Below is a contribution I made to an on-line psychoanalytic symposium, October 18, 2001. The topic of the symposium was what psychoanalysts might have to say in the wake of the 9/11 attack.
REFLECTING ON 9/11 AND THE PRESENT POLITICAL MOMENT
Thanks to the organizers of this symposium for inviting me to join the panel. Until now I have not made a post because I wanted to see how the discussion would go, and what topics would draw interest in and around the set topic: what light psychoanalysts, speaking as such, might have to shed on the horrible events we have all, from our various positions and locations, witnessed. But I have also had trouble finding my own connection to the discussion as it has been evolving in all its diversity of registers and foci; as it has been going from inside the clinical setting (with children and with adults) up to the metatheoretical and out to the world, from the intrapsychic to the extrapsychic and back again.
Before I trained as a psychoanalyst, I worked as a historian-biographer and a political theorist, and I find myself in the present moment comfortable only in my “native” intellectual tongue, political theory (and I have been dreaming often of my mentor in this field, Hannah Arendt, with wishes that it does not take a psychoanalyst to interpret for her guidance and comfort and her presence as a survivor of the mid-century totalitarianism). So, I want to write in that voice, and to express, particularly, an apprehension about the present situation that I know others in this discussion share, and which I just read very clearly in a post from George Awad in Canada. It will take me more than a screen to say what I am thinking, for which I apologize.
This evening (10/18/2001), I went to a roundtable at the NY Institute for the Humanities to hear a fine journalist, Mary Anne Weaver, who has written extensively on contemporary Egypt and on Islamic fundamentalism (for the New Yorker, and in a really good book entitled Portrait of Egypt). There, I felt such a relief to be talking about the last Afghan war (against the Soviets, financed by us) and the present one (our own, financed by us), about the history of Saudi Arabia, about bin Laden’s associates and where they have come from (what countries, what political views, what religious views, what economic/class situations). This felt like what I needed to be talking about, learning about, asking about, as a citizen and an intellectual. As a psychoanalyst, this is what I needed to balance myself internally for sitting with my patients and dealing, as best I can, with their and my own intense anxiety at suddenly finding ourselves in a radically unsafe world with a mass grave of our countrypeople that we can see right out my office windows; but it was, even more, what I needed because I am trying to get ready for what I hope will come, soon: a rising up of citizens who are informed or who are informing themselves now to protest the foreign policy of our government and the current war in Afghanistan as a terrible mistake and a danger to us all –that is, to all people. I want to join this protest as an informed citizen, but also as a psychoanalyst, bringing that theory and training to public statements, joining it to the political theoretical language that comes much more readily to me in a political crisis. Because our psychoanalytic understanding is not practically, pragmatically political, we get tempted to huge quick abstractions –to seeing battles of East and West, fundamentalism and modernity; to doing comparative fundamentalisms; to analogizing world political phenomena to individual ones and talking about, say, splitting processes in a group-Islam (even one obviously made up of a multitude of sub-groups, cultures, languages); to using metatheoretical concepts like the Death Instinct to imagine the young Muslim men who are enrolling in a terrorist movement and standing willing to give their lives to it, and so forth. We need to feel we can grasp what has happened in this way, our way –all the more as we have no idea what is going to happen next, reeling as we are in the face of an attack (not unpredictable or unpredicted, but still feeling so out of the blue).
The political analysis that I think we need for our citizenship, not for our consulting rooms (except as a comfort), should concentrate not just on the nature of the enemy that has attacked us, but on our political response, because this has been the feature of the present situation that is having the hardest time becoming public, becoming discussed and discussable. Immediately after the September 11th attack, our elected representatives in the Congress responded to the President’s declaration of war –a declaration not directed to any group or nation—a “war on terrorism”– with almost complete unaninimty (one brave dissenting vote from Congresswoman Lee of Oakland). The sudden end of bipartisanship was extolled, and it became unpatriotic to question in public any feature of our foreign policy or our war policy –as though debate would be a sign of weakness or even an act of apostasy to the very religiously suffused “God Bless America” politics that suddenly became normal and was widely felt as salving and comforting in our pain. Over the next weeks, the Bush administration felt no need whatsoever to justify or envision the purpose of the declared war, no need to explain why it is a good idea to do something like make a quick marriage of convenience with the military dictatorship in Pakistan, and so forth. It was just “you are for us or you are against us,” and they are evil and we are good. Period. I view this as a collapse –hopefully temporary—of our democracy, a crisis of the republic. There are some signs of debate arising by now among the intelligenstia, but still none in Congress, where preoccupation with bioterrorism now complicates the situation.
The attack upon Afghanistan we are now conducting is a far, far more dangerous launch into the unknown than the elder Bush’s Gulf War, in which America consented to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia in order to protect the flow of Saudi oil to this country, installing American soldiers on Saudi soil and maintaining an embargo on post-war Iraq that harms only civilians, to the disgust of the entire of the rest of the Islamic world (most moderates as well as all extremists), radicalizing many. But the main reason why this current war is so much more dangerous is that now, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s failed invasion of Afghanistan and in the wake of the Gulf War, there exists not just in Afghanistan but spread out over the whole world, a network that calls itself the “World Islamic Front.” We know now (and our intelligence services as well as scholars of the region have known for years) that Muslims from all over the Muslim world poured into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets (and were financed by America, and then left hanging when America withdrew support –an event that left great bitterness toward America, and that cost thousands upon thousands of Muslim lives before and after the Taliban was installed); and then another wave of Muslim recruits to bin Laden’s training camps arrived when he left Saudi Arabia and set up his terrorism business in Afghanistan (which still has financial sources in Saudi Arabia). This is an unprecedented pan-Islamic movement, of which the perhaps thirty thousand training camp registrants are just the varsity team. And bin Laden makes it very clear in all of his propaganda interviews and broadcasts that the aim of the pan-Islamic movement is the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, or the creation of a new Empire to address the humiliating end, eighty years ago, of the Ottoman Empire and all subsequent humiliations of the Muslims. It is also to address the failures of all of the ‘isms’ that have been taken up in the Arab world since the First World War –nationalism, pan-Arabism, capitalism. The only ideology left to try, as it were, is pan-Islamism (and that at least has the advantage of being a homegrown product, not imported from the West). Islam the religion (in a perverted version) is, of course, key to the formulations of this ideology, but it is a political ideology, a totalitarian ideology, that can be embraced by fundamentalists and secularists. It is about destroying all the corrupt state governments of the Muslim world and replacing them with a pan-Islamic supranation; it is about showing the superpower America that it, like the old superpower the Soviet Union, is vulnerable to Muslim warriors, not so super as it vaunts itself to be. The war we have launched in Afghanistan is far more dangerous than the Gulf War because this is the enemy that now exists, having evolved as an organized political (not religious, although it is woven into religious terms and institutions) movement over the last decade, and this the ideology. And far more dangerous because so many of the recruits to this ideology are well educated (secularly) men who understand contemporary technologies and institutional structures –they can sponsor the only successful health facilities for the indigent in their countries as well as plan terrorist attacks. To my judgment, it is blockheaded to think that this enemy can be fought with a bombardment of Afghanistan, which can only (if it “succeeds”) take out the Taliban regime (which will be lamented by very few in the Muslim world as it is widely viewed as a primitive and corrupt creation of the American CIA) and leave …what? Some government full of warring ethnic and tribal factions backed by America and thus hated by all who hate America –-a further magnet for violence from the “World Islamic Front,” a further justification for a holy war against the infidels. And there will be two million starving refugees flowing into Pakistan, fomenting the incipient civil war in Pakistan, and increasing the pool of future recruits for the World Islamic Front’s terrorism networks.
I am certainly not, with this statement, meaning to lay blame for the indefensible attack we have suffered on our past governments and what they have done in our names and with our tax dollars and consent, much less to make a big argument about the vicissitudes of paranoid or depressive aggression and the contradictions of modernity. And I don’t view what I have said as liberal guilt; I view it as political analysis. It carries my deep apprehension that we are being led now by an inexperienced and not very bright but very obsessional good-vs-evil type and a group of warriors turned politicians who think in military solutions (a group who think we “won” the Gulf War, which they conducted) for a situation that cries out for another approach: the re-evaluation of our foreign policy to stop shoring up and pouring billions in aid and arms into regimes that oppress their Muslim populations; serious attention to international treaties and collaborations that aim at reducing the world’s supply of arms and especially the means to wage biological, chemical and nuclear war; real concern through the United Nations for human rights violations, especially as they fall upon Muslim populations. (I learned this evening, for example, that we have supplied Egypt with billions to build a state of the art prison system in which approximately ten thousand political prisoners have done time over the last decade—including bin Laden’s second in command.) There is no arguing with the terrorists who now operate within the World Islamic Front –and I am not for being pacific or pacifist about them and their activities. I would support internationally coordinated (preferably UN guided) police operations to combat them, physically and financially, as if they were Mafiosi; to bring them to trial in international courts, and to prevent their further access to weapons of all sorts. We have many means to support voices of moderation across the Muslim world, to help drain the swamp of the misery and disenfranchisement and oppression in which terrorism grows.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
