dimanche 2 novembre 2008, par Thierry Leterre
A question was asked to America after September 2001 : what is the price of freedom ? Terrorists had travelled freely to and in the US territory ; they had taken lessons to become pilots without raising much suspicion. Once crossed the US border, they easily got lost in the American society. They used every commodity of the American way of life. Then, they became mass-murderers, as they had intended to, from the moment they had put a foot on the American land. They had turned what I appreciate the most in the US, the feeling of freedom against the US themselves.
The 9/11 terrorists had come to a country that had struck me in the 80’s, when I first visited it, by the absence of anti-Islam feelings—or even the absence of reticence towards Islam. There were certainly exceptions, but I undoubtedly felt that Muslims were regarded with the general benevolence that prevails towards religion in the US. In their daily interactions, they benefited from the respect shown to minorities, and on the liberal East Coast where I was staying, being different was very close to being invisible, or hardly noticed. Islam was no problem. It is there, however, that a bunch of would-be murderers came to, bringing along their hatred for the country, its foreign policies, its ruthless arrogance, or what they pictured to be so. I can understand that—I even can be not shocked by that. All over the world people grab every single reason to hate other people, sometimes on very thin grounds, often on no ground at all. What strikes me though is that they kept the same hatred, the same cold-blooded rage, through months of acquaintance with peaceful, friendly, smiley and casual Americans, as we all know them. I can imagine them under the delusion that behind every smile offence was meant ; behind friendliness, indifference to the people they claimed to care for ; behind liberty—what ? The fact that people were free, simply. They must have done on themselves a formidable work of fantasizing, with all the resources of prejudice and all the power of self-blinding to commit the unforgivable and the unforgettable. Freedom, it seems, had not made the miracle of redeeming them from their murderous obsession.
It is easier to kill than to understand, it seems.
President Bush soon talked of “the heinous acts of violence perpetrated by faceless cowards upon the people and the freedom of the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.” He would add, a few days later that the 9/11 terrorists “hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. (…) They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” . He knew he had to enter the game of defending freedom, and this deep sense of freedom that, even more than liberty itself, defines America as I love it though it sometimes is disconcerting to Europeans and probably to many other people in the world facing the empty infinity of individual choices.
What the terrorists had revealed was that it was free choice, within the limits of their devious, raging and twisted convictions, to kill thousands of people to safeguard their own fantasy. They had been trusted to make the right choice by their host society ; they did not make it. They kept enough of this freedom offered to them to ignore it. The freedom that was granted to them—to fly aircrafts, to travel, to cross borders—was but a weakness in their eyes, or a miraculous opportunity to act, a mere instrument to use in order to kill.
Did the terrorists hate liberty, as President Bush said ? I doubt so. They just did not consider it one moment. They just did not even think that they had the possibility to consider themselves as free agents. But it was easy to picture them as hating ; that would justify hating the haters, while it is more difficult to deal with people who just do not understand anything about what you are and what you want to be. In a way, what made the terrorist so full of hatred was beyond hate : it was sheer inability to live in a free world. That they killed themselves in trying to destroy such a free place was after all logical.
And free, America was. We now say that security was lax. It was not. It was more profound. Absence of suspicion was a testimony to the American sense of freedom in these lasting 90’s. The period after the fall of the Berlin wall had brought the hope that liberty, which had always been on the American agenda, would no more be a defensive value, but rather a best practice of politics, a flag that one could show off to the nations on earth. It was too good to be true. Or rather, the ill-elected politician that had become the first American president of the millennium intended to let his people believe it. In the American history, George W. Bush will stand as a monument of collective unhappiness. His victory in the 2000 elections was the worst example of democratic turmoil. He soon would be the president that had let the attacks happen in his country. At the end of his two terms, he would leave his country with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, having proved that the military giant that his country had been could not easily defeat the ghostly foes he had chosen to create. He would have made the situation of the Iraq people still more miserable than under a merciless tyranny, and he left also a deep economic crisis. Maybe, as it has been repeatedly said, George W. Bush had picked the wrong time to become the US president ; maybe he was the wrong guy at the wrong moment, or even, he has been like any guy at the wrong moment : maybe, anyone would have faced the attacks, declared wars, and would have led the country to economic recession. Maybe that was fate. Has then fate become part of the public ideology of the US ?
Beyond fate, there are men. It is reported that the president’s first thought, when he knew that the country was under attack, was that the US were living a new Pearl Harbor. The comparison was easy ; it was wrong. There was not nation-state behind the terrorists—only a mass of fuzzy encouragements—it was no war : in this totally different situation the president chose old notions dating back from WWII. It mainly served as a reminder to the American people that liberty had a price. Not the price of tears and sorrow after the attack, but the price of sending troops over, to fight indecisive and probably unjust wars, to face economic recession after having sunk billions of dollars in destroying far away countries. The price of liberty had become the price of fear.
We just forgot, once more, that freedom is priceless.