Terror: A Meditation on the Meaning of September 11 Review

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(More customer reviews)No one could be more innocent than the people in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, who became victims of fundamentalist religious fanatics with a grudge against the success of the United States.
Carroll, a self-proclaimed fundamentalist Calvinist with a tragic view of life, liberty and happiness, asserts on page 1 they became victims because "the modern West is being brought to judgment."
By page 7 Carroll says this attack was inflicted because "we have been outsmarted in our own domain of strength -- functional rationality. A capacity for brilliant long-range planning, mobilising technical expertise, carried out by clear-minded and self-disciplined individuals, has been the key to our civilization. Yet which of our institutions could match the successful hijacking, in unison, of four passenger jets, flown skilfully, three of them proceeding to hit their targets . . . . . "
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Carroll is right.
On that basis, it is proper to assault a little old lady and take her jewels if she is not sufficiently pious and her jewels are an excess. Rationally, no society justifies such assaults on little old ladies. That is the weakness in the reasoning of Carroll and Usama bin Laden.
Terror does have a legitimate use. It is the classic weapon of the weak against the strong. But, it fails when used against the innocent. The Cuban Revolution is an example of the strength and weaknesses of terror: Castro's forces targeted the police, army and Batista supporters, Batista's forces attacked innocent peasants and the middle class to deter people from supporting Castro. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas attacked a powerful Establishment; the Contras failed because they attacked the broad mass of people.
There's no evidence Carroll understands any of this basic strategy. Instead, he tries to explain why the Satanic Usama bin Laden (he uses the 'Usama' spelling because of its symbolic use of 'Usa') is the scourage of materialist American society that is not sufficiently pious. It's the same reasoning bin Laden uses; and the same reasoning that once justified the far great terror of the Spanish Inquisition.
In brief, he argues that Amerca is not perfect and thus deserving of attack. True enough, America is not perfect; the answer, whether in direct confrontation or by terror, is to attack the guilty and not the innocent. The usual definition for people who attack the innocent is insanity; bin Laden may well be brilliantly insane, but Carroll is just piteously nuts.

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This extended essay argues that the attacks on the World Trade Center have exposed the Western world not just to terror, but also to an underlying cultural emptiness that is crippling its ability to respond adequately. Ranging from the ancient Greek gods to recent American films, and visiting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on the way, Carroll argues that the West is in disarray. What is now faced is not just the threat of further attacks, he contends, but a world where values have been leached away by a secular culture based on excess.