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September 11, 2006
Five years on the site of the World Trade centre has become known as ground zero. Some images are still too raw and jarring for Americans.
John Albanese
Ground zero is now a scared site in New York.
Nick Fanelli
Graham Morrison
Memorial events were taking place around the world today on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US. I've just watched on television the thousands of people at Ground Zero gathering for a moment's silence to mark the time when the first plane hit one of the twin towers five years ago.
What is lacking is a cognitive mappingof 9/11 that is different from Washington's 'war on terrorism' narrative. Slavoj Zizek approaches this by asking: 'What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? It's a good question. He says:
...terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.
That is whywe often suspect that the terror alerts---Sydney is not safe--- are designed to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. Where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves - a space is opened up a space for manipulation of such events.
Zizek also says that:
Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.
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