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Commemoration of 9/11.  What do we commemorate?  why and for what purpose?  What lessons may we learn and share as a consequence of not forgetting these events and of reflecting on their consequences and their effects on our times? It so happens that this, by now universally meaningful event coincides with other anniversaries and commemorations.  On a joyous note, today is the Ethiopian New Year and we would wish to extend our congratulations and good wishes to our Ethiopian friends and colleagues.

On a very different note, it is important to remember what the Chilean author Ariel Dorffman has called: ‘that other 9/11’.  In 1970 (on 4^th September), a left-wing coalition government was elected in Chile, led by President Salvador Allende.  His government of Popular Unity implemented wide ranging reforms, including nationalization of key assets and industries, such as copper, an invaluable resource that historically had been extracted by British and later US capital, democratization of rights and social justice.  The expectations unleashed by the victory of the Popular Unity coalition was felt across Latin America and further afield.  In Italy, where strong Communist and Socialist parties participated in electoral politics, the Chilean case offered hope of revolutionary change through democratic electoral politics.  Equally, the coup that took place on 11^th September 1973, desired by the conservative classes in Chile but just as critically, by multinational interests, supported by the US administration, also entailed lessons for progressive forces across the world – and there were also lessons for the right as well as for the left.  The hopes and illusions of left-wing, democratic and progressive forces were punctured by the coup and highlighted the bitter lesson that military might and the power of international and multinational interests could – in Europe as in the Americas – be brought to a bloody end. Three years after the Chilean coup, the Argentine military initiated a brutal regime and put the term ‘the disappeared’ on the cultural and political lexicons across the world, avoided the spectacular use of force used by their colleagues in Chile – there, the rounding up of Allende sympathizers in the Football Stadium in Santiago de Chile, the mass arrests and executions (including the much loved singer composer Victor Jara, whose guitar-playing hands were cut off) caused an outcry across the world.  The Argentines decided to devise new tactics, based on stealth, misinformation, the disappearance of people and, usually, of their bodies as well.

 

So from the Chilean 9/11 we see the outline of the first stage of what came to be called ‘the war on terror’, such as:

1)    the coalition of the wicked (the Plan Condor that involved collusion and collaboration between the US, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other neighbouring countries to pursue, arrest or murder suspected left-wing sympathisers, critics of the regimes, intellectuals, artists, and those who did not conform with the dominant ideal of the submissive citizen).

2)    The intersection of state power (particularly that of the US) and material interests, notably large international corporations (ITT in the case of Chile, but many others, including Volkswagen who took advantage of the repressive apparatus in Argentina to get rid of ‘trouble makers’ amongst its workers).

 

It is worth remembering that the Pinochet regime that supplanted Allende’s popular and progressive government, became the pioneer that implemented the ideas that would come to dominate the world we live in:  the Chicago boys, the dogma of the free market and the dominance of individual interest above all else, was developed first in Chile before being taken up with great enthusiasm by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

 

Turning to more recent events, in a recent interview to an Italian journalist (Enzo Venengia, L’Unità 5^th September 2013, p. 18), the British writer, John Le Carré commented that:

‘in the world that emerged from the catastrophe of the 11^th    September (in the USA), a new and devastating concept was     formed. (That is to say): ‘as in any activity, war can also be      privatized.  They are called contractors and they are the        mercenaries of the 21^st century.’ (my translation)

These contractors, he explains, specialize in operations that governments are unable to carry out themselves, openly.  They fight, invade and kill, ‘for a price’.

 

Here too, as with the Argentine junta, apparently invisible, untraceable operations take place, spaces of limbo and liminality, such as Guantánamo operate side by side with human rights legislation won over decades for the international community; ‘extraordinary renditions’ were nothing more that globally organized ‘disappearances’ much like those developed by the Argentine military. As in the case of Chile, and in parallel to the contractors described by Le Carré, we saw the influx of contractors in Iraq, the clear expression of material interest and of the collusion of state and private capital in the process of invasion, conquest and exploitation of foreign countries.

 

Today we face another challenge, another puzzle to decipher, the waters made deliberately murky – perhaps by all sides in this story – in the tragedy unfolding in Syria. Today, there is less enthusiasm for war and all those potential members of the coalition (of the willing as it was called in relation to the defiance of UN regulations when it came to invading Iraq) face strong opposition from their own citizens and what’s more, from their own political and military establishments.  It is a mystery to me that France, or rather the government of the Socialist Hollande, should defy public opinion to support military adventures, first in Mali and now in Syria.  In the case of other allies, the conditions of support are clearer though evidently extremely complex.  The role of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East requires an understanding and analysis that eludes me.  But, turning our minds back to the lessons gained from the ‘first 9/11’, it is worth reflecting on the nexus of material interests, profit and repression.

 

Saud Al-Fasal has declared support for military intervention in Syria.  In 2011, Saudi Arabia and the USA, clinched the largest contract for the sale of arms in history (Gigi Riva, L’Espresso, September 2013).  The contract was, according to the Italian journal L’Espresso, worth 60 billion dollars that involve the labour of 77 thousand workers at Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Electric (for the supply of 84 fighter jets, 70 Apache helicopters, 72 Black Hawks, 36 support helicopters, laser guided missiles, etc.). Of course, the massive arming of Saudi Arabia is matched by equally (or indeed superior) arming of Israel (in the interests of regional equilibrium). The purchase is on such a scale that it will take 15 or 20 years to complete the delivery of the items.

 

Profit (from oil, from the arms industry, from engineering and so on) is clearly of crucial importance.  These are the spoils of war today, where bullion and precious materials, slaves and land were the spoils of war in the past.  The enormity of the war industry itself and the intimate connections and interdependencies of ‘ordinary’ firms such as Halliburton, General Electric, ITT to name a few and global politics and conflict, makes for a pessimistic reading of the future.  But another significant factor has to do with home politics – and jobs.  77,000 jobs thanks to the purchasing capacity of just one country and the ability of the US to secure the contract for itself in the face of strong competition (not least from the UK arms industry).

 

So what kind of world emerges after the 9/11 of four decades and one decade ago? A world of securitization, surveillance and ‘exceptional’ interventions in national and transnational terrains.  A world of joblessness, especially for the youth of the world – 73 million young people out of work, mainly in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

 

and where the connections between profits (and sometimes jobs) and state-sponsored violence are so intimate and close that the factors in favour of permanent – albeit low level – war appear to outweigh the more obvious and morally sound alternatives based on peaceful negotiation, dialogue and compromise.

 

If we are remembering and commemorating, we should also recall that the massacres of Sabra and Shatila will be commemorated soon as we recall how on the night between 16^th and 17^th September 1982, with the complicity of the occupying Israeli army, thousands of Palestinian women and men were killed by Lebanese Phalangists. A reminder, should we need one, of the entanglements of states and non-state agents, of military and paramilitary power and of the deep divisions that characterize so many societies to this day; Syria being a case in point, but also consider Iraq, Egypt, for example, in the Near East alone. In Chile, deep divisions are still to be found between the supporters of Pinochet’s coup and his regime (which lasted nearly 18 years!). Egypt and the Arab Spring also reminds us of a generation of young people who have had dreams, who have studied in preparation for the future and looked forward to a life that could be better than that of their parents, only to find that the doors are closed to them. Exile, precarity and marginality are their lot.

 

The problems of our times have deep ramifications and we should ensure that we learn as much as we are able from the lessons gleaned from the histories we inherit. And above all, in my view, is the lesson that there are no innocent states and that the desire for profit unleashed and unfettered as it has been, the model that was spawned in the 9/11 of 1973 has left with us a legacy of unemployment and precarity, especially for the young, of internal conflict and regional war, of the securitization of social space, the suspension of human rights in the face of an ‘exceptionality’ that was produced by the 9/11 of 2001 and which is fed and fomented through fear, anxiety and insecurity across the globe.

Victoria Goddard,

Wilson Room,

Portcullis House.

 

11^th September 2013.