openDemocracy was born out of the horror of 9/11 and the defiance it created. We had launched in May 2001, convinced that a magazine on the web, published in fortnightly issues like a print magazine, could bring intelligent, well-organised, global debate to the new-fangled internet.
The first lesson we learnt immediately was that while making it free to read might have consequences for our ‘business plan’, if we kept a pay wall no one would read us at all. Let alone around the world. Less than three months later, the planes went into the twin towers. There was no television in the office and, of course, no smart phones. Some of us went to the nearby Tapas bar and watched live as the second tower came down. My eldest daughter had already rung me from her college to say, “It’s the Apocalypse”. With these words ringing in my ears I decided we would publish daily.
I called Todd Gitin, our American editor, who was then teaching at NYU. He had an apartment high up in Washington Square, where, over breakfast, he and his wife Laurel thought momentarily the first tower had caught fire, before they learnt the reality.
He wrote an immediate response, reportage on being in Manhattan, rather than analysis, which we published at 11pm London time on the day. We titled it: Is this our fate.
Daily publishing demands a forum and, sensing what was coming and in need of a question to attract contributions, we called it: Is Terror the New Cold War?
Contributions came in from around the world — and in these terrible circumstances openDemocracy took off.
In different ways most contributors confronted what everyone knew immediately would be a historic turning point, with a dreadful feeling that while justice could be done, it was all too likely that something even more terrible would ensue.
You can feel this tension in Paul Gilroy’s response, who was writing from Yale at the time as he witnessed the beginning of The American Jihad.
A month after the attack we ran Tom Nairn’s response, Hooligans of the Absolute. Its references to some of the articles we had published gives an idea of the debate we were now hosting. The ‘front page’ of ‘Issue 7’ pictured at the top shows how many we had already published by 25th September.
Nairn’s article is marked by an underlying optimism that the bizarre world-view of the terrorists was never going to prevail. In one sense his judgement has been vindicated. But in another it has been defied. He rightly identified Palestine and the need for Palestinians to have their own state as a crucial cause of the catastrophic irrationality. He could not imagine the genocide now being inflicted upon them in Gaza and the West Bank twenty-five years later. Or that the baton of al-Qaeda’s assault on liberal ‘internationalism’ could find its way to new, incredible figures seeking to lure humanity “through ‘Black Pluto’s door’ into an antique Underworld of theocratic absolutes and paranoid finality”. For Elon Musk and Peter Theil show every sign of becoming the inheritors of bin Laden’s “fundamentalist spirit-world”, only now they are armed not with hi-jacked passenger planes but the internet itself.
Todd Gitlin, Paul Gilroy and Tom Nairn’s articles follow:
Is this our fate?
TODD GITLIN - September 11, 2001, 11:09 pm
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’ve been groping around in a fog since 9 this morning when my wife pointed out the window at the sickly yellow-brown smoke pluming eastward, one mile further downtown. A couple of minutes later, an explosion – the second one, I missed the first – and since then, we weave in and out of the unreal.
Staring into the unknown, we fall back on the aura of precedents – catastrophes felt so deeply in common they define the ground for a generation or more. Pearl Harbor, the marker in my parents’ lives and times. The Kennedy assassination, when the world went gravely strange, and we knew nothing would be the same. We were right. But of course we didn’t know the ways, not the half of them...
The American Jihad
PAUL GILROY - September 17, 2001, 11:09 pm
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. These transcendent qualities have been celebrated as its antidote to a human tragedy that remains inexplicable, most habitable when it is localised. Locality becomes the enemy of explanation. The tragedy is the making of the city, which rediscovers, renews and strengthens itself in overcoming adversity. Rudy and Hillary, holding hands across their receding political divisions, discovered a historical precedent for this magical civic bond in the memory of London during the Luftwaffe's blitz of 1940...
Hooligans of the Absolute: Black Pluto's door after 11 September
TOM NAIRN - October 04, 2001, 2:06 pm
As Brendan O’Leary has pointed out in a recent contribution to openDemocracy, one of the key things about 11 September is that no-one claimed responsibility for the atrocities. They were an ontological statement, rather than propaganda of the deed for a particular nation or oppressed class. The world was meant to stand revealed by them: ‘reality’ as God’s ultimate struggle against Satan, exemplified by the martyr-hijackers. In such a cosmic phantasmagoria, a new world war is nothing. The bigger the Satan, the harder will he eventually fall. The perpetrators – attacking a society already so strongly inclined towards belief in UFOs, moral absolutes and the Christian version of ‘fundamentalism’ – must have calculated that they could hardly fail.
Yet fail they will, for perfectly mundane (and profane) reasons having little to do with the atavistic theology of either side. O’Leary is surely right to call for normality: “Be normal… think about being normal as a way of standing up for yourself and your values”. Keep the head, in other words. The object of the criminals was socio-cultural decapitation. They will not be allowed to get away with it...
