Interpretations of "Ground Zero,"

...The tradition of enlightenment for which this journal stands is premised on the possibility of progressive self-awareness and liberation from forms of prejudice...

...The wound has two dimensions...

...I don't claim that every contributor to these pages shares this limiting "we," or that those who do share it do so to the same degree...

...IT IS FOR these reasons that I have difficulties reading in these pages passing characterizations of the Second World War as an admirable antifascist struggle that should serve as a model for leftist patriotism and politics...

...A momentous revelation: in the confusion of that traumatic disturbance, Americans found and grabbed tightly onto this term from the past, in order to claim for themselves a status of victimhood that would express the gravity of the injury...

...The arguments are about what that change really consists in...

...What it "says" is that Americans know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible crimes...

...For Mitchell Cohen, it has to do with the gravity of global threats and our awareness of them: "The threat of terror is real...

...September 11 changed the political landscape...

...But at the level of identity, post-9/11 American fear for personal safety merges with the fear of confronting that fantasy...

...Nevertheless, psychology and identity refer to real forces—forces that are often behind the kinds of conflict in which the diDISSENT / Fall 2003 n 81 ARGUMENTS lemmas of humanitarian intervention, debated so lucidly in these pages, emerge most starkly...

...84 n DISSENT / Fall 2003...

...These origins are no secret...

...No, they compared themselves to the Japanese of Hiroshima...

...We are told, in effect, that our choice now is between perpetual preemptive war and "suicide...

...Even now, Americans remain, psychologically, in a very fragile state...

...Premise two: the good do not commit gross violations of human rights...

...First, it punctured an assumption of American invulnerability and revealed a real limit to U.S...

...WHAT THEY GOT instead was, for example, continued resistance to the International Criminal Court and demands for special immunity for U.S...

...Americans need to work through that legacy and their role in it, and critical intellectuals will have to lead that effort...

...No one should deny today that violent non-state actors represent a real threat...

...To this day, the ambivalent post-9/l 1 meanings of this term have not been adequately remarked or analyzed...

...The usually unacknowledged "we" is that of "we Americans...

...Fear and anger are the dominant emotions, and they translate into bad, unenlightened politics...

...It is not merely that the Bush government has fully exploited the selective American memory of that global conflict, using the "Good War" as a template for the "War on Terror" against the "axis of evil...

...Cohen does distinguish between the two...

...And it will have immense consequences for the rest of world...

...Is it not precisely its insistence on this project of reality testing that so incenses many Americans about the domestic and international peace movement...

...And as readers of this journal know, the doctrine of preemptive attack has even deepened splits within the dissenting left...

...Enlightenment, understood in this way, is impossible until wounds are acknowledged and feelings fully articulated...

...The threat of terror is real...

...political reality...

...A cooperative law enforcement or juridical response would not, by these terms, suffice...

...Widespread fear and anger made it easy for the Bush government to pursue a politics of simplification and moral exceptionalism...

...Spontaneously, Americans began to refer to the destroyed site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan as "ground zero...

...Second, it punctured a cherished collective self-image...

...But we can disagree, I hope, about how far they really threaten U.S...

...I am aware of the problems involved in invoking "psychology" and "identity" as categories here...

...There was, however, a moment in the weeks after the attacks in which a more complex response came to light...

...I cannot see that great project succeeding without a parallel critical project—without the deepening of self-critical enlightenment and the progressive transition to what Juergen Habermas has called "post-traditional identity" or loyalty to shared constitutional principles rather than to race, place, or people...

...Clearly, such a reversal of the current course would not be achievable overnight...

...The first thing it says is how deeply Americans were hurt...

...But the widest split of all is the one that has opened up between the United States and the rest of the world...

...That would be a morally and politically "credible" goal, consistent with the vision of "cosmopolitical democracy" advocated in these pages and elsewhere by Daniele Archibugi...

...The underlying logic and its link to identity is perfectly clear...

...And yet they chose a term that could not say otherwise than that they too, in recent history, had been terrorists...

...The tragedy of the attacks was also an invitation to work through a shared past: to let go of and begin to mourn a fantasy of exception that was flattering but delusional, and, in accepting that burden and that task, to adjust the way the United States represents itself and acts in the world...

...Unconsciously, Americans understand that the official image of their nation is based on a fantasy of special virtue that will not stand up to reality...

...GENE RAY writes about the intersections of ethics, politics, and art and edited Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy...

...Ground zero" and its links to Hiroshima recur quite often in histories, novels, and films...

...But it was not the material reality that was changed by September 11, so much as a shared (U.S...

...It seems rather to mark a limit imposed on internationalist premises: a limit on the ideas of universal justice and solidarity...

...Something extremely profound and important, then, was trying to "say itself' in the quick acceptance of this term after September 11...

...national survival and what to do about them...

...The broad sympathy extended to Americans after 9/11 has been withdrawn, not because the world "scoffs" at the threat of terror, but because it finds the Bush doctrine of preemptive war an unacceptable threat to an international order of mutual security grounded on a shared rejection of war...

...For whom is "terror" a real threat...

...Even now, there is much pain, confusion, silence, depression, rage, and anxiety loose in the land...

...Conclusion: Americans cannot possibly be guilty of crimes against humanity...

...The world thinks this government has done so not because it was necessary but because it had the power, because it could...

...Why did they do it...

...Let's make the "strategic choice" to eliminate them, universally and not selectively...

...For the attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, even in the context of war, a quantum leap in the terror bombing of civilians...

...The weeks following 9/11 were indeed weeks of decision: history had intervened in the normal course of American life, demanding a response but also opening up an opportunity for national reflection...

...The official discourse insists that what is at stake, since 9/11, is nothing less than national survival and "our way of life...

...perception of existing threats that then itself became a new (U.S...

...The notorious "Unit Four" of the censored 1995 Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, and which would have exposed millions of Americans to devastating photographs of the civilian victims of Hiroshima, was called "Ground Zero...

...How must one acknowledge the "reality" of that threat...

...The way the United States concluded that war was a disastrous ethical and political failure that destroyed three hundred thousand (mostly civilian) lives in two cities and left the world a legacy of trouble and terror...

...power...

...nationals...

...Anyone who scoffs at it will lose moral and political credibility— and ought to...

...Americans have persisted in imagining themselves as 82 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 the most virtuous and generous nation on earth, and yet the atrocious morning of September 11 revealed them to be targets of intense hatred...

...I think that this official choice lacks credibility...

...The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush government's "War on Terror" have both united and divided Americans...

...It will not be necessary to rehearse here the long repression, in American memory, of Hiroshima, or the historians' debate about the official motives behind the decision to use the bomb, in order to recognize that this displacement of ground zero from Japan to Manhattan is a rejection of the gross simplifications of official post-9/11 rhetoric...

...Whoever first used the term in this context, its dissemination and acceptance was rapid: the New York Times had begun using the term by September 16...

...What is missing in the published dissections of this opportunistic rhetoric is an appreciation for the wound and for the powerful feelings of fear and anger that it set loose...

...It acknowledges what the United States as a nation has long resisted acknowledging consciously and officially...

...I accept that well-intentioned people can hold such a position, but I can only reject it...

...That, I take it, is what Cohen refers to by "political credibility" His claim also includes a notion of "moral credibility" that appeals not to the constraints of particular perceptions but to universal norms and standards...

...But it is legible in every recent issue, and I ask my fellow leftists to consider it as a possible problem...

...The term is an uncomfortable part of American public culture...

...The attacks were the work of "evildoers," and evil is a sufficient cause unto itself...

...Every kind of discourse, popular and official, took up the term, uncritically and without reservation...

...This ARGUMENTS would be the manifest meaning of the term "ground zero" in this context...

...Reality testing" and the revision of identity—individual and collective— are irreducible aspects of this process...

...identity...

...It is rather that an uncritical perspective on the "Good War" reinforces the myth of American moral exceptionalism and blocks the transition to a more enlightened identity formation...

...The United States has never been held accountable for that failure, and it officially refuses to hold itself accountable...

...Everyone agrees on that...

...Americans, moreover, should remember and reflect on the fact that Pearl Harbor is a classic example of a preemptive attack...

...If not preemption, then what...

...The attacks did not just strike the symbols of U.S...

...moral authority...

...Conclusion: indictments of Americans can only be "politically motivated...

...Moreover, it seems clear that Americans have not really appreciated—and this point may DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 83 ARGUMENTS also apply to some contributors to Dissent—the extent to which the rest of the world no longer recognizes U.S...

...The unconscious meaning of "ground zero" gradually becomes clear...

...More than crimes, the attacks were exceptional "acts of war" that demanded an exceptional response...

...In the end, a just global order will have to be grounded in a more equitable and democratic distribution of resources and benefits: although redistribution cannot pacify every hatred, it remains the soundest material basis for mutual security...

...It was first used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1946, in a New York Times report on the damage inflicted on the city of Hiroshima...

...But I cannot help thinking that his position on intervention in Iraq, as well as a great deal of the debate in these pages, is caught in a post-9/11 American psychology of fear...

...Of course, it was too much to hope for that the unconscious revelation of the term "ground zero" could become fully conscious while the wound of 9/11 was still fresh...

...The Second World War was a just war, but the Allies did not always fight it with just means...

...It is not yet clear which disputed criteria— which ethical, political, and legal languages— will win control over the evaluation of the new intervention and its consequences...

...He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor's Scholar and a guest of the Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin...

...Wounds, traumas, psychic scars: these mark points of repression, where inassimilable experience, painful knowledge, and threats to phantasmic or imaginary investments are forced back from consciousness...

...Official" categories imposed on public discourse about 9/11 served to simplify the complex background of the attacks and to block any critical reflection about their causes...

...Although I think I agree with Cohen's claim, I cannot do so without directing some critical questions to its formulation...

...The response could only be military: "Infinite Justice...

...In whose eyes, exactly, do scoffers lose "credibility...

...Because they are evil...

...But it says something more...

...but I wonder if, at the level of psychology and shared identity, they are not subtly conflated after all...

...It is not merely a matter of recurring calls for "leftist patriotism" on the model of the Second World War or condemnations, subtle or not, of "anti-Americanism...

...It makes a great difference if a people thinks of itself as capable, like everyone else, of making terrible ethical mistakes, or if, instead, it thinks of itself as morally qualified, in a unique and exceptional way, to lead the world...

...Dissent, Winter 2003) Parts of the left and of the peace movement have been denigrated or dismissed in these pages by contributors advancing some version of this argument...

...As soon as they come into play, we've left behind the orders of logical and empirical proof, in which propositions can be invalidated in any strict sense...

...The world doesn't trust a government that has thrown away the doctrine of the sovereign equality of all states and given itself permission to attack anyone, anywhere, whom it deems a threat...

...power: not even a superpower can protect its citizens from every kind of threat, even at home...

...The reference to an exemplary community of victims insisted that American pain and shock be recognized as terrible...

...Following Freud, enlightenment is interminable analysis: the unending self-critical labor of "working through" narcissistic wounds and fantasies and a continual turning, through this effort of mourning, toward others and the world...

...Nowhere is that task more urgent today than in the world's only superpower...

...What to do...

...politics...

...Anyone who questioned this response would be categorized as an enemy: "Whoever is not with us is with the terrorists...

...Premise one: Americans are good...

...That political reality is a constraining one for U.S...

...But as the analysis of the term "ground zero" indicates, there are at least some grounds for hope...

...For "Hiroshima" is contested ground, a key term and irreducible point of reference for conflicting formations of American identity—for both the official identity, based on a notion of American moral exceptionalism, and alternatives to that identity, based on the critical processing of the past...

...It designates the point on the ground directly below a nuclear explosion...

...This is what our friends in "old" Europe and the world keep waiting and hoping for...

...This analysis does help us to see, however, that the critical countermemorial project of the American left can only facilely be dismissed as a form of "anti-Americanism...

...There is an implicit "we" in Cohen's claim and in these pages, and this "we" marks the point at which self-critique stops...

...The term is technical in origin...

...If nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are a grave and urgent threat (and they clearly are), then let's stop testing and producing them...

...they also struck the ground of U.S...

...I know that Cohen can define these terms coherently and has deployed them carefully and responsibly, in complex and cogent arguments...

...It may have credibility in America, but from an internationalist perspective, it lacks a necessary distance...

...They knew, even as they suddenly and horribly found themselves the target of an atrocious attack, that their own government had, in their name, committed a great atrocity...

...The attacks hurt us as deeply, the term says, as the atomic bomb hurt the people of Hiroshima...

...So the terms of our public discourse unwittingly revealed the depth of American ambivalence and self-conflict...

...As a way of indicating the depth of their pain, they chose the people on whom the United States used the first nuclear bomb...

...For Americans insisted, through the term, in comparing themselves to a specific group of victims—but not to the most exemplary group: the victims of Nazi genocide...

...IWANT TO SUGGEST that the United States, as nation and a people, was traumatized by the attacks of September 11, but not quite in the way most Americans believe...