A 911 Awakening

For John, BLUF:  Not everyone in Europe suffers from groupthink.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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How 9/11 Made a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical a Conservative

Here is the sub-headline:

‘Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.’

From The National Review, by Annika Hernroth Rothstein, 11 September 2018.

Here is the lede plus four:

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.

What happened was the ends of 911.

Sometimes you have to adjust who you think of as friends.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff