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The Spirit of Terrorism
By Jean Baudrillard
[excerpts]
'...All the discourses and commentaries betray a gigantic suturing of the event itself, and of the fascination it commands. The moral condemnation, the holy alliance against terrorism are on the scale of the prodigious jubilation at seeing this world superpower destroyed, or better, seeing it somehow destroy itself, in a beautiful suicide. Because with its unbearable power it has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing.
That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic - that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it's a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up.
To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it. If that's not taken into account, the event loses all its symbolic dimension, it's a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the deadly phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, who can then just be eliminated. But we all know that's not the way it is. Hence the delirous counter-phobia of the exorcism of evil: it's because the evil is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have the resonance that it does, and in their symbolic strategy, the terrorists undoubtedly knew they could count on this inadmissible complicity.
It goes way beyond hatred of the dominant world power by the dispossessed and the exploited, those who have ended up on the wrong side of the world order. This satanic desire is in the hearts even of those who share in the profits. The allergy to any definitive order, to any definitive power, is fortunately universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center, the perfect twins, precisely embodied such a definitive order.
No need for the explanations of a death drive or destructive impulse, nor even for an effect of perversity. It is logical and inexorable that the rise of power to the heights of power exacerbates the will to destroy it. And that power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers fell, you had the feeling that they were answering the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicide....
...In a sense, it is the entire system whose internal fragility lends a hand to the initial action. The more the system concetrates on a world scale, finally constituting a single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already a single little Philippino hacker had succeeded, from the depths of his PC, in launching the I Love You virus that circled the world, devastating entire networks). Here, eighteen kamikazees, with the absolute weapon of death multiplied by technological effectiveness, have triggered off a process of global catastrophe.
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