September 11 and the end of ideology
Keith Windschuttle
Quadrant
December 2001

The Vietnam War was known as the first television war. The current war against terrorism deserves to be recognised as the first Internet war. There is so much material available on the Internet -- news, information, comment, opinion -- that you could literally spend 24 hours a day on the events of September 11 and their aftermath, and never read the same thing twice. Anyone who has been seriously foraging through all this will have found that, among English-speaking countries, the worst single response to the terrorist attacks was made by an Australian. In his column in the New Statesman, the London-based expatriate journalist John Pilger said the real terrorists were not Muslim fundamentalists but the Americans themselves. Pilger wrote:

If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can be surprised? … Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims -- that is, the victims of American fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.

What made this especially reprehensible was not so much what it said -- similar sentiments were subsequently expressed by a number of Western intellectuals in the days that followed -- but its timing. The statement was published on September 13. New Statesman is a weekly magazine and on weeklies the copy deadline, especially for regular columnists like Pilger, is not the day before publication but the day before that. This means Pilger must have written these words on September 11 itself, while the horror of the events was still unfolding on television. The fact that he offered no gesture of sympathy for the victims and refused to condemn their murderers on the very day itself, displays a complete lack of moral principle. It destroys the credentials of all the appeals he has made over the years on behalf of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Palestinians, appeals purportedly made under principles of universal humanitarianism, and reveals his motivation as mere anti-Americanism.

Pilger was soon joined by a number of other leading leftist intellectuals. Noam Chomsky took a similar line. On September 12 he wrote:

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.

In short, now matter how bad the attacks of September 11 might seem, America had done worse. However, for Chomsky to portray the 1998 Sudanese attack in the same terms is not to compare like with like. That attack was in retaliation for the bombing of two American embassies in Africa. The factory was suspected of making biological weapons, and the missile was fired at night, so that no one would be there and the loss of innocent life would be minimised. A week later, Chomsky repeated his charge, adding a number of assaults on Palestinians by Israel that he put in the same league, as if the Israeli government was the moral equivalent of the plane hijackers. Because Israel was a client state of the US, Chomsky said, that made September 11 understandable.

This kind of response came from members of a generation of political activists who have believed since the days of the Vietnam War that America is the greatest source of evil in the world and should be brought low. In any summary of Western responses to September 11, this older, ultra-left anti-Americanism forms only one of the many possible categories. What follows is an attempt to classify the responses on the left according to their political inspiration. In this taxonomy, there are a number of familiar political categories, but a number of newer ones too.

The anti-globalisation movement
Although the movement that organised the recent anti-globalisation riots in Seattle, Washington and Genoa is composed of a young generation of student-age radicals, much of its thinking is a replica of its elders like Chomsky and Pilger. In fact, on www.nologo.org, the website of the Canadian journalist and unofficial spokeswoman of the movement, Naomi Klein, the first interview published after September 11 was with Chomsky himself. Klein also wrote an article for the old Stalinist American weekly magazine, The Nation, in which she responded to charges that the terrorism of September 11 was part of a continuum of anti-American violence started by her own adherents. Rather than being intimidated by such charges, she wrote, the anti-globalists saw the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to promote their movement:

The street slogans -- PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT, THE WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE -- have become self-evident and viscerally felt truths for many in the wake of the attacks. There is outrage in the face of profiteering. There are questions being raised about the wisdom of leaving crucial services like airport security to private companies, about why there are bailouts for airlines but not for the workers losing their jobs. There is a groundswell of appreciation for public sector workers of all kinds. In short, "the commons" -- the public sphere, the public good, the noncorporate, what we have been defending -- is undergoing something of a rediscovery in the United States.

The anti-globalists showed no inclination to stem any of their activities in the wake of the events. By early October, they had announced a campaign of "economic disruption" against the Conservative provincial government of Ottawa. This involved an attempt to shut down the financial district of Toronto. At the same time, they were organising another mass campaign to disrupt meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Ottawa in mid-November.

In addition, movement activists organised anti-war protests against the American air strikes on Afghanistan. Retaliation by the United States, they claimed, had a hidden agenda:

For the Bush administration is determined to use the hijackings and mass murders of September 11 as a political opportunity to transform the definition of dissent here in the US and to project the US military into the oil-rich former republics of Soviet Central Asia.

Overall, however, their main concern about September 11 was how it would impact on two groups: themselves and the Arab people. On September 13, the nologo website said:

For one thing, it is virtually certain that Tuesday's events will function to legitimise the criminalization and repression of all forms of political dissent in North America. For many, though by no means all of us, this will substantially increase what is at stake when we organize and protest. Tuesday's events and the corporate media's responses to them have also fanned the flames of racism and xenophobia -- and particularly of arabophobia -- that already lay smouldering in North American society. Such racism demands a response from us that is both immediate and sustained.

Despite this bravado, the movement never actually refuted the charge that its own activities and those of the Islamic terrorists were part of the same spectrum of violent anti-Americanism. The reality is that both have similar origins and motivations. While one is secular and the other religious, the sociological background of both the anti-globalisation activists and the jihadists are parallel. Both are movements of the well-educated and the wealthy who claim to speak on behalf of the wretched of the earth. Both kinds of activists are opposed to what they claim is US-style materialism and profiteering. Both have the crippling of US power, and that of its supposed subsidiaries, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, as a fundamental goal. While the violence of the anti-globalists has been nowhere near as audacious or murderous as that of the jihadists, theirs is a difference of scale rather than kind.

The literary elite
As you would expect, professional writers were some of the first to comment on the events. Some of the most currently celebrated literary writers, however, were anything but sympathetic to the victims. In the English newspaper, The Guardian, the novelist Martin Amis chose the occasion to coin a Smart Alec aphorism: "Terrorism is political communication by other means."

In the same newspaper, the feminist novelist Jeanette Winterson adopted a tactic that would soon be emulated by other literary figures. This was to say something unexpected and at the same time place her own response on a more elevated plane than that of ordinary people. She wrote:

The Arab Fundamentalists who wanted this to happen are joined by millions of others [in the West] for whom terror is a relief… Terror means a tightening of morality and an intolerance towards others. Terror means hitting back before we get hit again. Make no mistake, plenty of people prefer the world as terror.

Winterson also claimed that America had only reaped what it had sown. "Capitalism and imperialism," she wrote, "were the real co-pilots of those planes." She shared these views with Susan Sontag, who wrote in the New Yorker on September 17:

The voices licensed to follow the event [that is, press and TV news reporters] seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilise the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

In other words, the ordinary public, the consumers of the media, are gullible children who, if they were better informed, would see their own country's responsibility for the terrorist attacks. This kind of comment drew the following sycophantic support from the Melbourne literary critic, Peter Craven, who wrote in The Australian: "It's not hard to admire Sontag's stance… It is so cool, so bracing, it stares so bravely over the heads of the mob."

Of course, by "the mob", Craven means those ordinary Australians who constitute the citizenry of this democratic nation. To him, to Sontag and to Winterson, such people are plainly objects of contempt.

The worst single literary comment, however, came from the German Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, London, he described the Bush administration's rhetoric in the war on terrorism as: "Conjuring the spirit of November 9, 1938". This was a reference to the Kristallnacht, the Nazi's notorious anti-Jewish pogrom.

Not far behind Grass was the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who used the attacks to allow all of her hitherto suppressed anti-Western bile to come to the surface. Osama bin Laden, Roy wrote, is the American president's "dark doppelganger". He has been:

sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: … its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.

In other words, according to Roy, there is no difference between the Islamic terrorist and the American President. It was left to Salman Rushdie to rescue the reputation of the literary community and to put the comments of people like Roy in their place. Rushdie said:

Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming US government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to cloak his true motives… These are tyrants, not Muslims.

Feminists
The feminist position on the attacks ranged fairly widely across the political spectrum but was generally against the idea of responding with violence. Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms Magazine, was against bombing the Taliban because it would be "the surest way to unite most Afghanis around them". The author Barbara Ehrenreich thought that pursuing bin Laden was pointless because it "would not address the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is ultimately rooted." Ehrenreich went on:

What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist is that the strongest response to corporate globalisation and US military domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology.

That is, if the terrorists had been less misogynist, their actions might have been less disturbing.

In Australia, the English radical feminist Beatrix Campbell, a resident commentator on the ABC's Late Night Live radio program, claimed "the victims of September 11 are also the architects of a mess of their own making and that's what has to be sorted out". In other words, those killed by the terrorists -- including the women and children -- brought their deaths upon themselves. This grotesque piece of blame shifting brought not a murmur of dissent from the host of the program, Philip Adams.

The most publicised feminist response was made in Canada at a Women's Resistance Conference in late September where a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Sunera Thobani, directed her comments not at the Al Qaeda network but at the Bush administration. Thobani, who is now professor of women's studies at the University of British Columbia, told a cheering audience that they should oppose the American war on terrorism. Women, she said, must:

reject this kind of jingoistic militarism and recognise that as the most heinous form of patriarchal racist violence that we're seeing on the globe today…The women's movement has to stand up to this… We have to break the support that is being built in our countries for this kind of attack … The West for 500 years has believed that it can slaughter people into submission and it has not been able to do so. And it will not be able to do so this time either… There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the Western domination of this planet is ended.

During her 45 minute speech, Thobani received several standing ovations from the conference's 500 delegates. Few of them stopped to consider that if the West really did believe it should slaughter people into submission why Western governments allowed Ms Thobani such freedom to criticise them, rather than simply execute opponents like her, as the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan regularly do.

The prize for the most quintessential feminist comment, however, went to the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who managed to capture in one brief statement an unmatched combination of total condescension and utter irrelevance.

I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt." I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt.

Freudians
Some feminists are also Freudians and September 11 gave them the opportunity to apply their theoretical assumptions to the symbolism of the events. A columnist for the London Times, Mary Ann Sieghart, said she was struck by how the attack left men much angrier and emotional than women. The reason, she said, was:

The twin towers are two huge phallic symbols, populated with mainly men, most of whom are in the macho business of making money. They were then attacked by two more phallic symbols -- jet airliners -- and soon after are cut to their bases … How much more emasculating could a terrorist's action be?

These comments derive, of course, from the well-known feminist insight that anything longer than it is wide is a phallic symbol. Fortunately for Ms Sieghart's reputation, this particular column was spiked and never published in The Times, although one of her colleagues leaked it to the New York Press.

Nonetheless, she was supported by another Freudian-inspired theorist, Professor George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley. He also described the towers as phallic symbols and saw "the planes as penetrating the towers with a plume of heat. The Pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile."

Black radicals
The politics of race were quick to enter the debate. Writing in the journal CounterPunch, one American black radical, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, said:

Now we are supposed to fight and die for a racist corrupt government in yet another imperialist war, when it is the US which has clearly brought on this attack … The obvious question is what the hell are we fighting for? To avenge America? To mourn America? Why, we don't owe this country anything.

While the leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People condemned the attacks unequivocally, in North Carolina, Curtis Gatewood, chairman of the local NAACP chapter, said many of the companies in the World Trade Center discriminated against blacks and so "our brothers" should not help fight a war on terrorism because "America has not protected our rights".

The Black Muslim movement in America also took a position on the terrorist attacks. They said it was the will of Allah who was teaching America a little humility. When a nation became too powerful:

The Qur'an teaches that Allah then seizes that nation with distress and affliction, that it might humble itself. For only in humility can the proud and the powerful heed the Guidance of God… Allah used this tragedy, hopefully, to bring a great nation to Himself.

That was a comment by Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam and organiser of the Million Man March of 1995.

The academic politically correct
Although fiercely contested, the prize for the most absurd comments about September 11 went to the American university sector where, despite the momentous nature of the events, it was business as usual in terms of the enforcement of codes of political correctness.

At Berkeley, the biggest student protest in the aftermath was against a campus newspaper for publishing a cartoon showing two Muslim suicide bombers in hell. The protestors denounced the cartoon as a "hate crime". At Yale, a panel of six professors concluded that one of the underlying causes of the attack was America's "offensive cultural messages".
The American Association of University Professors released a statement promising to "continue to fight violence with renewed dedication to the exercise of freedom of thought and the expression of that freedom in our teaching".

However, there is also an anti-PC movement on campus these days, which includes the National Association of Scholars, who denounced the above statement as "fatuous nonsense". The conservative classical scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, said that at his institution, California State University at Fresno: "Maybe 90 percent of the faculty [the academic staff] sympathises with boutique anti-Americanism, and 90 percent of the students are firmly behind the government, with the strongest support coming from the Mexican-American kids."

There were some academics who, in the heat of the moment, overlooked the prevailing politically correct speech codes and paid the price. One of these was Charles H. Fairbanks, director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. During a panel discussion about September 11, Fairbanks, a well-known conservative, said he favoured the United States retaliating against governments who supported the terrorists. He also said the US would not be able to find bin Laden himself. He added: "I'll bet anyone here a Koran on that."

A woman in the audience then accused Fairbanks of making "a pathetic attempt at stand-up comedy" and of "innuendos intended to encourage and to assist people in conducting hate crimes toward Muslims." Fairbanks then apologised for the comment about the Koran. The following day, the Dean of the School of Advanced International studies asked him to write a letter of regret, which he did. The day after that, Fairbanks received a letter from the Dean telling him he was sacked. He continued as a research professor but lost his position as director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.

This was not the only incident of its kind. At Pennsylvania State University, one professor said on his website that it was worth killing some innocent civilians in order to topple the governments of Afghanistan and Iran. He was warned by a senior university administrator that Afghan and Iranian students "would find such comments insensitive and perhaps even intimidating". At Orange Coast College in California, a professor challenged a class of students about why some Muslims who condemned the World Trade Centre attacks did not also condemn terrorism against Israel. For this, he was placed on indefinite leave.

So much for the commitment of the American Association of University Professors to fight violence with the exercise of freedom of thought.

Environmentalists
I haven't seen any comments from the usual suspects like Greenpeace but an idea of their position is contained in some of the environmentally-informed public statements already made. In Village Voice, the American rabbi, Robert J. Marx, asked:

How can we declare to the nations of the world that they are either for us or against us, while we demonstrate our contempt for the world by greedily devouring its resources, by refusing to join the Kyoto Environmental Pact, by rejecting the 1972 ban on biological weapons, and by refusing to join the world court?

There was this comment made on CNN's Showbiz Today by the actor Robert Redford:

I would hate to see … that we don't get so jingoistic with the word 'security' that we pull things that should be dealt with separately under that banner. I'm chiefly talking about the environment. I think there should be a defense policy for our environment, too.

The prize for the most environmentally correct response, however, was again won by Barbara Kingsolver.

It is not naïve to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation on Earth, inside and out … I'd like the efficient public transit system of Paris in my city, thank you. I'd like us to consume energy at the modest level that Europeans do … If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland's.

New Age therapists
The New Age movement has been around since the 1970s so it is not so new these days, but its members also published opinions about September 11. The novelist Alice Walker said that Osama bin Laden had probably anticipated all the armaments and violence now directed at him. But, she asked:

What would happen to his cool armour if he could be reminded of all the good, non-violent things he had done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love.

Another sympathiser with this movement said:

In a situation like this, of course, you identify with everyone who's suffering. But we must also think about the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma. It's all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible. If you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There's nothing better.

These words of wisdom were provided on American ABC News by the actor Richard Gere.

Civil libertarians
As in Australia, where various councils for civil liberties are well-known for their political interventionism, so in America these bodies have also performed the same role.

After September 11, the Breen Elementary School in Rocklin, California, erected a sign on a marquee saying "God Bless America". The American Civil Liberties Union subsequently wrote to the school saying the message was "a clear violation of the California and United States' Constitutions, as well as the California Education Code." An ACLU lawyer wrote:

By displaying a religious message, the Breen Elementary School is dividing its young students along religious lines. School officials are hurting and isolating their schoolchildren of minority faiths when they should be supporting them and the values of pluralism and tolerance… It must be replaced immediately.

This demand prompted a rally at the school by 250 angry parents, students and administrators, most clad in red, white and blue, all declaring their intention to keep the message flying.

The Sixties counter culture
California is not only the home of the fiercest defenders of civil liberties but also of the remnants of the counter culture of the nineteen sixties. Journalists who have recently visited Stanford University, south of San Francisco, report an outbreak of sixties nostalgia, including messages proclaiming: "War is unhealthy for children and other growing things" and also "You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one."

At the Berkeley City Council, the politics of the anti-Vietnam War days were also given a retrospective. The local firefighters, who were trying to raise money to help the families of their fallen comrades in New York City, were forced by the city manager to remove American flags from their fire trucks. An anti-war rally had been scheduled and the city manager felt the flags might makes the protestors uncomfortable and therefore spark violence. That is, the "peace" protestors might become violent if forced to look upon the American flag.

The Berkeley City Council also sent a letter to the American Congress asking its members "to take whatever action they can to cease the bombing of Afghanistan and to seek a legal, non-military resolution". The council then adjourned "in memory of the innocent civilians in Afghanistan being harmed and made refugees due to the bombing". The councilwoman who sponsored this recommendation, Dona Spring, said:

Berkeley has always been an island of sanity in terms of the war madness that has prevailed in this country. The US is now a terrorist. According to the Taliban, these are terrorist attacks.

Social workers
I haven't actually seen any comments from people employed as social workers but the social work mentality is alive and well. This mindset believes that Islamic terrorism, like any social problem, can be solved by spending money on social programs. The novelist Isabel Allende responded to September 11 with these comments:

A massive Marshall Plan for the third world is required to help diminish the gap between rich and poor. The 'gated community' mentality will not keep the underprivileged subdued and invisible.

The Marxist historian Howard Zinn wrote:

Treat this as if a criminal is taking refuge in a neighbourhood of poor, desperate people… Don't bomb the neighbourhood, but clean it up with food, jobs, good housing and health care, in order to get at the root of terrorism and eliminate the pool of desperation from which terrorists are recruited.

In other words, social policy developed for poor inner-urban black ghettoes will work equally well with the son of a Saudi billionaire and his middle class, tertiary-educated, terrorist colleagues.

International lawyers
International law was the preferred option of commentators who were otherwise the most ultra-left on this issue.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist on the leftist weekly The Nation. When her daughter came home from school and wanted to hang an American flag from her window, Pollitt told her: "Definitely not, I say. The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war". Yet Pollitt's suggestion of how to respond was for the US "to lift non-military sanctions on Iraq in return for Osama bin Laden, who would be tried at the international criminal court".

Similarly, Noam Chomsky offered the following: "When the US launched a murderous terrorist war against Nicaragua, Nicaragua did not set off bombs in Washington but took the matter to the World Court… No one will stop the US if it follows the procedures it blocked in the case of Nicaragua."

Also, the radical New York University historian, Robin Kelley, said, on the one hand: "We need a civil war, class war, whatever, to put an end to US policies that endanger us all," but on the other hand, said of the terrorists: "We could identify and isolate those directly responsible and bring them to trial." That is, US policy deserved an armed response but the terrorists' actions required legal jurisdiction.

The principal Australian advocate of an international law response was Michael Kirby, the High Court judge who seems to offer a public opinion these days on almost every issue that makes the front pages. Kirby told the University of Wollongong in October that the appropriate answer to the events of September 11 was law not war. Like Chomsky, he criticised the United States for its opposition to an international criminal court to try war criminals.

The appeasement lobby
Many of those who argued that America got what it deserved were part of the appeasement lobby. Like most of those who favoured a response in terms of international law, the appeasers generally represented the far left of politics. They used the terrorist attacks as a reason to advocate concession to Arab demands in the middle east, such as a Palestinian state and lifting of sanctions on Iraq.
Writing in The Nation, Dilip Hiro said the United States should not only redraft its current policies on Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also: "One way for Bush to counter the rising popular animosity towards the United States in the Islamic world would be to appoint a Muslim American to a high-profile Administration post."

The old English Trotskyite, Tariq Ali, pointed out that Osama bin Laden's video messages made three political points: the Gulf War was a crime against Iraq; the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine is offensive; and the American-supported ruling regime in Saudi Arabia is corrupt. Therefore, Tariq Ali says, the proper response to the terrorism is to cease the sanctions against Iraq, solve the Palestinian problem and withdraw American troops from Saudi Arabia. Until all this is done, "there will be many willing recruits to carry out terrorist actions".

In other words, the far left's policy response to terrorism is to cede to the terrorists all their demands.

Terrorist admirers
There were even some people in the West who admired the terrorists. The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, described what they did as a work of art. He said on September 16:

That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert, and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.

Another admirer was Susan Sontag. She drew comparisons between the terrorists and American air force pilots, and thought the terrorists were the more courageous.

If the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of the slaughter, they were not cowards.

Since that was published in the New Yorker it has been reproduced many times. In a more recent interview, Sontag says she was amazed by the ferocity of the criticism she received. She complained of being subject to "demonisation", that is, it is she who is now the victim.

She also demonstrated a severe case of moral nihilism. Courage is not an amoral term. People display courage when they risk something precious, especially their lives. This requires a moral decision. Committing suicide, no matter how many people you take with you, puts nothing at risk and so requires no courage at all.

Postmodernists
The postmodernist position is that both knowledge and ethics have no objective validity. We cannot know anything for certain and there are no universal moral principles. September 11 put this position to the test. The postmodernist attitude to knowledge, of course, is a bad joke, for it entails that a fact such as the destruction of the World Trade Center could not be objectively true. To date, no postmodernist has yet advanced such a thesis, though no doubt some enterprising theorist will eventually do so. However, postmodernists were more confident of their position about the ethics of the events.

Writing in the New York Times on September 23, the postmodernist writer Robert Stone asked of the terrorists: "Are they moral monsters?" He answered that, because they were locked into a different "narrative system", Americans had no right to condemn them.

Though we are being judged, despite our grief and loss, we cannot really judge. We are steeped in relativism, as confined by our narrative as the murderers are confined by theirs.

In short, the terrorists were simply doing their own thing.

The Chicago literary critic Stanley Fish had a slightly more sophisticated argument than this but one that led to the same conclusion. Fish denied that the relativism of postmodernism left its adherents with no way of condemning the terrorist attacks.

Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one. The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies… That is why what Edward Said has called "false universals" should be rejected: they stand in the way of useful thinking. How many times have we heard these new mantras: "We have seen the face of evil"; "there are irrational madmen"; "we are at war against international terrorism". Each is at once inaccurate and unhelpful. We have not seen the face of evil; we have seen the face of an enemy who comes at us with a full roster of grievances, goals and strategies.

Fish's statement is a good example of how postmodernist relativism entails moral nihilism. If the actions of the September 11 terrorists were not evil, then that word has no meaning. Anything at all becomes morally justified, so long as someone believes it to be so. The murder of thousands of innocent civilians cannot be condemned. Their killing is reduced to nothing more than a political program, a "roster of grievances, goals and strategies", like any other.

Fish's notion that moral principles cannot be universal until everyone, "including our enemies" accepts them, is evidence of the same nihilism. If this were true, we would be left unable to judge anyone else's behaviour. We would have no grounds for the universal proscription of crimes like murder and rape. Each murderer and rapist would be validated by his own perception of his actions. As almost everyone except Muslim fanatics and postmodern theorists clearly recognise, the mass killings of September 11 cry out for a transcendent moral perspective.

The truth is that postmodernism's cultural relativism always involves moral nihilism. If values are no more than expressions of particular cultures, and there are no universal principles, then no culture can itself be subjected to any values. This is because there could be no trans-cultural values to stand in judgement over any particular culture. Cultural relativism, in short, approves any cultural practice at all, no matter how barbaric. It entails the endorsement not only of terrorism but also of human sacrifice, the incineration of widows, genocide and any other practice, no matter how cruel and unnatural. It is a philosophy of anything goes.

Terrorist defenders
Among the radical left, only a minority came out like Fish and Stone to overtly advocate the postmodernist position. Nonetheless, one of their most common arguments relied upon an implicit commitment to the same kind of relativism. Like Pilger, Chomsky and several others, they claimed that America deserved what it got because it had a morally culpable government.

However, this was so much at odds with public sentiment that some defenders of the left intelligentsia recognised the political costs involved. Such an affront to popular opinion would lose them support. So they made attempts to temper the initial response. Their most common line was that the situation needed to be considered dispassionately in order to make a calm assessment. For instance, Tariq Ali defended the writings of Pilger, Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Harold Pinter, and what he called the "excellent" New Yorker piece by Susan Sontag, by pleading: "to explain is not to justify".

This is true: to explain is not to justify. It is equally true, however, that to rationalize is to condone. The difference is that an explanation is a disinterested account whereas rationalization means providing reasons that amount to an excuse. In their response to September 11, most of the radical left indulged in rationalization rather than explanation.

They could hardly have done otherwise. People who are committed to the position that there is no such thing as an objective account of events, who argue that values are relative and that all social statements are political, cannot suddenly alter their ways and hide beneath the shelter of a new-found interest in disinterested commentary. In other words, despite much hedging to the contrary, they condoned the attacks and defended the terrorists by providing them with excuses.

The biggest loser -- the prevailing multicultural/postcolonial ideology
This final category needs some background. In the last week of September, the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made an extraordinary statement. He said:
We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights.

The minute he had uttered these words, a bevy of European politicians rushed to denounce him. The Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said: "I can hardly believe that the Italian Prime Minister made such statements." Spokesman for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added: "We certainly don't share the views expressed by Mr Berlusconi." Italy's centre-left opposition spokesman Giovanni Berlinguer called the words "eccentric and dangerous". Within days, Berlusconi was forced to withdraw.

It is true that the statement could have been more diplomatically timed, made as it was while American officials were trying to put together an anti-terrorist coalition of Islamic allies. But there is little doubt it would have generated just as many denials no matter when it was uttered. The statement was extraordinary because Western superiority, though patently obvious to everyone, has become a truth that must not be spoken.

The chief reason is the prevailing ideology of the Western intelligentsia. Today, the leading opinion makers in the media, the universities and the churches regard Western superiority as, at best, something to be ashamed of, and at worst, something to be opposed. Until thirty years ago, when Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Today, however, such thinking is dismissed by the prevailing intelligentsia as triumphalist. Western political and economic dominance is more commonly explained in terms of its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Our success has purportedly been at their expense.

The intelligentsia widely regards Western success as inherently sinful. Consequently, we are urged to redeem ourselves not only by changing our policies towards the non-West but also by acknowledging our sins and denying our superiority.

We are told to adopt the ethics of moral equivalence and cultural relativism. Under these rules, all cultures are equal though different. We are taught the postmodern rule that no culture can judge another because there are no universal standards. The most blatant recent example of this was expressed by the Reuter's News Agency. In response to September 11, it banned its reporters from using the term "terrorists". According to Reuters global head of news, Steven Jukes, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".

According to this ideology, instead of attempting to globalise its values, the West should stay in its own cultural backyard. Values like universal human rights, individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many "ways of knowing". In place of Western universalism, we are told to accept the relativism of multiculturalism, a concept that regards the West not as superior but as simply one of many equally valid cultural systems.

Although presented with a gloss of tolerance and respect for other cultures, this position is inherently inconsistent. Its plea for acceptance and open-mindedness ceases when it comes to Western culture, whose history it regards as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. We cannot judge other cultures but we must condemn our own.

This anti-Western, postmodern, multicultural, postcolonial intellectual edifice constitutes a true ideology: it is formidable in its comprehensiveness, in the number of intellectual fields it encompasses, and in the number of professional and public institutions it has successfully captured and whose agenda it now controls. With the demise of Marxism since the 1980s, it has emerged as its major ideological successor.

Although it is early days yet, one of the biggest losers from September 11 may well be this very intellectual mindset. It has become palpably clear to everyone except the current intelligentsia that you can no longer be a cultural relativist or a moral nihilist of the Susan Sontag variety. The great majority of ordinary people, who are so despised by Sontag and her acolytes, see straight through all this dissembling. Victor Davis Hanson's comment about all those upwardly mobile Mexican-American kids who disagree with their university teachers, rings true. So do the actions of those parents who put up the God Bless America sign on their school in defiance of the authoritarian lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Since September 11, the most visible political development on the left has not been the series of half-hearted, poorly attended anti-war marches. The most obvious phenomenon has been the split between the liberal left and the radical left. The liberal left is pro-American; the radical left is still anti-American.

A number of celebrity leftists have very publicly jumped this fence. The best known is Christopher Hitchens, who called bin Laden "fascism with an Islamic face" and has since been denouncing his former colleagues in similar terms. He has even announced he has given up socialism. Todd Gitlin, one of America's celebrity revolutionaries of the Sixties, has begun flying an American flag from his balcony. Harvey Kaye, a Marxist American historian who writes for the Times Higher Education Supplement, also announced he had changed his ways and joined the liberal left. Even the Australian literary impostor, Helen Darville, said, when describing her response to September 11: "I have watched, since that day, the cosy leftist pieties of my youth disintegrate." For every public conversion of this kind there are bound to be many more private ones. While this development might be difficult to quantify just yet, it is very clearly detectable.

Some of this is, admittedly, sheer opportunism. For instance, the first comments by the postcolonial literary critic Edward Said took the same line as Pilger and Chomsky. He made no censure of the terrorists but said the Bush administration was engaged in "inflamed patriotism and belligerent war-mongering". But by the end of September, having seen which way the wind was blowing among his colleagues, he made some criticisms of the terrorists, calling their actions "demonic" and "bloody-minded", before going on to repeat the familiar radical left demands for Israel to retreat from Palestine and for the overthrow of the pro-American rulers of Arab states. Said added that people should "discriminate" between Palestinian terrorism in Israel, which he found "understandable", and the less acceptable Islamic terrorism against New York, where he lives.

Similarly, Susan Sontag, once she realised how widely detested her initial comments had made her, suddenly discovered patriotism. Abandoning her cool and deserting earlier devotees like Peter Craven, she told an interviewer in mid-October: "I cry every morning real tears, I mean down the cheek tears, when I read those small obituaries that the New York Times publishes of the people who died in the World Trade Center." She added: "And, no, I don't think we have brought this upon ourselves."

However, not all of those who have changed their sentiments can have been opportunists of this kind. The terrorist attack forced every one with the capacity to think for themselves to do just that. In this situation, people really did have to ask where their loyalties lay, especially when so many of their compatriots died so horribly.

Terrorism does have an evil logic: it is a cathartic and a polarising phenomenon. It concentrates the mind and forces many people to seriously examine their allegiances. In the West from now on, this process will face the radical left, no matter how many academic and media outlets it still controls, with political and cultural isolation.

Most of the political activists, writers, artists and intellectuals I have quoted in this article are plainly people who do not fit the category of those who could think for themselves about the matter. All of them could immediately slot September 11 into their own pre-existing matrix of morality, without it shaking any of the certainties on which their worldview was founded. This was because they remained creatures of the prevailing anti-Western ideology, which determined their responses.

In the wake of September 11, however, there is a real possibility that we may be seeing the last of this mode of thought. If the split between the radical left and the liberal left continues to widen, the radicals may indeed be among the major losers from these terrible events. And if this particular ideology does collapse completely, this may well be momentous. For once the postmodern, multicultural, postcolonial mode of thought has gone, there is no alternative anti-Western ideology waiting in the wings to replace it. If all this comes to pass, we may be witnessing the often predicted, but yet to be realised, "end of ideology" in the West.

Nonetheless, intellectual edifices of this kind, no matter how disconnected they become from the mainstream of their society, never fall entirely of their own accord. They still need to be pushed. Those who are opposed to this particular ideology have still got a lot of pushing and shoving left to do.