Slavoj Zizek (2003), 'A Holiday from History,' (first published in Janus #9/2001) in, Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.

 Zizek would see fundamentalist terrorism in terms of the 'passion for the real', citing the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof gang) in their attempts to shake the masses out of their apolitical slumber through acts of violence, to 'shatter their ideological numbness' (2003). Here he is drawing upon Lacan's definition of the Real as the void, to explain the spectacle of terrorism as a fake (just as modern warfare has been described as war with no human casualties to paraphrase Colin Powell). Images of the planes flying into the world trade centre then are to most observers simply reminders of spectacular Hollywood disaster movies (he must be thinking of The Towering Inferno). It was the unlikely figure of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, rather than Baudrillard, who pointed this out in his statement that the event was the ultimate work of art. Zizek explains the after effect in terms of 'de-realisation' where the scenes are presented without gruesome close-ups unlike the coverage of events elsewhere that confirms that real horror happens over there too, and confirms the home as safe. For Zizek, America simply 'got what it fantasized about' and the Real violently entered everyday reality (2003). 

This simply reflects the vision of catastrophe that occupies the smug safety of the powerful few and that which knowing revolutionaries exploit. More overtly, the link to catastrophe is established through the story that Hollywood film directors who specialised in disasters films had been called upon by the Pentagon to help imagine possible scenarios of further terrorist attacks. To Zizek, this acts as empirical evidence that Hollywood acts as the 'ideological state apparatus' (self confessed 'dream factory') and prepares the wider population for the spectacle in which reality is served as fantasy or the real is kept virtual. In psychoanalytic terms, historical traumas that we cannot remember haunt us all the more forcibly, and paradoxically to really forget something you need to remember it fully. Therefore, his reading of the fear of Osama Bin Laden (apart from that he is a typical anti-hero from Hollywood) relies on the history of his emergence from the CIA-supported anti-Soviet activity in Afghanistan. There are countless other examples around the world of figures of evil that have been formed through close association with those now in fear. Zizek calls this 'the U.S. fighting its own excess' (2003). In this way, the outside always contains our own essence in Hegelian terms. This can be further extended to the logic of master and slave, wherein the oppressed realise that it is only they who can be free so even suicide might express this logic. (note: I am reminded of the non-Hollywood film The Battle of Algiers where one of the captured freedom fighters (or terrorists) is asked why they insist on blowing up cafes with bombs hidden in baskets carried by women volunteers. He replies "I would gladly swap our baskets for your planes".)  

Zizek's essay title refers to the right wing American commentator George F. Will who proclaimed the end of the 'holiday from history'. For Zizek, it is the end of the holiday from the reality of brutal global policies and the lack of engagement with the political economy: 'the impact of reality is shattering the isolated tower of liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality' (2003). In this the 'war of terror' is both enacted through the computer-aided bombing and the computer-aided financial policies of global capitalism. There is more than a structural link between these weapons of mass destruction through systematic policies of terror. As Peter Fend puts it, the weapons of mass destruction were there all along plainly for all to see - he means oil, Zizek would see this in more general terms as the horror of global capitalism. Capitalism's other struck back because it had not remembered its own history sufficiently. This can be explained as its own internal struggle. In relating to others, it has to relate to itself: 'One should apply Hegel's well-known dictum that the Evil resides also in the innocent gaze perceiving Evil all around itself' (in Zizek, 2003).