We Were All Americans

The attacks of Sept. 11 were not only a major political event, traumatizing a country and shocking the world. They also exposed the feelings embedded most deeply in human nature: emotion and solidarity, as well as cynicism and hate. On this 10th anniversary, we undoubtedly remember where we were at 9 a.m. on that fateful day, but the important thing is that we ask “who we were.”

“We are all Americans,” exclaimed the director of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, on the day after the attacks, expressing his compassion for the victims, but also his defense of a humanist ideal which, that day, was the focus of terrorist hijacking.

On Sept. 11, in fact, the men of al-Qaida attacked with equal rage the two faces of the United States: The global superpower “dominating and sure of itself,” but also a certain American idea, set out in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, with which political liberalism, inspired by the Enlightenment, has supplied universal democratic thought.

Osama bin Laden’s right-hand men were not the only ones to express their hatred of these two Americas. On the evening of Sept. 11, while New Yorkers of all nationalities were mourning their dead, elsewhere toxic words were stripping their thin varnish of humanity.

“They asked for it,” they were murmuring. The barbarity was justified in the name of revenge and resentment, never mind the thousands of innocent victims trapped in the planes and the towers. “Innocent?”

Like a far-off echo of the murderous crusades against the Cathars, the phrase of the abbey Arnaud Amaury before Béziers the dissenter was heard among those who “understood” the attacks: “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”

This reaction was even more disgraceful when expressed in areas which had suffered from terrorism. In Argentina, a lively debate was held between journalist and defender of human rights Horacio Verbitsky, who had harshly condemned the attacks, and Hebe de Bonafini, one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an association famous for its opposition to the military dictatorship of 1976-1983.

“I was in Cuba when I heard the news,” she said. “I am not going to be a hypocrite: I felt joy.” Responding to her opponent, one of the most eminent progressive journalists of Latin America, she described him as a “servant of the United States”!

How can one explain that a person claiming so strongly the status of victim could let herself be led astray by bitterness and ideology, to the point of ignoring the suffering of others? How can one not see that the terrorists of Sept. 11 belonged to the same breed as the Argentine military, who, in their unmarked Ford Falcons, captured soldiers and dissidents in order to execute them in torture centers, before making them disappear in the frozen waters of Rio de la Plata?

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 have led some people to singularize this crime, to proclaim its uniqueness, to the point of forgetting or underestimating other crimes. But other people have tried, on the contrary, to relativize it, by comparing it with tens of thousands of deaths from wars led these past decades by the United States and its allies, from the Middle East to Latin America, or by comparing them to other large-scale massacres with much less media coverage.

Emotion, unfortunately, is often one-eyed. How many Americans were indignant when, on Sept. 11, 1973, General Pinochet overturned President Allende, with the support of Washington, prompting a repression which had more victims than September 11, 2001? How many of them were revolted by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, while between the months of April and July, in the country of a thousand hills there were “three September 11s per day for 100 days,” over 800,000 deaths?

How to avoid being led astray by these asymmetries of indignation? By recalling that the comparison is legitimate when it affirms the necessity of according the same value to all human beings and condemning all crimes against humanity. By highlighting that it is slanderous when it attempts to “explain” a terrorist action since it wounds an enemy, to cover up the atrocities committed by its allies or to justify its own brutalities. By learning, too, to think and to feel in a more universal manner.

Certainly, feelings, emotion and compassion are inevitably influenced by proximity to the victims, be it personal, geographic or cultural. Nevertheless, if empathy with close ones is natural and vital, is it not enough when it is expressed in attachments of nationality, ethnicity, ideology or faith?

One of the challenges of our times, marked by affirmations and distortions of identity, is to protect ourselves against a communitarianism of compassion and a nationalism of indignation. “It is a matter,” writes journalist and philosopher Jean-Claude Guillebaud in Le Nouvel Observateur, “of reconciling two distinct aspirations which should never be separated: on the one hand, the attachment to a country, a tradition, a cultural particularity and, on the other hand, an open horizon of universality.” This reflection by the author of “patriotism and its opposite, nationalism,” applies to other “attachments,” be they religious or ideological.

The commemoration of Sept. 11 should henceforth remind us of the urgency of banishing selective indignations. It should put us on guard against the temptation, to which the Bush administration ceded, to respond to terror with illegal, arbitrary actions and torture. It should also and above all set in stone our common humanity.

In these confused times where, under the blows of extremisms and obscurantisms, our basic bearings crumble, the universality of values, the equality of all beings and the friendly expression of differences should be more than ever the pillars of the democratic ideal, in tune with more and more diverse and complex societies. With the image of this city of New York, so unique and so multicultural, where the victims of the attacks belonged to nearly 100 nationalities.

“I am neither here nor elsewhere,” sang Argentine troubadour Facundo Cabral, brutally assassinated at the beginning of July in Guatemala. “To be happy is the color of my identity.” It was also the identity of the victims of September 11, of the youths beaten last July 23 on the island of Utoya, of all the human beings taken by ideological, ethnic, religious or state terrorism which dirties and savages the world.