Hell’s hottest places are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.

- Dante

We will never be free from war – from killing, from death, from fear.

Despite popular support for the idea that the end of history is near and that our collective fate being all but decided, the end of our story is still a long way off. If anything our history is only horribly replaying itself on a world stage that is not growing more organized, but entropying into a clamor of fearful and increasingly desperate voices. Much has been made of the changing nature of warfare, as if something about the way organized groups of people have assembled to kill other groups of people has changed.

Studying the evolution of warfare, or of terrorism, without examining the way the societies it haunts have grown ever more complex – simultaneously farther from their past and yet more tied to each other – misses the point entirely. The killing occurring or being plotted in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, or Europe is not some new permutation of warfare’s awful visage.

All of it has happened before, what has changed isn’t the war – but the societies it’s happening within.

None of what can be alternately described as war or terrorism is new, it’s simply the natural progression of organized violence finding novel niches to seep into as they’ve opened up within advancing societies. The violence isn’t new, the precise construction and interrelationships of the societies harboring it are.

To the Muslim world, 9/11 symbolized something entirely different than it did for us. It was a theatrical spectacle with an entirely different appeal and effect. It empowered bin Ladin and granted him an air of legitimacy and authority that can only be expressed by tens of thousands of sons being named after you and T-shirts with your face on them flying off the shelves from Marrakesh to Manila. Homages that are only made after you appeal to a deep-seated sense of justice, after proving you’re willing to sacrifice everything you have to Right the worst Wrongs.

Not only was bin Ladin’s violence dramatic, it spoke to the Muslim world with the legitimacy of inarguable truth. Then, just as Gideon’s commando violence granted him authority which centuries later caused those seeking to spread Christian ideology to borrow his name, bin Ladin’s ideology became both physically manifest and imbued with influence after the commando violence he ordered into action had such dramatic results.

There hasn’t been any follow-on to 9/11 largely because bin Ladin hasn’t needed there to be one – the impact of that act of Symbolic Terror was greater than he ever could’ve hoped, and it sent into motion the forces he’d hoped it would. Islam was forced to question its own identity, and bin Laden was, for a time, thrust to the forefront of candidates to carry the Prophet’s banner. It sparked al-Qaeda’s birth as a fiery ideology, provoked America to further invade Islam’s homelands, and captured the attention of every human left alive.