Twin Towers Terrorism
“Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers” was written in 2002 by Jean Baudrillard, a French twentieth century philosopher and sociologist and published in the French newspaper Le Monde on the one-year anniversary of 9/11. Baudrillard delves into many separate subjects in this essay such as, the underlying symbolism of events in contrast to non-events, the breakdown of a singular dominant world player (the West, especially the US), and the effect of media imagery in the reporting of world events.
The Twin Towers attack, taken for face value only as a senseless killing of thousands of innocent people, has far less meaning by itself without the symbolism of the event. Baudrillard calls it “the mother of all events, the pure event uniting within …show more content…
“We no longer have any idea what a symbolic calculation is, as in poker or potlatch: with minimum stakes, but maximum result. And the maximum result was precisely what the terrorists obtained in the Manhattan attack, which might be presented as quite a good illustration of chaos theory: an initial impact causing incalculable consequences; whereas the Americans’ massive deployment (‘Desert Storm’) achieved only derisory effects –the hurricane ending, so to speak, in the beating of a butterfly’s wing” (Baudrillard 22,23). Baudrillard is saying here that we did not understand the power of the symbolic effect of an action. As a result, we launch massive actions with minimum results. In the West, Operation Desert Storm was presented and seen as having a beginning, middle and a conclusion by the media. Ultimately in the end, Saddam Hussein was perceived in the West as the loser. That was probably not the perception in the Middle East however. This is how we in the West are comfortable seeing war. It is seen through images, from smart bombs, on aircraft carriers and in the newsrooms of the US. We are at once intimate with the details of war but we do not understand the symbolism of the act. The images and the symbolism of the images on 9/11, the crashing down of the empire (the United States) truly had the intended result in the eyes of the terrorists, which was the opposite result that the US achieved with Desert Storm. To many in the US, the war was over. In reality, it gave birth to a new war, one against
The Twin Towers attack, taken for face value only as a senseless killing of thousands of innocent people, has far less meaning by itself without the symbolism of the event. Baudrillard calls it “the mother of all events, the pure event uniting within …show more content…
“We no longer have any idea what a symbolic calculation is, as in poker or potlatch: with minimum stakes, but maximum result. And the maximum result was precisely what the terrorists obtained in the Manhattan attack, which might be presented as quite a good illustration of chaos theory: an initial impact causing incalculable consequences; whereas the Americans’ massive deployment (‘Desert Storm’) achieved only derisory effects –the hurricane ending, so to speak, in the beating of a butterfly’s wing” (Baudrillard 22,23). Baudrillard is saying here that we did not understand the power of the symbolic effect of an action. As a result, we launch massive actions with minimum results. In the West, Operation Desert Storm was presented and seen as having a beginning, middle and a conclusion by the media. Ultimately in the end, Saddam Hussein was perceived in the West as the loser. That was probably not the perception in the Middle East however. This is how we in the West are comfortable seeing war. It is seen through images, from smart bombs, on aircraft carriers and in the newsrooms of the US. We are at once intimate with the details of war but we do not understand the symbolism of the act. The images and the symbolism of the images on 9/11, the crashing down of the empire (the United States) truly had the intended result in the eyes of the terrorists, which was the opposite result that the US achieved with Desert Storm. To many in the US, the war was over. In reality, it gave birth to a new war, one against