ABSTRACT
At midday on 12 September 2001, CNN showed silent pictures and a running band of caption saying: ‘no comment . . . no comment . . . no comment’.3 A moment of silence and confusion. The attacks on 9/11 are often said to have inaugurated a new, unprecedented, unfathomable era, but what is more striking than novelty and confusion is the speed and firmness whereby the attacks were interpreted and explained. The important thing about 9/11 happened on 9/10, that is the time before, because that is where we acquired our perception of the event. We stood confused only for moments, then interpretation set in, and what we found were ready-mades taken from political convictions, historical memory and other already established cognitive patterns. What the (initial) interpretations offer are not first and foremost interpretations of the event but of the interpreter. They reveal automatically activated images from the ‘societal unconsciousness’ and, I will argue, many of the images come from a ‘frontierland imaginary’. Just one month after the attacks, on 8 October, the acclaimed military historian John Keegan published an article in The Times entitled ‘In this war of civilizations, the West will prevail’.4 Taking his cue from Samuel Huntington, Keegan spoke of ‘the Islamic mind’ as an unchanging, total entity right from the preMohammed nomads until today, manifesting itself in a devious way of war. The ‘crucial ingredient of any Western-Islamic conflict [is] their distinctively different ways of making war. Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go on until one side or the other gives in.’ This must be the only military historian who has never heard of cruise missiles and predator drone attacks and who mistakes the image of war (outlined in Chapter 3) for the reality of war (or perhaps ‘war’ is only thought of as internal Western conflicts, the rest being ‘police
actions’). He continues: ‘Orientals, in contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy.’5
