The horror of what has just happened plunges us all into sadness and fear. But such emotions must not paralyze our thoughts and deprive us of sound judgment….

The entire planet is praying and America is sure that God will express his wrath and his desire for a just revenge against the pious and impious. The dead become only figures and, absent from all pictures, are renamed" disappeared." Never has God been talked about so much. We are made to believe that the real victim is not made of flesh, is not human but symbolic. The confusion has become total not only between victimizers and victims, but also between the reality of mourning and the fiction of flags, between the symbols of concrete and those of human life.

Some have talked about the dangers of an abuse of "real-time death images," other have evoked the heavy cinematography analogy of catastrophe films. But this is not so.

In fact the endless use of a dozen relentlessly repetitive loop images of two towers crashing has no relationship whatever with a temporality that would be either a real one or a narrative one. On the contrary it pushes the spectator into the hallucinatory repeat of a nightmare clip, that of a bad dream borrowing from the rhythm of advertising. In this manner, de-realization can operate in the fascination of awe and give us hope of a liberating wake-up call. We are hypnotized, maintained in a state of stupor. The unexpected has become unthinkable and I hear a radio commentator saying:

"The unthinkable has happened." This method of information is extremely violent and prepares us to the unreflective violence of responses that are being prepared.

So let us, in turn, be clear. As in every murder screenplay the questioner's question is: Whom does the crime profit? The Palestinians? Certainly not: Sharon now has a free hand. He dares say that Arafat is his Bin Laden and he will push on with his blind politics in the face of paralyzed nations!

So does it profit the Afghans oppressed by the Talibans? Not at all, they are now running the risk of disappearing tomorrow under American bombs. The poor? The oppressed? Not at all. If Bin Laden is the perpetrator, he is the traitor son of the United States, their old student, yesterday's strategic tool; his riches are American. Now in the whole world Arabs are pointed at as if they were monsters, programmed to be so by their religion. Stop these characterizations, some say. But the characterization is already made, this is the sad truth.

No. Those who rise, more arrogant than ever, are Bush, Putin and Sharon. What a result! Bush becomes a huge hero, a tragic avenger, and Putin can do away with the Chechens… Are the Arabs stupid enough that they would do everything to magnify their worst enemies? But it is true that we look down on them and think they are stupid….

I do not think that any Machiavellian plot is at work, but what I do see is that a confusionist strategy of information aims at producing a dark chaos in everyone's mind. And if we don't know what to think anymore, what a boon for those who think in our place and who will make terrifying decisions without us being able to express our doubts, our questions, our analyses. The price paid by the real victims of this horrifying devastation is immeasurable. But do human lives in the West have as much value as we are told? Our XXth century history allows us to have our doubts.

All I wish is that our Western governments will not jump unthinkingly into an inextricable weave of economic interests, with which the civilian population of the entire planet is being held hostage. We all have to resist the impulse of blind vengeance that would, once again, give way to racism, religious fanaticism of all kinds, and which would have us forget the search for the true economic and political reasons of such an immense disaster.

Marie-José Mondzain
Research Director, CNRS ( Institute of Scientific Research), Paris