The second plane, p.16
The Second Plane,
p.16
The above, I suggest, is a very minor parable about the herd instinct: the herd instinct and its tolerance of nonsense. The rolling creed we call Islamism is also an embrace of illusion, as indeed is religion itself—a massive and multiform rearguard action, so to speak, against the fact of human mortality. Our own performance, in what we may limply but accurately call the struggle against those who use terror, has also shown signs of mass somnambulism and self-hypnosis. This is true at the executive level, insofar as the Iraq misadventure (and much else) is a corollary of the neoconservative “dogma” and it is true on the level of individual response. Six years later, we are all still learninghowtothinkandfeel about September 11.
In the summer of 2006 I came back to live in the U.K. after two and a half years in South America. I maintain that I had not become more of a fascist in the interim—at the feet of a Galtieri, say, or at the knee of a Pinochet. But in politics it is surprisingly easy to move from side to side while staying in the same place; and the middle ground, I discovered, was not where it used to be. The extent of the shift became dramatically clear to me on live television, when I appeared on Question Time (the BBC’s interactive discussion show) and was asked about our progress in what was now being called the Long War.
The answer I gave was, I thought, almost tediously centrist. I said that the West should have spent the last five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan, while in the meantime merely containing Iraq. In Afghanistan we have already seen, not the “genocide” eagerly predicted by Noam Chomsky and others, but “genogenesis” (in Paul Berman’s coinage)—a burgeoning census. Since 2001, the population has increased by 25 percent. Meanwhile, too, needless to say, the Coalition should have been tearing up the earth of Waziristan in its hunt for the remnants of al-Qaeda.
At this point I started looking from face to face in the audience, and what I saw were the gapes and frowns, not of disagreement, but of disbelief. Then a young woman spoke up, in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness, saying that it was the Americans who had armed the Islamists in Afghanistan, and that therefore the U.S., in its response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” I had time to imagine the F-16s yowling in over Chicago, and the USS Abraham Lincoln pumping shells the size of Volkswagens into downtown Miami—in bold atonement for the World Trade Center, for the Pentagon, for United 93, United 175, American 11, and American 77. But then my thoughts were scattered by the sound of unanimous applause.
We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishization of “balance,” the ground rule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100 percent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel). And yet the handclappers of Question Time had moved beyond the old formula of pious paralysis. This was not equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection. Accordingly, given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, mysogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.
As I drafted this piece (in early July 2007), Dr. Kafeel Ahmed—the furious, steaming, orange-hued hulk we saw applying himself at Glasgow Airport—lay slowly and expensively dying in the burns unit of the Royal Infirmary. At that time, too, we were learning about the men who planned and botched the attacks of July 21, 2005. And certain questions could now be asked in a rather less self-reproachful spirit. It might even be that we have ceased to toady to those who proclaimedly seek our murder.
Was Ladies’ Night at the Tiger Tiger discotheque a legitimate target for Dr. Ahmed’s “anger” about Iraq? Were the morose North Africans of July 21 “desperate” about Palestine? And what do all the U.K. jihadis have in common, these brain surgeons and jailbirds, these keen cricketers and footballers, these sex offenders, community workers, ex-boozers and drug addicts, primary-school teachers, sneak thieves, and fast-food restaurateurs, with their six-liter plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapatti flour, and their “dockyard confetti” (bolts and nuts and nails)? And the answer to that question seems to be slowly dawning. What they have in common is this: they are all abnormally interested in violence and death.
Let us briefly trundle through the argument for moral equivalence, and let us begin with a trio of ascertainable truths. First, the years 1947 and 1948 saw two imperialistic decisions that guaranteed an increase in hostility between Muslim and non-Muslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. (These decisions also led to, but did not invent, murderous hostility between Muslim and Muslim—in East Pakistan, in Gaza.) Second, throughout the 1970s the Arab regimes sponsored by the U.S. started to head off political dissent by guiding the opposition toward Islamic fundamentalism. And, third, in the 1980s the U.S. backed the mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also helped fund the Pakistani madrasas, whose graduates (all of them unemployable zealots) increased from 30,000 in 1987 to well over half a million by 2001.
Thereafter, or so the equivalence argument goes, the Islamist vanguard, having wearied of seeing the battles fought exclusively on their own soil, visited a taste of this destruction on the West. Which turns out to suit the neocons and Christian Zionists, who can now place the U.S. under military rule while they prepare their push for Islamic oil and for Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The goals of the so-called “terrorists” (who are merely responding in kind to state terrorism from the U.S. and its clients) are not delusive or messianic but solemnly political. So it has always been: the oppressed struggle against the oppressor; the wrongs of the past rise up to avenge themselves on the present.
The equivalence line always anticipates the usual counter-argument, which it considers to be an orientalist smear: that the Islamists are fanatics and nihilists who, in their mad quest for world domination, have created a cult of death. With each passing day, however, the counter-argument is sounding like an increasingly sober description of reality. With the twentieth century so fresh in our mind, you might think that human beings would be quick to identify an organized passion for carnage. But we aren’t quick to do that—of course we aren’t; we are impeded by a combination of naïveté, decency, and a kind of recurrent incredulity. The death cult always benefits, initially at least, from its capacity to astonish and stupefy.
Gathering what we can from the works of such thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Mawdudi, and Abu Bakr Naji (the author of The Management of Savagery), and from various pronouncements, fatwas, ultimatums, death threats, and suicide notes, we may compare radical Islam with the thanatoid political movements we know most about, namely Bolshevism and Nazism (to each of which Islamism is indebted). Of the many affinities that emerge, we may list, to begin with, some secondary characteristics. The exaltation of a godlike leader; the demand, not just for submission to the cause, but for utter transformation in its name; a self-pitying romanticism; a hatred of liberal society, individualism, and affluent inertia (or Komfortismus); an obsession with sacrifice and martyrdom; a morbid adolescent rebelliousness combined with a childish love of destruction; “agonism,” or the acceptance of permanent and unappeasable contention; the use and invocation of the very new and the very old; a mania for purification; and a ferocious anti-Semitism.
But these are incidentals. Thanatism derives its real energy, its fever and its magic, from something far more radical. And here we approach a pathology that may in the end be unassimilable to the non-believing mind. I mean the rejection of reason—the rejection of the sequitur, of cause and effect, of two plus two. Strikingly, in their written works and their table talk, Hitler and Stalin (and Lenin) seldom let the abstract noun “reason” go by without assigning a scornful adjective to it: worthless reason, craven reason, cowardly reason. When those sanguinary yokels, the Taliban, chant their slogan, “Throw reason to the dogs,” they are making the same kind of Faustian gamble: crush reason, kill reason, and anything and everything seems possible—the restored Caliphate, for instance, presiding over a planetary empire cleansed of all infidels. To transcend reason is of course to transcend the confines of moral law; it is to enter the illimitable world of insanity and death.
This dual negation is for a while intensely propulsive. It gives the death cult its needed momentum—its escape velocity. On the other hand, for our part, the high value we assign to human life is not a matter of illusion or sentimentality or “hypocrisy” it is not the “Papist-Quaker babble” derided by Trotsky. “Reason,” moreover, is one of our synonyms for realism, and indeed for reality; without it, as Islamism will soon find, the ground turns to mire beneath your feet. Death cults are in the end obedient to their own illogic: what they do is die.
Certain actors in the Middle East, Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr of the Mahdi Army, and even Ismael Haniyeh of Hamas (Hamas, whose charter goes so far as to “quote” from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), are within evolutionary distance, you feel, of a political process that concerns itself with practical outcomes. Osama, and his bewilderingly repulsive surrogates, are in the position of the Japanese military in the months before Pearl Harbor. Without supernatural intervention on behalf of our divine emperor, the top brass argued, we can’t conceivably win. But for a time we can raise merry hell. And that’s what they decided to go ahead and do.
September 11 means September 11, 2001—the day the towers came down. It was also the day when something was revealed to us. Do we now know what that was? Much of our analysis, perhaps, has been wholly inapposite, because we keep trying to construe Islamism in terms of the ratiocinative. How does it look when we construe it in terms of the emotions? Familiar emotional states (hurt, hatred, fury, shame, dishonor, and, above all, humiliation), but at unfamiliar intensities—intensities that secular democracy, and the rules of law and civil society, will always tend to neutralize. There is religious passion too, of course, but even the bruited, the roared fanaticism seems unrobust. It may even be that what we are witnessing is not spiritual certainty so much as spiritual insecurity and spiritual doubt.
Islamism has been with us for the lion’s share of a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, and within a decade there was an offshoot in what would soon become Pakistan. But the emotionally shaping event, one is forced to deduce, was the establishment of the Jewish Homeland. In the war fought to bring that about, Israel, occupying 0.6 percent of Arab lands and with a proportional population, defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Transjordan, together with the supplementary forces of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
In the other 99.4 percent of Arab lands, this event is known as al-nakba: the catastrophe. And that epithet hardly overstates the case. The “godless” Soviet Union, after a comparable reverse, might have fallen into troubled self-scrutiny; but what does it mean for peoples who sincerely believe that an omnipotent deity is minutely attentive to their desires and deserts? Having endured several centuries of Christian prosperity, global power and reach, and eventual empire, the Islamic nations were vanquished by a province the size of New Jersey. In the Koran, the Jews are portrayed as cunning and dangerous, yet they are never portrayed as strong: “Children of Israel…Dread My might.” We in the West have ceased to understand the meaning of the word “humiliation,” and we use it, in descriptions of our daily struggles, with the lilt of comic hyperbole. Now we must further imagine how it feels to be humiliated, not only by history, but also by God.
This was surely a negative eureka for the Muslim idea. Following the defeat of 1948, and following the defeat (in six days) of 1967, Islam, or its militant vanguard, was finding that it had arrived at a crossroads—or a T-junction. The way to the left was marked “Less Religion,” and meant a journey to the future. The way to the right was marked “More Religion (Islam is the Solution),” and meant a journey to the past. Which direction would lead to the return of God’s favor? On their left, a stretch of oily macadam, perhaps resembling one of the unlovelier sections of the London orbital, scattered with windblown trash, and, of course, choked and throttled with traffic. On their right, something like a garden path at the Alhambra, cleaner, simpler, and—thanks to the holy warriors and their “smiting of necks”—much, much emptier. In Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, John Gray reminds us that Islamism, in both its techniques and its pathologies, is on the crest of the contemporary. But the emotions all point the other way; they speak of retrogression and revanchism; they speak of a vehement and desperate nostalgia.
Sayyid Qutb, like someone relaying a commonplace or even a tautology, often said that it is in the nature of Islam to dominate. Where, though, are its tools and its instruments? The only thing Islamism can dominate, for now, is the evening news. But that is not nothing, in a world of pandemic suggestibility, munition glut, and our numerous Walter Mittys of mass murder. September 11 entrained a moral crash, planet-wide; it also loosened the ground between reality and delirium. So when we speak of it, let’s call it by its proper name; let’s not suggest that our experience of that event, that development, has been frictionlessly absorbed and filed away. It has not. September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2007. The Times
ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Yellow Dog
House of Meetings
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dread
FOOTNOTES
*This last figure, we now know, should be drastically revised. In Iraq we have brought about a new kind of hell; and there is no exculpation in the fact that Muslim deaths, in Iraq as elsewhere, are predominantly Muslim on Muslim.
Return to text.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2008 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London. Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Some of the pieces in this work originally appeared in the following: “On the Move with Tony Blair,” “The Second Plane,” “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” and “The Wrong War” in The Guardian; “ ‘In the Palace of the End’ ” and “ ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ ” in The New Yorker; “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind” in The Observer; “Iran and the Lord of Time” in The New York Times Syndicate; “An Islamist’s Journey,” “Bush in Yes-Man’s-Land,” “Conspiracy Theories, and Takfir,” “Demographics,” “September 11,” and “What Will Survive of Us,” in The Times.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amis, Martin.
The second plane: September 11: terror and boredom / Martin Amis.
p. cm.
1. United Airlines Flight 93 Hijacking Incident, 2001. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. I. Title.
HV6432.7.A3836 2008
974.8'79044—dc22 2007040222
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Amis, Martin, date.
The second plane: September 11: terror and boredom / Martin Amis.
1. United Airlines Flight 93 Hijacking Incident, 2001. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. I. Title.
HV6432.7.A58 2008 974.8'79044 C2007-907665-3
Portions of this book are fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26928-7
v3.0
Martin Amis, The Second Plane
