An Inclusive Litany

11/2/01

From a mile-long essay by Jean Baudrillard in Le Monde, November 2, 2001:
Because with its unbearable power [the West] has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing. That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic—that is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it's a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up. To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted it.

[Ed.: Baudrillard earlier wrote a book with the interesting premise that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.]