Le Monde - September 17, 2001
Let's Look Reality in the Face. By Susan Sontag
For a terrified and sad New Yorker, America never seemed to be further away from recognizing reality than facing the monstrous dose of reality of Tuesday, September 11.
The gulf which separates what occurred and what one should understand, on one hand, and the sheer deception and self-satisfied nonsense peddled by practically all the leading public figures of American life, and its television commentators, is stupifying and depressing.
The voices authorized to keep track of the events seem to be joined in a campaign aimed at treating the public like children. Who has acknowledged that it wasn't a matter of "cowardly" aggression against "civilization," or "freedom," or "humanity," or the "free world," but an aggression against the United States, the self-proclaimed world superpower, an aggression which is the consequence of specific American actions and interests? How many Americans know about the continuation of American bombings in Iraq? And since we're using the word "cowardly," shouldn't it be applied to those who kill from high in the sky, out of the range of possible reprisals, rather than to those who are willing to die in order to kill others?
As for courage -- a morally neutral virtue -- whatever one can say of those who perpetrated Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
At all costs American leaders want to make us believe that everything is all right. America is not afraid. Our resolve is not broken. "They" will be hunted down and punished (whoever "they" might be). We have a robot-president who assures us that America always has its head held high.
A whole range of public personalities, vigorously opposed to the foreign policy of this administration, apparently feel free to say nothing but: we are all united behind president Bush.
We've been reassured that everything was going along well, or close to it, even on a day marked by the stamp of infamy, and even if America was now at war. Yet all is not well. And this isn't Pearl Harbor. Considerable reflection is going to be necessary, maybe it's being done now in Washington and elsewhere, on the colossal failure of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, on the possible options for American foreign policy, in the Middle East in particular, and on what constitutes an intelligent program for military defense.
But those in charge of official functions, those who wish to be and those who have been in the past, have decided -- with the willing complicity of the major media -- not to ask the public to bear too great a part of the burden of reality. The complacent and unanimously lauded platitudes of a Congress composed of one Soviet-like party appeared contemptible. The unanimity of moralizing rhetoric, aimed at masking reality, poured out by leading Americans, and the media, in recent days is unworthy of a mature democracy.
Leading American figures, and those who would like to be, have let us know that their duty is only one of manipulation: to impart confidence and manage the pain. Politics, the politics of democracy-which involve disagreements and encourage sincerity-have been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's suffer together. But let's not be stupid together. A little historical conscience can help us understand exactly what happened, and what might continue to happen.
"Our country is strong", they keep telling us. For my part, that really doesn't console me. Who can doubt that America is strong? But America should not be only that.