September 11, In Theory

Year 2001, Issue: 14, 105 - 109, 01.10.2001

John R. Groch

Abstract

Of the many rumors that spread like viruses after the September 11 attacks, perhaps the most emblematic was the suggestion that, visible in the smoke billowing from the World Trade Center – and photographed by both the AP and CNN – was the face of Satan. No other rumor was as audacious, as improbable, as flat-out bizarre; yet no other rumor so neatly incorporated as many of the themes evident in the post-9/11 Internet-driven circulation of pseudo-information. Like the story that CNN had falsified its footage of celebrating Palestinians or the widely-circulated “snapshot” of a tourist on the WTC observation deck as the tower is about to be hit by a plane, Satan’s Face turned on the reliability of photographic evidence. Like the supposedly prophetic quatrain in which Nostradamus had predicted the attacks or the story that a miraculously unburned bible had been found in the charred wreckage of the Pentagon, Satan’s Face placed the supernatural at the heart of an event otherwise characterized by emblems of secular modernity planes, skyscrapers, cell phones, etc. . And like the claims that 4,000 Israelis working in the WTC had been ordered to stay home on the day of the attacks or that there was no actual evidence of an airliner found at the cite of the Pentagon crash, Satan’s Face suggested that there was far more to the attacks than could be rationally explained by an objective analysis of the facts at hand.

References

• Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. London: Verso, 2002.
• Virilio, Paul. Ground Zero Towers. London: Verso, 2002.
• Žižek, Slavoj Welcome to the Desert of the Real!. London: Verso, 2002.