Neutral? Not on your life!

Even The Archers couldn't resist mentioning it: on Wednesday evening Ruth Archer tearfully told us how lucky she feels compared to all the people who died in the twin towers last year. I'm not sure whether I was more offended by the spectacle of a fictional character muscling in on private grief or the BBC's assumption that the first anniversary was of such overwhelming significance that it had to be acknowledged in a radio soap opera.

I am not an Archers' fan, so I don't know whether the characters also emoted over the mistaken bombing of a wedding party in Afghanistan earlier this year or the gassing of thousands of Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Somehow I doubt it. One of the difficulties with anniversaries, which come round with bewildering frequency these days – I am sure there are far more than there used to be – is that they are presented as apolitical events whose only rationale is to express solidarity with the victims and their families.

We are not supposed to ask, when the grief of the bereaved is still raw, why one tragic event deserves so much commentary and analysis and others do not. Few of us will ever forget the sight of desperate people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Centre, but that is precisely my point. Since we are not likely to forget – some Americans apparently regard the 11 September attacks as more significant than the entire Second World War – it is reasonable to ask why it has been deemed necessary to revisit the familiar images of destruction so many times.

Interviewed in Le Monde last week, a leading French psychiatrist suggested that last year's protracted TV coverage had had a damaging psychological effect and might even have been responsible for a spate of bomb hoaxes. I suspected this at the time, and made a conscious decision not to watch TV at all on 11 September or the days that followed.

Apart from the question of respect for the dead – when you watch the second hijacked plane plough into the south tower, you are witnessing the moment of annihilation for hundreds of terrified airline passengers and office workers – repeated viewing seems to me comparable to consuming pornography. It prolongs the original sense of shock and agitation at events we are powerless to prevent, trapping viewers in a cycle of repetition without resolution. (I have similar reservations about the recent media obsession with the Soham murders.)

As a consequence, I must be one of a tiny handful of people who watched film of the 11 September atrocities for the first time last week. And I could not shake off an uneasy sense that I was being manipulated, because watching in helpless horror is precisely what the terrorists wanted me to do: the attacks are the most dramatic example of what Professor Mary Kaldor calls "spectacle" wars, in which organisations without access to sophisticated modern weaponry achieve their aims by instilling terror.

In that sense, if no other, Mohammed Atta and his followers were hugely successful, destroying America's sense of invulnerability in a single morning. And their fanatical supporters must surely have gloated, when they heard about the huge amount of airtime and column inches devoted to the anniversary. Yet it is not only Islamic terrorists who aspire to control our emotional responses, which was one of the unhappy conclusions suggested by 9/11, an American documentary shown on BBC1 last week.

The film consisted for the most part of jerky footage from hand-held cameras, which two young French film-makers used to record the response of New York fire fighters to the terrorist attacks. Much of it was harrowing, from the sickening thuds as bodies hit the ground outside the twin towers to the uncomprehending expressions of emergency workers as they waited for instructions. Yet some idiot felt it necessary to add a banal commentary and a soundtrack that ranged from "Amazing Grace" to plangent piano chords.

In the context of the escalating war against terrorism, it is impossible not to regard such clumsy aural cues as a form of propaganda, if not an insult to the dead. It also pinpoints the fundamental problem with anniversaries, which is the way they are used to further other agendas. Ruth Archer may not mind being manipulated, but she is a fictional character. I do, which is why I found myself holding back from last week's commemorations.