S11 The Day the Empire Died Dennis Redmond © 2001

Final version Dec 12, 2001

It’s amazing just how fast, how far, and how completely things have
spun out of control for the Wall Street neoliberals. As late as
October of 2000, the conventional wisdom was that the rentiers were
still the Masters of the Universe, the US was still an intergalactic
superpower, and the Bubble was merely taking a breather before Dow
30,000. One year later, the infrastructures of neoliberalism’s
allegedly unassailable political, economic, and cultural hegemonies
lie in heaps of smoking rubble.
First came the epochal political meltdown of the 2000 US Presidential
election: an unelected oiligarchy openly seized control of the US
government, despite losing the popular vote by over half a million
ballots – all without a peep of protest from a crassly neoliberalized
Democratic Party, long ago become just another Party of Wall Street.
Thanks to its atrocious electoral college, reactionary first-past-the-
post voting system, and deeply undemocratic system of Senate
apportionment, the US Constitutional order achieved the rare feat of
making the average Middle Eastern theocracy look good.
Next came a steadily expanding wave of the biggest anti-capitalist
protests in world history: Paris ’95, Bonn ’96 and Seattle ’99, and
then the multinational upsurge of Prague/Millau ’00, and Porto
Alegre/Quebec City/Genoa ’01. In less than five years, popular protest
smashed the EU’s Maastricht monetarism, tore huge holes in the
ideological armor of the IMF and the World Bank, and knocked
neoliberalism squarely back on its heels for the first time in twenty-
five years. Even more unsettling from the neoliberal point of view,
the protest movement was no one-shot deal, but is merely the
mediatic tip of an enormous socio-political iceberg: the multinational
proletariat spawned by the ferocious marketization of the planet has
begun to create new forms of cultural, political and economic
solidarity across all manner of traditional national borders,
everywhere from promising new forms of Eurosocialism to Japan’s
gargantuan bailout of Southeast Asia, and from the rise of feisty
developmental states in China, Vietnam and Eastern Europe all the way
to the stellar productions of a truly multinational media culture.
Then the multi-trillion-dollar dotcom bubble burst, pulverizing the
high-tech manufacturers who were among the Bubble’s main eneficiaries.
Northamerican chip equipment sales plunged by more than 45% in the
summer of 2001, the DRAM market has collapsed by a stunning 67%, while
the global chip biz as a whole is on course to contract by 35%, the
worst annual decline in its thirty-year history. To make a long story
short, the allegedly perfect, self-correcting, frictionless market so
beloved of the neoliberals has self-destructed in epochal fashion; the
Age of the Bubble Boom has given way to the age of vast and expensive
post-Bubble Bailouts.
Just when things couldn’t possibly get any worse for the neoliberals,
the hijacking operation of the century sent two jetliners careening
into the heart of downtown New York City, on a suicide run which
pulverized the World Trade Center of lower Manhattan. In less than an
hour, twin kiloton-strength detonations reduced the Twin Towers to a
ghastly pile of rubble straight out of a WWW III movie, strewn with
twisted girders, pulverized concrete and eerily fluttering printouts.
A third hijacked plane killed hundreds when it punched a huge hole in
the Pentagon building, setting an entire wing on fire, while a fourth
crashed in rural Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard.
The sheer enormity of the disaster – two skyscrapers and four jets
annihilated, an entire wing of the Pentagon heavily damaged, more than
three thousand killed, the heart of Manhattan’s financial district
ripped open – blew out neoliberalism’s mediatic circuitry. Commercials

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and sports events vanished from the airwaves; normal programming
disappeared, in the ideological equivalent of a total systems crash.
For the first time in US history, the entire US air transport system
shut down. On Monday, US citizens went to sleep with visions of
endless Intel greenfield sites dancing in their heads; on Tuesday,
they woke up inside the shell-shocked ruins of Half Life’s Black Mesa
Research Facility.1

Lineages of Catastrophe

What made S11 unique was its status as the first truly multinational
catastrophe of the post-Cold War era. Armed with nothing more than
knives, the hijackers meticulously turned the system’s own technology,
organization and infrastructure against itself, transforming the
signature transport vehicles of late capitalism into kiloton-strength
cruise missiles, and turning the premier architectural symbols of the
multinational era into nightmarish kill-zones. In contrast to the
hijackers of the 1970s, who still had the naïvely modernist belief in
the power of political manifestoes to disrupt the continuum of
Cold War capitalism, and thus merely threatened to blow up their
planes, the S11 team dispensed with diatribes, escape routes, and the
obsolete heroism of dying underneath a hail of Special Forces bullets,
innovating what might be termed just-in-time terrorism.
The unruly temporalities of the manifesto, the hostage crisis and the
commando action or explosion were abolished, replaced by the
endlessly-replayed video clip of the second plane plunging into the
tower, or what amounts to the crash of globalization’s medium
into its message – at the significant price, to be sure, of signing
the event in question that much more fully over to the bane of the
video images which constitute the cultural superstructure of
multinational capitalism.
Airborne catastrophes have an extensive history in the annals of 20th
century culture, ranging from Nazi Germany’s V-bombs to Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, all the way to the carpet-bombing of Vietnam by US B-52s in
the 1960s. Theodor Adorno had this insightful comment on the V2 all
the way back in 1944:

Had Hegel’s philosophy of history encompassed this epoch, then

Hitler’s robot-bombs would have taken their place, next to the death-
scene of Alexander and similar images, among the empirically selected
facts in which the symbolic state of the world-spirit is immediately
expressed. Like Fascism itself, the robots are self-steering and yet
utterly subjectless. Just like the former, they combine the utmost
technical perfection with complete blindness. Just like the former,
they sow the deadliest panic and are completely futile. Theodor
Adorno, Minima Moralia, “Far from the firing-line”, Aphorism 33.

Like the V2, al-Qaeda’s pilots were in complete control, and therefore
completely out of control; like the V2, they sowed the deadliest
panic, and yet were ultimately futile. Though al-Qaeda are by no means
fascists in the historical sense of the term, i.e. reactionary
nationalists bent on imperial expansion through a militarized strain
of monopoly capitalism, they were indeed the adherents of a deeply
reactionary strain of Right-wing fundamentalism with significant
parallels to Fascism, in the sense that both ideologies are no
atavistic survivals of the past, but are the purest products of
international modernity (and in the case of al-Qaeda, multinational
postmodernity). One of the central features of reactionary thinking
since the dawn of the capitalist world-system in the 16th century has
been the deployment of the most advanced technological means on behalf
of the most reactionary political ends. But whereas Fascism’s slave

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labor camps and military plunder represented the reinvention of
primitive accumulation in the semi-periphery, al-Qaeda’s program of
maximal violence tied to a minimal politics points to a rather
different social constellation, namely the regressions of the Middle
Eastern petro-periphery.

Oil Rentiers, Petro-fundamentalists

Unlike the Axis semi-peripheries of the 1930s, the petro-periphery

never developed an autonomous industrial base. Saudi Arabia is an
excellent example of the social contradictions of the region; thanks
to annual oil revenues of $62.4 billion, it maintained a per capita
GDP level of $8,200 in 2000, seemingly not too far away from Portugal
(per capita GDP $12,000) or South Korea (per capita GDP $9,500). But a
closer look shows this wealth is literally and figuratively built on
sand. Energy exports continue to account for 35-40% of the total Saudi
economy, but the national accumulation structure is heavily weighted
towards elite consumption and overseas capital markets, rather than
long-term industrial investment. No true Saudi working-class exists;
rather, its oil wealth has been used to prop up a deeply reactionary
regime, a bizarre postmodern caste society wherein 14 million Saudi
citizens live on generous state subsidies, while the service sector is
staffed by a population of approximately 6 million guest-workers and
their families (for the most part, migrants from the poorer countries
in the Middle East and Southeast Asia). According to one State
Department report, these guest-workers comprise an astonishing 72% of
the total workforce.2 The long-term result was that after the boom of
the 1970s, stagnating oil prices in the late 1980s and 1990s brought
fiscal crisis, torpid growth rates, an increasingly onerous foreign
debt (currently $139 billion, or 85% of GDP) and an explosive
legitimation crisis for the Saudi elites who continue to mismanage the
country’s wealth.
Osama bin Laden was the direct product of this world: not only was he
the son of a billionaire Saudi construction contractor, but he
received an MBA and later developed extensive logistical experience in
managing complex construction projects. Similarly, the core members of
al-Qaeda were not expropriated peasants or downtrodden fellahin, but
middle-class Saudis and Egyptian expatriates with some degree of
education, who bore the brunt of the petro-periphery’s long-running
economic crisis, and thus were in a position to make the link between
the corruption and venality of the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian
one-party state, and US corporate power and military influence. There
were of course important contributing circumstances here: absent the
Gulf War, the punitive and cruel ten-year blockade of Iraq (various UN
reports have estimated the death toll caused by the US-led embargo on
Iraq in the hundreds of thousands), Israel’s brutal repression of the
Palestinian Authority, and the long-running CIA intervention in
Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would likely have remained an insignificant
splinter group. Taken together, these factors formed a lethal cocktail
which not only galvanized indigenous discontent, but provided the
financial and military means, the ideological motive, and the
historical opportunity for a social explosion. This is something
chillingly evident in this excerpt from the New York City court case
involving the 1993 WTC bombings, ably recounted by Guardian reporter
Giles Foden:
Q. And why did al-Qaida want an aircraft?
A. They have some goods of their own they want to ship from Peshawar
to Khartoum.
Q. And first of all, who is “they”?
A. Again, I’m referring to Wadih and Osama.
Q. And did he tell you what the goods were that he wanted to ship from

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Peshawar to Khartoum?
A. Yes.
Q. What were they?
A. Stinger missiles.

Many al-Qaida trainees saw videos of such missiles and other weaponry
daily as part of their training routine. Showing hundreds of hours of
Muslims in dire straits – Palestinians on the West Bank, Bosnians
being shot by Serbs, Chechens under attack from the Russian army and
(most of all) dying Iraqi children – was part of al-Qaida’s Ipcress-
file style induction strategy. Giles Foden. Bin Laden: the former CIA
“client” obsessed with training pilots. The Guardian, September 13,
2001.

Such atrocities were used to justify new atrocities, namely the

attacks on the USS Cole and the US embassy bombings in 1998. Instead
of taking the hint and moving US troops out of harm’s way, as the
Reagan Administration did after the bombing of the US Marine barracks
in Lebanon in 1983, Clinton responded by lobbing cruise missiles at
what later turned out to be a harmless Sudanese aspirin factory and an
al-Qaeda base camp in Afghanistan. Three years later, al-Qaeda
returned the favor, by commandeering one of the central mediatic
tropes of the US Empire in its late, decadent phase, namely, the
celebrated Gulf War video clip of a US cruise missile as it slammed
into a hapless Iraqi bunker. An appalling Wall Street Journal
editorial in the days following the end of the Gulf War sneered, “For
once and for all, force works.” Osama Bin Laden carried out the
Journal’s mandate to the letter: on September 11, 2001, ten years to
the day the US formally unleashed its campaign against Iraq, the
images of cruise missiles slamming into bunkers recoiled, through a
gruesome but ineluctable historical logic, into the images of
hijacked jets slamming into skyscrapers.

Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

Given this background, it’s safe to say that the minimal political
goals and maximal operational audacity of S11 mark it as an act of the
multinational petty bourgeoisie, whose fundamentalism was a global
spin-off of the Saudi regime’s own notoriously reactionary petro-
fundamentalism. These fundamentalists were not fanatics of faith but
of energy-rents, the inevitable products of unstable oil monarchies in
the
throes of irreversible economic decline. As if sensing that those
energy-rents were going to dry up in the hydrogen-powered future,
Osama Bin Laden, child of the petro-bourgeoisie, rewrote the demise of
petrocapitalism into the messianic ciphers of apocalypse.
But whose apocalypse, precisely? And why were US targets chosen,
instead of the homes of Saudi princes or Mubarak’s residence? The
names of the targets yield an important clue: United and American
Airlines were picked due to their obvious relation to the words
“United States”; the World Trade Center is the self-evident symbol of
global trade and exchange; while the Pentagon is eponymous for the US
military. Taken together, they form an unmistakable constellation of
the global military, financial and transport superstructures of
neoliberalism, bereft of their political, industrial and service-
sector infrastructures – the uncanny imago, indeed, of the polarized
Gulf economy itself.
In fact, Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are the purest products
of the Cold War: Bin Laden served as a significant CIA asset in the
decades-long US proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and
those CIA-trained and CIA-equipped forces, supplied via Pakistan’s ISI

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agency, spawned the Taliban. Back in 2000, post-colonial theorist and
cultural critic Aijiz Ahmad, one of the savviest analysts of the
Southeast Asian scene, wrote this chillingly prescient analysis of the
Frankenstein the US was creating in Central Asia:

It was at the Khyber Pass that Professor Brzezinski, President

Carter’s National Security Advisor, had stood, an American-made gun in
hand, promising his hired mujahideen that this gun would enable Islam
to prevail against the godless communists. Osama Bin Laden is only one
of the hundreds of thousands who came out of the barrel of that gun;
he simply has more money that most others of his kind.
What did the war in Afghanistan mean for Pakistan?
In the nuclear arena itself, the great dependence of the United States
upon Pakistan for the conduct of the war meant that Pakistani
intelligence services were free to beg, buy, and steal nuclear
technologies from the best laboratories of the Western world without
getting punished, even as the United States continued to blame China
and North Korea for transferring this technology to Pakistan; the
Americans had to swallow hard as Pakistan developed its weapons
capability.
Then there was the money. Quite aside from the countless billions that
came from the United States and the Gulf monarchies, the illegal drug
trade alone, which American secret services helped organize for the
Afghan mujahideen to finance part of their operations, was said
to be bringing in over two billion dollars annually during the early
1980s.
A side-effect for Pakistan was that for a decade or so drug addiction
grew in Karachi faster than in any other city in the world, and
Karachi became a major hub for gun-running by
drug-trafficking mafias; it was in those years that social and
political life in the city was first massively criminalized. And the
cancer of course spread far and wide.
In other parts of the country, in the Northwest Frontier Province
particularly, but also in Baluchistan and Punjab, over three million
Afghan refugees poured in, altering the social fabric itself in the
regions where they were concentrated; one-third to one-half are said
to be there still.
Many of the leaders of Afghan Islamic organizations had migrated to
Pakistan during the Bhutto period, and the bulk of the ruling class,
minus the ones who went straight to Western countries or went to Iran
instead, now also converged there. The refugee camps, where military
training and
Islamic education of the most arcane kind were dispensed in equal
measure, became the source of
virtually infinite recruitment for the war inside Afghanistan. The
combination of military expertise and extreme religious conservativism
that the Taliban has displayed is a direct reflection of the lethal
brew first stirred up in those camps. We might add that the seven-
party alliance that was recognized by Pakistan and the United States
as the legitimate soldiers of God, who then fought over the spoils
after the Soviet withdrawal until the Taliban threw them out, was only
slightly less conservative than today’s Taliban and surely no less
brutal. The same applies to the Pakistanis who joined them in
increasing numbers and the ones who came from a variety of other
countries, from the Sudan to the United Kingdom. Many of those who
have tasted blood are now looking to other sources for the same
ghastly nourishment.
In the process, Pakistan’s own Islamicist organizations, such as the
Jama-at-e-Islami, which had remained politically marginal and
militarily inconsequential have made spectacular progress in terms of

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money, arms, men, and expertise. There has also been an immense
proliferation of other such outfits. Furthermore, there is still a
huge pool of human beings, not only in Afghanistan but also in
Pakistan, not only army regulars and controlled irregulars but also
freelance seekers after martyrdom, from among whom guerillas for
covert wars can still be recruited. Equally dangerous, perhaps, is the
fact that many are men of shifting loyalties and fierce egotism, under
no one’s control and largely footloose. Weapons of all sorts and of
all levels of sophistication, right up to a handful of Stinger
missiles, are spread across Pakistan and among the Afghan irregulars;
no effort to disarm this marauding mass can wholly succeed. Aijiz
Ahmad.
Lineages of the Present. Verso: NY, 2000 (pp 264-265)

Wars of the Second World

Strange as it sounds, Osama Bin Laden’s trajectory from oil rentier to

multinational warlord is the uncanny mirror image of quite another
petro-oligarchy of a declining realm, namely the Bush family. The
involvement of the Bush clan in the oil and spook biz is the stuff of
legend; after successfully parlaying a moderate amount of oil
wealth into major-league political capital, the elder George Bush
served as head of the CIA in 1976, oversaw the CIA’s patronage of
Panama’s General Noriega, and was up to his neck in the Iran-Contra
scandals of the 1980s, before going on to orchestrate those
twin house-cleaning operations of the immediate post-Cold War era, the
invasion of Panama in 1989 (launched against Noriega, a former CIA
asset gone embarrassingly bad) and the Gulf War of 1991 (launched
against the former counterweight against Iran). It is deeply fitting
that Dubya, the flyweight governor of Texas who seized power thanks to
a crooked electoral system cooked up by 200-year-old slavelords (plus
the timely help of brother Jeb Bush in Florida, the Republican
majority of the Supreme Court, and the active complicity of the
Democratic Party), should end up confronting Osama Ben Laden,
a monster created by his father’s CIA.
The riveting horror of S11, on the other hand, the nerve it touched,
was the ghastly thought of wondering just what the passengers on the
doomed planes must have gone through, in those last desperate moments
when they realized, thanks to their cellphones or just by looking out
the window, what was in store for them. The thought has a rational
kernel: this is the dawning intuition that we are all passengers of a
doomed system, its utopian promise of prosperity hijacked by what Marx
called long ago the fanatics of exchange-value – financial
fundamentalists who are ready to sacrifice indescribable amounts of
human and natural life for the greater glory of “shareholder value”.
The neoliberal world-system has condemned four billion human beings to
utter misery, while permitting a few hundred thousand human beings to
own and operate the vast bulk of the planet’s wealth for the sole
purpose of enriching themselves. At present, the global periphery is
shackled to 2 trillion euro of hard currency debt, which it has not
the slightest means of repaying, thanks to its structural dependence
on agrarian and raw materials exports, global unequal exchange, and
the toxic effects of IMF and World Bank austerity. The social effects
of unfettered, unchecked global accumulation, measured in terms of
falling real wages, loss of life expectancy, cutbacks in education and
health services, and rising crime and violence, have been the
equivalent of a thirty-year world war on the working people of this
planet. Entire peoples, cultures and ecologies continue to be
sacrificed at the altar of a financial fundamentalism which, since it
is perfect in theory, need not be called to account for its colossal

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failures (twenty years of declining real wages in the US, the Wall
Street Bubble, the collapse of Eastern Europe, Mexico, Russia, and
Indonesia, etc.). Instead, the social reality is forcibly adjusted to
financial dogma, with ghastly consequences for billions of human
beings.The telos of neoliberalism, a.k.a. financial fundamentalism, is
global destruction: after the age of the Wall Street Bubble comes the
double-barreled Crash, replayed over and over in front of our
astonished eyes. The financial fundamentalism of Wall Street
neoliberalism has its distorted mirror-image in the religious
fundamentalisms of the petro-periphery: both wish to regress to a
fantasmatic past, of unquestioned US hegemony and of the unquestioned
energy-rents which fed that hegemony, respectively.
The dogma of ROE (return on equity) is the rentier jihad; the US
dollar is the rentier Allah, and “Neutron” Jack Welch is the rentier
Bin Laden (no joke, when one considers the hundreds of thousands of
lives trashed by GE’s savage cost-cutting, or the vast swathes of the
Hudson River contaminated with its PCBs). That is why the most
appropriate metaphor for the Bush bombing campaign is neither WW II
nor WW III, but the War of the Second Worlds – a bogus petro-Islam
facing off against an equally fraudulent petro-Christianity, a battle
between identically anachronistic oiligarchs, rather like the Turkish-
Russian wars of the 19th century or the murderous civil conflicts of
postcolonial Africa.3
This raises the question of what the long-term effects of S11 will be
on a neoliberalism already in the throes of a severe legitimation
crisis. It’s probably not an accident that Afghanistan should have
exploded into fundamentalism; bereft of Pakistan’s remittances,
agrarian and textile exports, and lacking the raw materials and
energy-rents of the former Soviet republics turned nation-states,
fundamentalism was the only ideology capable of forging a rudimentary
state apparatus. It’s interesting that fundamentalism has completely
failed to do anything more than inconvenience entrenched one-party
states in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere; even Iran, the usual
example of a religious revolution, is very much the exception which
proves the rule – the mullahs chased out a monarchy and replaced it
with the equivalent of a Cromwellian one-party state. Natural
geography and Cold War social history seem to have conspired to
make Afghanistan the weak link of the Central Asian region, the first
fault-line in the tectonic shift away from the US Empire and towards
the rule of the EU and East Asia. In the optimistic version of this
process, states will slowly adjust to the new situation,
assisted by far-sighted UN diplomacy and EU aid; one cannot discount,
however, the possibility of a horrendous regional conflagration, if
the US is so foolish as to extend its military campaign to other,
unrelated countries, or to try to reexert its lost economic hegemony
by military means.

Limits of Catastrophe

If this is so, then there may well be a sense in which even our most
fervid scenarios of catastrophe – colossal destruction and ever more
spectacular oil wars throughout the petro-periphery – are missing the
point. What such narratives gloss over is the fact that the US is not
the center of the world-system. The true Twin Towers of the
global economy are not New York buildings, but the abstract, largely
invisible infrastructures of the European Union and East Asia, the new
global hegemons who have financed the US’ vast current account and
trade deficits to the tune of 400 billion EUR annually, and who the US
owes some 2.4 trillion EUR on its net international investment
account. More importantly, the EU and East Asia are leading the charge
towards renewable energy, efficient mass transit and conservation (the

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EU is on track to generate 20% of its electricity via windpower by
2010, and both regions consume half the energy per capita which the US
consumes). To be blunt, the EU and East Asia are cutting the umbilical
cord tying their economies to the petro-periphery.What this means is
that one of the fundamental assumptions of the Left – the
simple demand, “Peace Now” – needs to be supplemented by a more
nuanced set of demands, which might be summarized as “Global Justice
Now”. In the year 2001, it is an indisputable geopolitical reality
that the US is nothing more than an advanced semiperiphery, a Second
World oiligarchy with a Third World electoral system, ruled over by
reactionary dimwits who quote the Bible the way the Taliban quote the
sharia, only without the Taliban’s incomparable provincial charm.
While this decline has triggered increased US juridical and military
intervention in the declining petro-peripheries, it’s striking to note
how quickly the rising industrial semi-peripheries of
Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe are moving into alignment with East
Asia and the EU.
Both Bush and Bin Laden represent identically reactionary responses to
the impending end of the hydrocarbon epoch and beginning of the
Hydrogen Age, i.e. the displacement of irreconcilable internal
conflicts into murderous but curiously powerless acts of
multinational violence.

Three practical consequences come to mind:

1. S11 was a multinational crime, and multinational police action is

necessary to both track down its perpetrators, and ensure that similar
events do not happen again.

2. Some sort of intervention in long-suffering Afghanistan is

necessary, and this must take the form of a long-term United Nations
commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan, and preventing future
multinational organizations from essentially hijacking nation-states.
The closest analogy here is Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in
1978, which kicked out the genocidal Khmer Rouge. That said, the scope
and scale of military intervention must be firmly limited to rooting
out al-Qaeda; the Left must firmly resist attempts by the US
oiligarchy to transform a global police action into a permanent
military occupation of Central Asia.

3. Realistically, the only counterweight to the power of the US on the

world stage right now is the EU. The EU must step up and play the role
of peacemaker and consensus-builder, in order to end the sanctions
against Iraq, provide the nascent Palestinian state with the resources
it needs to develop an autonomous economy, and in general permit the
Middle Eastern countries to find their own path to democratization and
industrial development; if they do not play this historic role, then
al-Qaeda will be the forerunner of social explosions too horrible to
contemplate.

Towards Global Justice

The objection might be raised that insofar as exploding buildings and

crashing airplanes have been a grim reality since WW II, and given
that the body-count of S11 pales next to the fearful toll of the wars,
famines and epidemics occurring elsewhere in the world-system, we
ought not to make too much of the event. In the more extreme versions
of this view, the victims of S11 are written off as unfortunate
bystanders, complicit citizens of an arrogant, violent superpower
which finally got a taste of its own medicine. The objection falls
short, however, precisely where it feels itself to be most certain:

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this is the ideal of juridical comparability, of a common global
standard for all acts of violence. No such standard exists. The Cold
War version of this argument was the simple-minded equation of the
Nazi atrocities of WW II and Stalin’s purges, without any regard for
the historical differences between the two regimes; an argument which
was subsequently used by the US Empire to justify its savage war on
Vietnam, just as Soviet ideologists regularly invoked the horrors of
Fascism in order to crush democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe. It
is one of the terrible ironies of history that both former superpowers
bear a nearly equal share of responsibility for the current misery of
Afghanistan. The aporia is that every act of violence is particular,
i.e. committed by certain individuals against other individuals or
objects, while justice by its very definition must be universal. No
application of justice would suffice to fully restitute to the victims
what was done to them, and the attempt to do so would only fall back
into the same old injustice – an eye-for-an-eye leaves, as Gandhi put
it, the entire world blind. True justice can only prevent future
violence.
What an authentic justice might be like can perhaps best be grasped
from the standpoint of two of the greatest works of art of the
multinational era, both of which have a surprisingly direct
relationship to the unforgettable imagery of S11. The video trope of
the skyscraper was invented by Patrick McGoohan’s magnificent 1967 TV
series The Prisoner. During the opening tag which begins each episode,
there is a scene in which No. 6, the hero of the story, is abducted by
secret agents who knock him out with sleeping gas. Just before he
falls unconscious, he looks out the window and sees two office towers
in the window; their sheer surfaces are briefly superimposed against
his puzzled face. Later, he wakes up in the nameless, stateless
Village, one of the great metaphors of postmodern placelessness, thus
qualifying the preceding tower shot as one of the first great
multinational allegories in media history. On a certain level, S11 was
fuelled by the regressive impulse to destroy those towers, instead of
understanding why they were built, and how the multinational economy
might be changed for the better.
Hideaki Anno’s 1995 anime series Neon Genesis: Evangelion took the
skyscraper narrative in a whole new direction, by transforming a
futuristic Tokyo-3 into an informatic battleground between giant
robots or mechas (the Evangelions) and mysterious creatures called
“angels”, who assail the human race from another dimension.
In 1996, many Japanese observers felt Evangelion was an uncanny
prediction of the Aum sect’s poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway;
nowadays, the battle-scenes in evangelion read like the most
shockingly precise premonition of S11 imaginable, relaying the same
sense of a shocking planetary catastrophe which can only be answered
for with new forms of collective mobilization – ones which neither
lash out against the multinational era with homicidal (and ultimately
suicidal) fury, nor reiterate the dreadful cycle of revenge, but reach
out towards the horizon of global justice, renouncing the total
violence of market competition by new forms of multinational
cooperation.

Footnotes

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1. For those unfamiliar with the 3D videogame scene, Half Life was the
greatest PC videogame of the late 1990s. Created by Valve Software,
and scripted by fantasy and fiction writer Marc Laidlaw, Half Life was
the first 3D videogame to surpass the blockbuster Hollywood thriller
or sci-fi spectacular, by transforming 3D textures, level design and
scripting sequences into multinational art-forms. One of the
fundamental innovations of the game was its creation of a genuinely
post-Cold War narrative scenario set in a mythical Black Mesa Research
Facility in Arizona, which ingeniously turns the standard “alien
invasion” trope of Cold War science fiction on its head (though the
plot is far too delightful to reveal here, suffice to say that your
player-character eventually discovers that the worst aliens are human
beings themselves). For complete information on the game, see Planet
Halflife at .

2. http://www.state.gov/www/background_notes/saudi_0998_bgn.html

3. The limits of the metaphor are the limits of the social decline of
the US. This is probably most evident in the figure of Colin Powell,
truly the adult supervision in the White House, who has steadfastly
refused to expand the war into the global bombing spree which the Far
Right of the Administration would like to see, and whose commanding
presence has put Dubya and Dick Cheney in the shade. In mass-cultural
terms, Powell has played the mythic role of the cool-headed, logical
Tuvac in Star Trek Voyager, at a moment when Captain Janeway has been
captured by aliens and pinheaded Starfleet admirals are calling for
bombing an entire spiral arm of the galaxy into the next dimension.
Connoisseurs of the Bush tribe will note that Powell’s role uncannily
mirrors that of James Baker in the Administration of Bush Senior, with
the qualification that this Autogestión y Tecnología para Empresas.
Bush is dumber, and this Baker is more capable.

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