Wanting to avoid the blocked streets for the official ceremony in memory of September 11, in the Lower Manhattan district (in the presence of President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump), I found myself in the middle of an informal wake in front of an Irish bar, O’Hara’s, from which numerous firefighters in regalia overflowed, both animated and saddened by the memory of hundreds of their comrades who died in the collapse of the twin towers.
It’s hard not to see the contrast between the families and friends of the victims — their faces wet with tears or reddened with anger — and the politicians busy talking about the martyrs of the great American project, condemned to manage the entire world at will. the yardstick of Protestant righteousness while seeking to appease the worst radicals of Islam, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Hampered by the American government and a legal system that has little interest in uncovering the truth, the civil lawsuit filed by victims’ relatives against the Al Saud family kingdom for its alleged complicity with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, drags on endlessly.
What remains of September 11, apart from the clichés? There are still New Yorkers who seek to describe the event in purely heroic and tragic terms. Even if it is not completely false, this kind of story is still carried by emotion, especially by the sympathy felt for the 2753 people burned and destroyed in the towers. As a result, the banalities of the day—the numbness, the stupidity, the incomprehension—tend to disappear, much as happens with the memoirs of high-ranking military officers that Tolstoy talks about when describing the battles of yesteryear.
I myself am tempted by a simplistic and grandiose explanation, borrowed from Malcom had reaped what she had sown (“ chickens coming home to roost “). According to Malcolm X, the president’s death was the consequence of the “climate of hatred” which then reigned in the country. 9/11 could also be described in terms of quasi-religious punishment. American hubris attacked and humiliated, its imperial ambition literally collapsed.
In fact, on the morning of September 11, I was initially completely wrong about the origin of the attacks. By chance, I heard the first news in the foyer of the Alliance Française in the 60e Street, where a radio announced the crash of planes in the towers. Reflexively, I concluded that it was the consequence of President Reagan’s anti-union policies, which broke the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and destroyed their morale and collective competence. No doubt, I reassured myself, a plane had entered the building by accident, like in July 1945, when an American bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in the middle of thick fog.
Comforted by my stupidity, I took the metro from the 59e Street on the east side of Manhattan, toward the disaster, and toward my office in NoHo, less than a mile from al-Qaeda’s chosen target. Tourists in my carriage were better informed than me and, as I left the station, at the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette streets, I could no longer ignore the great plume of black smoke which crossed the magnificent azure sky, signaling the enormity of the terrorist strike.
From my office overlooking Broadway, at 11e floor, I watched the fall of the second tower with my colleagues, there, in front of the television, inside the conference room. Later, on the sidewalk in front of my building, I watched the parade of thousands of office workers, largely refugees from the business district, walking north up Broadway, their faces drained of emotion, silent and staring straight ahead. in front of them. The night of the living dead in broad daylight. I walked home, more than six kilometers away, without ever realizing that my metro line was still running.
Malcom 9/11 was the result of an aggressive, arrogant and cynical foreign policy. Supported by America in its proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, then “betrayed” by Washington and its Saudi allies during the first Gulf War, Osama bin Laden, the kid of a rich Saudi who became a fanatical Islamist, s ‘is well avenged.
Such an ingenious plot deprived us of being able to talk about the real heroes of 9/11 — aside from the passengers who forced the crash of the fourth plane in Pennsylvania — because there were almost no injured people saved by emergency workers. Manhattan’s emergency rooms remained eerily empty. The attacks left nearly 3,000 martyrs (including those at the Pentagon and the fourth plane) who died without knowing the corrosive ties that linked their government and the Saudi oligarchy and ignorant of the role played by Bin Laden in this great geopolitical scenario.
Such blindness cannot be cured on its own. Unless we recognize the profound impact that American foreign policy had on the affair — starting with the CIA’s support for the cause of jihadists in Afghanistan against the Soviet army in the 1980s and the installation of American soldiers on the holy land near Mecca in 1990 – we will remain prisoners of endless mourning and incomprehensible politics.