Pre-class 2/18

The following is my reaction to the short excerpt from Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism. This piece did not grab my attention until about halfway through, but when it did it took hold. He states:
    “We would forgive them of any massacre if it had a meaning, if it could be interpreted as historical violence – this is the moral axiom of good violence. We would pardon them any violence if it were not given media exposure (‘terrorism would be nothing without the media’).” (229)
    First of all, he makes the point that if these attacks were grounded in some kind of historical reasoning, they would have been forgiven (for lack of a better term). I believe this is true to some extent. We would be saying “ok, we had that coming” as oppose to “wtf?” The next point he makes is what caught my attention immediately and is partly the reason I am so interested in CMC. He states that the media gives terrorism its power. This is absolutely the case. If the media had not exploited the attacks on the WTC towers – if they had not even covered it – then would we still be “at war with terror” and would the nationwide uproar have occured? My answer is no. The attack took approximately 3,000 lives. Not to say this is not a serious tragedy, but that is a very small number in the broad scheme of things. If there was no coverage, the families of those involved would have been devastated, the city of the New York would have wept, and the powers at be would have been debating on how to handle it. We could have just said “Fuck you too!” and been done with it or quietly retaliate. Zizek stated in his piece that “the terrorists themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it” (231). If they wanted to create great physical damage they would have had a much different plan. 3,000 people out of over 300,000,000 is nothing when you look at it from a distance. However, our country’s mass media exploited the event, playing videos and showing photos nonstop to everyone in the country. Now 300,000,000 people were experiencing this event virtually at home. People who otherwise would not have heard about it and would probably not care very much were being told over and over that this was a catastrophe and that something had to be done. And as we all know when you say something is true enough times it eventually becomes true. Baudrillard goes on to point out that the terrorists’ victory was visible in the shift of our country’s value system and the “ideology of freedom… on which [America] prided itself, and on which it drew to exert its hold over the rest of the world” (229). Terrorism is powerless without the effects of mass media. They wanted to send a message, which our media allowed them to do. Without such exploitation, families grieve and the rest of the country goes on functioning as it would.