Readings on terrorism and 9/11

I have a confession to make. We don't own a TV. We have a monitor to watch movies. We took this decision when our children were still young. There was a mourning period since my husband and I, living as immigrants in Canada, were cut from our cultures of origin, not being able to watch TV5, the French channel, and Bernard Pivot interviewing with his usual witt, French and francophone writers...But this decision did a lot of good to our children who are great readers now. My son read 'Les rois maudits' in its integral version, 6 books, when he was 10. The same year he read Michel Tournier's masterpiece 'Vendredi ou les limbes du pacifique'. I remember him laughing out loud at certain passages from his room.

When 9/11 occured we, unlike many other people, didn't watch the reverberating images in a closed circuit of the planes hitting the towers, the smoke, the screams, the panic and the final collapse. We were well informed through newspapers and the internet. I remember that this year I started a subscription to Le Monde's online edition which allowed me to archive their articles and organise them in specific folders on their site.

Recently, after reading an excellent article written at the time by Pierre Tristam on 9/11 and featured recently on his blog, I opened my archives of this period. A great wealth of opinions and articles appeared on terrorism then and it was difficult to know which will become obsolete five years later and which ones will stand the test of the changes that were to come. To my great surprise, I found another gem. The article is 10 pages long and is by Jean Baudrillard, French sociologist and Philosopher and its title is 'L'esprit du terrorisme'. I am making it available to the readers of this blog. The article was also published in an english version by Harpers in february 2002.