Fear Devours America

The 9/11 assassins not only set out to kill as many people as possible but to change the lives of everyone as well. In that, they succeeded: Fear has become an integral part of everyday life in our society, causing paralysis and despondency. Fear is the most resilient legacy the terrorists have left behind. It has given America a bunker mentality.

Now the pictures are shown again in slow motion from every conceivable angle: Bodies fall from the windows and the buildings collapse. The sound recordings are rerun — the voices from the cockpits, the last telephone calls made from the aircraft and the last messages left on answering machines. Imaginary images appear from the 92nd floor just before the nose of the airplane smashes through the windows. Now it seems as if time has been standing still.

The memories awaken a trauma as never before experienced by so many people. And the trauma confirms that it’s the fear – the naked, primal fear – that characterizes the events of 9/11.

Everything has really already been written and said about Sept. 11, 2001. The biographies of the perpetrators have been reconstructed and their final moments traced. On the other side, we can observe the CIA and FBI, who had more than one opportunity to expose the plot carried out on that dark Tuesday. Today we know a lot more than we did back then. Today we know who the conspirators were, as well as their telephone numbers in Yemen; we know through which bank accounts their money flowed and how a terrorist biography comes into being.

The American government’s reaction to the attack has been exhaustively documented: how it went impulsively to war in Afghanistan and then 18 months later started another war with the invasion of Iraq. That war has ended but the bill for Afghanistan is still open and it is unlikely to be a reason for celebration when it falls due. The inner war — the one that gave us new laws and new agencies, body scanners and new intelligence gathering systems — will play out slowly.

The geo-strategists used the past decade to map out China’s rise and America’s rise and fall as a hyper-power, and they plotted the curves on one graph. The economists have submitted the final balance sheets from the ashes of ground zero — the policy of cheap money, the feel good gifts after the attack; they’ve added the costs of war and drawn a direct line from there to the U.S. real estate bubble, the banking crisis, the debt catastrophe and the collapse of the global economy.

And the cultural scientists, after much debate about the relationship of global regions to one another, are satisfied that the Arab world is throwing off the yoke of dictatorship, something that in fact may owe its success to the fact that the old order was no longer being supported from without and the radical Islam alternative with its fanatical nihilism destroyed itself from within.

Rebirth of the Ideologues

That day brought out extremists of all stripes, and the century of ideologues that had just been buried 10 years earlier experienced a surreal resurrection. With us or against us; God is great; God is dead. The world was polarized. Sept. 11 derived its dark power not only from the naked destructive effects of the attacks — 3,000 dead, two symbols of American power reduced to rubble, the command fortress of military power crushed like a cola can.

The power also derives from the practically unbelievable contrast between cause and effect, fanaticism and naivete, apocalyptic fantasy and normal imagination. At 8:46 that morning, no one beneath the blue New York skies had any idea that men armed only with box cutters would be capable of changing the course of the world. No amount of inventive imagination was capable of picturing the hate within someone that would cause him to take the controls of an airliner and fly it deliberately into a skyscraper.

Shrill Mock Combat

This train of thought had been heretofore unknown, the staging was unique. The idea was to not only kill as many people as possible with one blow, it also had to materially change the lives of everyone. If old anxieties are now reawakened by pictures of the event, that— in the logic of the terrorists —validates the effectiveness of their attacks.

The historical context of the acts has become an academic challenge. Did 9/11 really change the world? Did they permanently cripple America or assure the Islamists victory? Or have the attacks been overestimated as a historically significant event? Such questions are indicative of the need for closure and a final reckoning.

On the other hand, the debate is also proof of an underlying problem that has affected America and everyone else: On Sept. 11, 2001 everyone fell into a state of shock. History’s bean counters ignore the actual significance of 9/11. They deny the magnitude of the fear that has eaten its way into our society. In actuality, they continue to repress terrorism instead of trying to expose its effects.

America has developed a bunker mentality over the last 10 years. Pumped up with a lot of money, they stoically accepted President George W. Bush’s advice to return to their jobs, resume their everyday lives and not become infected by the terrorism virus. The advice was wishful thinking, and it was Bush himself who went whistling past the graveyard. With this frame of mind, America became a completely different nation in those 10 years. The country became exhausted and discouraged. It lost its luster.

Today, America indulges in ideological mock combat and is undergoing a shrill, hate-filled polarization. The moderate middle has all but disappeared in U.S. politics and even the election of a Barack Obama — seen by outsiders as an act of self-cleansing — was only successful in temporarily modulating the shrill volume.

The actual problem, terror and its debilitating power, was outsourced in favor of an over-the-top security apparatus. The old ways of dealing with security were preserved. In order to ensure no one else would have to suffer additional effects, George Bush outsourced 9/11. When someone like Barack Obama now says Americans will have to make sacrifices — higher taxes, for example — he pays a bitter price for it.

But most don’t need to hear a message of fear, the actual currency of terrorism. It has persisted for 10 years. The enduring legacy of the 9/11 terrorists has brought about paralysis and despair. The radicals who wanted to alter the world weren’t successful: Their movement is waning, their recruiting sources drying up and their strategic goal of creating a new Caliphate, a mass movement, remains unrealized.

But in equal measure, neither have their victims been successful in liberating themselves from the fear that gripped them on 9/11. That long day still hasn’t come to an end.