On September 11, 2001, when I taught my third class as a professor of East European history at Yale, I knew what the subject had to be: provocation. The Russian imperial secret services, and then the Soviet secret services, had perfected the art of convincing adversaries to do what they wanted them to do while making them think it was for their own reasons. When something terrible happens, as it had that day, suffering, though no doubt desired by those who caused it, is not the point. The point is to get you into a frame of mind that leads you to do something that hurts yourself even more.
History is full of acts of terror. The real question, I told the students that day, is what you do next. You cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But your freedom begins with your response.Sadly, we Americans responded exactly as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we likely exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.
The obvious response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Had we funded clean-energy sources, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars, and prevented the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy.It was not to be. President George W. Bush, the feckless scion of an oil family, had no interest in intensifying the search for safe energy. The terrorists attacked us, he claimed, because “they hate our freedoms.” Yet our own government then acted to limit our freedom. A new Department of Homeland Security placed a grab-bag of agencies, including border management, under a single authority, treating them all as a matter of security. This set the stage for a domestic politics that divides people living in America into “legals” and “illegals,” us and them, and builds concentration camps.The notion of a “homeland,” which echoes the Nazi fascination with Heimat, was even more dangerous. At the time, it was an exotic label for a government department, not really in keeping with American English or institutional traditions. But the word has since been normalized in an essentially fascist sense. Under President Donald Trump’s administration, the main threats are deemed to be domestic, from those who do not truly belong. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth treats the armed forces as a site of culture wars: men against women, whites against Blacks. Troops’ future task is “homeland defense.” The armed forces are to become the personal militia of a ruler, used to quash resistance to Trump.
