By: Paul S. Marchand
Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it has been fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Such an analogy is tempting. After all, millions of Americans living today, my father among them, can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack.
Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy is inapt.
Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.
Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast. On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”
The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.
The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England: “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”
After the events of 9/11, one can easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change: “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”
What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever be lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.
Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda. To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers. Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.
Herein lies the paradox. While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.
By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.
For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping our sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.
By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively. The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.
This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails. While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines. The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.
Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 may merely have been the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age. If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last ten years how to respond, it is because we have not faced a challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.
Our challenge, then, on this tenth anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time. Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.
Second, we must overcome our solipsistic insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have no understanding. As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11. We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere. For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization.
Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in Al Qaeda’s outrages some kind of existential clash of civilizations. Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous. We know from direct observation that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities. We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.
It may be that the coming of the so-called Arab Spring may undo some or all of the appeal Al Qaeda has heretofore had; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated. With Osama bin Laden dead in the Arab world going through a process of revolution not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.
We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova. But ten years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead,may come to an unlamented end. and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,”
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved.
