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Title: The French 9/11
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: December 14, 2015
Language: en
Topics: France, 9/11, interview
Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2015/12/14/feature-the-french-911

CrimethInc.

The French 9/11

A dialogue with members of the French news source Lundimatin comparing

the aftermath of September 11, 2001 with the situation in France today.

For more background on the situation in France, read our Letter from

Paris; for our perspective on how this relates to the so-called migrant

crisis, read The Borders Won’t Protect You, But They Might Get You

Killed.

Bonjour, France, and welcome to team War on Terror! For fourteen years,

you’ve looked askance at us across the Atlantic, raising your eyebrows

at US foreign policy. Now you get to have your own state of emergency,

your own far-right party in power, your own warrantless wiretapping and

waterboarding scandals and Department of Homeland Security. Where will

you put your Guantanamo Bay? (Finally, French fries and Freedom fries

will mean the same thing!) For maximum effect, consider starting a new

war that has nothing to do with the cause of the attacks, so you can

destabilize another region and draw additional populations into the

conflict.

We Americans know all about this stuff. For decades now, the US has been

the policeman of the world, while social democratic France has been its

comfortable bourgeoisie. But in the 21^(st) century, everyone has to

take part in policing. To preserve France, the liberal alternative to

the US, it is now necessary to copy the US model of anti-terrorism.

Permit us to show you the ropes.

[Lundimatin:] The day after the Paris attacks, Prime Minister Manuel

Valls declared, “What I want to say to the French people is that we’re

at war.” He would repeat the word “war” nine times within a nine-minute

speech.

“Because we are at war, we’re taking exceptional measures. We will

strike in France but also in Syria and Iraq and we will respond on the

same level as those attacks with the determination and will to destroy.”

Within a few days, France was bombing Syria. This war rhetoric is coming

back again and again. However, and this is even more palpable two weeks

later, this war (outside and inside the country) doesn’t imply a general

mobilization of the population. Or, on a minor level (no enlistment

campaign, no war efforts): be watchful, tell on your neighbors, let us

handle this, endorse our security measures. “Be cowardly,” to sum it up.

Of course, there’s a slight rise in enlistment in the army, but in a

general way, the “Bataclan Generation” is left powerless.

On a TV show, the day after the attacks, a dandy Parisian writer speaks:

“It is no longer possible to be indifferent. I have absolutely no

solutions. So we have some sort of drive for violence that grows within

oneself… Just like the Marquise de Mertueil puts it: ‘So it will be

war.’ So here it is, it is the war of our generation. I spoke about 9/11

but the second time is in my town. And I have no idea of what could be a

solution. I feel powerless…”

Of course, it reminds us of Bush’s speech on 9/11: “We’re united to win

the war against terrorism.” What did it mean for American citizens then

to engage in a war against terrorism?

September 11, 2001 was the last great televised event of the twentieth

century, the apogee of a half century of spectatorship. Everyone from

staunch Republicans to inveterate anarchists huddled in front of the

television awaiting updates with a sort of passive urgency. Every

conversation in every city, state, and nation focused on New York. The

fallen towers were the epicenter of reality, and the zones radiating

outward from them were less and less real.

Much of the US population felt more stunned than bellicose. Yet certain

politicians had prepared a flood of new legislation and military

interventions in advance for precisely such an opportunity. This was the

context in which Bush made his famous open-ended declaration of war.

Both the media coverage and Bush’s declaration must be understood as

complementary military operations on the field of public attention,

preparing the ground for what came next. It was not just a question of

spreading fear and vengefulness; it also caused the average viewer to

feel insignificant, sidelined by the spectacle of world events. As the

World Trade Center attacks monopolized public discourse, everything else

receded from view: the chain of events leading up to the attacks, the

lives of the Afghanis and Iraqis threatened by reprisals, and the agency

of the spectators.

This was the same intersection of war rhetoric from above and feelings

of powerlessness from below that you are describing in France today.

Participating in the War on Terror looks a lot different than what our

grandparents did in the Second World War.

To understand this, we have to go back a bit and look at the changes

that are taking place in society at large. The industrial era was

characterized by the total mobilization of the populace in the processes

of mass production and mass destruction. From the Levée en masse through

the First World War, massive segments of the population were mustered

into the military machine. Of course, this total mobilization was risky

for the people at the helm: just as an economy that depended on the

industrial proletariat could be paralyzed by the general strike, a form

of warfare that involved arming a considerable part of the population

entailed the risk that the army would give way to “the people in arms.”

From the Paris Commune to the global wave of uprisings starting in 1917,

this repeatedly threatened the institutions of power.

In the post-industrial era, new technologies have rendered the majority

of the population redundant on the factory floor and the battlefield

proper. But contrary to the utopian promises of 19^(th) century social

reformers, this hasn’t freed us of the need to work or the dangers of

warfare; rather, it renders everything factory, everything battlefield.

Thanks to capitalist globalization, all that was previously separated

now interpermeates: populations, economies, conflicts. Today’s world is

not so much divided into rival nations as into concentrically circled

gated communities; the increasingly precarious and volatile job market

in the United States and France mirrors more dramatic instability in

North Africa and the Middle East, which can no longer be quarantined

outside the gates.

For a population to be militarized in this context, it is not a question

of pressing a gun into every pair of palms and setting a helmet on every

head. Rather, it is a matter of inducing the population to identify with

a certain kind of order, the imposition of which takes place within the

national borders as much as outside them. From the speech that Bush made

on September 11, it was already clear that the same National Guardsmen

that were to be sent to Iraq would sooner or later be deployed in the

United States as well. Bush’s task, on that day, was not to persuade his

countrymen to enlist to fight overseas so much as it was to maximize the

number of people who would acquiesce to the militarization of their

daily lives.

This declaration of war served to obscure the possibility of any other

war, any other stakes for which we might fight outside the framework of

defending the state against its rivals. You could be for the state or

against it, to paraphrase Bush, but it was the only struggle

conceivable. Thus the authorities in the United States and France and

their symmetrical adversaries in al-Qaeda and ISIS hope to assert their

conflict as the only one in history, sidelining “the people in arms”—the

demonstrators who shut down the Seattle WTO summit in 1999, the crowds

who occupied Tahrir Square and Taksim Square, the protesters who oppose

the COP 21.

In the speech that I just quoted, the Prime Minister précises that “we

will strike in France,” and that “exceptional measures” will be taken.

On the very day of the attacks, President Holland declared the state of

emergency. That means an imbalance within the power structures (a

transfer of power from the judicial to the executive, or rather, the

administrative). However, this state of emergency, declared everywhere

in the country, doesn’t look how one would imagine of a state of siege,

with curfews, restrictions, and the like. On the contrary, it takes the

form of a call to go out for drinks and to consume. (“Consume, it’s the

festive season, spend money, live!” declared Valls). The day after the

attacks, in the “provinces” (all cities that aren’t Paris), and even a

week later in Paris, in the streets of the city centers, you couldn’t

“feel” the state of emergency, or at least the atmosphere that is

supposed to go with it.

The state of emergency actually seems to work in a really selective

manner: this demonstration is banned, that neighborhood is under curfew,

this person is put under house arrest or in jail, etc. Moreover, the

state of emergency allows the police (freed from certain judicial

constraints) to accelerate certain investigations: arrests in the

organized crime milieus, in drug dealing cases, raids at activists’

houses. Finally, these additional powers given to the police set loose a

certain police violence, like we saw at a demonstration against the

state of emergency last week in Paris. And that, even in operations that

have nothing to do with the state of emergency.

Immediately after 9/11, Bush arrogated himself full powers. That took

place within the very first days, that is, even before the Patriot Act

was voted through. What did that change, concretely? In terms of

“atmosphere,” police operations, or the general behaviors of the police?

Here is what you can expect in France, based on what we experienced in

the United States after September 11. In the wake of the attacks, the

authorities will stage spectacles of preparedness, clumsily showing off

their security apparatus. At the same time, they will urge you to show

your courage in the face of terror—by going out shopping. (For a clue to

what caused this mess, take note that the best thing you can do to

support the war effort is to carry on with what you were already doing.)

The police, too, will intensify what they were already doing—all the

profiling, surveillance, and repression directed at the general

population—while partisans of civil liberties focus on symbolic outrages

against “the innocent.”

The first changes will be cosmetic: checkpoints on the train, security

alerts on the news, highly publicized investigations of suspected

terrorists. It will take months or years for the long-term effects to

set in. By that time, there will be a phalanx of armored riot police at

every demonstration, a host of new state organizations prying into every

aspect of your life, and an array of new laws to deploy against anyone

who is concerned about these things.

They will justify all this by saying that state security is in danger.

In fact, if we understand state security as a methodology for

maintaining control, we see that the security of the state thrives in

these conditions. This is another sense in which the ambitions of the

United States and France coincide with the goals of al-Qaeda and the

Islamic State. The control that all of these parties seek can be

expressed by killing, but it can also be expressed by making us live in

a certain way (and no other). The underdogs are more likely to rely on

butchery, while the dominant powers can present themselves as the

guardians of life—in the same way that a weak army will destroy

resources it knows it cannot hold, while a powerful army will preserve

them intact for its own use. In both cases, our lives are reduced to

playing pieces in conflicts that have nothing to do with our safety.

Pundits will celebrate the victims as martyrs who were killed for being

ordinary: in the media narrative, they become the martyrs of daily life.

But the authorities intend to invade daily life, too, no less than the

attackers did—an invasion paralleling the interventions they propose to

carry out overseas. And all this invasive action, from bombings in Syria

to racist raids and regulations in Paris, will only generate more

resentment, leaving more frustrated young people ready to martyr

themselves and others for revenge.

To summarize this a single phrase: state security endangers.

Let’s go back to what the rhetoric of war on terrorism allows. After the

Parisian dandy, on that same TV show on November 14, a right-wing

Franco-Israeli lawyer offered “a message of optimism”: “France has

defeated many enemies within the last 1500 years. That’s why we must be

optimistic, and galvanize ourselves… We must choose in which state we

are, at war, then we must act like it. It was done before in the 1960s

and ’70’s, in England with the IRA, the European Court for Human rights

had validated it. A direct and imminent threat to national security was

needed, and we are in such a situation right now… All the people on file

as dangerous Islamists must be put in retention centers just like De

Gaulle did with the FLN [Algerian Liberation Front] and OAS [Secret

Armed Organization, a right-wing underground movement that fought in

Algeria and France against the independence of Algeria]. If we are at

war, we act as if we actually are, or else we are just not at war.”

He is probably right on to speak of the struggle against FLN or IRA. The

tradition of antiterrorism is identical with the lineage of

counter-insurgency. The last time the state of emergency was declared in

France was during the 2005 banlieues riots. And before that, it was

during the Algerian war. Today, antiterrorism doesn’t seem to be

directed against a whole territory—it is more selective—nor against a

precise enemy; rather, it is directed against the general population.

In the United States, despite all the efforts to preserve the amnesia

upon which this nation is founded, it was not long before it came out

that the attacks of September 11 were the result of the previous round

of counter-insurgency, during which the CIA funded the same mujahideen

that became enemy number one. Whether you call it counter-insurgency or

anti-terrorism, relentlessly interfering with a target population tends

to produce iatrogenic effects—though this is not necessarily a

disadvantage for those in the security business. In 2001, even as

critics charged that the War on Terror would only produce more

terrorists, no one could imagine that fourteen years later a vast swath

of land previously governed by essentially secular Ba’athist regimes

with no ties to al-Qaeda would be controlled by Islamic fundamentalists

determined to bring about the Apocalypse.

Opponents of this protection racket would do well to unearth the

backstory of the attacks, seeking the sources of the social tensions

that produced them. Not for the sake of changing state policy (a

hopeless endeavor) nor simply to discredit it (as we are not simply in a

PR contest), but rather to figure out who might make good allies in the

struggle against the state, if only there were an option other than

complete submission or fundamentalist jihad.

Think of the refugees fleeing ISIS right now, who le Pen wants to trap

in Syria. (Imagine French politicians sending refugees back to Hitler in

the 1930s!) Caught between fundamentalists to the East and nationalists

to the West, they have reason to find common cause with anyone who

opposes both sides of this dichotomy. Here, once more, the politicians

and their ostensible opponents concur that the refugees should be forced

to choose between them rather than forming a third side against them

both.

And Syria is only the most obvious case among many. In addition to the

examples you cite, a state of emergency was also declared in 1984 in

French territory in New Caledonia, where Louise Michel was exiled after

the Paris Commune. That forgotten theater of contemporary colonialism

completes the triangle with Algeria (the former colony) and the

banlieues (the internal colony). If you pan back from these three

examples of ongoing French economic and military intervention, it is not

so hard to understand why some people might be angry enough to join

ISIS.

Like the United States, France is not a discrete people occupying a

specific body of land, but a worldwide colonial project drawing in

resources at great human expense. French corporations backed by French

troops are still extracting resources in nations like Mali and the

Central African Republic; you can’t compare the parties responsible for

the November 13 attacks in Paris and the November 20 attacks in Bamako,

but both events are the result of the French government deploying the

military in conflict zones to pursue economic objectives. The same

counter-insurgency strategies that are already in use in Mali, CAR,

Chad, Libya, and elsewhere could cause any one of them to metastasize

into another Syria, justifying further anti-terror measures within

France proper.

It’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again: the greater the

imbalances that are imposed on a society, the more control it takes to

preserve them.

This state of emergency (which allows raids, searches, and house arrests

without the permission of a judge) could be extended for six months and

added to the constitution (which will make it impossible to contest

juridically). Furthermore, some measures could be sustained—house

arrests, for instance. Finally, new antiterrorist laws might be voted

soon. The government talks about allowing police raids and night

searches without even the oversight of a prosecutor, and the creation of

a new felony: obstruction of a police search. They discuss gathering and

making accessible all types of files (including social security files),

extending video surveillance. All rented cars would have GPS, police

custody would be extended to eight days in terrorist cases, and so on.

All these are temporary measures that will probably become permanent—the

full power of the police (and not only in terrorist cases) inscribed in

law. We can’t help but think about the Patriot Act, the military order,

and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Here, after two

weeks, a few left-wing politicians began to worry about what they call a

“permanent state of emergency.” It’s the least they could do, after

having criticized the Patriot Act for more than ten years. How were all

those measures instituted in the US? Was there a general assent?

Indifference? Were they contested?

What changed in the work of the police? And in the general assent of the

population to surveillance that was later known (cf. Snowden) to be more

and more total? How is it that once the state of emergency is declared,

its suspension is no longer possible, and there is no turning back?

From this vantage point, it’s difficult to distinguish which of the

changes in policing that have taken place in the US over the past

fifteen years should be attributed to the aftermath of the September 11

attacks, and which would have taken place anyway. I’m inclined to

believe that they would have occurred regardless, as it would be

impossible to maintain the inequalities in this society without

ever-increasing police violence and control. But the discourse of

anti-terrorism was instrumental in legitimizing these changes and

consolidating support for them.

The narrative of anti-terrorism certainly helped to speed the

introduction of military technology into US police forces. Today, the

ongoing militarization of the police is justified with a discourse of

security, often without reference to terrorism. Even small town police

forces often have at least one tank in their arsenal. What begins as an

exception continues as the new normal.

We have also seen changes in the ways that police and FBI pursue cases.

Rather than simply going after radicals who play an important role in

organizing or direct action, they seek easy results by entrapping

inexperienced individuals who had no prior intention to break the

law—especially peripheral targets who don’t know how to protect

themselves from agents provocateurs. Muslims have by far gotten the

worst of this treatment.

Another sign of the changes in policing is the sheer numbers of officers

deployed at demonstrations. When the famous summit of the World Trade

Organization took place in Seattle in 1999, only 400 policemen were

charged with maintaining control of at least 40,000 protesters—a ratio

of 1:100. By contrast, when the G20 met in Pittsburgh in 2009, at least

4000 police augmented by National Guardsmen converged from around the

country in response to a couple thousand protesters—a ratio of 2:1 at

best. A year later, at the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, protesters faced

off against more than 19,000 security officials with a budget of nearly

a billion dollars. As Canada has not witnessed anything on the scale of

the September 11 or November 13 attacks, this underscores that these

changes are systemic rather than incidental, even if the anti-terror

narrative has smoothed the way for them.

Today, the most significant protests in the United States are not

occurring at mass mobilizations or as a part of activist campaigns.

Rather, they are spontaneous responses to the police violence that kills

over a thousand people every year. The same National Guardsmen that were

deployed in Iraq have been sent to Ferguson and Baltimore to quell these

uprisings. Here we see the security promised by the state in its

ultimate form: the police shoot you, then the National Guard occupies

your city. The authorities end by doing to their own citizens what the

terrorists first did to them, only with the full protection of the law.

We know this old tune: the exceptional laws against “extremists”

(terrorists, pedophiles, hooligans) always end up being applied to the

whole population. An example often put forward in France is the use of

DNA files. At first, this was promoted as only targeting pedophiles,

then all sexual crimes, then criminals… and now, if you even steal a

piece of chewing gum, they will take your DNA and keep it for 20 years.

We said it earlier: the administrative raids and searches (more than

2500 were conducted within the first two weeks) had no direct link with

the Paris attacks, and they also concerned other forms of criminality

(drugs and guns). And finally, they ended up targeting political

activists or people considered as such: 24 people were put under house

arrest during the COP 21, while many more were subjected to police raids

and searches. The justification of these operations is really vague—for

example, “having relationships with the violent anarchist movement” or

“being willing to go to Paris for the COP 21 demonstrations.” Political

demonstrations are forbidden all over the country on the pretext that

demonstrators could be targeted by terrorists and that they require too

much police mobilization—while all Christmas events and other sports

events are allowed. The only COP 21 demonstrations that were tolerated

were on the condition of having no slogans or banners. Last Sunday, 5000

people gathered in Paris to defy the state of emergency. At that

occasion again, the attacks of the 13^(th) were used to discredit

demonstrators who were accused of having soiled the memory of the

victims. (Some candles that were on the Place de la République ended up

being thrown at the police.)

2001 was a peak in the anti-globalization movement. It was right after

Seattle and in July there was Genoa. How did 9/11 affect the movement in

the US in terms of police measures, as well as call for national unity,

war, the memory of the victims, and so on?

Immediately after the attacks of September 11, social movements of all

kinds froze up around the United States. Radicals were afraid that the

authorities would take advantage of the opportunity to mop them up.

Participants in the so-called anti-globalization movement, accustomed to

seeing themselves portrayed on television as the primary opponents of

the status quo, weren’t prepared to be pushed out of the headlines by a

bigger, badder enemy. Momentum gave way to demoralization and malaise.

This turned out to be a mistake. At the time, for all their absolutist

rhetoric, the authorities were still disorganized and unsure how broadly

they could apply the category of terrorism without turning the

population against them. The real danger came later, after all those

movements had splintered and died down and the authorities could target

the former participants individually. The full force of military

technology wasn’t deployed against demonstrators until the Miami Free

Trade Area of the Americas ministerial in November 2003; the eco-terror

and entrapment cases now known as the Green Scare didn’t begin until the

end of 2005; the SSSS classification limiting the flying privileges of

certain individuals without recourse didn’t become widespread until

later than that. All the things we had feared came to pass, but not

immediately. Ironically, our best hope would have been to intensify our

organizing, making connections with the other populations that were

being targeted and challenging the public discourse of anti-terrorism

before it took root. Even today, we are still struggling to build ties

of solidarity with immigrants, Muslim communities, and others on the

receiving end of state repression who should be our natural allies in

taking on the state.

In some cases, we didn’t trust the general population enough to imagine

that others might also reject these impositions on their freedoms. This

was another role the media played, representing the views of “average US

citizens”; we should not have taken those representations at face value.

As a consequence, when ordinary people stood up against additional

gratuitous security measures for air passengers—what some dubbed “the

war on moisture”—it caught us flat-footed.

In the long run, the greatest challenge was to keep the new security

measures from becoming normalized as an inevitable part of life. You can

refuse to go through the X-ray machine, forcing the security personnel

to search you in full view of the rest of the people waiting in line,

but eventually such sights become so familiar that they produce

resignation rather than outrage.

The other mistake we made was to fall back into rearguard, reactionary

struggles, letting the authorities and their liberal critics define the

terms of the conflicts of our time. In the days leading up to September

11, anarchists across the country were preparing for the protests at the

International Monetary Fund meeting scheduled to take place in

Washington, DC at the end of September. When the attacks occurred and

that meeting was cancelled, some people went forward with what became

the first anti-war protests—but as with the COP 21 protests, they were

smaller and less fierce than they would have been otherwise. Liberal

organizers took advantage of the opportunity to make an argument against

confrontational tactics, and for the most part anarchists complied,

fearing the police would have a free hand to employ violence.

The anti-capitalist movement, which had assertively set its own agenda

and discourse since at least 1999, quickly gave way to a single-issue

anti-war movement dominated by authoritarian socialist and liberal

groups. This was the reaction on the level of social movements,

paralleling the reaction carried out by the authorities. For years,

anarchists had to struggle yet again against resurgent doctrinaire

pacifism (for isn’t the opposite of war—peace?) and to regain the

territory ceded in the discourse of opposition. Even the most militant

anarchists ended up adopting a role as the risk-tolerant front lines of

a movement that was fundamentally reformist, in hopes that more

confrontational tactics would necessarily convey a more radical

critique.

Eventually, of course, the Bush administration burned up all of its

political capital and the liberal backlash began. Leftist democrats

appropriated the critiques we had formulated and the symbols we had

invested with meaning, draining them of our values. We had made this

easy for them by toning down our politics and focusing on establishing a

common front—not realizing that sooner or later, the tide was bound to

turn, and we would be better positioned if we continued to assert our

own agendas and priorities, even contra mundum. Obama took office

utilizing a watered-down version of the rhetoric about hope and change

that had first arisen from our networks—and once again this paralyzed

radicals, who didn’t know how to take a stand against the first black

President when he seemed to be bringing such a difficult era to a close.

In fact, he carried on practically all the policies Bush had initiated.

Despite all our errors, the escalation to war overseas and anti-terror

policies at home ultimately did not pay off for the Bush administration

or its successors. The hegemony that the patriotic pro-government

position seemed to enjoy in 2002 was squandered entirely by 2008, and by

2011 a new anti-capitalist movement with fewer illusions had picked up

momentum. During Occupy Wall Street, it was typical to see veterans of

the Iraq war facing off against police lines, screaming belligerently at

the officers opposite them. By any metric, the stability of the US

government has eroded since 2001. Every time the authorities escalate

the conflicts they expose us to and the control they hope to subject us

to, they are taking a big risk.

Looking at the COP 21 and the ignominious cop-out of all the official

organizations that cancelled their protests on orders from the state, we

can see that it is becoming more and more difficult to straddle the

middle ground between docility and opposition. Even the tamest

environmentalists should be able to work out that the choice between

being killed by terrorists and being killed by climate change is no

choice at all. The more the authorities grasp for total control, the

more every attempt to adjust some small aspect of life will inevitably

become a confrontation with the forces of control in their entirety. As

the stakes get higher, we may find huge numbers of people unexpectedly

pushed into our camp.

To our comrades in France, we wish you the courage to stick to your

convictions, the confidence to choose your battles on your own terms,

and the good fortune to find others alongside whom to fight. Bonne

chance.