Histories of Now: 9/11 and the War on Terror
Prickly Paradigm Press was born of 9/11. Within a year after the collapse of the twin towers, my father, the anthropologist and activist Marshall Sahlins, became the publisher of an imprint dedicated to reviving the pamphlet. Its second release was Bruno Latour's War of the Worlds: What About Peace? (#2, 2002), and over the next seven years, six more pamphlets about 9/11 and the War on Terror followed: Eliot Weinberger's serial dispatches from a traumatized New York (# 9, 2003); Magnus Fiskesjö on the theater of presidential mercy (#11, 2003); Bruce Holsinger on the crusading language of medievalism (# 29, 2010); Roberto González and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists on US counterinsurgency and the abuse of social science (#34 and #35, 2009); Kurt Jacobsen on the euphemism of “pacification” and its tortured history (#38, 2009). Of course, PPP did much else in these years, publishing sharp, unconventional takes on art criticism, antisemitism, publishing, media studies, and more. But Sahlins, as publisher of PPP, mobilized his fellow anthropologists and others to respond. The result is a corpus of pamphlets that constitute a history: how a democracy built an authoritarian regime to respond to an emergency, and how the machinery kept running long after the emergency was over.
That's the case for treating them as a set today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event that set it off. The anthropologist Roberto González just published a dispatch about how the global war on terror became a war at home – how the legal architecture of the Department of Homeland Security, built to fight foreign enemies, has been redeployed against immigrants, activists, and American cities. But that’s only part of the story. These seven pamphlets taken together are also a record of the vocabulary, the legal framework, and the theater of power that a second Trump administration has implemented at home and abroad. History is not just repeating itself as farce, it is being used to wage the new battles of an authoritarian regime against democracy.
Weinberger’s 9/12, which we offer today as a free PDF download, is a diary written in real time, an evocative memoir of New York in the days, weeks, and months after 9/11. It’s also packed with observations that took others years to record. Of the many insights shared by the accomplished New York essayist, one memorable line stands out. Weinberger looked at Bush and bin Laden and called them mirrors of each other – “both the formerly dissolute sons of rich families; both called by the One God... both cut off from the world, one in a cave and one on a ranch in the middle of nowhere; one who reads no books and the other who presumably reads one book.” It’s a telling observation about how absolutist certainty flattens the world viewed from both sides of an ideological divide — and how democratic institutions fade with the evocation of emergency powers. Weinberger goes on to trace the rhetorical and bureaucratic details. There’s a telling examination of the rhetoric of "homeland security” — “that bizarre, Teutonic phrase.” He traces the phrase back to Rebuilding America's Defenses, the September 2000 manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, which called for a “Pax Americana” and imagined “some catastrophic event,” a “new Pearl Harbor,” to make it happen. The infrastructure of emergency powers didn't emerge from 9/11; the attacks supplied the pretext for an idea already drafted by the men who would soon run the war.
Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon looks at that rather bizarre, often trivialized practice of American presidents, one that speaks to the theatrical core of sovereign power. The famous Rose Garden pardon, he writes, "is really a symbolic pardoning act which, through public performance, establishes and manifests the sovereign's position at the helm of the state by highlighting... his power to control matters of life and death." Reading Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba through the works of the German anti-liberal jurist Carl Schmitt and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Fiskesjö argues the detention camp and the Rose Garden ceremony are structurally identical: both stage a single decision, unconstrained by law, that determines who (or what) lives. For the Guantánamo detainees, citizenship becomes mere "subjecthood," dependent on executive whims rather than legal rights and protection. Read the pamphlet today, after the eighteen months of Trump pardons for his allies and corporate favorites, alongside the news of ICE and a deportation regime treating due process as inconvenience and citizenship as revocable. The analysis has hardly lost its relevance.
Holsinger's Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, which I wrote about last April, has even greater relevance in the context of Trump’s “excursion” to Iran. His argument is that George H.W. Bush's "crusade" language wasn't a mere rhetorical flourish. The administration reached for a medieval idiom invoking non-state actors, a holy war, and enemies without territory or uniforms that did real work in authorizing the suspension of legal frameworks. Holsinger builds the pamphlet around Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft telling Senate committees, in 2002 and again in 2005, that detainees belonging to "failed states" or "medieval organisations" could rightly be tortured, since they fell outside the Geneva Conventions, which protect only the soldiers of regular nation-states. It was a maneuver identical to Trump’s early executive order 14157 (January 20, 2025) designating Latin American cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, "quasi-governmental" entities that are neither quite states nor quite criminal syndicates. And then there’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own “Divine War” and long history of militant Christian rhetoric. Holsinger’s closing line reads less like a warning than a headline: "We are all medievalists now."
The Iraqi War gave birth to the military’s “Human Terrain Systems,” an army training (and indoctrination) program that “embedded” social scientists in military units as part of a counter-insurgency, which launched in 2007. That same year PPP published Roberto González’s American Counterinsurgency and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, with a preface by Sahlins, who did not mince words about the "military intellectuals.” González traced the idea of a "human terrain" counterinsurgency back to a 1968 House Un-American Activities Committee report on the Black Panthers – domestic counterinsurgency vocabulary, repurposed decades later for Iraq. Catherine Lutz's chapter, "The Military Normal," points to how the media largely came to accept such initiatives that powered a lethal, hugely costly military. A similar, apparent consensus has justified the unfathomably bloated DHS budget and workforce, larger than the FBI, DEA, and ATF combined. Although the HTS itself was disbanded in 2014, the government’s control and use of knowledge that González and the NCA described inside one Pentagon program in 2009 has become, in 2025 and 2026, a general strategy for disciplining higher education itself – as Jim Chandler suggests in his recent Prickly pamphlet, The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Education (#66, 2026).
Political scientist Kurt Jacobsen's Pacification and its Discontents opens with the psychoanalytic idea of "repetition compulsion" – the doomed attempt to master an old trauma by reenacting it, badly, again and again. The security state's habit of reviving the “pacification” doctrine as humanitarianism is a further application of a psychoanalytical disorder. Resurrected during the Iraq War, “pacification” did the same work as its Vietnam-era ancestor: as Jacobsen sees it, the language of military field manuals – "local security efforts, programs to distribute food and medical supplies, and lasting reforms" – could easily have been lifted from the CORDS program of 1967. Similarly today, the ICE operations are cast as cheerful, positive projects (eg, “Operation Catch of the Day”). Jacobsen would also recognize the same “pacification” compulsion in the White House’s website that uses barely disguised copies of “retro” video games to promote policies that illegally separate families, disappear people, and deport citizens without functioning oversight.
It’s not that these or the other pamphlets predicted Trump and the dismantling of democracy; none of our authors claimed to see the future. But they did understand history: the historical precedents of the legal exceptions, the authoritarian performativity, the militarization (or at least politicization) of knowledge, and the euphemistic rhetoric that the post-9/11 security state assembled. Sometimes drafted before the emergency, the infrastructure was justified by a terrible act. Then it remained in place, unchallenged by Democrats and Republicans alike, waiting to be used at home and abroad.
The French anthropologist and historian of science Bruno Latour (1947-2022) supplies the philosophical foundations of how all that happened in War of the Worlds: What About Peace (available on our website as a free download). The modern West, he argued, never really fought wars against true enemies, but engaged in “police actions” that enforced a single natural order (of Nature, Reason, and Progress) against those too irrational to grasp it. Trump’s version, in his “excursion” against Iran, is but a hollowed-out shell: he invokes the same grammar of civilization – the call to destroy an “evil empire” – but without any of modernity’s faith in the universal principles. Trump’s transactional politics makes him even less capable of a peace, however hypocritical, than Bush’s ever was. What will peace with Iran require? Latour ended his pamphlet with a plea for constructivism, a sense that “the common world is not behind us and ready made. It is ahead of us, an immense task.” That project – the slow, diplomatic, genuinely bilateral construction of a regional order that Iran can live in and that others can rely on – will likely take place until the Trump regime is but a bitter if enduring memory. But reading Latour against the other six pamphlets that PPP published during the War on Terror, it’s clear that the task will not just be one of international relations. We will have to rebuild the world, not just in Tehran but in Minneapolis and across the United States, and to reconstruct our democracy that was not just dismantled by Trump but scarred by the long history of 9/11.
Demographers traditionally define a generation as twenty-five years. That’s how long it’s been since the terror of that September morning. It’s a long time, long enough to have forgotten just how improvised the security state that emerged from the War on Terror was, but not long enough to have stopped noticing how much of its machinery and rhetoric is still with us. These seven pamphlets are more than worthy of our attention today, to be read not just as a history of then, but a history of now that explains so many features of the current crisis of American and global democracy.
