In these past, dark days, it has been difficult to draw a line between the outrage and anxiety provoked by terrorist attacks, and the urgent need for some more-humane and
In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, The Chronicle asked scholars in a variety of disciplines to reflect on those events. Their comments were submitted in writing or transcribed from interviews.
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historical reflection on the tragedy itself.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The appalling images of death, destruction, and daring that invaded our homes on September 11 left us with no doubt that these unimaginable scenes belonged to a moral universe alien to ours, acts perpetrated by people foreign to the very fiber of our being.
But CNN had a sobering tale to tell. While the headline news staggered from one towering inferno to another, the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen interspersed its roll call of the brave and the dead with lists of Hollywood movies--films that had told a similar story many times before, and new, unreleased movies that were about to tell it again. What was only an action movie last month turned, this month, into acts of war. Same mise-en-scene, different movie.
I have chosen to start with the global genre of the terrorist action film in order to question the widely canvassed cultural assumptions that have come to frame the deadly events. This terrorism was a manifestation of a much deeper “clash of civilizations,” we were frequently told. One night during the week of the attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu developed this thesis and ended up, in effect, by placing Israel just off the East Coast of the United States. The next morning, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz affirmed wide international support for the United States from nations that he described as belonging to the “civilized world” and the “uncivilized world.” By returning to CNN’s ticker tape of terrorist movies and special effects, we see the futility of framing the event in such a divided and polarized civilizational narrative.
Each of the unimaginable actions we were subjected to on our television screens have been repeatedly imagined and applauded as plot devices in movie houses across the country by law-abiding Americans, and successfully exported to other ordinary film-loving folks across the world. The decision to carry out terror, whether it is done in the name of God or the state, is a political decision, not a civilizational or cultural practice.
Ironically, the “clash of civilizations” is an aggressive discourse often used by totalitarians and terrorists to justify their worst deeds, to induce holy terror and create a debilitating psychosis of persecution among oppressed, powerless peoples.
When we use the civilizational argument against them, we are, unwittingly perhaps, speaking in the divisive tongue of tyrants.
When American foreign and economic policy is conducted in terms of the civilizational divisions of “them and us,” the nation assumes that hawkish, imperialist aspect that provokes a widespread sense of injustice, indignation, and fear.
Once we see terrorism as an organized political action, rather than the expression of cultural or civilizational “difference,” we can both fight it and look toward the future -- a future that makes common cause between the victims of terror, and those peoples around the world who are fated to live in countries governed by regimes or organizations that impose such unlawful and inhuman policies. Only those societies -- whether they are in the north or the south, the east or the west -- that insure the widest democratic participation and protection for their citizens are in a position to make the deadly, difficult decisions that “just” wars demand. To confront the politics of terror, out of a sense of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation, gives us some faint hope for the future: hope that we might be able to establish a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.
Homi Bhabha is a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard University. This is a later version of Mr. Bhabha’s contribution to the printed forum. That version was used in error.
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