Tartuffe, and true, lived faith felt by the believer as a result of his or her belief in the existence of God. What, then, of such apparently “religious” political states? Are these nations truly living their faith, or is it all really just a faith of representation, of public spectacles? This question is not anecdotal, for the ultimate justification for the existence and direction of these national or sectarian organizations is God Himself, and more precisely, the instrumentalization of the concept and name of God by his supposed faithful since, beyond the revealed Word supposedly represented by the Koran or the Bible, God has been silent for some time now, at least since the end of the book of Revelations. This one and only “God”, does He have reasons to be proud of His most committed flock of believers, those most determined to defend his religion? Does God want to be revered? Is this why He created a Universe outside of Himself, separate from Himself? Is God a megalomaniac? If there exists, on the one hand, a Christian God who supposedly saw airplanes used as weapons to kill thousands of people and, on the other hand, a Muslim God who supposedly saw the same airplanes accomplish the same acts for His glorification, would one consider that these were good works or that those flying the planes were victims duped by a few usurpers? This “God of Armies” behind whom each believer seems to fall voluntarily into line like a good soldier is so attractive to those seeking meaning in and for their lives that a good conversion if often very useful in acquiring and maintaining political power. There is little, then, that prevents skilled comedians from making use of divine approbation to legitimize their various dogmas, decisions and actions. Might Osama Bin Ladin be one among many such comedians claiming to be of the Muslim faith, a faith that, in the name of the Prophet, he mangles with interpretations that fly in the face of Mohammed’s generosity? It is therefore not certain that the events of September 11, 2001 are the result of religious fanaticism, but rather, it provides proof of the omnipresence of an atheist spirit, lost and without anchor, crouching at the very heart of a monotheis, for which everything is possible, starting with the worst, of course. It is up to us to understand what makes their existence possible, to identify their roots, and it would indeed be strange were it the just and good God of the monotheists nourishing these roots. These questions obviously concern the Muslim world, but they concern the United States as well, since beyond the constitutional gestures made by the victorious candidate in a presidential election who becomes President of the United States by swearing on the Bible to defend the Constitution (and how might this action be interpreted if the President were atheist or non-Christian?), the Bible and Christian organizations predominate in this country, whether its members are white, black, Hispanic…or even Native American. Now, Americans are proud of what they consider their piety, but biblical idolatry, for which the biblical word is the defining word, the truth, can represent not only evidence of America’s true faith in God, but can also serve to illustrate the godlessness of the United States and other countries, for readings and interpretations of the biblical word can vary and develop into potentially and tangibly dangerous fanaticisms. And while our assumptions regarding American piety might generally apply to the whole of the American Continent, the United States seems to have been most impregnated by Christian culture, for it constitutes a building block of both the American psyche and American politics, reaching from the first Puritan colonists to the Compassionate Conservatism of George Bush, Jr. Because of this, Americans, citizens of the largest economic and military power of our day, seem more susceptible than many to various manipulations of the biblical word, both old and new.
On September 11, 2001, the two towers of the World Trade Center burned in the fire of a religious, monotheistic, millenaristic “thought” articulated by Bin Laden and his cohorts. For Americans and Westerners, it was a demonstration of the mobilizing and irrational power that can be generated through a personal interpretation of the Koran or the Bible expressed by minds seeking above all murder and reciprocal hate. For Muslims who refute a priori Bin Laden’s reading of the Koran and for Westerners who desire to avoid leaving the task of interpreting sacred texts solely to insane readers and who now feel the need to pay closer attention to irrational or criminal interpretations of the Bible, it becomes a question of approaching these texts in the most honest and sensible manner possible in order to attempt to learn what this “Word of God” can and does mean. Are those who believe themselves to be its most faithful lovers and servants really that, or just ignorant liars? For Europeans or other non-American Westerners, it is also important to better understand the history and the cultural, intellectual and social specificities of the United States in order to avoid the iconographical simplifications bantered back and forth at cafes of commerce and politics by groups that are a priori and systematically anti US. In the same way, it is necessary to understand the constitutive and problematical diversities of the Muslim “community of believers” that many illusively believe forms a single and united community that has simply spread and radiated from its historical home in Saudi Arabia.
Beyond the perception and analysis of historical events and principles concerning the monotheistic West and the Islamic Middle East, Far East and Asia, it is also absolutely necessary to address “religious affairs” using a rigorous and without doubt innovative approach that enables one to understand and act upon the roots of religious power in a way that accurately schematizes the nervous system of these traditions of a Humanity open to the absolute gift of Being, Eternity, and the Blessed State, traditions which have crashed, like the airplanes, into the hypnotic power of the Darkness of Evil. For while the foundational and structural energy of the two Christian and Muslim monotheisms resides in the projection of the subject beyond its end and into the eternal existence of its soul, thereby disengaging an absolute positivity for the individual subject by illustrating the omnipresence of the Divine that is eternally in it, around it and for it, the enthusiasts of this “Eternal Paradise” find themselves devoured by a new negativity: there are others living in error who must be “corrected” through the administration of a particular lesson. The illuminated adherent then becomes an armed tool in the edification of a “World religion” requiring a perfect resemblance among subjects, an attack of clones. With the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France, the criminal events of September 11 prove that monotheisms are necessarily articulated though a dualism fixed around the pole of Evil against which those supposedly endowed by the Good become “knights” to a General whose actions also target the general at the expense of the particular. The workers at the World Trade Center were no longer humans coming under the umbrella of Divine Creation and also, therefore, the divine laws expressed by the Prophet, since their American nationality or their social condition as workers for American or Western companies became the a priori reason for their condemnation.
The mobilizing power of one or the other of these monotheisms has not disappeared. Responsible for these crimes because it made them possible through the charismatic person of a Bin Laden, a giver of orders, it is an ever-active crucible for other anti-Western terrorist attacks throughout the planet, but also for fanatical and murderous crises within the very heart of the Muslim world. The study of transcendental and historical conditions of possibility concerning this “science of crime” incarnated in the absolute power attributed to the “Verb” of only one person, the Prophet, the chief of the Assassins, the Pope, the guru of some sect, should serve to protect Westerners by allowing them to identify the discursive perversions at work in their own civilization and in those of the rest of humanity, and also by enabling them to exercise a critical pressure on these apprentice murderers by limiting as much as possible their confidence in themselves and in the truth of their beliefs and projects by attacking them at their very roots. For what all-important reason is it so imperative that we sense the weight of these determining realities of humankind’s life here on the earth? It is because living is a “chance”: a situation that we try to render constant by eliminating contrary factors and defending favorable ones, by being open to what is possible, useful and good for oneself, by taking the opportunity to do and receive good, by having space in which to exist. And since we’re all dependant even in terms of our existence, bound together consubstantially by the multiple conditions that make life possible, it is necessary to gauge the breadth of these same conditions that offer us the chance to live and to be. Faced with people who separate the world into those who are on their side and those who aren’t, into “friends” and “enemies” on the basis of a racial, ethnic or religious filter, should we separate that which, a priori, it is not, like Humanity, but also to separate, a posteriori, that which it is, like Humanity and Nature, Humanity and God? Or to put it another way, should the events of September 11 convince us, by reciprocity, of racism à la Bin Laden, who seeks to oppose arabs, muslims and whites, or should they convince us that “religion” is bad and fanatical by nature? Or perhaps, on the contrary, we should take refuge in “religions” that oppose this “wicked world” dominated by suffering and unhappiness, an image fed to us regularly by our tragedy hungry media outlets in this world where daily we witness the post mortem of God and His angels? To take up a leitmotif of existentialism, even the person who commits suicide in order to avoid taking sides in this conflict of priorities, or the person who remains silent to avoid having to answer all of these questions, has chosen and answered in some way. Humanity, by its nature, must make choices, and the right ones, since bad choices cost dearly.
Now, in the context of the general situation created by these events, the questions and the problems are both individual and macroindividual, or collective. At the beginning of August, 2002, one of these geostrategical questions is, for Westerners, whether or not to attack Iraq in order to overthrow Saddam Hussein, since Western intelligence gathering indicates that Iraqi scientists and military personnel are developing, in secret, nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction. The events of September 11, 2001 sent us a clear message: think radically, now, as much as you can, or accept one day to be, tomorrow or in a few months, active or passive toys in a great manipulation, a great catastrophe. At the heart of this question is the overly simple and the overly mysterious: “God.” What should we think about Him? What should we do with Him? Should we submit to Him, and if so, how? Should we convert to Islam? But why would Islam be God’s religion? Perhaps Christianity would work, but the same questions arise. Or should we just deny the existence of God and label all believers as crazy? Or, on the contrary, should these questions be subject to new scrutiny, new analyses, new perspectives? On September 11, 2001, God didn’t intervene, just like he didn’t intervene during the five years of World War II, like he didn’t intervene in the murders of Holly and Jessica, and so on. Does this lack of intervention in human affairs prove God’s non-existence?
Our epoch, with its knowledge, its human and technological networks, is it not well prepared to make progress, to bring about new innovations in answering these questions instead of falling back on the same, dull repetitions that leave us turning around in circles? Should the person who knows and the person who believes go round and round or go forward together? Four hundred years ago, the men and women of Europe answered this question by choosing a path that led them straight to…








Mr. Grellety
Thank you for the link to this information. It is nice to learn that there
are some French who are questioning their governments actions and attitudes
- as well as those of the Parisian school of anti-Americanism.

The unfortunate fact is that France has ignored the lessons of 9-11 for
Americans. Worse, they have misunderstood these lessons. By doing so France
is in even greater danger than the USA. In what way? First, France has a
large minority of unassimilated - and angry - Muslim immigrants. Terrorist
groups need lots of support - and even Action Direct had trouble with this
requirement. However Muslim terrorist have the existing support network they
need. Secondly, France's naive pacifism is perceived as weakness by enemies
who view the French in the same light as they view Americans: secularist
non-believers whose existence is an affront to their "religion". Finally,
France is much closer to the Middle East than the USA and has not enacted
protection measures to prevent terror attacks. It is worthy to note that had
Richard Raed succeeded in Dec 2001, a French airliner carrying mostly French
people would have been destroyed over the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the French
prefer to see themselves as allied with the very radical Muslims who
threaten them.

As many on the American Right, I do not hold much hope for France until it
removes its current government or worse - experiences a successful terrorist
attack. While such an attack would be regrettable, perhaps it would awaken
the French before their nation and culture is lost.

Regards
Niccolo Machiavelli
www.therazor.org









There are those who opposed the war in Iraq by necessity, because their anti-Americanism is so radical that they preferred closing their eyes to the violence of Saddam Hussein's regime - minimizing it, applying relativism… They should have listened to voices of the opposition living in western countries - 4 million exiles. From now on they shall hear the testimony of those who were victims of the regime’s criminal madness, not counting that they are forced to digest proof left about the regime’s crimes, such as recently discovered documents. (http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=106710) Saddam Hussein's Iraq fits the definition of totalitarianism well (http://fr.encyclopedia.yahoo.com/articles/ni/ni_3228_p0.html): “The imposition of an official ideology established as dogma, a single party based on mass state expropriation, terrorist police control, a monopoly of communications, central planning of the economy, and the arbitrary establishment of ‘objective’ enemies, the Jews for Nazis, the middle-class as traitors to the Stalinist regime, a label that justified their physical elimination as parasites of society.” In Iraq’s case, this ideology was Baathism, whose historic development tried to elaborate a fusion of “socialism” and radical fundamentalism; the Baath single party, a particularly ferocious, criminal, terrorist police state (http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=106710), with media completely controlled by the Hussein family, a centralized “personalized” economy, and official enemies represented by Iran, Kuwait, Israel and the United States. The dictator’s madness multiplied his enemies even among those who had never shown the slightest aggression toward Iraq or its overprotected dictator for thirty years. Because one particularity of this Iraqi totalitarian State was its longevity. The world effectively adapted to the regime’s mass crimes for many years with little to say.
Business is business, and with regard to greater international law, the French were less exemplary than others in Iraq (because its complicity with the fallen regime seems clear http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=106711). Is liberated Iraq “condemned” to freedom? We know this: all democracies are fragile and can, without full necessary safeguards, die by collective suicide, following Germany’s example in 1933, or be overthrown by putschists. Iraq is not yet saved.
Among its children are those who dream of making Iraq a regime that could support “The imposition of an official ideology established as dogma, a single party based on mass state expropriation, terrorist police control, a monopoly of communications, central planning of the economy, and the arbitrary establishment of ‘objective’ enemies, the Jews for Nazis, the middle-class as traitors to the Stalinist regime, a label that justified their physical elimination as parasites of society.” - and they are the Shiite extremists who want to make Iraq the region’s second Islamic republic based on the Iranian model. This would not be History’s first paradox: now that Iranians are more pro-American than ever and dream of Marines delivering them from mollahs and ayatollahs (see newspaper article in “Le Monde” entitled “The pro-Americanism of Iranians worries Teheran”, April 24th, 2003) that Iraq could, according to the wishes of some Shiites, also become a prison society. Facing such a nightmare, it must be acknowledged that General Jay Garner dares to say and perhaps believes that Iraqis will be free to choose their political system. But the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld fortunately is more in touch with the reasons that led the United States to sacrifice over a hundred men in the war in Iraq. Justified and motivated by the will to avenge the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and by the will to protect free countries from Islamic terrorism, the United States, having just liberated Iraq, cannot accept that country becoming a new base for Fundamentalist Islam, fanatical Islam, following the Iranian example. Further, we must realize: this Shiite religious madness is contrary to the principles and spirit of the Koran! We must not allow ourselves to be impressed by the language of “allegiance” of these devotees to the Prophet, Ali and Hussein. Because as soon as the Prophet was dead, the ambitious did not hesitate to claim “the” power even when the Koran, supposedly “God's Word”, orders them to practice brotherhood and sharing. Now what emerges from the historical tradition of Arab political experience is indeed the opposite of the sense of sharing, with an exclusivity of power in the hands of only one or of a clan. To defend democracy in Iraq, is therefore equally to lead a fight toward true comprehension of the Koran… Otherwise, “the Shiites” will indeed be a new “American nightmare”, and not merely American…

http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=105876.





The Eyes of France Since 09/11

It’s been a year now since they dared. Only a short time ago, billions of human beings were going about their daily routines. Some among them were making love, others discovering something new, perhaps even uncovering the traces of worlds long since gone. Still others prayed, died in their sleep, and cared for the sick. But at the same time, 19 males were boarding civilian airplanes, carefully masking their intentions. Did Mohammed Atta, while at the commands of American Airlines flight 11, experience any last minute doubts as the airplane approached the first tower of the World Trade Center? Many things have changed since.

Now that this special moment of remembrance, the first anniversary, has arrived, we think and will continue to think about the victims of the largest collective assassination of civilians in a terrorist attack. Men and women from around the world will turn their hearts to the United States, to New York and to Washington. Each one will choose his or her thoughts from amongst the all too familiar images. Perhaps some will picture the events and realize with a shudder the extent to which we can now exercise power over each other. Americans are and will remain united in the face of this new threat. But will this be the case throughout Europe, and in France in particular?

France has just seen one of its most illustrious citizens and a willing participant in the American war for independence, the Marquis de Lafayette, become one of only four Honorary Citizens of the United States. In return, France received the inestimable help of American boys and GIs during two world wars. But as we move from this historical give and take into the present, can we truly say that the nation facing the United States from across the Atlantic has truly embraced the American cause in both word and act within the framework of a plainly spelled out, global solidarity? Has it analyzed the events of September 11 with depth and clarity? Has it fought an effective battle against terrorism within its own borders? In a public show of support after the attacks, hundreds of thousands of French, in concert with the peoples of other European nations, gathered the day after September 11, 2001 and the following day in front of American embassies and in other public places. On September 13, 2001, the publisher of the newspaper Le Monde penned an editorial entitled “We’re All Americans” in which he declared, “In this tragic moment when words seem too poor to express the shock we feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: we’re all Americans! We’re all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared, in 1963 in Berlin, that he was a Berliner. Moreover, how can we not feel, as we have felt in the gravest moments of our history, a profound solidarity with this people and their country, the United States, to whom we are so closely bound and to whom we owe liberty, and therefore our solidarity?” This statement clearly expressed the prevailing sentiment among the French public.

Yes, but if the majority of French felt an a priori sympathy for Americans in this tragic moment, those who spoke out during the year that followed have, to varying degrees, called into question American foreign policy in the Middle East, American culture, and also American business practices. At the same time, the French press has largely denounced France for the recent spate of anti-Semitic acts that have been committed on its territory.

And today, as the US government repeatedly insists upon the obligation of all free countries to act in light of secret Iraqi projects presumed undertaken by Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, the French president, has affirmed that supporting a military campaign in Iraq is out of the question: “We note the stirrings of a desire to legitimize the unilateral and preventative use of force. This is a disquieting evolution. It is contrary to the vision of French collective security, a vision founded upon the cooperation of States, a respect for the rights and authority of the Security Council. We emphasize these rules whenever necessary, and notably concerning Iraq. If Baghdad continues to refuse the unconditional return of inspectors, it will then be necessary for the Security Council, and only the Security Council, to decide upon the measures to be taken.” If France is present alongside the United States in Afghanistan, the French president is handing the ball off to the United Nations and the Security Council on the issue of Iraq, where the presence of Russia and China promise certain impunity for Iraq since these two nations will use their veto power to oppose the type of intervention desired by the Unites States. As usual, the French president is playing on both sides of the fence, which could understandably lead Americans to doubt the French level of commitment to the war on terror, or perhaps worse. Moreover, if the executive power in France cannot decide on a well-defined course of action, the general populace is left at the mercy of the media to inform them of the consequences to be expected from any military intervention. Indeed, the French media choose to emphasize the excessive zeal of the world’s greatest superpower, while at the same time affirming that no one knows for certain whether or not Iraq has access to biological or chemical weapons. Article after article highlights the growing number of opponents to American military intervention in Iraq and their views on the subject. The tone of these articles varies from coldness and irony to the usual sarcasm elicited by the portrayal of an America lusting after war. Surveys of the media saturated French seem to confirm this, showing that the people conclude that the danger represented by Saddam Hussein is “overestimated.” Thirty percent of French Internet users presume that he is undoubtedly seeking to get around some of the UN sanctions and that the risk of leaving the control of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dictator is not without risk, but according to the majority (59%), his country is bloodless, his people exhausted, his military apparatus limited and his economy failing, at least until facts prove otherwise (survey of 1024 individuals on September 1, 2002 for www.expressionpublique.com). If the hunt for al-Quaeda appears justified to these people, an international campaign to eradicate terrorists and the states that support them seems unreasonable. The new logic of “better safe than sorry” seems not to have won them over yet.

One year after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the French have still not accepted the doctrine of Good nations versus Evil ones, and seem cautious in the face of the American superpower that promulgates it. The recent French best seller L’Effoyable Imposture (The Frightening Deception) by Thierry Messan, has provided ample fuel for their speculations. According to this author, the Pentagon was not the site of a terrorist attack using a civilian airplane as a weapon, but was instead devastated by a truck bomb in an effort by the US government to orchestrate a massacre that would justify subsequent actions in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Tens of thousands of copies have been sold and the work has become an international success, with the subsequent appearance of a sequel by the same author entitled “Pentagate”. Sadly, in a country that once willingly participated in the Enlightenment, today even the most outrageous rumors have a chance of success. For those who were already convinced of the existence of conspiracies, for those searching for reasons to be convinced, and also for those whose ability to reason isn’t what it ought to be, this type of material feeds into an anti-American sentiment that is well rooted in France, even if only among a minority. For example, at the eleventh annual Pessac International Festival of Historical Films where the theme was “American Power”, the public questioned the contributors, economists, historians and journalists that were present on the status of African Americans, the death penalty and recent executions, rising social inequality, and the entry of American pension funds into French businesses. But it was obvious at the same time that the French possess only a sketchy knowledge of America’s past and present and that it consists mainly of clichés that are often propagated via Hollywood. This geopolitical ignorance distorts the reality of America and is probably reciprocal. Yet French perceptions of the events of September 11 are grounded in precisely the same type of simplistic images and caricatures of the United States. This trend is worrisome, for it indicates that the same type of generalizations shared by the terrorists are present on a more universal scale since they touch even France, one of the oldest and most reliable allies of the United States. At present, nothing exists to counterbalance these cut and dried images, characterizations, and judgments.

It has now been a year since the terrorist attacks, and after the anniversary and commemorations we have the opportunity to make a fresh start. Even though the al-Qaeda terrorist network has been scattered as a result of military action and intense tracking, it is nevertheless not destroyed. We have not yet targeted, brought to light and dealt with the psychological, philosophical and theological roots of monotheistic violence. Iraq is still in the hands of Saddam Hussein, while even today Iranians suffer under the iron rule of the Imams. Sleeper cells are still in existence. People around the world are as unfamiliar with each other as ever. The networking required for the effective sharing of information and coordination of action among Western executive powers has not yet been put into place. Nor is it desired or willed, for on either side of the Atlantic countries are playing the same tired separatist refrain. And yet, September 11, 2001, the date of the worst terrorist attacks in history, have reminded us that we are all united, that we are all interdependent at many different levels: physical, biological, political, philosophical. We can only hope, then, that at the next anniversary, September 11, 2003, we will have made progress toward a new consciousness, and that the example of the Americans and the French will illustrate, in all of its excellence, the dialogues, partnerships, common goals and friendship that must exist between

Jean-Christophe Grellety – translation : Coby Fletcher



posted by jean-christophe at 8:02 AM

 
Below, the English-speaking readers can read the totality of the introduction of the philosophic attempt presented on this weblog.

For the moment, the manuscript of this attempt is available so that an American or English publishing house publishes it. For any information, you can write in jeanchristophegrellety@ifrance.com.



Life is about survival.
We, as living beings among other living beings, find ourselves continually surrounded by threats to our continued existence: a virus, a serious illness, an unexpected climate-changing meteorite falling silently from the sky, a rock or tree crashing down as we drive along the road, or even one of our fellow humans, that “wolf for man”, inexplicably enraged, his or her face clouded with criminal hate. Threats such as this are ever-present and fundamentally invisible. Living, then, is the process of passing between the drops of this rain of constant aggression, of appreciating the fragile miracle of life, of navigating around or through these dangers, perceived or not. Survivors of catastrophes relate that each second of life is a second stolen from death, a simple pleasure, as if the near escape from their own demise had awoken them to the life that transfixes and defines them. I exist. But can we accept to be nothing more than simple survivors? Can we stand, infused with the intensity forced upon us by a mind having become conscious of the difference between being and non-being, at the edge of life and death at each second of our existence? The power of the will within us refuses to give in to this tendency and our intelligence argues in favor of the satisfaction to be found in security, in forgetting our hierarchized conditionality (I am if the world exists; I am if my body exists; I am if others exist.) We desire and work at obtaining a worry-free existence; and yet, life regularly offers us the exact opposite. It obstructs our natural inclination to amusement and the absence of anything serious.
Being conscious of September 11, 2001, thinking and talking about these massive terrorist attacks, proves that I survived them. I wasn’t present in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon or the fourth airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania. But being alive to read or write – right here, right now – also proves that I have escaped hundreds or even thousands of accidents. When one of these misfortunes occurs, when an airplane crashes by accident and the subsequent list of victims is published, most of us feel a mixture of sadness, pity and sometimes even anger. Members of the human “substance” were destroyed in a brutal, violent way, having left this life in a helpless state of suffering, fear and anguish. Thousands of accidents and deaths punctuate the ebb and flow of humanity, and yet life goes on. The feelings evoked by such events are sufficient for us and we press on with our daily lives, secretly praying to be protected from such accidents, to be permitted to pass between the stitches of chance and enigmatic destiny sown into the fabric of our existence.

Most of the inhabitants of our planet viewed the events of September 11, 2001 with disbelief, moved by the unfortunate lot of those unable to escape the effects of this collective crime. And why not? With the means available to them, the Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked large, civil airplanes and sought to cause a maximum of destruction, to kill a maximum of people completely unknown to them. It was a mini-genocide, the assassination of US citizens simply because of their nationality, and for one basic reason: the identification of the United States with Evil. These racist crimes shocked us because they proved that others like us were so devoid of any human feeling as to be capable of laying the framework for large-scale Machiavellian acts in a coldly practical, intellectual way. This even after the events of the Second World War proved to us that we should all be aware that, occasionally, members of the human community identify a mass of living beings as deserving of bloodshed that can reach dizzying heights without immediately shocking the conscience of the masses. The fifty million dead from this war, whether they were soldiers or civilians, form a macabre mausoleum of striking and terrifying proportions. We still have lessons to learn. At the same time, we can associate 9/11 with no specific, openly-declared military conflict. Indeed, the terrorists might have struck at American military forces, but instead innocent civilians were targeted and assassinated. The men and women who had assembled in the two tall towers that day were only there to accomplish their respective tasks, and just as the sunny day was breaking, they suddenly found themselves the target of flying bombs, two civil airliners with tanks full of jet fuel. The towers were struck partway up and eventually crumbled, becoming a gigantic tomb for individuals of many different nationalities and ethnic origins who weren’t lucky enough to find a way out.

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re an employee in one of the businesses on the 50th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and let’s give this person the fictitious name of John Mitchell. John gets up early the morning of September 11 to enjoy the sunrise and gorgeous morning predicted by the weather forecaster. Like thousands of New Yorkers, he stops off at a fitness center to get in a brief, early morning run. An hour later he returns home for a quick shower, after which he dresses and checks to make sure he has all the paperwork he needs for his day as a business analyst. Being single, he’s one of the only company employees who can afford to live in New York itself, close to where he works, and he regularly walks to his office. Once he enters the tower, he takes an elevator to get to the 50th floor. By 8:30 John is seated at his desk and turns on his computer. His company’s website appears, welcomes him and displays his email. He begins reading when suddenly a great shockwave traverses the building. It’s 8:45 and the force nearly knocks him out of his chair. Right away he can tell that something serious is taking place within the tower. Slowly and cautiously he approaches the window and sees large flames and an ever-growing cloud of smoke spewing up from lower floors. He wonders if he’ll be able to get out of the building and runs from his office. People are beginning to panic as everyone wonders what’s going on. ‘Didn’t you see? There are flames coming up from the lower floors!’ And then John realizes that the same thing is occurring at the other side of the tower. He begins to fear that the floors beneath them are totally engulfed in fire. He returns to his office, grabs his cell phone and dials his parents’ number. There’s no answer so he leaves a message on the machine, relating to them what’s happening exactly as he’s just seen it. He tells them not to worry, that he’s going to get out just fine. But John is beginning to wonder how he and everyone else here are going to do exactly that. In fact, he won’t escape this trap, but he doesn’t know it yet. When he opens the door to the stairwell a rush of smoke from the lower floors immediately takes his breath away. He can hear the crackling of the flames that burn nearby. Making it to the ground floor is starting to appear more and more unlikely. He returns to his office. He doesn’t speak much with those around him, many of whom are crying or seem paralyzed by what’s happening. But John reflects, thinking that if he can’t reach the ground floor, perhaps the roof will provide an escape route. “Up the stairs!” he cries to the others. Some follow him, others don’t move, and he notices that there are even some men and women who have opened windows and are straddling them as if preparing to throw themselves into the emptiness below. The image floors John as he begins to mount the steps mechanically, one by one. When he reaches the roof he takes in a great breath of air, but also notices growing amounts of smoke rising from all around the building. If it grows too thick no one will see the little group and no helicopter will be able to land on the emergency pad without it becoming trapped as well. And now John understands. Unless there’s a miracle, he’s going to die here. So he prays to the God of the Bible so venerated by Americans as the smoke continues to thicken, forcing its way into everyone’s throat and lungs. But John won’t die from asphyxiation. As he thinks about those he holds dear – his parents, his sister, the woman he met only a few days ago and might love already – the “ground” literally falls out from under his feet. The first tower of the World Trade Center crumbles.
John is already dead.

Everyone that perished in the fall of the World Trade Center experienced, with only minor differences, the same catastrophe, the same violent death among the dust, steel and concrete that had only moments ago seemed indestructibly solid. To attempt to understand, to even begin to understand, what the death of John Mitchell and others who perished in the World Trade Center was like, we must put ourselves in their place, either through pure imagination or by drawing on relevant personal experience (an accident or tragedy of some sort, perhaps). If the attacks of September 11, 2001 struck us in ways that made us feel such pain and anger, it’s because those in the towers who were targeted and assassinated represented humanity in its diverse biological and organizational “normalcy.” These were human beings caught by surprise in the workplace, condemned to a violent death, stolen away in a callous, impersonal way from the ones they loved. The spiritual foundations of the most cosmopolitan city in the world were wounded: the capitalist symbol at the center of world commerce and its servants who had come from all over the world were dealt a horrifying blow. If we’re still alive and well, it’s because we escaped from or avoided this particular drama, and many others as well. But as we think about September 11 in particular, we’ve become used to projecting ourselves into the events and thinking about how lucky we are not to have been a brilliant trader or one of the firefighters who risked and lost a life in order to save a few others. It’s not always like this. Often when we think about other dramatic events, we don’t necessarily imagine ourselves there and don’t, therefore, feel directly concerned, even though an unforeseen sequence of circumstances might very well have thrown us into one of these tragedies. Any airplane accident, even if it’s exceptionally serious, is for us part of the everyday order of things. There are necessarily airplane accidents, we think, and for the people transported in these fragile fuselages, it’s a simple question of not being unlucky. On the other hand, the attacks against the Towers and personnel of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were not part of the same everyday order of things, those material realities that we’re more or less powerless to prevent, because these attacks were the result of the pure and simple determination of a few men bent on the destruction of other people not in their own image.

And if to live is to survive, we’re also used to forgetting, and as the weeks and months pass, the events of September 11, 2001 will undergo the same effects of time. Time makes us forget, and a host of solemn commemorations, books, seminars and eyewitness accounts will attempt to help the power of memory overcome forgetfulness. And yet, the intensity felt on the first day of the unfolding drama, the horror at being confronted by the thought and effects of actions designed to inflict the greatest violence possible, have already lessened and will continue to lessen. Contrary to some of the oft-repeated affirmations of the days following the attacks, it’s clear enough that the world hasn’t changed. Everything is nearly as it was before except, perhaps, in the geopolitical and geostrategical realms where, after the gelling of tensions resulting from the disappearance of the USSR, the continents have begun once more to move around a Middle Eastern axis. Life has exercised its rights over us. Fading memory spreads through minds that have begun to return to their favorite forms of entertainment, even if the form of Western entertainment par excellence, the cinema, offers up fictions that pale in comparison to the scenario of the September 11 terrorist attacks, for the expectations and possibilities associated with the historical reality now playing itself out far outpace even the grittiest Hollywood scenario.

And yet, let us consider the Second World War, which ended in Europe on May 8, 1945 with the surrender of the remaining German military apparatus to the Allied steamroller. The figures are dizzying. Fifty million people died a violent death, a record that has never been surpassed. Twenty million died in the USSR alone, and five million perished in concentration and extermination camps. The Al-Qaeda terrorists seem like choirboys beside the groups of thousands of soldiers who participated in this way, each trained for all-out obliteration. Even if the terrorists were able to use the limited means available to them to bring about the greatest degree of destruction possible, the havoc they brought about seems small when compared to the massive destruction wrought by the Allied and Axis armies. Note, however, that the Second World War played itself out openly, in the ultimate criminal frankness, and the relationship of might to might was direct and occurred within the classic framework of war between opposing armies: airplanes against airplanes, tanks against tanks, even if, one might add, the large-scale hunting of civilians was one of the more original priories of this conflict. The attacks of September 11, 2001 confront us with a new situation. Now the mighty American superpower, the greatest military, scientific, technical and human power in history, must track small groups of individuals forming an international network scattered over the surface of the planet, groups inspired by a radical anti-Western and anti-American sentiment and whose means and objectives are not easily discernible to the US and other Western countries, who, logically, fear the worst (chemical or biological attacks, small-scale nuclear bombs, dirty bombs). And it is not a simple question of an “understandable” paranoia among military-minded individuals whose natural inclination is to fear or desire the worst, nor is it the fantasizing of people too caught up in books by Jim Fleming or Tom Clancy. Rather, this fear is based upon volumes of documents, testimonials, speeches, and evidence from other elements tied to the terrorist organizations who seem to be engaged in an epic conflict of the humble, the “good guys,” of course, against the mighty, necessarily the “bad guy”. If Hitler thought huge armies were needed to destroy the Allied forces and realize his objectives, the “miniaturization” of their armies permits the terrorists to believe that they will be able to accomplish large-scale criminal acts without being noticed by any international network of surveillance. In order to make such necessarily constant surveillance successful, Western secret services have understood that they must enter into frank and honest cooperation with each other, even among different services within the same nation. In the United States, especially, the CIA, NSA and FBI, all agencies with diverse prerogatives but each charged with defending national security, have naturally tended to protect their terrain without sharing information – even in the Internet age! – for fear of having to share the spotlight. Western countries are fortunate, however, that the elaborate design and construction of this type of arm seems to be beyond the means and abilities possessed by the terrorists, with the possible exception of some the of the states “friendly” to these groups. But has not this “evil-minded nature” (if this is how we might, at this stage, designate the desire to destroy for pleasure) already proven its ingenuity, leaving us no choice but to fear the worst? For those who inhabit this world in a generally honest and respectable way, the potential actions of these clandestine groups and their trophy hunters inspire fear and anxiety, if only because of the powerlessness the majority feels before the insanity of one or another tiny minority. Civilians have understood that because of the worldwide presence of these terrorist groups, because civilians must travel, they have become the favorite target of such actions as the taking of hostages or exemplary murders like that of journalist Daniel Pearl in early 2002. Warriors for their cause, whether they be Islamist, Basque, Irish, Philippino, Columbian, Palestinian, etc., take aim at civilians as if they represented an easier and more impressive target than soldiers or officials who, by nature of their status, tend to be armed or otherwise protected. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a vague unease is ever-present in our minds, whether overtly or nearly imperceptibly, for it seems that wherever one goes, the presence of risk is measured everywhere. Before the attacks, such risks were associated only with foreign countries or regions to be avoided, or perhaps with certain means of transport.

Interestingly, sales of the Koran have increased since these events took place, almost as if Western citizens needed to know for themselves whether or not the word revealed to the prophet Mohammed invites its followers to lead all-out war against their enemies, a Jihad, as both convinced fanatics and experts like to say. Religion, it would seem, has made a thunderous return onto the world stage, and in its worst caricature or form: fanaticism. The servants of National Socialism fought for five years to impose Hitler’s eugenic legal code upon the world. The members of Al-Qaeda struck like a bolt of lightning in the name of Allah, someone they’ve never seen and who apparently only spoke through the intermediary of the prophet Mohammed, sole and definitive receptacle of divine thought. In one of his numerous, narcissistic, media-style declarations, the billionaire son Osama declared the following a few years ago in the newspaper Al Qods al Arabi: “I fight, and therefore I may die as a martyr and go to paradise to meet God. Our struggle now is against the Americans,” for there are troops of “infidels on the sacred soil of Arabia, which harbors the two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.” As a prelude to this struggle, he declared at a large meeting of Islamic activists held at Peshwar, Pakistan in the spring of 2001: “I call upon the young generation to be ready for the Holy War and to prepare themselves for it in Afghanistan, for the Jihad, in these moments of crisis for Muslims, is an obligation.” Humanity “marginalized” by the course of History, a community of believers, Islam has come to remind the “dominant” civilization, the capitalist Occident, that it won’t be shoved into a corner. And if statistics on religious numbers are reliable, the diffusion of a “practical atheism” seems, as prophesied for Christianity by Nietzsche, to dominate in the great majority of lives and consciences around the world, as if God, or anything else divine, didn’t exist at all. It was as if the sign, the name of God, should no longer resound in the ears of humanity, leaving tranquil consciences in its wake. September 11, 2001 represents, then, the shock of impact between a civilization that, by the very fact that it has rid itself of its repressive ideological tutors, is advancing, and a civilization fixed in place by the satisfaction of existence, by the presence and direction of “God”, a collision between an atheistic and a religious civilization. A certain segment of Islam joyfully and consciously attacked an important American symbol in the same measure in which it felt its own existence threatened and intimidated by this very symbol, a representation of the Western mental war machine that has targeted, among other things, religion (given that Western countries have tended to marginalize authorities of the major monotheistic religions, as well as the intensity with which these religious officials can express themselves publicly). But this is only the most obvious expression of this tendency. The American leader, the President of the USA, even if he swore on the Bible to protect and enforce the Constitution, is not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word. On the other hand, Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, is always extremely careful that his personal appearance and that of his officials are in agreement with the dictates of Muslim tradition for religious chiefs, though the faithful of Mohammed have not yet begun to regard him as such (God or whomever else be praised!). But if the United States and Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Mohammed and Bin Laden, claim to be founded on “sacred” bases, and if the leaders of these countries seem to be in competition to see who can make the best public expression of their personal “faith” and their respect for the prevailing religions in their respective countries, how well does the articulation of actual social and political life correspond to the religious narrative? Does the businesslike appearance of President Bush demonstrate a distancing from God while the semantics of Bin Laden’s appearance make him a true believer? Is this an apparently systematic and rigorous articulation of the fusion of political law and religious law, as with the Sharia? And does this fusion provide sufficient proof that the nation and its members are “believers” or of the “faith” called for by Mohammed? Does it require no more than the simple following of a negative judicial code (don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t worship idols…) or repetitive acts (prayers toward Mecca, giving to the poor, pilgrimages to Mecca…)? Western historical experience has proven to us that there exists a veritable gulf between the appearance of faith through the expressions of religious signs worthy of a Tartuffe, and true, lived faith felt by the believer as a result of his or her belief in the existence of God. What, then, of such apparently “religious” political states? Are these nations truly living their faith, or is it all really just a faith of representation, of public spectacles? This question is not anecdotal, for the ultimate justification for the existence and direction of these national or sectarian organizations is God Himself, and more precisely, the instrumentalization of the concept and name of God by his supposed faithful since, beyond the revealed Word supposedly represented by the Koran or the Bible, God has been silent for some time now, at least since the end of the book of Revelations. This one and only “God”, does He have reasons to be proud of His most committed flock of believers, those most determined to defend his religion? Does God want to be revered? Is this why He created a Universe outside of Himself, separate from Himself? Is God a megalomaniac? If there exists, on the one hand, a Christian God who supposedly saw airplanes used as weapons to kill thousands of people and, on the other hand, a Muslim God who supposedly saw the same airplanes accomplish the same acts for His glorification, would one consider that these were good works or that those flying the planes were victims duped by a few usurpers? This “God of Armies” behind whom each believer seems to fall voluntarily into line like a good soldier is so attractive to those seeking meaning in and for their lives that a good conversion if often very useful in acquiring and maintaining political power. There is little, then, that prevents skilled comedians from making use of divine approbation to legitimize their various dogmas, decisions and actions. Might Osama Bin Ladin be one among many such comedians claiming to be of the Muslim faith, a faith that, in the name of the Prophet, he mangles with interpretations that fly in the face of Mohammed’s generosity? It is therefore not certain that the events of September 11, 2001 are the result of religious fanaticism, but rather, it provides proof of the omnipresence of an atheist spirit, lost and without anchor, crouching at the very heart of a monotheis, for which everything is possible, starting with the worst, of course. It is up to us to understand what makes their existence possible, to identify their roots, and it would indeed be strange were it the just and good God of the monotheists nourishing these roots.

These questions obviously concern the Muslim world, but they concern the United States as well, since beyond the constitutional gestures made by the victorious candidate in a presidential election who becomes President of the United States by swearing on the Bible to defend the Constitution (and how might this action be interpreted if the President were atheist or non-Christian?), the Bible and Christian organizations predominate in this country, whether its members are white, black, Hispanic…or even Native American. Now, Americans are proud of what they consider their piety, but biblical idolatry, for which the biblical word is the defining word, the truth, can represent not only evidence of America’s true faith in God, but can also serve to illustrate the godlessness of the United States and other countries, for readings and interpretations of the biblical word can vary and develop into potentially and tangibly dangerous fanaticisms. And while our assumptions regarding American piety might generally apply to the whole of the American Continent, the United States seems to have been most impregnated by Christian culture, for it constitutes a building block of both the American psyche and American politics, reaching from the first Puritan colonists to the Compassionate Conservatism of George Bush, Jr. Because of this, Americans, citizens of the largest economic and military power of our day, seem more susceptible than many to various manipulations of the biblical word, both old and new.

On September 11, 2001, the two towers of the World Trade Center burned in the fire of a religious, monotheistic, millenaristic “thought” articulated by Bin Laden and his cohorts. For Americans and Westerners, it was a demonstration of the mobilizing and irrational power that can be generated through a personal interpretation of the Koran or the Bible expressed by minds seeking above all murder and reciprocal hate. For Muslims who refute a priori Bin Laden’s reading of the Koran and for Westerners who desire to avoid leaving the task of interpreting sacred texts solely to insane readers and who now feel the need to pay closer attention to irrational or criminal interpretations of the Bible, it becomes a question of approaching these texts in the most honest and sensible manner possible in order to attempt to learn what this “Word of God” can and does mean. Are those who believe themselves to be its most faithful lovers and servants really that, or just ignorant liars? For Europeans or other non-American Westerners, it is also important to better understand the history and the cultural, intellectual and social specificities of the United States in order to avoid the iconographical simplifications bantered back and forth at cafes of commerce and politics by groups that are a priori and systematically anti US. In the same way, it is necessary to understand the constitutive and problematical diversities of the Muslim “community of believers” that many illusively believe forms a single and united community that has simply spread and radiated from its historical home in Saudi Arabia.
Beyond the perception and analysis of historical events and principles concerning the monotheistic West and the Islamic Middle East, Far East and Asia, it is also absolutely necessary to address “religious affairs” using a rigorous and without doubt innovative approach that enables one to understand and act upon the roots of religious power in a way that accurately schematizes the nervous system of these traditions of a Humanity open to the absolute gift of Being, Eternity, and the Blessed State, traditions which have crashed, like the airplanes, into the hypnotic power of the Darkness of Evil. For while the foundational and structural energy of the two Christian and Muslim monotheisms resides in the projection of the subject beyond its end and into the eternal existence of its soul, thereby disengaging an absolute positivity for the individual subject by illustrating the omnipresence of the Divine that is eternally in it, around it and for it, the enthusiasts of this “Eternal Paradise” find themselves devoured by a new negativity: there are others living in error who must be “corrected” through the administration of a particular lesson. The illuminated adherent then becomes an armed tool in the edification of a “World religion” requiring a perfect resemblance among subjects, an attack of clones. With the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France, the criminal events of September 11 prove that monotheisms are necessarily articulated though a dualism fixed around the pole of Evil against which those supposedly endowed by the Good become “knights” to a General whose actions also target the general at the expense of the particular. The workers at the World Trade Center were no longer humans coming under the umbrella of Divine Creation and also, therefore, the divine laws expressed by the Prophet, since their American nationality or their social condition as workers for American or Western companies became the a priori reason for their condemnation.

The mobilizing power of one or the other of these monotheisms has not disappeared. Responsible for these crimes because it made them possible through the charismatic person of a Bin Laden, a giver of orders, it is an ever-active crucible for other anti-Western terrorist attacks throughout the planet, but also for fanatical and murderous crises within the very heart of the Muslim world. The study of transcendental and historical conditions of possibility concerning this “science of crime” incarnated in the absolute power attributed to the “Verb” of only one person, the Prophet, the chief of the Assassins, the Pope, the guru of some sect, should serve to protect Westerners by allowing them to identify the discursive perversions at work in their own civilization and in those of the rest of humanity, and also by enabling them to exercise a critical pressure on these apprentice murderers by limiting as much as possible their confidence in themselves and in the truth of their beliefs and projects by attacking them at their very roots. For what all-important reason is it so imperative that we sense the weight of these determining realities of humankind’s life here on the earth? It is because living is a “chance”: a situation that we try to render constant by eliminating contrary factors and defending favorable ones, by being open to what is possible, useful and good for oneself, by taking the opportunity to do and receive good, by having space in which to exist. And since we’re all dependant even in terms of our existence, bound together consubstantially by the multiple conditions that make life possible, it is necessary to gauge the breadth of these same conditions that offer us the chance to live and to be. Faced with people who separate the world into those who are on their side and those who aren’t, into “friends” and “enemies” on the basis of a racial, ethnic or religious filter, should we separate that which, a priori, it is not, like Humanity, but also to separate, a posteriori, that which it is, like Humanity and Nature, Humanity and God? Or to put it another way, should the events of September 11 convince us, by reciprocity, of racism à la Bin Laden, who seeks to oppose arabs, muslims and whites, or should they convince us that “religion” is bad and fanatical by nature? Or perhaps, on the contrary, we should take refuge in “religions” that oppose this “wicked world” dominated by suffering and unhappiness, an image fed to us regularly by our tragedy hungry media outlets in this world where daily we witness the post mortem of God and His angels? To take up a leitmotif of existentialism, even the person who commits suicide in order to avoid taking sides in this conflict of priorities, or the person who remains silent to avoid having to answer all of these questions, has chosen and answered in some way. Humanity, by its nature, must make choices, and the right ones, since bad choices cost dearly.

Now, in the context of the general situation created by these events, the questions and the problems are both individual and macroindividual, or collective. At the beginning of August, 2002, one of these geostrategical questions is, for Westerners, whether or not to attack Iraq in order to overthrow Saddam Hussein, since Western intelligence gathering indicates that Iraqi scientists and military personnel are developing, in secret, nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction. The events of September 11, 2001 sent us a clear message: think radically, now, as much as you can, or accept one day to be, tomorrow or in a few months, active or passive toys in a great manipulation, a great catastrophe. At the heart of this question is the overly simple and the overly mysterious: “God.” What should we think about Him? What should we do with Him? Should we submit to Him, and if so, how? Should we convert to Islam? But why would Islam be God’s religion? Perhaps Christianity would work, but the same questions arise. Or should we just deny the existence of God and label all believers as crazy? Or, on the contrary, should these questions be subject to new scrutiny, new analyses, new perspectives? On September 11, 2001, God didn’t intervene, just like he didn’t intervene during the five years of World War II, like he didn’t intervene in the murders of Holly and Jessica, and so on. Does this lack of intervention in human affairs prove God’s non-existence?
Our epoch, with its knowledge, its human and technological networks, is it not well prepared to make progress, to bring about new innovations in answering these questions instead of falling back on the same, dull repetitions that leave us turning around in circles? Should the person who knows and the person who believes go round and round or go forward together? Four hundred years ago, the men and women of Europe answered this question by choosing a path that led them straight to…

Jean-Christophe Grellety
Translation by Coby Fletcher


posted by jean-christophe at 2:15 AM