Patrice Riemens on Wed, 17 Oct 2001 21:50:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Paul Virilio on NYC911: A Crash of Strategic Thought? |
Bwo John Armitage and the Cyber-Society list. --------------------------------------------- A Crash of StrategicThought? Paul Virilio An essayist who has written a lot about war, diagnoses a completely novel form of conflict. http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/16/1227234 The massive destruction of September 11 has taxed the term "war". Is that an obvious fact to you? Absolutely. The great terrorism which is beginning doesn't have anything to do with the small terrorism of the 20th century. On September 11, 2001 we entered in historic fashion onto a form of war at once worldwide and "accidental ". Clausewitz qualified as "substantial" war as the continuation of politics by other means. But he also noticed, regarding Napoleon in Spain, that "substantial" war could decompose, fall apart, stop pursuing its political objectives and become a sort of frenzy impossible to put down. That latter form was "accidental" war, and civil wars constitute a known form. But that which has just begun is without reference. Up to now "accidental" war was local, not global. We are involved despite ourselves in a new form of war that we must learn as like a foreign language. Must the United States then revise their strategic choices? One can say that we have just witnessed two crashes. That of the net-economy in 2000. And that of the net-strategy of the Pentagon in 2001. All the strategies elaborated until now, information war, aero-orbital war which we saw in Kosovo or the antimissile shield, all this has just been swept away by a large-scale terrorist action which caused twice as many victims as the air armada which destroyed Pearl Harbor. We are before a logic which does not have anything to do with traditional militaro-strategic thought. As an urbanist, I will underline that terrorism has just inaugurated an anti-cities strategy. This means that all towers are today threatened. Instead of being a place of dominion, as the dungeons of the past, the tower has become a place of weakness: vertically, it is henceforth the equivalent of the outer wall which the artillery blew up. Can such a war be won? That's the whole question. It would need a political invention as great as the threat. But Bush is not Churchill. And neither is Sharon . For the moment, it is necessary to defend ourselves, in particular at the level of cities: it is too early to consider the offensive. I especially distrust the reactions which it is going to arouse. My main fear, is that all this degenerates into a religious war impossible to master. As was said when I was young, one must start by turning the tongue in the mouth seven times. Because the tongue of war is the tongue of a viper. Original in French from the Swiss weekly magazine 'L'Hebdo'." at http://www.webdo.ch/hebdo/attentats_usa_11_09_01/usa_4.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net