Historicizing 9/11

Readers may find some of the reflections on 9/11 in the Fall 2011 issue of Radical History Review of interest.  Abstracts of articles that struck me as particularly interesting follow; the entire issue is accessible here.

September 11, the War on Terror, and Perpetual Warfare: An  Interview with Andrew Bacevich
Paul L. Atwood
29-34
The history professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University is a West Point graduate, a Vietnam War veteran, a self-styled conservative, and a leading critic of over-reach in U.S. foreign policy. He was interviewed in November 2010 by Paul L. Atwood of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The interview covered the Bush administration's response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the dynamics of U.S. overseas interventionism, including military-civilian relations. “Civilian control has been deeply compromised,” Bacevich claims, “and the policies that have resulted have been, more often than not, deeply flawed. This is a huge problem, to which most Americans remain blind.”

The FBI and the Making of the Terrorist Threat
Ivan Greenberg
35-50
The Bush administration's so-called war on terror needs to be situated within the context of earlier efforts to demonize dissent. Since the early 1970s the FBI has increasingly linked the threat of terrorism to lawful domestic social movements to undermine their legitimacy and blur meaningful distinctions between violent and peaceful political activity. In recent years, the FBI has become the leading control agency in what scholars and popular writers term the “surveillance society.” The FBI monitors public spaces and has deployed increasingly sophisticated technological surveillance. The bureau also has developed a new “preventative paradigm,” viewing well-nigh all street protest as dangerous. Recently declassified government records are beginning to document how the FBI, using its expanded powers, played a major role in threatening the rights of free speech and of assembly after 9/11.

Testimonies and Archives

The September 11 Digital Archive: Saving the Histories of September 11, 2001
Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown
101-109
This article focuses on the creation and subsequent development of the September 11 Digital Archive (www.911digitalarchive.org), currently one of the largest digital repositories of historical materials on the September 11 attacks. The article reflects on archival and methodological questions and on issues raised by the efforts of staff members at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP) at the City University of New York Graduate Center to preserve and present via the Internet digital resources related to the epochal events of a decade ago. The authors, two of the project's three executive producers (the third being the late Roy Rosenzweig), discuss various collecting and organizational issues involved in building a digital archive. They also discuss the effort to balance the development and deployment of an open and accessible Web interface for individual online submissions of digital materials with targeted outreach to and solicitation of contributions from members of underrepresented communities, including the Arab, Chinese, and Latino communities. The article proposes that historians must also function as archivists and preservationists in an era of fragile and ephemeral digital communications.

Herodotus Reconsidered: An Oral History of September 11, 2001, in New York City
Mary Marshall Clark
79-89
In “Herodotus Reconsidered: An Oral History of September 11, 2001, in New York City,” Mary Marshall Clark reports on some outcomes of the large, longitudinal oral history project she and the sociologist Peter Bearman undertook in the weeks following the events of September 11, 2001. The project was designed to capture the life histories and event narratives of a diverse set of New Yorkers, and the interviewing resulted in more than one thousand hours of recording, six hundred hours of which are now available to the public for a total of 440 interviews. Clark and Bearman explored the ways that the stories of New Yorkers, whether directly or indirectly affected by the events, differed from the national construction of meaning disseminated by the government and the media. In this essay Clark explores the importance of oral history in defining public meaning and interpretation as the basis for the construction of the collective memory of events that are considered historical turning points.

Can the Diaspora Speak?: Afghan Americans and the 9/11 Oral History Archive
Ann Cvetkovich
90-100
This article evaluates the role of oral history in the public memory of September 11, 2001, through a small cluster of interviews with Afghan Americans that form part of Columbia University's September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project. The interviews, most of them with young, educated, and secular Afghan Americans whose families came to the United States after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, tell a different story of 9/11 than that of eyewitnesses and survivors at the World Trade Center. In addition to illuminating the impact of 9/11 on the everyday life of New Yorkers, the interviews reveal the backlash experienced by immigrants from Afghanistan (and from the Middle East and South Asia) and the transgenerational and transnational legacy of histories of violence, which manifest themselves in ordinary family stories and feelings. Moreover, this culturally literate, relatively assimilated group testifies to the challenges of making its perspectives on Afghanistan legible when they are solicited for public commentary. The article argues that these putatively minor and ordinary voices suggest the value of Columbia's 9/11 oral history archive in countering the hyperdocumentation and sensational representation of 9/11 in a range of genres.

When we say that 9/11 changed something, what are we saying?

We are beginning a week of reflection on the events of September 11, 2001.  Some 10th anniversary events will be memorials, remembering those who perished that day.  Other events will seek to make sense of what 9/11 did – to New York, to the United States, to the world.  So often remembered as a day that “changed everything,” academic panels will be held and op-eds written about just what 9/11 changed, and what it didn’t.

But what does it mean to say that 9/11 changed something?  There is often a slipperiness in the causality.  It is sometimes assumed that the terrorist attacks set certain historical events into motion.  But if we see 9/11 as causing the politics, culture and military actions that followed, then we are giving the airplanes that slammed into buildings a powerful determinism.  We are assuming that al Qaeda did not just slaughter thousands, but drove American politics for the next decade.

The post-9/11 era has sometimes been compared with the Cold War era to understand the way security concerns can impact rights.  The Cold War era shares another feature with the post-9/11 years: a murkiness about causality.  Although library shelves are filled with studies about what the Cold War did, just how the Cold War acted in history is sometimes left to the imagination.  The Cold War is sometimes evoked as if it were a climate system – as in the “Cold War climate,” but this climate somehow nebulously drove politics and culture.  Sometimes the Cold War is treated like a “hot” war, but without attention to its different military characteristics.  Sometimes it is simply a time-span, but nevertheless retains its causal character.

Diplomatic historians devote themselves to running down the details and understanding how the domestic and global puzzle pieces fit together.  But legal scholars often employ the Cold War as a category without this precision.

Similarly, 9/11 is seen as setting into play a series of events, without attention to whether we need a causal stopping point.  This builds in an assumption that there was a direct and inevitable line from the terrorist attacks to the Global War on Terror, and to the way American domestic and military policies were formulated. This accords Osama bin Laden more power that he actually had.

The assumption that 9/11 directly caused post-9/11 American policy also obscures one of the experiences of September 11 itself: the profound confusion.  When the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the terrible shock was coupled with fear and anxiety, and the question of what on earth was going on.  President George W. Bush provided an answer:  the nation was at war.  The wartime frame provided the president with a powerful way to rally the nation.  Americans came to see 9/11 as the opening of a wartime, but this displaced competing arguments at the time about what 9/11 was, and how the nation should respond.

On this 10th anniversary, we should see 9/11 as a crisis that enabled a political moment.  In the face of this crisis, American leaders made choices.  The most important choice of all was how to frame the terrorist attacks – to call the crisis a war.

Al Qaeda succeeded in a devastating attack on September 11.  What the terrorists did not and could not do was to determine American policy and politics for the next decade.  Even if 9/11 changed the way Americans thought about the world, it could not determine the actions we would take in its aftermath.  It did not deprive American leaders of choices.

Cross-posted from Balkinization.