9/11 and aftermaths: mishra tells it like it is

I will let Pankaj Mishra do all the talking through this truly excellent piece on 9/11 and its violent aftermaths. It comes under the guise of a review of Jason Burke's book, "The 9/11 Wars." If you don't have time to read the entire article, below are some quotations that will give you plenty of food for thought:

"The sense of mad overkill, intellectual as well as military, grows more oppressive when you realise that, though al-Qaida murdered many people on 9/11 and undermined American self-esteem, the capacity of a few homicidal fanatics to seriously harm a large and powerful country such as the US was always limited. There is nothing surprising about their spectacular lack of success in rousing Muslim masses anywhere (as distinct from inciting a few no-hopers into suicidal terrorism). Their fantasy of a universal caliphate was always more likely to provoke fierce Muslim resistance than the globalising project of the west. Over-reaction to al-Qaida was by far the bigger danger to the west throughout the last decade; and, as it happened, groups of rootless conspirators, initially cultishly small and marginal, quickly proliferated around the world as a direct result of western military and ideological excesses after 9/11."

Pankaj Mishra

"The wars for which a small group of people in the west, essentially members of the military and their families, bore a disproportionate sacrifice were largely invisible to the rest. Unlike in the 1960s, the anti-war movement failed to animate political life; and there wasn't even a significant countervailing "support-the-troops" attempt at civic patriotism. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?" Barbara Bush, mother of George W, exasperatedly asked. "Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Why indeed? The wars were kept invisible by such willed ignorance as well as governments eager not to advertise their high costs."

"In fact, the cumulative effect of sparsely reported carnages immunised us against sympathy with their many faceless and speechless victims in the wider world. We were hardly aware, let alone troubled, when entire cities and ways of lives were destroyed. More than 30,000 people, nearly 10 times the number of those killed on 9/11, have died, and many centres of folk Islam destroyed, in terrorism-related attacks in Pakistan during the last decade of the war on terror. Yet Pakistan, a country with 170 million people, is little more than a shadowy battleground in the western imagination, a security and strategic imperative rather than an actual place with flesh-and-blood human beings and long histories."

"Globalisation, it turns out, does not lead to a flat world marked by increasing cosmopolitan openness. Rather, it sharpens old antipathies and incites new ones, while unleashing a cacophony of opposed interests and claims. This can be seen most clearly today within Europe and America, the originators of globalisation. Inequality and unemployment grow as highly mobile corporations continually move around the world in search of cheap labour, low-tax regimes and high profits, draining much-needed investment in welfare systems for ageing populations. Economic crises, bleak employment prospects and a sense of political impotence stoke a great rage and paranoia, often directed at non-white immigrants, particularly Muslims, or channelled into random criminality."

9/11 must-reads coming soon...