The fragility of global power
Shelly Walia

Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews
by Noam Chomsky
(edited by John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu).
Natraj, Dehradun. Rs 195. Pages 158.

The Spirit of Terrorism
by Jean Baudrillard. Verso, London. $ 13. Pages 52.

IN the interviews compiled by John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu and then made into a documentary titled Power and Terror, Noam Chomsky was singled out for this production because of his radicalism that has questioned not the terrorism of the weak, but of the powerful against the weak. In the post 9/11 days, intellectuals around the world thronged to listen to Chomsky's voice of reason and conscience. It was as if the Twin Towers had become the eighth wonder of the world.

Chomsky's reasonings have not gone unheard for he has succeeded in substantially putting pressure on world opinion to chastise Washington as well as the opinionated mainstream media backing it. Historical accounts backed by wide documentation have formed Chomsky's methodology to expose the truth behind international violence and abuse.

In spite of his demanding schedule, he agreed to do the documentary which the producers began shooting in California around May, 2002. During the course of making this film, John Junkerman discovered the real Chomsky behind the political persona-a man full of generosity and humility, who "does not see himself as the vehicle for social change, but perhaps its enabler, by providing his audience with the information and analysis that are the fruits of his research".

His lectures as well as his interviews are a pointer to the future of freedom and peace in the world that is possible through activism that is necessarily constructive for initiating changes around the world. This attitude of optimism, according to Chomsky, is justifiable in an age of political upheavals and is dependent largely on "what people like you and I decide to do".

Though the 9/11 attacks were shocking, innumerable documents, official and public, clearly indicated that such lethal attacks were not unforeseeable. This attack was, therefore, not surprising to the Western world. Chomsky states: 'There are plenty of loose nuclear weapons around the world, unfortunately, tens of thousands of these and the components for these." Much before the Iraq war, Chomsky had already cited the arguments by many NATO members that "a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates and would lead the US and its allies into a 'diabolical trap," as the French foreign minister put it.

True indeed, the world has begun to see the real reasons behind the American-led militarism in West Asia as well as the law and order situation in Iraq. Apparently, 9/11 is now scapegoated as a justification for the accelerated militarisation needed to counter the Islamic onslaught. The legitimating of violence was emphasised in the post 9/11 Israeli infiltration into Jenin, Ramallah and Jericho as well as the scenario of rising bloodshed in the Balkans and Northern Ireland. Immediately the US war machinery began to get into a state of alert, a belligerence also seen in public.

However, as we witnessed, the public opinion slowly veered to the view that the US had indiscreetly and blindly rushed into warfare in Afghanistan to root out the Taliban and in Iraq to first destroy the WMD and, on failing to find any evidence of the existence of these, to argue that the American presence was necessary to introduce democracy there. As Anthony Elliott writes: "The productive core of society, whether at the level of individual fantasy or at the level of Western global expansion, arises through such structuring of imaginary representation."

In this context, Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism maintains that the terrorist imagination is inherent in all of us. The whole play of history and dominance shows the forces of the holy alliance on one side gearing up to put an end to the "evil" other and, on the other hand, the massive jubilation at the destruction of the global superpower symbolised in the collapse of the Twin Towers; for one can easily see the superpowers fomenting violence all around the world, and thereby committing "suicide in a blaze of glory". Any power that becomes hegemonic stirs up deep-seeded desires of its annihilation. Do we not all dream of killing our dominant and oppressive father, an anti-Oedipus trait that looks down upon any "definitive order" or "definitive power". Most logically then, Baudrillard goes on to reason that "the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it."

Thus, suicide bombers are the children of a self-destructive instinct born within the idea of power. The Twin Towers seemingly committed suicide as a response to the suicide planes. The corollary from this is that it is the West that has relentlessly become suicidal and "declared war on itself". The media goes on playing its role of creating images almost pornographic in their amusement and appeal and which we all simultaneously accept and reject. "The spectacle of terrorism becomes the terrorism of spectacle".

Symbolically, the Twin Towers stood, therefore, for an "internal fragility" which gave a helping hand to its collapse in the face of antagonistic forces.

Like the computer virus, the rigorous system of any power thus becomes susceptible at a single point capable of hitting at the roots of the hegemonic system: When global power dominates the situation to this extent, when there is such a terrifying concentration of all functions in the technocratic machinery and when no different form of assessment is allowed, "what other way is there, but a terroristic situational transfer? It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. By seizing all the cards for itself, it forced the Other to change the rules".

As the Syrian poet, Nizar Qabbani (according to whom, "terrorism" is a word used by the oppressors to "defame a national liberation struggle", sums up in one of his poems:

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