Literatură, Politică și Mass-Media, Reprezentări Anglo-Americane ale Atentatelor de la 11 septembrie 2001

Abstract

On September 11, 2001, the United States of America, and, at the same time, the entire Western world, were struck with the most devastating terrorist attack up to that date, orchestrated by the Muslim fundamentalist organisation Al-Qaeda, in which four planes were hijacked and turned into weapons of mass destruction. Three of them reach their targets, hitting the two towers of the World Trade Center complex in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington DC, and killing around 3,000 people, most of them, civilians. The event, metonymically referred to as 9/11 is live broadcast by the televisions around the world, thus entering the sphere of representation and fictionalisation. Its immediate outcome is the military operation in Afghanistan, initiated by the United States and supported by NATO, with the aims of overthrowing the Taliban regime and capturing the mastermind of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. The Western coalition’s military operations are further pursued in 2003 with an attack on Iraq and the deposition of the dictator Saddam Hussein. These events are known in historical and diplomatic sources, as well as in the press, as The War on Terror, a phrase coined by President George W. Bush in his address to the American Congress. However, the attacks have had an equally powerful impact on the Western collective mindset, determining changes in understanding and accepting the Other, an unprecedented rise of phobia and paranoid reactions to the Muslim Arabs, but also adverse reactions of the Europeans, who saw themselves drawn into a war which not all deemed justified.