By Annika Hernroth-Rothstein
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the floor of my
sister’s living room, babysitting her one-year-old daughter. We were lazily
playing, with the afternoon news on the TV in the background. The first thing I
noticed was how the anchor’s voice changed. The woman was saying “Wait, wait,”
while staring to the side of the camera. There had been a horrible accident,
she said, as I watched the smoke pour out of the first tower. When the second
plane hit, I hoped beyond hope she was right.
I had just gotten back from a year in France. A few
months earlier, I’d been standing in a crowded bar on Place de Clichy,
celebrating my 20th birthday. I remember that night, although several bottles
of bad white wine say I shouldn’t. I was surrounded by my peers, other
upper-middle-class liberals who had fled to Paris to fulfill their fantasy. We
had come to this historical city to live the life of songs and books and
Technicolor movies. We were radicals. We were heroes. We were going to change
the world.
The people with me in that bar were a random sample of
the political atmosphere of Europe at the time. Militant feminists,
pro-Palestinians, members of the autonomic environmentalist movement, and your
run-of the-mill anti-government thugs. Having a friend who had been jailed for
rioting was as necessary as a Malcolm X T-shirt and a back-pocket paperback of Catcher in the Rye. I gladly picked up
that uniform, just as I picked up rocks and banners knowing that this was the
ticket to ride.
Raised in a family of academics, this was a natural
evolution on my part and a result of a serious political interest. I identified
as an intellectual and as a political thinker with a critical mind. What I
failed to acknowledge at the time was that my country was a controlled
environment and that the spectrum on which political analysis took place was
limited. Not unlike The Truman Show,
where the choices you think you are making were already made for you long ago,
and any dreams of a different fate are swiftly corrected.
I left my one-bedroom apartment in the chic slum of the
19th Arrondissement in June 2001. I was headed back to Gothenburg, Sweden, and
the mass protest against the EU summit and George W. Bush. I planned to be back
in time to see the first leaves fall on the Champs Elysées. Turns out, that
didn’t happen.
Night fell and morning broke before I managed to get off
that floor to answer my phone. On the other end I heard my boyfriend’s voice,
chanting frantically:
Two more towers! Two more towers! Two more towers!
He and his friends were having a party, celebrating the
attack on America. He called to invite me, and to this day I have never felt
such intense shame.
During his speech on September 14, 2001, President Bush
said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. Well, on that day I was
introduced to who I had been and who I truly was. I saw my own place in the
context of history, and how the ideas that I helped promote, the accusations I
had met with silence, all had a part in shaping the world I now saw burning
before me.
It wasn’t a game. I had played it, but it was never a
game.
In the weeks that followed, I watched the American news
with one eye, and its European counterpart with the other. It was like seeing
the slow shifting of the tectonic plates, dividing the world through op-eds and
analysis. On September 12, 2001, the headline of the largest Swedish newspaper
read, “We Are All Americans.” A few weeks later, that beautiful creed had
already been forgotten. The one time my country could side with the U.S. was
when America was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went
back to the smug relativism of World War II, the icy efficiency of a country
never having to fight for either ethics or its existence.
Soon enough, the narrative was clear. The end of the
story had already been written: The U.S. was unjustly acting as the world
police, once again. Bush was a moron and a puppet. America was killing innocent
people for oil. It went on and on, and all I could think was that if I know
that these things are not true, then what other lies have I accepted as truth
throughout my life?
So I pulled at the thread of my ideology, and it all
unraveled before me.
On September 20, I watched Bush’s address to Congress. I
had heard him speak before, but on this night, I listened — and one sentence
jumped out and grabbed me:
“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been
at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”
So I asked myself if I was free. Not free in movement or
by law, but free in thought and intellect. I was not, nor had I ever been. The
politics I had held and protected so violently were a version of the norm, and
for all my intellect and breeding I had done nothing more than tout the company
line.
I left everything that year; it was like walking away
from the scene of a crime. I remember thinking that it would have been easier
leaving a cult — at least then there would be a welcoming, sane majority on the
other side. Or if there had been a physical wall to climb and a dictator to
topple, instead of the silent oppression of the consensus.
My country did not change that day, but I had to; the
tectonic plates where shifting, and I decided to jump.
When I stood in that bar toasting myself, I thought I was
a radical. Today, as a neocon in Sweden, I know I was wrong.
I was raised in a country where that neutrality — that
indifference before right and wrong — is a badge of honor. I was taught that
morality is weakness, faith is ignorance, and the concept of good and evil is
cause for ridicule.
On September 11, 2001, I saw, for the first time, the
difference between fear and freedom, and I vowed not to be neutral between them,
ever again.
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