THE LASTING WOUNDS OF 9/11: A BOOK REVIEW OF "AFFLICTED POWERS"
- Gonzalo Santos
- Sep 11, 2024
- 4 min read
This book gives an account of the strategic significance of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 which spectacularly targeted the most powerful symbols of U.S. global economic and military power.
It is written from the radical perspective of those that claim that the modern capitalist world has entered, since the advent of electronic mass media, the stage of relying on the ceaseless production of "spectacle" to continue to ceaselessly accumulate capital, exert power, and regulate all social relations.
Beyond the physical harm and loss of innocent lives they caused, the authors claim, the attacks were a traumatic counter-spectacle meant to destabilize and disrupt the pervasive dominant spectacle. They were meant to be seen on television by everyone, over and over again, without any possible censorship or answer by those accustomed of peddling spectacle for profit and power.
So, what happened? Well, the American state responded reflexively by launching new land wars in central Asia and a "Global War on Terrorism" that produced many more innocent, mostly Muslim, victims and also many more terrorists.
The "forever wars" eventually all ended up badly, costing trillions of dollars, millions of casualties, and no results. The U.S.'s military adventurism was globally repudiated, it's global leadership much weakened. And the geopolitical world of the major power rivalries became much more destabilized, tense, and violent.
In all of this, the intellectual architects of 9/11 - Osama bin Laden et al. -, who counted mainly on non-state social networks of religiously-indoctrinated violent actors, seemed to have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. The flailing U.S. empire was doing itself much more harm that the attacks of 9/11 ever did.
The Spectacle Society and its masters in the U.S., the authors continue, still have no answer to the strategic blow they suffered with the counter-spectacle of 9/11. The American people, previously socialized to be perpetually mesmerized by pro-systemic spectacle, continue to be gripped by wild fear and insecurity. The rise of Trumpism can be seen as its most bitter fruit. Soon, migrants became redefined and treated as "potential terrorists" by both parties.
The book still criticizes the tactic of 9/11 as a way to challenge the system, saying you cannot defeat capitalism and its ceaseless production of spectacle with counter-spectacles, terrorist or otherwise, and raises the key question of strategy and tactics: what will it take to really change things for the better, for a post-capitalist, post-spectacle society?
For it is not only the powers-that-be that are now profoundly afflicted; it is all the rest of us, caught up in the chaos of social, political, and geopolitical turbulence, too.
For example, take the latest edition of "The Duopoly Games" - the quintessential political spectacle mounted in the U.S. every 4 years. This last edition has proven to be a particularly shallow, phony simulacrum of democratic competition, with a neofascist demagogue & megalomaniac bully commandeering one of the major parties, and the other unceremoniously tossing out a decrepit incumbent president with genocidal tendencies, and instantly replacing him with an anointed successor of like proclivities, without any primaries or challengers permitted.
The well-manufactured simulacrum of "consensus" at the top, and "enthusiasm" at the base of both parties is as obvious as it is deceptive: both are, to their respective mesmerized, gullible bases, supposed to "save democracy" from the other, and claim will lead America to a better future mostly based on empty and even cruel promises.
It is considered bad manners, of course, to point any of this out to spectator "participants" of these phony spectacular games. The balloon will pop later, let them have their fun now, why spoil the delusion?
There is a direct line connecting 9/11 to today. Up to the last day of innocence - the universal, manufactured belief in the benign duopoly -, September 10, 2001, the good people of the United States were being told by their newly-elected leaders that they could look forward to a new era of "compassionate conservatism". Even the Mexican president had come to a joint session of Congress to "demand" they pass, "by December at the latest" a new bilateral treaty to humanely regulate migration. He received a standing ovation...
By noon the next day, the first two ideological casualties of 9/11 were buried in the rubble: any sense of "compassion" - domestic or international -, and any sense of multilateralism to solve global problems.
Henceforth, it would be strictly unilateral, violent actions that would be applied to solve every problem - domestic or international. Neocon Bushism 101.
But the brutal spectacles those two ideological casualties unleashed, far from restoring peace and freedom, have themselves proven to be deeply destructive of the social order - domestically in the U.S. and internationally - that they were meant to restore and preserve.
The era of post-9/11 political and geopolitical chaos began (followed by financial meltdown), and we are not anywhere close to having resolved or escaped this period - quite the contrary, we are still in it and it threatens to engulf us further into wars and social conflict with every passing day.
What do we put in place of the toxic spectacles of imperialist wars abroad and neofascist Trumpism at home? Anyone thinks that more of the same old liberal spectacles, complicit in all those wars and constantly capitulating to the ultraright, will save us?
The answer is blowing in the wind.
———