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Saturday, January 28, 2006

Someone had to say it
Posted by Jill | 7:57 AM

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration meme has been "9/11 changed everything", and it has beaten that particular drum to justify all of its efforts to bankrupt the country, oil-grab in the Middle East, and eliminate the rights that Americans have enjoyed as codified in the Bill of Rights for over 200 years.

Did 9/11 change everything? Or have Americans responded to a horrific attack that just happened to play out on national television in a way that is out of proportion to its importance when played out against the larger framework of history?

Joseph Ellis, a Mount Holyoke College professor, thinks it's the latter:

Whether or not we can regard Sept. 11 as history, I would like to raise two historical questions about the terrorist attacks of that horrific day. My goal is not to offer definitive answers but rather to invite a serious debate about whether Sept. 11 deserves the historical significance it has achieved.

My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

My second question is this: What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.

What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.


Ellis is 100% right. We are living in a country in which people who are at most risk of being hit in another terrorist attack -- those living in large cities -- are going about their business, cognizant, but not obsessed, with the threat which may loom. And these people are not voting for the totalitarian policies of George W. Bush and his fascist minions on the right. They are governed by Democrats or by moderate Republicans like George Pataki and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mike Bloomberg, and they elect people like Barack Obama to Congress. Like the Israelis, who really DO live every day with the possibility that they may be blown to bits while going to work, they don't obsess about the risk because if they did, they'd never get out of bed in the morning.

It's in the reddest of red states, and the "red areas" within the states -- the farms and suburbs of the heartland -- where the "9/11 changed everything" meme has taken hold -- in places that are more likely to be destroyed by an asteroid than by a terrorist attack.

Bush policies that do surveillance of antiwar groups and vegans, who brand as credible threats 15 people standing outside a military recruiting station with a banner reading "Bush Lied" and about as many handing out peanut butter sandwiches outside of Halliburton headquarters; that justify pre-emptive wars and warrantless searches; and that generally serve only to make us less free and keep people frightened while Bush cronies pick their pockets, are NOT justified by the events of 9/11.

If 9/11 changed everything, it's only because we allowed it to; because we were too frightened to question what our own government is doing to us.
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