In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard points out that they are as willing to die as we are to live. They are terrorists. We are the consumer capitalist global order. Baudrillard sees a disturbing manifestation of a trend of consumer culture he first observed in Symbolic Exchange and Death more than thirty years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: that slavery functions by way of a prohibition against death, and of all the social taboos produced by ‘global’ culture in the later half of the 20th century, such a prohibition – a prohibition on death, against a person’s moral right to die – is the most widespread. It is the slave owner, the master, who can die. The slave cannot die. Captured in war, the slave’s life is transferred to an infinite debt. He lives on credit; his death becomes the most immoral act possible, because it constitutes a failure to amend the debt accrued when his life was spared by his master. When we see suicidal terrorism on TV, our reaction to it is one of moral indignation. Of course, there is the outward violence of the event, the civilian casualties, the destruction, the reality
