In the first installment of The 9/11 Necromancy, the question was raised: how exactly did the attacks of September 11, 2001 manage to catch a nation of 280 million patriots entirely by surprise? Was the United States of America still the country of the future or had the time to repay the debts of the greatest generation now finally come home to roost? A general outline of the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was briefly put forth for the purpose of explaining the overnight transformation of yesterday’s civilization of “anything but communism at all costs” into today’s “global war of good against evil,” which amounted to a refinement of the crying contradictions and desperate fantasy flights into sheer irrationality that had previously defined the Cold War era. The second installment begins where the first installment left off: with President George W. Bush’s sudden realization that he was now expected to pretend to be a great man in history in his own right, a so-called man of destiny embarking upon a special world-historical mission, as much theological as it was economic, to destroy the Devil residing not only in the mountains of Afghanistan, but equally in the hearts and minds of Man himself, which was officially taken for the root cause of all terror by the vast majority of the western puppet regimes.
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Perhaps it was only a matter of time before President Bush, ensconced in the lofty heaven of the ideal republic that he had been steadily building for himself in the realm of his imagination, would begin toying around with the ideé napoléonienne of nineteenth century counterrevolutionary struggles: first the social domination of the priesthood as the “anointed bloodhounds” of the police, then the ascendancy of the army, plundering and revolutionizing the world, etc. Was the leader of the free world abandoning his former principles or was the free world now desperately clinging to principles that had grown useless? At least one thing was expressed with some degree of certainty: the middle class demands love for its kingdom and love for its regime, but above all else it demands the undiminished satisfaction of absolute respect for its domination and for the conditions in which it is exercised. For this very reason, the middle class constantly finds itself attempting to establish the holy kingdom of love on earth. But how would the next middle class kingdom of love on earth be able to effectively curb that inhuman being which dwells inside every human individual? What would the new kingdom of love on earth be able to do about that devil – that inhuman monster disguised in human flesh – which Christianity, the state, civil society and mankind have all been hitherto unable to master? How would such a kingdom finally manage to set free the human being without also liberating the inhuman being by the same stroke? In due course, therefore, it is eventually discovered anew that all middle class kingdoms of love on earth – such is the contradictory logic of historical progress – sooner or later devolve into mere hallucinations of the terrible death struggle of the bourgeoisie against its own logical conclusions, “words transformed into phrases transformed into ghosts,” and so on and so forth.
For an Englishman, however, the greatest liberty in the world is indeed to live under a monarch, which is the Magna Carta of the United Kingdom. As Sir Robert Filmer puts it: “All other shows or pretexts of liberty are but several degrees of slavery, and a liberty only to destroy liberty.” In any sphere of human activity, an implicit faith is given to the meanest artificer in his craft, and the management of public affairs by the command of princes is no exception. In fact, in such cases it holds especially true, according to this most peculiarly Anglican way of thinking, that whenever the profound secrets of government are called into question – “the causes and ends of the greatest politic actions and motions of state that dazzle the eyes and exceed the capacities of all men” – loyal subjects of the crown must demonstrate an innate knowledge of how to regulate their actions and sufferings by giving unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. For otherwise the very dangerous hypothesis will naturally follow “that all men may examine their own charters, deeds, or evidences by which they claim and hold the inheritance or freehold of their liberties,” which could scarcely have been tolerated in the chaotic aftermath of the attacks on America.
As the editors of The Economist recognized almost immediately, and with greater clarity than the other news outlets, the terrorists attacked America… did it really even matter why? America, after all, had accomplished what God himself could not manage to do, i.e. saved the House of Windsor from Stalin, who had accomplished what the rest of Europe could not do, i.e. saved the whole world from Hitler. To the writers of The Economist it therefore seemed a perfectly natural conclusion that the 9/11 attacks should have demanded in retaliation yet another unapologetic parody of imperialism under the military leadership and diplomatic cover of what was “probably the least territorial and most idealistic” of all the great powers in history. “Those who criticize America’s leadership of the world’s capitalist system – a far from perfect affair – should remember that it has brought more wealth and better living standards to more people than any other in history.” “America defends its interests, sometimes skillfully, sometimes clumsily, just as other countries do.” “[Her] policies may have earned it enemies…but in truth, it is difficult to find plausible explanations for the virulence of [the] attacks, except in the envy, hatred and moral confusion of those who plotted and perpetrated them.” Thus, in the end, its advice to the crown was simply to bomb first and ask questions later. “Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum;” if anything, by this logic, America should step “more often,” not less, into those “places where disorder reigns.” “First, build the coalition. Then, think what to do.”
After two weeks of sorting through chaos and rubble, the clouds of war were now beginning to gather on the horizon. Where would the next generation of American gladiators find the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions and the illusions, which they needed in order to conceal from themselves the limited content of their struggles, and to sustain their passion for Operation Enduring Freedom on the highest planes of great historical tragedy? Did the sons of liberty remember that the ghosts of the Roman period – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself – had been watching over the cradle of America’s civilization of anything but communism at all costs? In a letter to his friend Niethammer, the master of the European Enlightenment himself once confessed to his profound admiration of Napoleon’s Grande Armée as a youth: “I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.” Two hundred years later, did America’s Grande Armée not realize that this soul of the world was now theirs to defend? Believing that he understood exactly what was at stake in this struggle which had been thrust upon his fellow countrymen by the actions of the terrorists, the President for his own part tried to persuade the General Assembly of the United Nations in November that there was honor in history’s call to defend civilization and humanity against evil, terror, and lawless violence. “We speak the truth about terror,” he humbly insisted. “We have a chance to write the story of our times, a story of courage defeating cruelty and light overcoming darkness.” The God of Isaac and Ishmael would never answer the prayers of terrorists, suicide bombers and drug dealers, etc. It is difficult indeed to imagine a period in which we could identify a more confused mixture of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic striving for new directions and more deeply rooted domination of traditional methods, of more apparent harmony of the whole world and more profound estrangement of its elements.
