The plot of the event of September 11 — the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists — might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most thoroughly benefited from it. How do we take fantasms seriously when they come true?
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