This hatred was once proportional to the global power of the United States. It was both political and cultural in inspiration.
On September 11, 2001, Islamists inspired by American cinema staged an apocalypse for a global audience. That day, in New York, their horror film, targeting the two proud towers of the World Trade Center, reached the height of the terrorist imagination.
All political analyzes, from the most simplistic to the most sophisticated, fail to account for the earthquakes caused by the collapse of these buildings filled with workers who participated, each in their own way, in the American dream.
The hatred of the United States and its counterpart, the universal fascination with which the country of Uncle Sam is the object, two almost interchangeable faces, have rocked the whole earth forever.
Fracture
The divide within the United States itself widened by engulfing political institutions, Puritan morality and an almost infantile conception of happiness and human relations. The words “God Bless America,” the title of the patriotic hymn sung by Americans for a hundred years, no longer have any real meaning.
Is it any wonder that September 11 led to a disintegration of the American faith in democracy and, as a consequence, to the devaluation of politics and decent and reasonable politicians?
Because September 11, 2001 opened, fifteen years later, the doors of the White House to Donald Trump, allowing him to despise and insult the American virtues which made the country great.
No, God has not blessed America. God cursed America by offering it to the exacerbated forces of the far right, delusional libertarians and savage capitalism.
Extremists
Twenty years have passed. Twenty years have allowed all the racists, the uneducated, the conspirators and the intellectuals converted into censors to come together, in a way. Because the extremes merge to arrive at these “Disunited States”, as I wrote recently.
This is to the great pleasure of those who, at home and elsewhere, live in hatred of the United States to the point of praising tyrannical countries, even of turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed in Islamic and totalitarian countries.
Blinded anti-Americans, I rubbed shoulders with them, so to speak, when on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was invited to Radio-Canada to talk about my writing habits. When I entered Marie-France Bazzo’s studio, the first plane had hit a tower. It was panic. A few people in the studio, with an open microphone, hypothesized that this terrorist act was signed by the American extreme right.
When the second device was embedded in the other tower, I understood. It was only the jihadists to succeed in such an attack. I said it, but some collaborators then started to denounce the American policy in the world. In other words, some suggested that the Americans deserved these attacks.
Unfortunately, even today, twenty years later, many are convinced of this.
What more can be said ?
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