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Anniversary of 9/11: The Logic of Trauma In The United States

By Nath Aldalala’a

14 September, 2011
Countercurrents.org

The initial plan of the American administration was to bring 9/11 to the terrorists and defeat them wherever they were. In his address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001, George Bush stated that “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” There was not much time allowed for grief. The almost immediate turn to anger fundamentally influenced the way Americans responded to, and understood, the 9/11 attacks. Anger also appropriated the sphere of collective trauma experienced by the nation.

As we observe the 10th anniversary commemorations of the terrorist attacks we are witnesses to a fresh understanding of 9/11 by the American people. The current burst of documentaries, analysis and commentary on the attacks veer towards a sense of a traumatic tone rather than the politically aggressive stance which dominated most of the coverage in the weeks and months after 9/11. Whereas the images of the falling towers still pervade most TV programmes and documentaries, the focus has now moved on to the personal tragedies which collectively inform the American psyche. The sense of loss has been reoriented from that of America, the nation, to that of Americans, the people. I would also argue here, that there are two 9/11s: one being the 9/11 of patriotism, military mobilisation and revenge, and the other, a 9/11 of traumatic experience coupled with a sense of reflection. This latter 9/11 is the one that most coincides with the 10th anniversary. This new impulse is also accompanied by a sense of defeat and perception of weakness in the American collective consciousness, as the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have bankrupted the country without making America necessarily any safer from future attacks. Perhaps to the contrary, as on Thursday night, New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, warned of a ‘specific, credible threat’ as the anniversary approached. The logic of 9/11 for the Americans was, until recently, that there was no pre-9/11 and there is no after 9/11. There was simply ‘the’ historical moment of 9/11, that is, attack on America: Period. The consequence of this logic was that Americans became hostage to their own understanding and perception of the attack. This can be explained as three stages in their understanding of 9/11. The first of these was “sanctuary patriotism”, the second one “mobilisation”, and the third, “trauma”. The first two phases of this understanding dominated the American psyche during the Bush Administration, and the third emerged when the voters chose to not to give voice to John McCain and his fellow ‘hot’ jingoistic patriot Sarah Palin in the presidential elections of 2008.

To elaborate on this path in the thinking of America, it is notable that immediately after the attack in 2001 the media coverage and interpretations of 9/11 focused on two aspects: the heroic acts of the Americans who witnessed, aided, helped or supported victims of 9/11. And second, was the focus on the terrorist – or, rather, the creation and consolidation of the ‘coming’ enemy. As part of this, the news and media coverage focused on the Taliban, Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, the Kurds in northern Iraq, terrorist cells, the Hamburg Cell, terrorist camps, and stories of terrorism emanating from the Muslim and the Arab world in general. This mode of representation delayed the experience of personal trauma attached to 9/11. Now in the 10th anniversary, the emerging and concentration of narratives on stories of families, friends, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, all as victims of the attacks, brings 9/11 to a more personalised level. That is, a traumatic event that shocks the lives of many ordinary individuals. At the apotheosis of the nationalist rhetoric and clamour for revenge, and in the shadow of Bush’s frenzy to depose Saddam Hussein, 9/11 was given a much wider scope which drowned out the family tragedies. The way in which 9/11 was prioritised by America impacted on how it was understood by themselves.

In the first phase, “sanctuary patriotism”, Americans had no time to dwell on causes and consequences of 9/11 attacks for two reasons. The first one was the magnitude of the attacks which left many Americans vulnerable, and the second was their unfortunate luck that they had George W. Bush in office at the time of attacks. Their understanding of 9/11 in the wake of the attacks was formulated by their sense of themselves as a superpower undefeated by, and more importantly, immune to, any other power. Consequently, this created a sense of refuge in the mentality of the ordinary American on the street. Such patriotism did not necessarily require an understanding of world affairs, or of the consequences of American long-term involvement in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Patriotism was mainly a psychological refuge. What played a major role in such a refuge is that Bush and his fellow ‘pals’ in the White House created a far-reaching sense of threat to the Americans which stretched beyond the realities and direct consequences of 9/11. No doubt that the attacks on America were massive in scale and in execution, but America, being a superpower, had two choices, the first one was to show restraint and follow other means of bringing the perpetrators to justice without resorting to full scale war, and the second choice was to take the military action they did. The first option was ruled out for the very reason that Americans believed that they were the world’s major power, and without extending and exerting this it might be viewed as redundant or having been eroded.

The unfortunate factor that led the logic of trauma in the United States to take a different path was that Bush was a “cowboy politician” not a statesman. This was costly for his country, and also for the world. Less than one month after the attacks, on the 7 October 2001, the assault on Afghanistan began. Consequently, there has been no real space for personal trauma(s) to be experienced or counselled. The victims of 9/11 were invoked in the rounds of speeches about revenge and retaliation. During this period the American people rallied around the notions of “homeland”, and “unity” with the prominence of American flag as a symbol of this patriotism. A proliferation of flags waving from windows around the country was in evidence: the bigger the flag, the more patriotic the citizen. The people also rallied around locating an enemy, one which was easy to identify. This came to be the Muslim people. Kathleen Moore illustrated that the slogan “United We Stand” materialised virtually overnight, appearing on car bumpers, storefronts, and lapels across the US. This slogan takes on a particular resonance when we think of it in terms of the growing Muslim community in the US—are they part of, or apart from, the unity to which the sticker refer? The problem is that no questions were asked. The frenzied search for the terrorists and their termination dogmatically dominated the American mindset with George W. Bush operating as some sort of Texan Charlemagne.

A move from patriotism to mobilisation had accompanied the progression from the fiery speeches by Bush to the Americans that there was an eminent threat to the country, and that terrorists might “jump in from the window” any moment. Four months after the assault on Afghanistan began, Bush’s State of the Union address, delivered to Congress in January 2002, or “the Axis of Evil Speech”, told the Americans: “in four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation and freed a country from brutal oppression” This tone of hope and reassurance was coupled with a warning for the future that the Americans must be ready for a long ride. He told his fellow Americans: “For many Americans, these four months have brought sorrow and pain that will never completely go away. Every day a retired fire-fighter returns to Ground Zero to feel closer to his two sons who died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his lost father: “Dear Daddy, please take this to Heaven. I don’t want to play football until I can play with you again someday.” Such words were meant to call up a desire for revenge in the collective American consciousness. It was also to act as a further mobilisation for a further war, and that was with Iraq. Bush stated in the same speech that “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.”

This underlined the phase of mobilisation. The only factor that counted for Americans was that their president, their country, and their men and women in service are strong and they are going to, as Richard Dawkins put it in the Guardian in March 2003, kick the terrorists ass. Dawkins noticed that “Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam’s savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let’s go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We’re gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet.”

Iraq was invaded, and a countdown for certain realities to emerge was triggered. Ten years on, the anniversary commemorations being relayed across our TV screens, recall the images to the American people, but with the haunting question of where are we now? A legitimate question, and one which necessitates further reflection as to where were we in 2001? The answers may come easier than the questions suggest. This, then, is the third phase of American understandings of 9/11, a time of reflection and consideration of personal trauma. Yet, unfortunately this sense of trauma cannot be confined to the date of 9/11- that is not 9/11 2001, but the sense of 9/11 that has been extended over these last ten years for both the Americans and the Afghani and Iraqi people. And also, for those thousands, and millions, around the world who had to endure pain and suffering for the war on terror. Many elements of 9/11 are still recurring on a daily basis. First of these are the falling towers: the images of the World Trade Centre still penetrate deep into the minds of Americans, not as a feature of ‘a’ past, but as a signifier of the ‘war on terror’. But this in fact, might be seen as the first backlash against America. As 9/11 became a part of the war on terror rather than “the” attack on America. The experience of personal trauma, cast in the shadow of the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, is tainted by a sense of defeat. The killings of Osama bin Laden as the end of al-Qaeda and thus end of terrorism remains in question.

Ten years after 9/11 the shift of the focus from an attack on America to the trauma of American people brings 9/11 back home. Thousands of military personnel have been killed and maimed. About 4500 American soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the war in Iraq. Up to 32,130 US troops wounded as of 30 June 2011, twenty per cent of whom have serious brain or spinal injuries. America endured the lion share in the casualties. The death toll amongst other ‘Coalition of the Willing’ for example are: Kazakhstan: 1, Portugal: 1, Hungary: 1, Azerbaijan, 1, Fiji: 1, Romania: 4, Latvia, 3… etc. Still, the death toll in Iraq has been estimated to be tens of the thousands with no clear consensus of the exact numbers due to the nature of the war and the brutality of its randomness. Over two million Iraqis were displaced and the country was brought back literally to the stone-age. This all takes its toll on the consciousness of the Americans and it should also encourage them to reflect on their own understanding of 9/11.

Indeed, knowing that their war in Afghanistan remains unfinished as the Taliban are resurgent, and knowing that there was no association between Iraq and the 9/11 attack, also knowing that their mission is not accomplished in Iraq, the Americans consider themselves back to square one. The focus of the stories of 9/11 on families or personal tragedies speaks loudly about a failure of the political and ethical orders in America. Therefore, reflecting and understanding 9/11 on its 10th anniversary does not limit 9/11 to the falling towers and/or to the Americans who lost their lives on 11 September 2001. 9/11 was immediately moved out of the United States to the caves of Afghanistan and to the streets of Baghdad, to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, to the secret prisons of CIA, and the various methods of torture including the infamous waterboarding. Whilst that was happening in the name of the War on Terror, 9/11 at home was taking a more realistic trajectory. The American flag became associated with the “Return of the Fallen”. In April 2005, the Pentagon, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits, released hundreds of previously secret images of fallen troops with their flag-draped coffins, returning from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. These images perpetuated 9/11 and raised questions about the validity of the immediate sentiments of patriotism and revenge.

The question remains open while remembering 9/11 is about justice. Justice, George W. Bush argued, will be done. The logic of trauma at this juncture is bound up with the ‘consequentialism’ of the mere understanding of trauma itself. The given righteousness of trauma enacted as anger and revenge by the American War on Terror after 9/11 negated the authority of this trauma, and further exacerbated its causes and consequences. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 remains hostage to questions which are increasingly becoming a historical perspective.

Dr. Nath Aldalala'a is at School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne/ UK

 

 

 



 


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