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ZOELLICK: As President Bush explained, the terrorists who attacked the United States did so because they hate our freedoms. They "kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. . . . They stand against us, because we stand in their way."
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Not long ago, Chairman Greenspan gave a speech in which he pointed out that the degree of openness in the world today is about what it was a hundred years ago. We only recently attained the level of trade as a percentage of the global economy that existed in the late 19th century. The figures for capital flows are similar. Global immigration, too, was at a high point a century ago. [...] There were even great social movements sparked by globalization, although the participants in the revived Olympics of 1896 ran around a track, instead of in the streets, and hurled objects toward chalk lines, instead of at windows.
Yet as Barbara Tuchman's book _The_Proud_Tower_ vibrantly describes, the years from 1890 to 1914 were also rattled by crashing debates in the Socialist International and anarchists bent on senseless destruction. As Tuchman recounts, at the turn of the century theorists and thinkers called for a stateless society, without government and law, without ownership of property, without the ruling class and their despised ally, the bourgeoisie. "Tirades of hate and invective" trumpeted calls for action. Others were driven to deeds: "These became the Assassins."
Eventually, a terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, who belonged to a shadowy group named the Black Hand, triggered a cataclysm that began in the Balkans, but spread throughout the world. The point of this brief recollection is to caution that no future is inevitable. The hopeful prospects of 100 years ago - that age of globalization - were overwhelmed by other "isms": dangerous, even terrifying ideas, such as fascism, authoritarianism, corporatism, communism, a new mercantilism, isolationism, and protectionism. The world learned anew that not all ideas are good. Bad ideas can lead to cruelties and tragedies: depression, mass starvation, economic disasters, even wars and genocide. Thus it took American advocacy for openness, growth, and individual liberty over the past 50 years to reverse the disastrous decisions made in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the wake of the shock of 13 days ago, many people will struggle to understand why terrorists hate the ideas America has championed around the world.
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