* This article is based on a paper delivered in the Deputy Chief of Army’s Occasional Seminar series in Canberra on 2 April 2003.
In some ways I feel like an impostor addressing a military audience because I have been warned that the only people whom the armed services take seriously are those with a long line of ancestors who have demonstrated distinguished military service. I can trace my ancestors back on my mother’s side to Charles II, but I am afraid that it is a line that is rather lacking in military distinction. However, perhaps I can say in a timid defence that the Duke of Wellington is one of my heroes and that on the bookshelves in my study the only multi-volume works that I have are Charles Bean’s twelve-volume study, History of Australians at War, and Winston Churchill’s six-volume History of the Second World War.
One of my degrees is in mathematics. The only benefit to me from spending four years at the University of Melbourne doing an Honours Degree in mathematics was perhaps the lesson that, whenever in doubt, go back to first principles. Those of you connected with Australia’s defence would certainly know that returning to first principles is a very important rule to follow. I am going to adopt a broad-brush approach to the problem of terrorism in which I attempt to isolate what seem to be the first principles that should govern our thinking on the subject. The aim is to provide a cultural interpretation of the new phenomenon of mega-terrorism and the impact on the West of waging a war on terrorism.
As of 11 September 2001 we are in a new world—a very different world from the one that any of us have known before. There can be little doubt that the fifty-year Golden Age that lasted from the end of World War II to the brink of the new millennium—that Golden Age in the West of prosperity, relative peace, economic growth, social harmony and security—is now over. We have to take on a deadly new organisation—al-Qa’ida—and destroy it. While practical challenges that we face are clearly linked to such vital issues as the use of intelligence and the development of a suitable military strategy, my interest is in examining the cultural consequences of the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States.
The first principle is obvious, but one needs to state it nonetheless: the megaterrorism of the early 21st century is quite different from anything that has come before, and in order to deal with it we require a different style of thought. Of course, we have experienced modern terrorism since the Russian anarchists and Narodniks operated in the 19th century. Yet what happened when two hijacked planes were used to bring down the Twin Towers in New York was terrorism of a quite different order and scale—a new phenomenon. The Twin Towers were 110 storeys high and contained thousands of people. The war on terrorism in which we are now engaged is very different from the war on communism during the Cold War. Basically, the war on communism was a struggle between two competing materialisms. The Soviets wanted to become as powerful and materially rich as the rival consumer societies of the West, but the Soviets lost because the West’s politico-economic system was far superior at generating wealth and prosperity than anything Marxism-Leninism could offer.
In cultural terms, the long war against communism was easy to understand. In contrast, the new war on terrorism is difficult to comprehend. The West’s struggle against terrorism requires great subtlety of thought because the challenge that it presents penetrates the very heart of the democratic way of life. Let me illustrate the complexity of the challenge that we face by citing a speech that Osama bin Laden delivered on the day the Americans started bombing Afghanistan in 2001. The phraseology in bin Laden’s speech is highly unusual—indeed, it is quite extraordinary. We have not heard anything quite like it in the West since Martin Luther during the Reformation. In his speech, bin Laden outlines the parameters of his struggle. He says that the war against the West is between the Camp of Belief (Islam) versus the Camp of Unbelief (the West).
Bin Laden goes on to state, ‘My God Allah created the skies without pillars’. The subtext in this statement is quite clear. Bin Laden is basically equating pillars with New York’s Twin Towers. His charge against us is this: the West’s understanding of the meaning and the nature of the human condition is summed up in material progress and comfort. If all Western civilisation believes in can be summed up by the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, then the West’s culture can be destroyed. The bin Laden challenge is existential: ‘I can destroy your culture; with disciplined men who are not afraid of death, I can bring down the pillars of your culture’.
For most of us in the West, Osama bin Laden is a satanic monster. Although this is true, one must admit that he is a brilliantly rational, technocratic monster with an almost poetic cultural genius. After 11 September, how was the al-Qa’ida leader portrayed in the West, particularly in the American media? He was portrayed on horseback, as the lone man riding through the wastes of Afghanistan. These images unconsciously tapped straight into imagery out of the American western—from Shane, showing ‘the man with no name’, the John Wayne figure, the lone rider who can either restore or destroy law and order. In the case of Osama bin Laden, he is a rider of vengeance entering the frontier town to destroy, not preserve, civilisation.
If you look at the media imagery by which Saddam Hussein is portrayed, it is, of course, quite different. Hussein, an Arab dictator from the Cold War era, is easy to read—a creature of secular Middle East politics. The truth is that Osama bin Laden is highly difficult to interpret as a political figure. It is a very bad sign from a cultural point of view that we in the West have switched our attention from al-Qa’ida’s bin Laden to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Then there is the question of bin Laden’s name. The most accurate spelling of his first name is Usama rather than Osama. The US media were, however, disturbed, if not spooked, by the first three letters of Usama that spell USA and soon switched to the use of Osama.
Osama bin Laden wishes to be the nemesis of the West. He is not a revolutionary who is interested in the act of creation. Bin Laden is no Ayatollah Khomeini rebuilding Muslim society. Despite rhetorical flourishes, there is no evident al-Qa’ida drive to create a caliphate or a fundamentalist Islamic state in the Middle East. Rather, the al-Qa’ida leader’s whole drive, his passion, is to destroy the West. It is, of course, easy to shrug off the implications of a cultural analysis of Osama bin Laden. After all, the principal challenge posed by al-Qa’ida is practical: we have to find its leaders and kill or capture them, and for these tasks we need intelligence agents and military forces. Yet we underestimate the cultural phenomenon of al-Qa’ida at our peril. The very fact that we have witnessed the rise of virulent anti-Americanism in non-American Western societies such as Australia relates directly to Osama bin Laden’s challenge to the West.
Consider bin Laden’s use of imagery—the Twin Towers imagery, the vision of the pillars. One of his accusations is: What do you believe in the West, you who are soldiers without courage, who leave the moment one of your company is killed? What are the real Twin Towers of Western culture? In Ancient Greece the central sacred site was Delphi. Apollo’s temple at Delphi had two injunctions carved over the doorway. The first injunction was ‘Know thyself’ and the second was ‘Nothing too much, no excess’. These two instructions, these twin pillars, are warnings to Western culture from antiquity. Today the greatest weakness of the modern West is its excess. At its worst, our culture is based on greed and acquisition. The moment an individual feels anxious or empty, the moment he or she feels that life does not have meaning is the moment we are urged to consume, to eat, to purchase a new apartment, to build 220-storey skyscrapers rather than 110-storey skyscrapers. We are a culture that has contravened, and is increasingly contravening, the Delphic Oracle’s two commands, ‘Nothing in excess’ and ‘Know thyself’. These should be our real Twin Towers.
If you think that this line of thought is fanciful and exaggerated, let me remind you of a 1999 American film, Fight Club, which many of you would have seen. Fight Club is, if nothing else, a brilliant and prescient film in that it ends up with American skyscrapers being blown up by young disaffected radicals, and in particular the skyscrapers that house financial institutions. In terms of 11 September 2001, Fight Club is a prophetic film that foreshadowed what was going to occur on that fateful day. The first half-hour of the film is a biting satire of modern Western city life and represents a very dark reading of the absurdity of a life that values skyscrapers and material comfort over the quest for inner meaning. The central character, Jack, is employed by a car insurance company, trying to work out the statistics of faulty motor cars. He has no interest in his job whatsoever and he exists in a highly charged, anxious state whereby he cannot sleep. As a result, he spends his whole existence either half-asleep or half-awake.
This semi-comatose, half-sleepwalking condition is a metaphor for a complete lack of engagement with life at any level. Nothing gives Jack true pleasure. His one pride is his apartment, which he furnishes out of the IKEA catalogue. In fact, he spends most of his spare moments flicking through IKEA catalogues. The refrigerator, meanwhile, is full of condiment jars but there is no food in it. The only time Jack finds any emotional release, any real engagement with anything, is when he goes to therapy groups at night, especially a therapy group for men with testicular cancer—and he does not have testicular cancer. It is another metaphor, of course, this time for an emasculated culture—a culture that no longer believes in anything serious, a culture of images, materialism and trivia. In this way the film reflects the essence of bin Laden’s charge against the West.
Fight Club poses the question: ‘If the most pleasure one can get is by embracing other men who are castrated, then how can one escape such a fate?’. The dilemma is not a new one. It was investigated a century ago by Joseph Conrad in his brilliant Heart of Darkness and in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam film Apocalypse Now (which is based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness novella). If one wants to understand the cultural crisis of the modern West, then the starting point is Joseph Conrad. All that Fight Club does is update Heart of Darkness and relocate it in the urban jungle of New York. In the film, the Kurtz figure, a great charismatic leader, arrives as a new saviour for those who live without meaning. In Fight Club the new leader creates clubs composed of men who fight at night beating each other to a pulp. According to the film, it is the act of fighting that makes men’s blood move, validates their masculinity and tests their strength.
The problem is that the fight club leader does not believe in anything beyond fighting. He is a nihilist. Ultimately, all of the people who join his fight clubs turn into fascists. For when you do not believe in anything, in the end your only pleasure will lie in the act of destruction. Fight Club is an eerie foreshadowing of tragic reality, in that the protagonists end up destroying American skyscrapers. While the charismatic leader in the film is not an Arab with fundamentalist Muslim beliefs, he is similar in character and outlook to Osama bin Laden. Fight Club’s subtext is that, if you have been born into a world that teaches you that the IKEA apartment is ‘as good as it gets’, if you are fearful that your life has no meaning and the only consolation is a refrigerator full of condiment jars, then disillusionment quickly follows. If you grow up with such feelings, then you will feel betrayed by your elders, those who should have initiated you into a culture with deeper meaning.
If you feel betrayed, you will inevitably act out of self-hatred with hostility against the leading symbols and authorities in your own culture. We saw this self-hatred in the 1960s, with student protests against presidents, prime ministers, university vice-chancellors and a whole range of authority figures—to the ludicrous degree that Chairman Mao Tse Tung became a great hero to many Western students. We now know that Chairman Mao was one of the most brutal tyrants of the 20th century. He who is fighting against your culture becomes a hero only once members of that culture start to indulge in self-hatred. A major dynamic in current anti-Americanism in countries such as Australia, France and Germany is precisely a form of cultural self-hatred that is projected on to America simply because the United States happens to be the centre of Western power. When people complain about the vulgarity of American tourists or America’s clumsiness in foreign relations, it is usually a mask for resentment against a culture that has failed.
As Fight Club and before it Heart of Darkness imply, we in the West have become very bad at confronting the great questions of life. Consider the symbolism of the huge hole in New York where the Twin Towers used to be. The frenzy, the almost demented speed, with which the Americans decided to clean up the hole was extraordinary. Some 100 000 dump trucks of rubbish were used to remove rubble from the Twin Towers site. Moreover, every fragment of rubble was supposed to be DNA-tested like something out of a bizarre Grimm’s fairytale. Over three thousand people are dead and yet we do not know how to mourn. The site of the Twin Towers has become not a shrine to the dead but a place of great unease and discontent. The ridiculous range of architectural designs that were put forward to replace the Twin Towers were a symptom of paralysis about how we now handle the reality of death and tragedy in a world where the IKEA apartment culture dominates popular consciousness.
Bin Laden’s terrorist challenge asks deep questions about the character of Western culture. The great threat to the West that has come out of the al-Qa’ida attacks of 11 September 2001 is fear of paralysis. One of the American motives behind the campaign in Iraq may have been a cultural and psychological need to prove that we are still powerful and that we are not figuratively a society suffering from a collective syndrome of testicular cancer as in Fight Club.
In the West, we have become dependent on the wrong kind of knowledge. Technical knowledge has helped us to build our skyscrapers and to create the extraordinary military arsenals that are being deployed in Iraq. Scientific and technological knowledge has created the splendours of our civilisation. Yet this is the wrong kind of knowledge for probing the questions about the meaning of life and death, and for giving us an understanding of the discontent of political Islam. We must return to self-knowledge and draw our strength from the true Twin Towers of Western culture, the Delphic injunctions of ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess’. Only when we have regained such knowledge will we be properly armed to fight Osama bin Laden and the new phenomenon of mega-terrorism.
