Revisiting 9/11

A fog of terrorism has settled on us – America, New York, everyone I know. Affliction by the phantasmagorical. Dull fear – fear of what’s already happened, fear of the future. More than anything, perhaps, disbelief – a disbelief so bleak and wobbly you can’t even believe in it. Myself, I’

Most commentaries on the horrors of 11 September 2001 have been delivered from two positions. The first is a grounded location: the place of immediate rather than media-made spectatorship. Blanketed in dust and dioxin, downtown Manhattan opened onto the romance, heroism, fortitude and collective energy of the globalised metropolis.

The impulse of the attacks was not confidence but despair – the strike of a miserable old world against the unsettling but promising new.Tom Nairn is 80 today. To celebrate, we are republishing his reflections on 9/11, first published on 4 October 2001.

In India, as elsewhere, every person understood the cry for help: the horror and fear writ large on terror stricken faces, the trauma in the choked voices of people who saw it happen, the hopeless struggle to control an imminent breakdown in public, the unspeakable grief. For one moment, the

The greatest Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote over two hundred years ago that we are ‘unavoidably side by side’. A violent abrogation of law and justice in one place has consequences for many other places and can be experienced everywhere. While he dwelt on these matters and their implications at