“The Nation-State and Violence”

September 11,2001: After al Qaida operatives hijacked U.S. passenger planes and crashed them into the towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, the horrific results of the attack on civilian targets were witnessed by millions around the world. Included in the continually repeated televised sequence was a body falling through the air from more than ninety stories up; a doomed worker, hopelessly waving a white flag from a window near the top of one of the towers, and, most stunningly, the two towers imploding with thousands still trapped inside. Because viewers saw these events continually repeated in video footage on television screens, it played like a disaster movie (in video release) without a touch of redemption. But however horrendous it may have seemed, it was (to borrow a phrase from Don DeLillo) “an aberration in the heartland of the real.” ¹ A nation with the world's most powerful defensive and destructive capabilities had thousands of its citizens victimized by a small group of men with low tech weapons.