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Radical Daughter
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 in the background. The first thing I noticed was how the anchor’s voice changes. The normally-chipper 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 in order to fulfill the fantasy of their existence. 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. Members of the autonomic environmentalist movement, militant feminist, pro-Palestinians, 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 backpocket 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 literally a controlled environment and that the spectrum in which that 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 arrondisement in June of 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 Champs Elysees. 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 franticly:
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 14th 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 12th, 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 US was when it was on its knees, but when it refused to stay down it quickly went back to the smug relativism of WW2, the icy efficiency of a country never having to fight for either ethics or existence.
Soon enough, the narrative was clear, the end of the story had already been written. The US 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 20th, I watched Bush’s address 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 G-d 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 was 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 a reason for ridicule.
On September 11th 2001 I saw the difference between fear and freedom for the very first time, and I vowed not to be neutral between them, ever again.
Published in General
I think it’s rather natural for the Euro-baby boomers and younger who grew up under the umbrella of American security to have some resentment for the protectors. Children need to show their courage and impress each other with their wit and tick off their parents, and nothing shows more wit and courage than to poke the bear that is keeping the lion at bay.
I saw the same behavior in Korea as a young(er) USAF linguist in the late 80’s: College protesters have to protest something and the massive investment of American materiel and personnel was an nearly omnipresent and obvious target. I spent a lot of time knocking around Seoul, and I have a distinct memory of coming upon the aftermath of an anti-American rally where, even dressed as a civilian, I looked enough like a representative of the American oppressors that I drew irate looks from dozens of people. What it reminded me of, more than anything was the anti-war protests of the 1960’s. It’s universal.
I think the next interesting development in Europe culturewill be the disentangling of the American defense apparatus from the region. I have long had the view that our security guarantees were a significant contributor to the infantilization of the governments and culture (in Asia and Europe), and the prospect of having to look after their own concerns and dealing with actual (*shudder*) conflict would be a good thing for national identity and probably birthrates.
Riveting, as ever, Annika…Thank you!
This happened to me too. I am so thankful it did. Thank you for a beautiful and powerful piece.
Thank You Annika for sharing your journey with us.
Awesome writing talent on display in this essay! Thank you. I am inspired.
Thank you for your story. Very powerful. Being conservative is easy for me, given that I was raised in Arizona in a house by conservative parents who had a copy of “The Way Things Ought to Be” by Rush Limbaugh.
But I think it takes some real guts and intellectual honesty to critique your own views and leave them behind, especially when most of your peers and countrymen still hold to them.
I can’t really understand the moral equivalence (or just plain anti-Americanism) either. In the War on Terror, why can’t people see the difference between the side that has strict rules of engagement and tries to avoid civilian casualties versus the side that deliberately targets civilians? How can people look at the Middle East, full of atrocities and misogynistic traditions, and think that it’s Israel that needs lecturing on human rights?
(Sight) I know. It really is the world’s oldest hatred, isn’t it.
People of the right and left are different in their nature. Those of the left are rabbits – careless of their young, of no particular loyalty, conditioned by nature to take advantage of unlimited resources they had no hand in providing. Their opposites are wolves – intelligent, cooperative, fiercely loyal, conditioned by scarcity to make the most of what they can, and to spend every erg of energy on the future.
Circumstances of upbringing can only hide one’s nature until a time of crisis. Then the rabbit will betray his fellows for any illusion of warmth and safety, and the wolf will awaken and seek her kind.
Welcome home to the pack, Annika.
Thank you all so much for the responses to this piece, it means the world to me. This was difficult to write, because of the embarrassment I felt and somewhat still feel about what came before the awakening, and how it came about. However, I believe it’s an important story to tell as I think I am far from alone, and that it provides a fair description of how many European lefty-liberals think and feel about the world.
As I read through all your comments, some of which contain very personal and moving accounts of 9/11, I am humbled and I am thankful for being connected to you all and thus being connected to the world in a more meaningful way.
Much love, and may G-d bless you all.
I believe this sentence about sums up the rot that is infecting Western Civilization.
Very powerful writing Annika
Your graceful command of English is almost as impressive as your clearly thinking through some very hard truths.
As for the shame, it’s too bad Luther got rid of Confession, as relief of shame is one of its greatest psychological and spiritual gifts. Secularly, though, I think we’d all say te absolvimus. It’s not so important who you were and what you did before the epiphany and metanoia you describe above. Life-changing experiences are life-changing, he wrote tautologically. Consider that a bad koan.
Sorry for all the religious vocabulary (also not big in Sweden, I know from visiting and my brother’s living for a year in Stockholm), but since we’re talking about something that affects one at a deeper, more profound level than mere reason (or you’d shrug it off as a mere miscalculation), it’s pretty much all we’ve got. : )
Thanks for writing this. It touched me deeply.
You are not the first to go through something like this – have you read Radical Son by David Horowitz? I think you will find much in common.
Also, noticing your careful spelling of G-d, I now realize that Luther isn’t particularly relevant here. : )
Yet more reason why I am happy to be a member. Wonderfully written and impactful.
That book is why my piece is called Radical Daughter :)
:) Yup, I’m a member of the tribe, so I have plenty of guilt but less Lutheran shame.
Great story.
But of course it can’t be true because we are assured nobody cheered the 9-11 attacks.
Well, maybe white people, because we’re all evil bastards deep down.