Alan Atkinson, Three Weeks in Bali: A Personal Account of the Bali Bombing (ISBN 0733312381), Sydney, ABC Books, 2003, 112 pages, paperback, $12.95, reviewed by Maria Tumarkin, writer and historian.

Late on Saturday, 12 October 2002, two bombs exploded in the heart of the club and bar district of Kuta Beach, Bali's most popular tourist area.

The effects of the blast were devastating; the loss of life and terrible injuries appalling. For Australia, it was one of the most tragic events to occur in peacetime in the last one hundred years. For other nationalities, and especially the Balinese, it was calamitous.

ABC journalist Alan Atkinson was on holiday in Bali with his family when he received the call early on the Sunday morning that something catastrophic had occurred at Kuta. He was one of the first Western journalists on the scene. Atkinson kept a diary of his holiday and the days after the bombing. This is his personal account of an extraordinary three weeks.

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Alan Atkinson, ABC journalist based in Adelaide, was on holiday in Bali with his wife and two teenage kids, when the two explosions in Paddy's Bar and Sari Club in the heart of Bali's most popular tourist district late on Saturday 12 October 2002, claimed the lives of two hundred and two people, eighty-eight of whom were Australian.

This book is the diary Alan kept of his three weeks in Bali – 11 days of bliss and then of waking up very early on Sunday morning to a phone-call from Australia. On the other side of the phone is Alan's brother-in-law in Sydney. There's been an explosion at Kuta. Australians have been killed? Are you alright?

As the first Australian journalist present on the scene, Alan virtually immediately takes on a task of reporting, filing his first report for ABC Radio from the New Bounty nightclub right opposite the Sari Club already on Sunday morning.

Yet Alan Atkinson's account of the immediate aftermath of the explosions, asks for, I believe, no re-telling here. After all, the media coverage of what was dubbed one of Australia's worst peacetime tragedies has been all-pervasive, although, I can't resist noting in passing just how relative the notion of peacetime has become these days. Still I find it hard to imagine that there would be many people in Australia totally ignorant of the facts of the Bali explosions, oblivious to the far-reaching political ramifications of the blasts as well as the personal accounts, which had come out of the tragedy.

Above and beyond this, Three Weeks in Bali is Alan Atkinson's story and at 111 diminutive pages, the whole book can be read in one sitting in just over an hour. And this is how it should be read too, I believe, in one breath, so your pulse quickens as you get closer and closer to October 12, so you are, at least, half as vulnerable in reading this dairy as Alan Atkinson was in writing it. He does indeed tell us what he saw without the luxury of hindsight, of knowing who is to blame and what the future, no matter how short-term, may hold for the people of Bali and Australia. In that, his dairy is courageous and unguarded, eye-witnessing stripped to the bare bones.

As a historian who studies and writes about tragedies and trauma, I've come to treasure this kind of writing or accounting, which is a much better word for it anyway. Just like Alan's diary, this writing is immediate, distinctly non-manipulative and almost too plain. It is framed neither by historical context nor by social agenda, but simply by the sheer accident of being there, at the very moment, when, in the words of Judith Rodriguez, people's photos would become uninhabited, their allotment of years untaken.

As I was reading Three Weeks in Bali, I was continuously reminded of the poem written by African-American writer Toni Morrison two days after September 11. In The Dead of September 11, Morrison imagined that the only way of speaking to the dead and the living in the wake of a catastrophe was to ' abandon sentences crafted to know evil - wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister'. In his account, Atkinson does precisely as much – most notably, in his resistance to 'going big on Al Qaeda line' in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, when as he writes, the truth of the matter was 'heavily obscured by debris, rampant speculation and the differing political imperatives of various governments' (p 72). While some producers in Australia looked for big hooks for their coverage, Atkinson stood firm, his dogged professionalism and respect for facts neither shaken nor stirred.

For Morrison, the language with which we speak or write of tragedies at times like ours needs desperately to be purged 'of hyperbole; of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness'. All we can be, she writes, is steady and clear. This is precisely how Atkinson's diary comes across – steady and clear, almost unfamiliar to us in its lack of all-enveloping statements and spectacular metaphors. All Alan can do when confronted with the 'dark tunnel of grief' (p 66) of Australians and Balinese alike, when faced with the mountains of dry ice brought from a nearby fish processing plant to keep the bodies of victims from decomposing, is to continue filing stories. Steady does it.

'Weeping is a human universal', writes Tom Lutz in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. In all cultures people weep during funeral rites. Except Bali. For Balinese people, tears and, more generally, displays of sorrow and grief during funerals are seen as possible impediments to the passage of the souls of the deceased to the next world. Three Weeks in Bali is unlikely to make you weep uncontrollably. It is not a story of grief, but of Atkinson paying his respects to the victims of the blast, their families and friends, to the ethics of his profession and, perhaps most movingly, to the people of Bali, for whom he carries great tenderness, hope and unspoken, tearless sadness.

Reviewer: Maria Tumarkin, writer and historian [details]

Daniel J Sherman and Terry Nardin, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (ISBN 0253218128), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006, 272 pages, paperback, US$24.95, reviewed by Adam Atkinson, ADFA, University of New South Wales.

Terror, Culture, Politics: 9/11 Reconsidered takes a critical look at the politics of American culture in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The volume takes as axiomatic—and, therefore, as demanding careful scrutiny—the connection between culture as creative expression and culture in the broader sense of the beliefs, values, and habits that members of a society hold in common. Coming from a wide array of disciplines—art history, history, literature, media studies, law, and political science—the contributors ask not so much how 9/11 changed American culture but how our existing cultural patterns, in such separate but linked domains as the media, public art, and political thought, shaped our responses to it.
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As Sherman and Nardin note in their introduction to Terror, Culture, Politics, of all the rhetorical, jingoistic gestures and formulas to emerge from September 11, the notion most in need of critique is that '9/11 changed everything' (p 4). Implicit, of course, is the question for whom precisely 'everything' has been altered. The United States, certainly, has discovered its vulnerability, and its security fears have impacted on the international community in numerous ways. Further, many of America's allies, including the Howard government, seem determined to follow Bush's lead in justifying a raft of 'normative changes' (p 238) in the name of a vaguely defined war against terrorism. The value of Sherman and Nardin's collection though, is not primarily its analysis of cultural, ethical, and political developments since the World Trade Center attacks, although the critiques undertaken are both thought-provoking and thorough; rather, Terror, Culture, Politics takes a balanced approach to 9/11 by also analysing the pre-existing norms and anxieties informing America's current terror culture.

Although the editors still maintain a separation of terms, one of the book's principal concerns is to investigate the relationship between the 'narrow' sense of culture — the creative arts — and a 'broader' understanding of culture as the 'art of living together', (p 2) a definition that subsumes both ethics and politics. Both kinds of culture (art on the one hand and politics and ethics on the other) have the power to reflect existing states of affairs, but also, more importantly, to affect change — for better or for worse. (p 2) Terror, Culture, Politics is designed to investigate these notions side by side, to expose the origins of America's state of anxiety and where that same anxiety might be leading. Producing a cultural artefact of their own, the implicit desire of the editors and critics involved is to alter the cultural pathway revealed in their studies.

The essays are divided into two sections: 'Image/Memory', which investigates art critically engaged with 9/11; and the aptly titled 'Ethics/Politics'. The purview of the included texts is broad, taking in architectural design, commemoration, and (more interestingly, perhaps) comic books on the one hand, and investigating human rights, crisis government, national defence, and attempts to rehabilitate and clarify jihad on the other. Articles in the second section deal in original ways with the expected issues and questions, while the first section tends to eschew the obvious and popular art forms of television, film and music in favour of slightly more marginal cultural elements. Mainstream art, according to Henry Jenkins' contribution, tends to respond far more slowly to events like 9/11 than many of the art forms studied in the text. Often, once they are proven to be viable ideas, mainstream art later absorbs the rapidly developed themes of marginal culture, like comic books, for example. (p 97)

Jenkins' essay, 'Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears', argues that comics produced not only the earliest artistic interpretations of 9/11, but also, as 'a niche medium produced by a mainstream industry', (p 69) saw the emergence of a popular and progressive critique of globalisation and American imperium. While bellicose themes of good versus evil drawn in black and white terms might be the expectation for superhero comics, such elements are largely absent post-9/11, or at the very least subdued in favour of working through the grieving process and, significantly, attempting to understand the terrorist viewpoint (the included frames of the passenger uprising on United 93 from the perspective of the hijackers are particularly striking). For Jenkins, comic books stand in sharp opposition to 'axis of evil' rhetoric and might be put to serve a positive didactic role in dampening some of the ethico-political developments outlined in the book's second section of contributions.

Elaine Scarry and William E Scheuerman's essays in particular are intended to criticise the defence and governmental policies justified by the 2001 attacks, particularly the rhetorical emphasis on the necessity of speed and expedited action. Scarry's well-known essay, 'Who Defended the Country?', updated for this publication, criticises the Bush government's response to 9/11 as hypocritical or at the very least ill-informed. The rapid centralisation of national defence into the executive arm, the shift from democratic strategies of defence to authoritarian hierarchal mode, is based on the alleged need for the government, in an age of long-range missiles and high-speed aircraft, to respond to security threats with rapidity — within minutes. Her analysis of the facts known about Flight 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon) shows that despite, at the very least, a twenty minute warning confirming the hijacking of the flight (and an outside figure of one hour and twenty minutes), the attack could not be stopped because of the slow movement of information in a hierarchical, centralised defence structure. The democratic, decentralised defence carried out on Flight 93 within a comparable time frame (twenty-three minutes) was, on the other hand, successful and Scarry argues for a similar (and constitutional) approach to national defence: a decentralised defence force, the maintenance of Congressional approval of war, and a politically engaged citizenship.

Scarry's critique is certainly open to challenge, from both sides of the argument, but read in combination with Scheuerman's piece, 'Rethinking Crisis Government', lends value to pause in the face of rapid and often poorly informed decision making. (cf. Iraq) As Scheuerman argues, the strengthening of executive power in the name of speedy defence leads ultimately to 'monarchist conceptions of power', (p 215) at odds with everything America claims to stand for. Most of the essays, at least implicitly, suggest that the political knee-jerk responses to 9/11 are less a consequence of the event's unprecedented horror and destruction — indeed, as Toope argues, many nations deal with such trauma on a very regular basis — but more as an attempt to re-establish a prior state of perceived American invulnerability and power. In a certain sense, then, the events of 9/11 are read as a provocation toward dampening the American imperialist impulse. Ironically, though, the book's critique of America stops short of actually challenging American-style democracy as the pre-eminent form of government. America appears as a kind of lost utopia, buried momentarily under Bush's version of the USA, and hopefully to be resurrected by progressive elements of culture. A minor criticism, though, that detracts very little from the book's strengths as a measured response to 9/11. For Australian readers, too, Sherman and Nardin's book raises many important questions regarding our own cultural responses to September 11 and the ways in which those responses move in tandem with those discussed above. Terror, Culture, Politics spills outside its intended range of critique and its publication is both timely and of wide relevance.

Reviewer: Adam Atkinson, ADFA, University of New South Wales

Tony Coady and Michael OKeefe eds, Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World (ISBN 0522850499), Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2002, 142 pages, paperback, $24.95, reviewed by Eliza Matthews, University of Queensland.

The terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 profoundly shocked the international community. Policy-makers are increasingly aware of the inadequacy of existing intellectual, moral and legal frameworks for dealing with such events.

Terrorism and Justice is the first book since September 11 to address philosophically the moral and political underpinnings of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It brings together authors with different attitudes and original perspectives on the ethical and practical justifications offered for terrorism, and different conceptual frameworks for assessing and justifying responses to terrorism. Some defend the principle that non-combatants ('innocents' or civilians) should be immune from attack; others qualify it; others again argue that traditional distinctions between combatants and non-combatants do not apply in the case of terrorism.

Can terrorism ever be justified? If not, what are the grounds for condemning it? Is your 'terrorist' my 'freedom fighter'? What are the morally appropriate responses to terrorism--diplomatically, militarily and ethically? These are some of the questions this timely book seeks to explore.

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At first glance this book threatens to be one of the many published in the post-11 September period that exists solely to capitalise on the tragedy through the use of the word 'terrorism'. This is definitely not the case here. Indeed, Tony Coady and Michael O'Keefe should be commended for this compilation, whose various authors respectively analyse terrorism from a largely unbiased and unemotional viewpoint – something has been lacking by western scholars over the past year and a half. In the Preface, the authors acknowledge this essential problem with most scholarship regarding terrorism. They state:
Terrorism is both palpable and elusive. We are confronted by it, haunted by it, and confused about it. In some form or another it is as old as the sense of civilisation that it threatens… In the wake of 11 September 2001 the technologically advanced Western States are sensitive to it as never before, but other parts of the world are wearily familiar with its ravages… From this perspective, the idea that the outrages of September 11 were somehow unique or changed the world forever can be seen as understandable exaggeration. (p xiii)
The major strength of the book – the origins of which came from a workshop sponsored by the Australian Research Council Special Research Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics – is that it is concise and easy to read whilst still being largely well researched and footnoted. The bibliography is an excellent summary of the relevant works in the field and it would be difficult to find one that covers the topic in a more expedient manner. This is not to take away from the articles themselves, which cover the definitive debates and many of the moral arguments surrounding this topical and widely publicised issue in a manner which will make the book enjoyed by many, rather than a select group of philosophers.

Ten short chapters by notable authors such as former High Court judge and Governor-General of Australia Sir Ninian Stephen and Professor Raimond Gaita, cover such topics as, 'Political Terrorism as a Weapon of the Politically Powerless' (Chapter 2), 'Towards Liberation: Terrorism from a Liberation Ideology Perspective' (Chapter 6) and 'Responding Justly to International Terrorism' (Chapter 9). The latter topic mentioned, written by Michael O'Keefe, is particularly interesting when considering recent debates surrounding United States interventions in Afghanistan Iraq where one of the stated aims was to eradicate the area of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups harboured by the two former dictatorships. O'Keefe states:
The use of international terrorism as a mode of warfare raises a number of difficult questions for decision-makers, not the least of which is how to respond to threats from non-state actors whose use of force is illegitimate. The issue becomes more complex because these terrorists are resident in another state and acting against them without the 'host's' consent would be prohibited. States aim to limit the ability of terrorists to achieve their political ends through the use of morally dubious strategies, but how can they bring international law-breakers to justice? (p 103)
Although I would argue that only some states aim to limit the ability of terrorists to achieve their political aims, I believe this is a small oversight in an article which covers the topic of external intervention into the internal mechanisms of a country in order to rid it of terrorist activity very well. O'Keefe concludes that 'The rise of international terrorism displays the limitations of international law and morality in dealing with aggressive non-state actors…' (p 110) This argument is one which has concerned many people since before 11 September 2001 – from the media to academic commentators – and O'Keefe's examination of it will certainly be welcomed in the current environment of confusion regarding what to do with the terrorists themselves. This is a topic which is debated extensively in Janna Thompson's chapter 'Terrorism and the Right to Wage War'. (p 87)

Another strength of the work is the chapter by Abdullah Saeed entitled 'Jihad and Violence: Changing Understandings of Jihad Among Muslims'. (p 72) This is particularly important in clarifying many of the common misconceptions among non-Muslims regarding the religion. Saeed's chapter not only outlines interpretations of jihad in the modern period, but also its historical origins in the Qur'an and the doctrine of jihad as developed in Islamic law.

The only criticism that could be levelled at this work is a very minor one. It would have been beneficial if each essay were tied to each other a little more closely by the editors, rather than seeming like a loose conglomeration of well-written articles masquerading as a unified book. Overall, however, Terrorism and Justice is an important study in the field and will prove to be a valuable read for anyone interested in current events or history, from the academic to the lay reader.

Reviewer: Eliza Matthews, University of Queensland