Seumas Milne's Rationalisation as Justification for Terrorism.

With regards Peter Bracken's idea that some on the hard left rationalised the attacks of 9/11 on the World Trade Centre, I thought it might be an opportune time to publish this article forensically examining Seumas Milne's response which indeed did rationalise it to the point of justification on September 13 2001.

The Terror of 9/11 was "Visitedupon Them

Euripides (c. 485-406 B.C.), Phrixus, fragment 970: "The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children."

"For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer." - Horace, "Odes," III, 6, l. 1.

"The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children." - Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice," act III, sc. V, l. 1

Few national newspaper commentaries written in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Centre could have been more callous than the one written by Seumas Milne for the Guardian which appeared on Thurday September 13 2001.

'Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences...........If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming'.

Yet if time is taken to look at the nuances of the language and the assumptions embedded within it, then it is clear that Milne, if not exactly suggesting that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were justified, was trying to insinuate that 'the Americans' got what was coming to them and that it was in some sense the fault of the civilians that they were massacred.

The tone of barely suppressed and malicious vindictiveness throughout Milne's commentary amount to a form of sadism.

For Milne writes that the attacks had been ‘visted upon them’. Visited upon them like some Old Testament punishment of his errant children for their collective sins, for the sins of their fathers.

Milne is too talented as a propagandist not to know what the implication of these words are, even if others might not have thought to much about their exact meaning, those who wanted to see 'the Americans' as responsible for bringing the attacks upon themselves would get the gist of such language.

Now Milne used the same phrase both for the 9/11 attackers and for the US but the use of ‘visited upon’ ,with regards both US foreign policy and 9/11, is intended as a rationalisation of an act of terrorism against 'the Americans' .

It makes as look as though it was a regrettable necessity that was designed to make them see that and force them to make the link between the foreign policy of 'their government' ( democratically elected ) and was ‘visited upon them’.

Steven Poole , the critically acclaimed author on Unspeak, made the following important point in relation to Milne's language when he writes on Unspeak.net about,

'the contrast in his sentence between the passive (”what has been visited upon them”) and the active “what their government has visited upon [others]“). That might indeed tend to imply that the 9/11 attacks were a kind of impersonal retribution. Also there is an interesting conflation happening in Milne’s use of “their government”.

The US government was less than a year old at the time, but previous governments are somehow supposed to be the same government, which is I suppose handy if you are thinking of them as one continuous agent and so an appropriate object for retribution with regards to something that happened decades ago'.'

The words really do indeed imply an act of maniacal vengeance and God's Divine wrath, the sanctioning of an attack by a higher power in just the way Mohammed Atta himself regarded his suicide mission;that is, as martyrdom.

After all, the terrorists felt so strongly that Milne points out they were even prepared to lose their own lives, so even if the attack was 'an atrocity and horrific' the anger that drove them was somehow authentic enough.

If one accepts that violence is ‘visited upon’ people then that does in fact normalise such violence and suggest there is little way in which human agency could really do that much to have avoided it and that mass murder, bombing and the destruction of buildings and innocent people are to be expected.

Rather like a visit from a wrathful God punishing American people for their failure to act long beforehand to stop the source of the outrages committed or address its root causes.

Even more repulsive is the sense that if Milne’s rationalisation of terror is accepted then absolutely any attack on civilians in the West could be explained away in advance in such a way.

That is not to say that terrorism just emerges like some inexplicable evil from out of the void , as though it were the wicked machinations of some ‘cult of death’ only or, as the usual stale platitudes peddled by Blair or Bush have it, that they ‘hate our freedoms’ or 'can't stand freedom'.

Very few serious analysts of terrorism ( and Milne is hardly one of them ) would claim that.

Yet if such poor blanket explanations are given as to why terrorists are motivated to kill civilians, then those who harbour such psychopathological thoughts anyway would have no reason not to act upon them.

If a terrorist act is portrayed as if it were an act of a vengeful God, then one could assume that whilst no attack could ever be justified it would be merely explained as an attempt to even up the arithmetic of death and to get hedonistic consumers to feel the pain being suffered by Muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The mantra is usually the sterile platitude that ‘privatised’ terrorist attacks by Al Qaida can never be justified anymore than ’state terrorist’ attacks by the USA on Muslim civilians.

Yet though Milne tries to claim the attacks were explained by American foreign policy, this is done very crudely because two days after 9/11 few knew for sure it was Al Qaida.

Even so, Milne used it anyway as a pretext to reel off a whole series of US foreign policies which could have had little impact on the attacks other than in creating a generalised feeling of Anti-Americanism that had little to do with Al Qaida's specific goals, a main one which is to remove the presence of US troops from Saudi Arabia.

'Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages'.

So generalised is the criticism of US foreign policy that it suits the propaganda by framing the attacks as part of an ongoing struggle against US global domination which, of course, is an attempt to exploit them as a way of justifying struggles elsewhere.

Even when they are not connected to Al Qaida , just as the neoconservatives where able to portray all of those struggles as part of one seamless continuum of totalitarian evil everywhere carried out by evildoers who hate 'freedom'.

Milne then actually has views which reflect the binary thinking and Manichaeanism of the neoconservatives but he simply stands on the other side and supports all those who 'resist' the USA as somehow being 'freedom fighters'.

Al Qaida would then merely represent a perverted form of that 'resistance' which is considered trivial when compared to US 'state terrorism' but important enough for Milne to see as a reflection of how much the USA hated for what he considers legitimate reasons.

Not only the USA but 'the Americans'. the language elsewhere in the article does indicate a strong fatalistic sense that ‘the Americans’ had it coming. This reflects a basic failure to distinguish between the people of a nation and the government that is said to represent and insinuates the notion of collective guilt.

Yet it is upon that very basis that Milne has condemned US foreign policy elsewhere as innocent people have suffered because of the US government's actions.

So then the difference lies in the fact that the USA is a democracy. In which case, the failure of 'the people' to challenge it makes them somehow less innocent than those killed in Muslim nations.

That’s why he uses ‘their government’ and why they must ‘make the link’ between the foreign policy over which they have very little control as electors and ‘what has been visited upon them’.

Milne’s attempt to conflate ‘their government’ with that is as close as it is possible to get to telling ‘the Americans’ that they did nothing to stop those attacks because they really could not care less about what ‘their government’ does.

Now this actually follows the psychopathology of justifications for terror : namely, that those who do not actively wish to change ‘their government’ will get bombed. Milne writes that the Americans ’still don’t get it’ and can’t 'make the connections'.

Al Qaida, however, were able to make that connection which is why they blew up the WTC and show the literal meaning of ‘getting it’ in the same aggressive way that a person might ‘get it in the neck' if they do not change the way they think.

That becomes all the more apparent when Milne considers that not only do 'the Americans' fail to hold 'their government' to account but also that both seem to be in unanimous opinion that the outrage must be met retaliation instead of accepting their guilt as a nation.

From the president to passers by in the street seems to be the same, this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered by overwhelming force'.

Again, here is a totalitarian assumption that the people in the designated enemy nation of the rest of the world are just somehow easily brainwashed by the media and government propaganda rather like in Nazi Germany. That was the line taken by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War that the USA was the new imperialist successor to Hitler's Third Reich.

Underlying this crude line of thought is that here is nothing morally wrong with manipulating the masses but the real question is merely whether it is done for the Politically Correct causes that Milne supports

These are, the absence of the Soviet Union that he supported unconditionally until its demise in 1991, any radical revolutionary movement that can undermine US Imperialism and any nation or class that aligns itself that Imperial power.

Terror then is merely the result of so doing when vast numbers of people have the incorrect opinions about things or fail to stop their governments following policies that can be seen to oppose the total victory of those who claim the mantle of 'liberation' ( usually a group claiming to represent the 'will of the people' such as 'The Iraqi resistance' that Milne writes of in the wake of the US occupation since 2003 ).

So 'the Americans' are collectively suffering from what Communists called 'false consciousness' which makes terror attacks an inevitability. Hence the exasperated tone when Milne opines 'its perhaps too much to hope' in relation to the issue of whether these indoctrinated consumerist Americans will have any 'glimmer of recognition' why they were the target.

Such phrases suggest that they are so brainwashed that they are hardly amenable to reason and that terror is perhaps one way of trying to shake them out of their conditioning or belief that nothing can be done.

Milne would rather it did not take terror to do that which is why he throws in a few token adjectives to express the negative side to them e.g 'atrocity', 'horrific attack', 'counter-productive outrage' but it is not really clear for whom it will be 'counter-productive'.

Unless one thinks privatised and imperial terror are reactionary and that there are, in fact, productive forms of outrage or indeed productive forms of terror.

The upshot of all this propaganda is that if it takes terror to change people and strip them of their illusions and false consciousness then perhaps something productive might come from an attack like 9/11.

This fatalism is common not only to Marxist-Leninist ideologues who once espoused terrorism but also to militant Islamist groups and religious fundamentalists who share the belief that 'the worse, the better' and that spectacular terrorist acts like 9/11 are punishment for sin.

In a world which is a vale of suffering and tears nothing can ever justify the wholesale massacre of innocents anywhere so in a sense those condemned to death where doomed anyway in advance by events over which they had no control.

That's why the Bolsheviks were called by some 'God's Prompters', meaning that the call for frenzied political action and terror is a cry of despair at an unjust world which must be completely destroyed for there to be any chance of real and permanent change.

The upshot then of Milne's propaganda is that 'the Americans' are rather just like infants who are going to be punished if they do not take heed of what the all knowing elect few can see, i.e. 'the small minority' referred to by Milne who could see that 9/11 was coming.

Which is to say those such as himself and others with an oracular prophetic grasp of History who can look down upon History's victims with cold blooded disdain if they fail to acknowledge what he considers what is the true cause of their own destruction and the misfortune they have brought upon themselves.