The empire maintained collective amnesia by fabricating a succession of distinct enemies.

Evidence

The trauma of 9/11 was far worse than that of Pearl Harbor, with which it is usually compared, because of the sheer magnitude of the visual spectacle. The Armageddon-like crumbling of the twin towers showed the vulnerability of globalized capital’s totem poles, symbols of its monumental potency. That vulnerability was too disturbing to be allowed to be remembered. As globalized capital is amorphous, so did its enemy become faceless—a mere band of anonymous terrorists who came from nowhere and ended up dead, with their bodies dissolved in the ashes of the towers they had brought down. The faceless enemy did, however, need to have a momentary face and a location, for the erasure of collective memory required the fabrication of a short-term memory that in its intensity over-compensated for the shortness of its duration. The more fiercely Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan were depicted as principal targets of the War on Terror, the shorter the historical memory necessary to sustain the delusion. Two years after Bin Laden and Afghanistan came Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and after another two years Ahmadinejad and Iran. Fabricating successive enemies thus became the principal modus operandi of the empire: one to two wars per presidential election. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing reading on moral panics — fabricated enemy cycles and manufactured consent parallel panic-cycle theory.