Timothy Snyder on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11

Timothy Snyder has posted another thoughtful essay, written from Ukraine on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It's about our response to terrorism, in general and that attack specifically, what it lead to, and how we can do better.

I was particularly struck by this passage from near the beginning of the essay.

When spectacular terrorism comes, you have to think even as you suffer. Your suffering, though desired by those who caused it, is not the terrorists’ ultimate aim. They push you into a frame of mind so that you then hurt yourself even more. History is full of acts of terror.

The real question, I told the students, is what you do next.

You cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But your freedom begins with your response.

Sadly, Americans in power responded as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.

Americans let the terrorists set the terms: their violence and our violence. We had an opportunity to see 9/11 more deeply, and to react in a way that would have created a safer world for generations to come. And we did not take that opportunity.

The basic American policy 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. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 -- as I wrote to a friend in the White House -- was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars -- and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.

Today we face the reality of rising oceans, vast fires, and resource conflicts. We were given a chance to halt all of that.

But we did not take it. 

He goes on at length to discuss the distortions to our political system and foreign policy caused by our reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of Homeland Security and the systems that promise security but don't provide it, links all of that to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, and the possibility of another large scale attack and what our response should be. 

Tying it all back to 9/11, he finishes by saying:

Commemoration is a singular chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them.

We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. Thinking about the last quarter century, we can choose to think differently.

And what we failed to do then we can do now. We can think of our security as part of our freedom, as our education and our health and ability to realize our best selves. We can turn from sources of energy that kill to sources of power that enliven. We can love our country but recognize that our only homeland is a common one, the earth itself.