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141 David Sterritt Representing Atrocity September 11 through the Holocaust Lens The attacks of September 11 unleashed waves of media representation that served multiple and often conflicting purposes. Among them were three imperatives of the American mass media: the journalistic need to report an overwhelmingly important news event to the American and international publics; the commercial need to attract and retain the largest possible audience , even after the central facts had been disseminated, discussed, and analyzed at length; and the ideological need to stir up a sense of national unity and purpose in the wake of the catastrophe. These three orders of perceived necessity—the journalistic, the commercial, and the ideological— are interconnected, of course. And each is easily detected within the others; for example, the ideological drive to kindle feelings of nationalism and patriotism served to justify the news media’s protracted and repetitive obsession with visual minutiae of the attacks, and this in turn fed the sense that prolonged and repetitive TV watching had become a patriotic duty for real Americans who cared about their country—a perception that was quite a boon to commercial networks like CNN, which had gained its first great popularity with 24/7 coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. As cataclysmic as the events of September 11 were, their effects on the American psyche were driven more by the shock and awe of the attacks than by the absolute number of people killed. Most of the fatalities occurred at the World Trade Center in New York, where 2,819 died; by contrast, the number of U.S. deaths from motor-vehicle accidents in 2001 was 37,862.1 Shock and awe are real phenomena, however, and soon after September 11 the conventional wisdom was clear: Everything has changed, nothing will be the same again, and, as a corollary, America will 142 David Sterritt never allow things to be the same again. The position had a familiar ring: Never again. In terms of moral weight and historical magnitude, the bellicose “never again” of the George W. Bush administration bears no comparison with the principled “never again” voiced by much of the world after the Holocaust and its horrors were unveiled. Yet any pledge to forestall some future possibility raises important questions about historical memory and representation—questions about how we are to remember the past that has shaped our perspectives on the present and on the time to come. In an era as saturated with images as ours, matters of visual depiction must be front and center when such matters are discussed. I addressed this in an essay about two years after September 11, 2001, considering representations of 9/11 in the dark light of Holocaust iconography; in the present essay I revisit the subject and update my observations.2 My comments aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and my goal is to raise questions, not look for answers or solutions to the conundrums that arise. I have two basic questions in mind. The first, on the level of content and technique, is whether images can capture , reproduce, or convey the essence of events and situations more vast and horrifying than anything encountered in everyday life or the so-called normal world. The second, on the level of ethics and aesthetics, is whether it’s decent or permissible to try. On the practical level of everyday visual discourse, these questions can be boiled down to half a dozen words: to show or not to show. Comparisons and Contrasts The attacks of 9/11 have been compared with Nazi atrocities almost from the moment they occurred. “This is like the Holocaust,” a witness told a Toronto Sun reporter the following day. A week later, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen found rays of hope for the future by recalling “the people who survived the Holocaust and made a life for themselves.” Like those imprisoned in Adolf Hitler’s death camps, an Ohio newspaper observed , Americans could not control the enormity that had befallen them, but they could control their response to it (qtd. in Carr “‘American Holocaust ’”). The urge to draw these parallels is easily understandable, but communications scholar Steven Alan Carr points out that they run the danger of overlooking great differences between the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks . The former took place over twelve years and utilized an evolving “infrastructure of death” that claimed millions of lives, most of them Jewish, and brought such ancillary evils as concentration camps, reckless medical...

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