There is a lot to say about this. 9/11 we lived in Switzerland on a farm. I learned about the Apocalypse in the car radio on one of my frequent trips between Bern and Zurich. Even as an Consultant I dislike TV, So all we got were – only BCC over shortwave no pictures. Me and my American wife went in the evening to the Zurich Bellevue, setting candles like many others did. I will not forget. Oriana Fallaci put this in better words. America killed the responsible for it. Its a war, America was attacked, but Europe is doomed despite or because of its Dimmnitude. Especially Germany. The attacks were frightening enough, but they had another alarming aspect for me. And so we arrive at the Archetype of the Apocalypse. Jung says, “The real existence of evil will have to be recognized. This problem can be solved neither by philosophy, nor by economics, nor by politics, but only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit, whose fire descended upon , one of many, and despite all contemporary misunderstandings, was handed onward into the future.” (Jung) This is not to say that this archetype is evil personified. What this archetype is about is extremely difficult to understand not just because of our natural resistance to understanding of evil motives, especially if it is inside ourselves. Despite my respect for the intelligence and comprehensiveness of Carl G. Jung’s psychological insights, I did not have a very high opinion of his esoteric predictions, predictions that frankly sounded “far out” to me, even if do like astrology. After all, who in the modern world (prior to 9/11) cared about pentagons turning into four-sided figures (quaternities). Well, numbers and symbols are another thing.
Or as Jung said, “[Our attainment of consciousness during the Christian era] [is] gravely threatened in our anti-christian age, not only the sociopolitical delusional systems, but above all by the rationalistic hubris which is tearing our consciousness from its transcendent roots and holding before it immanent goals.”.
Rage and Pride
Il Corriere della Sera- September 29, 2001
Translated by Chris Knipp
You ask me to speak this time. You ask me-this time at least-to break the silence that for years I have imposed upon myself in order that my voice not get mixed up with the sound of the cicadas. And I will break that silence-because I have learned that even in Italy some have rejoiced as the Palestinians in Gaza did the other night on TV. “Victory! Victory!” Men, women, and children. I assume that those who do such a thing can be defined as men, women, and children. I have learned that some high grade cicadas, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, and others who don’t deserve to be called citizens, have behaved in the same way. “Good!” they say, “The Americans deserve it!” And I’m very, very, very angry. I’m angry with a cool, lucid, rational anger, an anger that wipes out any detachment, any indulgence, that commands me to answer, and finally to spit on them. And I do spit on them. The African- American poet Maya Angelou, herself as angry as I am, yesterday roared: “Be angry! It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy!” But whether or not it’s healthy for me I don’t know. However I do know it’s not healthy for them-I mean whoever admires the Usama bin Ladens, whoever expresses understanding, sympathy, or solidarity toward them. You’ve fired a detonator that has too long wanted to explode, with your request. You’ll see. You’ve also asked me to explain how I myself experienced this apocalypse. In sum, to furnish my own testimony. And so I shall begin with that. I was at home-my house is in the center of Manhattan, and at exactly nine o’clock I had the sensation of a danger that probably would not touch me, but that certainly concerned me. The sensation one feels in war-or rather in combat-which each pore of your skin feels the bullet or the rocket coming in at you, and you prick up your ears and shout to whoever is standing beside you “Down! Get down!” I rejected it. I was certainly not in Vietnam. I was not in one of those fucking wars that have made a torment of my life ever since the Second World War. I was in New York, for God’s sake, on a beautiful September morning in the year 2001. But the inexplicable feeling continued to possess me. Then I did something that in the morning I never do. I turned on the television. Actually, the audio wasn’t working. But the screen was. And on each channel-here you have almost a hundred of them-you saw one tower of the World Trade Center burning like a gigantic matchstick. A short circuit? A little, careless plane? Or an act of terrorism? I stared almost paralyzed and while I was staring, while I was posing those three questions to myself, a plane appeared on the screen. It was big and white. A commercial airliner. It was flying very low. And, flying very low, it turned toward the second tower as a bomber aims at its target-throws itself at its target. And I understood. I understood also because at that moment the audio came back, transmitting a chorus of wild shouts. Repeated, wild shouts. “God, oh God! Oh, God! God! God! Goooooood!” And the plane slipped into the second tower as a knife slips into a slab of butter.
Italian writer Oriana Fallaci is best known as an uncompromising political interviewer. Her subjects include Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the late Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, from whom she extracted such criticism of India’s Indira Gandhi that a 1972 peace treaty between the two countries almost went unsigned. Already as famous as many of the figures she interviews, Fallaci is a freethinker passionately committed to her craft.