New Millennium

The New Millennium marks, in Richards’s recollection, the moment when the old boundaries of war collapse. The September 11 attacks become both a spectacle he cannot forget and the proof of a new order: conflict is no longer confined to battlefields but has metastasized across the world and into civilian life.

Richards’s remembered threshold

Richards remembers watching the planes slam into the towers, the images repeating endlessly: fireballs, falling bodies, and the collapse of steel and concrete beneath clouds of dust. He was in Jakarta, though he could no longer remember why. What remained was not merely the broadcast but his bodily certainty that the world had changed. He experienced the attacks as a decisive break with the old way of doing things.

The passage gives this memory an unsettling doubleness. Richards regards the catastrophe as terrible, yet also as a moment of clarity: military institutions needed war to keep their purpose, but the conflict that followed would be different from the wars that had come before. The attacks make visible a transformation already latent in his understanding of violence.

War without a front

For Richards, the new war is a perpetual struggle between groups divided by power, identity, and belief. Its participants need not look like soldiers. They can be busboys, cab drivers, or mail carriers carrying silencers; young mothers pushing strollers packed with explosives; or schoolgirls carrying poison in their backpacks. The examples move violence into familiar roles and ordinary routines, making concealment—not the visible battlefield—the defining condition of conflict.

The settings widen just as dramatically: pickup trucks, airport hotels, caves, train platforms, cruise ships, malls, movie theaters, and places of worship. War can happen in a city or the countryside, in darkness or daylight. Its causes may be framed in the language of religion, nationalism, or popular allegiance, but Richards reduces those declared causes to underlying competition over money and position. The changing slogans conceal, in his view, a durable contest over who gets to benefit and who gets to sit at the table.

A world drawn into the conflict

Richards describes the preceding two decades as a long winning run, naming conflicts from Sarajevo, Albania, and Chechnya to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Peru. The list sets the September 11 attacks within a continuing history of war even as Richards insists that they inaugurate a new form of it. The break is not an end to conflict but its spread beyond familiar theaters.

His final image is biological: war has metastasized like countless cells across the planet, until everyone is implicated. That image gathers the passage’s movement from a single remembered broadcast to a worldwide condition. The New Millennium is therefore less a neutral calendar label than a turning point in Richards’s worldview: violence becomes ambient, covert, and difficult to escape, while the supposedly ordinary spaces of civilian life become part of its battlefield.