Martin Amis on 9/11 and the cult of death

"September 11, 2001, is the most momentous event in world history since the end of the Cold War. And the Cold War ended when the AntiFascist Protection Barrier, otherwise known as the Berlin Wall, was decisively breached – on November 9, 1989. That is to say, on 9/11.

The above, I suggest, is a very minor parable about the herd instinct: the herd instinct and its tolerance of nonsense. The rolling creed we call Islamism is also an embrace of illusion, as indeed is religion itself – a massive and multiform rearguard action, so to speak, against the fact of human mortality. Our own performance, in what we may limply but accurately call the struggle against those who use terror, has also shown signs of mass somnambulism and self-hypnosis. This is true at the executive level, insofar as the Iraq misadventure (and much else) is a corollary of the neoconservative “dogma”; and it is true on the level of individual response. Six years later, we are all still learning how to think and feel about September 11..."
'9/11 and the cult of death' London Times