Myth in the Making

For better or for worse, myths have always been used to cement societies. What was the effective role of the “War on Terror” narrative after 9/11 and why is the American public so prone to endorse myth making?

“In the aftermath of September 11 the American citizen was propelled into the realm of mythology, a new and different dimension of being, unworldly, where occult forces were bent on destroying a world that had been created for the children of light,” says the author. This chapter of Democracy Incorporated examines how the use of a myth is integral to totalitarianism’s political dystopia, where good and bad are opposed in absolute ways.

At the outset of the so-called “War on Terror,” invading Iraq to uproot the terrorist networks that committed the 9/11 attack made as much sense as invading Mexico. But a myth, as Sheldon Wolin points out, presents “a narrative of exploits, not an argument or a demonstration. It does not make the world intelligible, only dramatic.” Facts, reason, and human consideration could not matter, then, and they did not. The need to tally Iraqi civilian casualties was not even remotely felt like a necessity in mainstream media, for instance. In that “new and different dimension of being,” it suddenly made sense to disregard the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths brought as an answer to the thousands of American ones on 9/11, even though Iraq had had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on that day and terrorism in general.

Regarding the revival of American exceptionalism under the war on terror, Sheldon Wolin reports that “The underlying metaphysic to these dreams of glory, of an ‘American century,’ of Superpower, was revealed in the musings of a high-level administration official when he or she attributed a view of ‘reality’ to reporters and then contrasted it with that held by the administration: reporters and commentators were ‘in what we [i.e., the administration] call the reality-based community [which] believe[s] that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”¹ Such a statement seems definitely closer to the inspiration behind The Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous (or infamous) 1934 propaganda tribute to Hitler, than to a rational and reasonable democratic intent.

Sheldon Wolin argues that in the aftermath of 9/11, the United States government seized the opportunity to make its leadership in the fight against evil appear as a self-evident, using the same myth to rule domestically through fear and ignorance. As mainstream media knew almost instinctively what to do to fall in line, transparency and accountability became indeed the war on terror’s instant casualties under Washington’s auspices. Making the iconography of terror obsessive enough, “[The mainstream media] then announced, disingenuously, that “9/11 had forever been printed on the national consciousness.” Which is to say, according to Sheldon Wolin, that “the date was enshrined and readied, not merely to justify but to sanctify the power of those pledged to be its avengers.”² Any critical approach concerning the exact circumstances and deeper causes of what had happened was to be ignored: “September 11 became that rare phenomenon in contemporary life, an unambiguous truth, one that dissolved contradictions, the ambiguities of politics, the claims and counterclaims of political ideologies and pundits. Critics transformed themselves into penitents defending a preventive war as just and celebrating a constitution sufficiently flexible to be suspended at the pleasure of the chief executive.”

1. Quoted in Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
2. At the memorial service commemorating the second anniversary of those killed at the Pentagon, the director of the FBI read this from Ephesians 6:12–18: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Quoted in New York Times, September 12, 2003, A-19.