The Collapse of Thought - On September 11, 2001
Veils hang in the doorways of the grammarians' schools;
what they symbolize is less the prestige of the secrets that one learns there
than the mystery in which error wraps itself.
Saint Augustine
September eleventh effectuates a cut: a constellation of obsolete discourses has suddenly become insufferable. What was simply dated or deceptive is now unbearable. The events should have, in the West, imposed an immediate moral clarity. Such has not always been the case: the attacks have incited much just indignation and many pertinent analyses, but they have also slashed open an historical trash heap whose nauseating stench makes me feel like vomiting. I am talking about the sacrosanct alliance of intellectuals, representatives of the media, and western politicians of the extreme left or the extreme right, for whom the victims of the World Trade center are nothing but an opportunity to display moral and intellectual blindness. (I am not talking about the Arabic media, which is just a frenzy of officially sanctioned anti-Semite and anti-American propaganda; from what I know, their discourse is practically the same as that of anti-American intellectuals.) With an unsurprising but worrisome unanimity, we hear the continuing drumbeat of anti-Americanism trumpeted with self-satisfied narcissism. It is publicized with so much vociferous spite that one suspects it has become a swan song, the last chorus of pseudo-dissidence. For the nationalistic or religious right (Le Pen in France, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Fallwell in the US, Americans have only gotten what they deserve, either for being too accommodating to non Western cultures, or for having sinned in supporting the right of homosexuals, lesbians and others to fornicate. A different reasoning leads the Trotskyite or communist extreme left (Fredric Jameson and Noam Chomsky in the United States, Alain Krivine and Arlette Laguiller in France) to the same conclusion; for the proponents of socialist state intervention, which inevitably leads to misery and servitude (a truly sensational result!), America is guilt as charged. Fredric Jameson cites the decimation of Iraqi (in 1978!) and Indonesian (in 1965!) communists and the absence of an extreme left alternative to Muslim fundamentalism (!) as reasons for the massacre. Chomsky, for his part, does not hesitate to declare that the missiles Clinton dropped in Sudan on an objective believed to be military is a greater atrocity than the destruction of the WTC: "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext." (On the Bombings, September 13, 2001: http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/issues/us_violence/us_violence09.html). In an article in Le Monde (November 3, 2001), he equates the deliberate targeting of civilians by Islamists to the US military answer in Afghanistan, which carefully aims only at military targets. As for the heirs to postmodernism (Stanley Fish, Susan Sontag, Terry Eagleton, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Kirili), they try with all their might to avoid taking an ethical position, by deference to the sacrosanct equivalence of all morals or of all cultures(in the name of the scholarly cliché of multiculturalism) .
Stanley Fish, Dean at a rich American university, wants to make us understand that Ben Laden also has morals, that he is not the face of evil. So what? But it is very important: "We have not seen the face of evil: we have seen the face of an enemy who comes at us with a full roster of grievances, goals and strategies. If we reduce the enemy to evil, we conjure up a shape-shifting demon, a wild-card moral anarchist beyond our comprehension and therefore beyond the reach of counterstrategies." (New York Times, October 15: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/opinion/15FISH.html). Note that the unfathomable Dean proposes no feasible counter strategy.
Susan Sontag claims that no one in America has recognized, that September 11 is not about "a cowardly aggression against 'civilization', or 'liberty' or 'humanity', or even the 'free world', but an aggression against the United States, the self-proclaimed superpower, an action that is the consequence of certain American actions and interests." (Le Monde, September 18: http://www.elmandjra.org/new_war6.htm). The quotation marks are hers; all these notions: liberty, civilization, etc. are evidently in her mind terms of propaganda imposed by US imperialism. Sontagian truth is that the US superpower can produce only Evil, and so the attack on the WTC is justified(even if, unable to assume the indecency of her statements, she later retracted her statements; but it was too late). And they do not hesitate to call their adversaries Manicheans!
Terry Eagleton, Professor of postmodernism in Manchester, had the indecency to write that "America's only hope is too see itself in the eyes of others, but globalization, which means that one of the most fearfully parochial nations in the world now stretches to every corner of the earth, shatters the mirrors in which it might contemplate its own estranged visage." (London Review of Books online, vol. 23, number 19, October 4, 2001 - this issue is a veritable shop of horrors: the quasi anti-American unanimity, this mass consensus of opinion really inspires fear. See it for yourself: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult2319.htm). In Eagleton's worldview, hate holds hands with idiocy: America is one of the nations most open to the outside world (one of the causes of the ease of the attacks was this slightly blind confidence in the good intentions of others). On the other hand, what does America see in the mirrors that third-worldists and intellectuals so much want to hold out to her? Nothing more than the desire for her total destruction.
Psychoanalysts will not be outdone: Jacques-Alain Miller, worthy heir of Lacan's fierce anti-Americanism, doesn't quite know what to think, other than to celebrate Susan Sontag, the "Roland Barthes of America" (!) and to warn us about "not feeding the war Moloch" (?) (Agence de presse lacanienne, November 16, 2001: http://www.lacan.com/agence24f.html). The most rigorous formation in logic and psychoanalysis does not necessarily give direct access to elementary moral truths.
Speaking in early October at a conference on the feminine condition, Surena Thobani, a Tanzanian Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of British Colombia, proclaimed that "from Chili, from Salvador to Nicaragua, the track of American foreign policy is bathed in blood. Today in the world, the United States is the most dangerous and most powerful global force, which causes a terrifying level of violence." Thus the murder of 4300 innocents is entirely justified. More so, she continued, "there will be no emancipation of women anywhere on this planet until western domination of this planet is finished." Now that the Taliban have been eliminated, the liberation of women evidently no longer has a chance! The journal The Globe of Montreal adds that "Canadians received this speech with horror, but that a few hundred women present at the conference gave the speaker a delirious ovation." To see these minds of high culture trip over the most evident moral stumbling blocks does not reassure us about the civilizing value of knowledge.
We have descended low enough into this hell of complacent obscenities, but wait, it gets better. Very few reach the Dantesque circle occupied by Baudrillard and his article in Le Monde (November 2 2001: http://www.lemonde.fr/rech_art/0,5987,239354,00.html): "It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions of this brutal retaliation." To put it clearly, Americans are entirely responsible for what has happened to them: it was well deserved. "Moreover the system of globalization is a terror (a outright falsity), so it was terror against terror (...). The occurrence at the World Trade Center, this symbolic defiance, is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is itself immoral. So let's be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something about the events, let us look a bit outside of Good and Evil. For once we have an event that defies not only morality but all forms of interpretation, so lets try to have the intelligence of Evil." This cheap Nietzscheism (a character trait - I can't say thought, because it is not one) is the hallmark of numerous generations of French intellectuals. It is useless to get into the nauseating Castle of Mists built by Baudrillard: it is nothing other than an obscure and confused monument to his ignorant and hateful pride and does not merit an "explication de texte." Suffice to cite:
That we have dreamed of this event, that everyone in the world without exception has dreamed of it, because no one can not dream of the destruction of a power that has become so hegemonic, that is unacceptable for Western moral consciousness, but it is, however, a fact, which rightly pits itself against the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to erase the September 11 attack.
Finally, it is they who did it, but it is us who wanted it done.
In the same issue of Le Monde (November 7, 2001: http://www.lemonde.fr/rech_art/0,5987,242963,00.html), a mimicker of Baudrillard, Alain Kirili, a sculptor living in New York, audaciously compares two fundamentalisms: the first one belongs to Muslim terrorists and it is characterized by the negation of Eros: the second one - fasten your seat belts - is an American fundamentalism. Why, you may ask? Because there are no images of the corpses of the WTC on American television or in the American press. For Kirili, this is a negation of Thanatos, therefore it is equivalent to Muslim fundamentalism: for this artist, the only acceptable societies are those that combine Eros and Thanatos (France, maybe?), like the Freudian unconscious; it is useless to remind him that Freud never extolled the unconscious as a model of society. It didn't occur to Kirili that after the catastrophe there were no cadavers, only body parts, a head, some phalanges, a calf. He did not think that, perhaps, the media did not want to offend the grieving families, incite passions, cede to sensationalism.
There is irony in the malevolent unanimity of these fine thinkers, who always fight with faultless obstinacy against one-way thought, supposedly imposed to all by Western culture. Of course, this is pure fantasy: the West created critical thought. It is the only place where critical thought has been historically exercised, as opposed to the majority of traditional societies, which are always centered on rules that everyone must unquestioningly observe. It is the West (in particular from the birth of Christianity) that has upheld as essential objectives tolerance, respect for others whoever they might be, prohibition of slavery. To deny this is to prepare the way for a new negationism. When we abandon historical facts, delirium waits around the corner: the extreme left's or right's anti-American discourse reveals a psychosis that no evidence can shake. That is why, as with paranoiac psychosis, we are confronted by a self-repeating discourse, a discourse incapable of self-questioning, incapable of integrating the new, the events, the facts, unable to modify itself. As if September 11 had pressed the button of an old cassette, here they come in the media to peddle the same old stories.
This outpouring of moral vulgarity requests no courage; it is not the sign of an admirable dissidence. For the most part, the pseudo-critics of America, the last survivors of radicalism, enjoy fat cats' positions in universities or in the media, where they have found refuge; they do nothing but express the consensus of their peers. Protected by the West's fierce attachment to freedom of thought, religion, and expression, and, at the university, by tenure, they know they are untouchable. In other words, here are opinions that will never cost their authors anything, doctrines truly without consequence, except for exposing their abjection (for me, these lines risk costing me friends and relegating me to the lazaret of academic lepers, but too bad, I've had enough!).
Up until September 11, our small-time Saint-Justs and Robespierres could comfort themselves, with their habitual pride and self-importance, in the illusion that their blustering had precisely no weight and that they could indefinitely continue their jihad against capitalism, democracy and liberty, all the while hypocritically collecting their dividends. Now everything has changed, and they realize with dread (and without truly admitting it to themselves) that their incendiary discourses have the power to become written in the blood of innocent victims.
Our elite is quick to apply two weights, two measures. For example, as soon as Bush allows himself to say "Bin Laden, dead or alive!" or when Berlusconi, the Italian president, advocates a return to Christian values, they screech, they shout intolerable scandal; but when millions of protesters yell "Death to America, death to the Jews!", the reaction is tomb-like silence. Likewise, when Christians are tried for proselytism, punishable by death, or when believers are massacred in a Catholic Church in Pakistan, not a word. When we subsidize the construction of mosques in the West without insisting on strict reciprocation in Muslim countries for Christian churches or Buddhist monasteries, not one protest. I know, I know, a Muslims abjuration is punishable by death: this is one more reason to become indignant over the double standard.
Without a doubt, the hateful masses of the Arab world are only exercising their most elemental freedom of expression! Or, Bush and Berlusconi are supposed to better know what is permissible to say and do, which means also contempt for these masses, which are deemed incapable of sound judgement .
Another sign of scorn is the continuous demand for financial assistance from the West, as if the masses of the third world were perpetually condemned to begging, incapable of taking their own destiny in their hands, as if assistance to the third world has not been, almost everywhere and always, a massive failure, and as if the wealth of Saudi petroleum should serve only to support the decadence of princes and Koranic schools for anti-American propaganda.
The condescension goes even further: in the discourse of the extreme left (which has to be differentiated from the patriotic left), the masses, the people are always composed of manipulable idiots there to do their masters bidding. If the Afghans rejoice at the Talibans' fall (stiff upper lip and constipated look from our intellectuals), if the Vietnamese or Cuban boat people vote with their feet and their cockleshells, at the risk of their lives, if the poverty stricken people of the third world all want to emigrate to Western countries, its because they have been taken in. As if these masses were not capable of an elementary assessment of their own destiny!
Another sign of our intellectuals condescension and disdain is to hold only their adversaries to the norms of truth, logic, and elementary rationality. Not only do they easily abstain (since everything is nothing but propaganda in an always relative balance of power -see for example Noam Chomsky), but the Arab mobs and third world governments have been absolved: not one word to discredit conspiracy theories ("4000 Jews did not go to work in the towers September 11, the Mossad warned them, therefore it is a blow by the Zionists and the CIA to promote the fascist Bush, etc."), not one word against the numerous infractions to reason, human dignity and truth committed daily by the spokespeople of the Arab world (but a torrent of insults to greet any communiqué by the American government). It seems to me that a beginning of equality, an unmistakable sign of a spirit of justice, is precisely to hold the other to the norms of truth that oneself professes to respect: it is only thus that we can claim to defend the other's dignity.
It is striking to note how much the arguments of anti-American intellectuals recoup point by point the terrorist propaganda eructated by the Arabic media, in particular by the channel Al-Jazeera. The same themes (the United States is guilty of everything and responsible for everything and anything), the same refusal of any contradiction (there is only one correct point of view, and it is always anti-American), the same desire for the the adversarydeath of , the same reduction of every discourse to pure propaganda: the anti-American speech of Western intellectuals is terrorism.
In the economic domain, our elite thinkers are resolute proponents of third worldism and opponents of globalization with a unanimity that inspires little confidence. Their blind hate of capitalism and growth (for which the United States is, by default, the emblem) keep them from seeing that only globalization will allow the third world to pull through. But their conception of economy is that of four-year-old children at a birthday: the global market is a cake that always has the same dimensions, or even more so, a cake that must not become larger, because growth accentuates inequality. Thus, if the slice of the rich becomes greater, it can only be at the expense of the poor. Pure delirium! Each time that recipes of globalization have been applied with some consistency, the part of the rich has certainly grown, but that of the poor too. And of course, the real amelioration of ones sort is much more crucial and perceptible to the poor than to the rich.
Moreover, to think that the United States, by virtue of its economic weight, is the master of the world market springs from the fantasy and the crass ignorance of the most fundamental economic mechanisms. If there is a market, it is not masterable by anyone; if it is mastered, it is no longer a market (a common trait of our fine thinkers is their ignorance of the real world, be it economic or scientific). If the United States were as hegemonic as they think, everybody would live in a much freer and wealthier world.
As a Moroccan minister justly says, anti-globalization militants are working for the large Western monopolies. Clinging to dreams whose inanity history has revealed, our intellectuals are no less ready to support the most repressive dictatorships, and like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to let themselves be carried in Chris-Craft by all the Castros of the world. Today they are ready to minimize the aspect of political violence inherent to Islam, just like they always have some spittle reserved for a pope who preaches peace everywhere in the world.
But our moralists (Edward Said is a good example, see Le Monde of October 26, 2002: http://www.lemonde.fr/rech_art/0,5987,238460,00.html) relayed by the western governments (who no doubt, laudably, want to prevent attacks on immigrants), deny the conflicts evident religious dimension. This does not conform to their disdainful and reductionist vision of human history, which, they believe, is entirely dominated by politico-economic and ideological determinism.
Apparently, in the nightmarish world of the extreme left, only the poor have a right to the status of victim; this authorizes Noam Chomsky to proffer this patent un-truth: The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. (On the Bombings, September 13, 2001). Only certain social categories are granted the status of scapegoat: the fundamentally blind and egalitarian character of the Terror is thus censured, and the United States, emblem of capitalism, deprived of a legitimate response. Similarly, Fredric Jameson, unable to analyze the event within the Marxist category of the struggle of the classes, finds his cause in the lack of the extreme lefts ideological work with the Arab masses. Without a doubt these masses would have switched without hesitation from Muslim fundamentalism to Marxist totalitarianism, rendering the attack acceptable and conserving their precious ideological core: the hate of America, secular or capitalist!
Whether ignorance (in the case of certain journalists and editors of Le Monde), bad faith (at American universities), or a combination of the two, anti-American discourse rests on a solid disregard for the facts and historical evidence (that facts are discursive evidence changes nothing of their truth or exactitude). The United States is not a military or colonial imperialism in the classic sense; most of the time, as today in Afghanistan, as in 1939-45 in Europe and Asia, the US fights for democracy and liberty. Neither is the United States a commercial or cultural imperialism. In an Americanized milieu, there is always a choice: no one forces you to eat a Big Mac instead of steak frites, to drink a bud light instead of a trappiste beer, to go to Euro Disney instead of the Louvre, to listen to Michael Jackson instead of Chinese operas of the cultural revolution (of course, faced with this freedom of choice of consumption or culture, they are quick to pull out the theory of the contemptible masses indoctrinated by publicity, conveniently forgetting that publicity does not seek to impose, but to seduce).
There has been a massive collapse of intellectuals, in France and in the USA, whose unhealthy effervescence questions the entire Western educational system. If these are the elite that form the thinking of our youth, we are in trouble their students however are not falling into the same trap; 80% support the American governments actions (Harvard University opinion poll). If societys investments in the universities in the West succeed produce objective accomplices of the Talibans, if academia is a breeding ground for intellectual terrorists who are incapable, for example, of distinguishing between the deliberate murder of innocents and a legitimate war of defense, we have the right to ask ourselves a few questions. It is perhaps necessary to take another look at the programs if primary and secondary education produces consciences guilty of all the real or imagined offenses of Western white man, candidates predestined to perpetual self-flagellation for the crime of original sin, students who know all about the genocide of American Indians, but nothing of the Amerindian culture based on human sacrifice, or, to boot, anything of the scientific, political, artistic, and human triumphs of the West. If academia leads to the moral confusion by which we equate the assassin to an opposing discourse (for example American foreign policy), it is necessary to rethink the educational system that has produced these Hegelian beautiful souls, who project their interior moral disorder into the world.
We have tossed aside any ethical dimension in teaching; to take note of this is to immediately be considered a hideous reactionary, but the problem remains serious and merits examination. In the official version, all cultures have equal value, ethics are interchangeable; democracy and freedom of thought should not be placed above, for example, the most extreme religious intolerance or the most hateful contempt for women. In fact, democracy, liberty, economic progress are inferior, either to the totalitarianism of misery extolled by an extreme left undisturbed by historical facts, or to the marvelous societies, oppressed by American hegemony, that an fake multiculturalism admires. This system of thought where no moral idea is superior to another leads to the law of the jungle. If we do not extol the values that transcend ethnic groups, customs, nations, values that are to be respected and imposed (respect of a judicial system, tolerance, liberty, democracy, technical and economic progress), we quickly arrive at a generalized, anarchic and deadly combat where the strongest come out on top. And the strongest could be, as the attacks showed, a handful of fanatical obscurantists. Moral indifference is nothing other than the benign face of radical terror, not at all, as some have wanted to make us believe, the mark of a superiorly enlightened mind.
It doesnt bother me to be considered a manicheist: I believe that those who would deliberately massacre innocents represent Evil, and I am not ashamed to think that wanting to defend my family and my attachment to liberty and plural democracy represents Good, albeit a historically relative one (maybe history has something better in stock for us, but, for the time being, that is the best we have obtained). I dont want a war of civilization; but if I were forced to it, I have chosen my camp, because I think that its civilizing values are, by right and by fact, superior.
The essential spirit of anti-American discourse is what Lacan called the eternal nominalism of the University. All is but words and representation, all is but a war of concepts, where the most quibbling and verbose wins, not the one who, in spite of his poorly constructed sentences, is morally and intellectually right. Those who consider themselves the heralds of critical thinking (which is just an irrational explosion of hate, resentment, and denigration) have not gotten past the epistemological level of the sophists who, in the 5th century before Jesus Christ, peopled the pro-slavery democracy of ancient Greece.
Like the sophists, our fine thinkers take their discourse for decisive action; incapable of proposing positive solutions to a terrorism that immediately menaces our existence, they rush to the internet or to the library to read the complete poems of Ben Laden. Some even think it is possible to vanquish the enemy by loving him. Imagine them in power in 1933, glossing ad infinitum Mein Kampf, trying to understand Hitler in order to be able to dialogue with him: we would be in a fine situation today, and neither they nor I would be in a position to freely exchange arguments in a verbal sparring match! Typical in this consideration is Noam Chomskys reaction: As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. (On the Bombings) Excuse me, but I couldnt care less about the convolutions of Ben Laden's brain, to me his, his followers and future emulators elimination is more urgent. There is nothing to be understood about somebody who, with all his might, wish to see you dead, there is nothing to understand about pure hatred. As usual, our intellectuals conspiratorially lock themselves into an a-critical, unhistorical, and unrealistic discourse of denigration: a discourse of the ivory tower where words cost very little, and where the most free, the most tolerant, the most dynamic society in human history is put at the same level as a modern Islam absolutely incapable of integrating itself in modernity. But arent the words success and failure interchangeable? The fatwahs authorize suicidal terrorism (19 since 1960, only one opponent that had to rapidly retract); isnt that absolutely the same thing as Bushs terrorism in wanting to defend at all costs democracy and liberty?
In truth, Americans have become the Jews of the 21st century. I in no way mean to broach the privilege of the horrid exception that is the Shoah. But after all, when 3500 innocent victims are justified by the arrogance of the United States; when, whatever it does, the United States is always at fault (they dont intervene, they are isolationists; they intervene, they are imperialists seeking only to protect their monetary interests, well well like the cosmopolitan Jews of late); when, the US is responsible for all the woes of the world wherever they might be (it is impossible to quench a certain third worlds intellectuals thirst for irresponsibility); when, in Noam Chomskys paranoiac mind, everything the United States does is the result of a horrible and dark conspiracy to dominate the world (well, well again the recycling of the same old theme of anti-Semitism), it seems to me that I hear a terribly sinister and familiar tune, one that Europe sang in 1933: the new aria simply substitutes the Americans for the Jews. Now exactly what their adversaries do, Americans are accused of: the ignorant or false demonizing of the other, its reduction to the unique and obsessive thinking of pure hatred. Our elites are artists of the metastasis, this chicaning rhetorical figure that consists of accusing the other of what we ourselves commit daily. But all the means are good: we prefer to refer to the Talibans or third world propaganda, rather than to have faith, if only for an instant, in the news of an American government placed under high surveillance by a free press, a press which cannot indulge in faux pas, because it knows that any disinformation will eventually be dug up. We meekly accept the figures of the number of Iraqi dead put forth by Saddam Husseins propaganda machine, omitting to mention that humanitarian aide is diverted by the dictator to the black market and that he is entirely responsible for the deaths of his subjects. Credulity, as long as it serves ideological and political stakes (the destruction of the United States) is without limit, while truthful news from the other side is haughtily rejected like sinister propaganda destined to dissimulate plots and poison the masses.
There is a snag, however: absolute hatred no longer aims at isolated Jewish communities without means of defense, but at a proud nation of 280 million souls, quasi unanimous in the protection of its fundamental values and endowed with an army without equal in the world today either in quality or strength. I will probably not be pardoned for being reassured that this immense force, supported by the most productive economy in the world (and thus able to engage without limits on time or spending in the war against terrorism), is in the hands of the American government. Think about this army in the hands of the Russian, Chinese, or French governments! Only the United States, as the history of their military engagements mostly proves (of course there are always errors and flaws), seems to me capable, as much as is possible, of using such a power in a moral and rational manner.
Which is not to say that all is for the best in the best of all worlds: but the American soldier today fights as well for the right of everyone to have his or her own opinion and to express it, the right to critique and to dissent, a right that I myself question not at all. Our leftists, our extreme right, our open or closet anti-Semites just dont care for this freedom of expression: as soon as someone critiques them, university or media posts disappear right out from under the one who dared to criticize (historical conditions being identical, I am not sure I would have dared to write this pamphlet if I didnt feel definitively out of reach of their deceitful censure). They have succeeded in partially imposing the iron rod of their single-minded thinking, of their political correctness, and of their conformism. It is a matter of taking back the terrain of the university and media by re-imposing free debate, rationality, and respect for the facts. None will contest their right to an opinion, even if this is, as we often read, that the United States is a terrorist state; none will forbid them the expression of such an absurd, deceitful, and venomous stupidity. However, they are in no way guaranteed the right to influence opinion and future generations from birth and for all eternity; they would do well to remember this. I am not calling for censure or for a witch-hunt; but, each time the magi of anti-Americanism show their true faces, we must hold up, in the media and at the university, a revealing and critical mirror. Don't tell me that these are poor oppressed people: on the contrary, their fetid gargle finds a favorable echo everywhere, and they do not at all hesitate to take their share of the surplus engendered by capitalism.
It is not at all a matter of tossing aside critical thinking and substituting the idols of moral relativism and the equivalence of all value systems beyond Good and Evil for the new idol of American infallibility (the absolute hegemony of the United States over the entire world is the anti-American bogeyman par excellence). In passing, let us note that the destroyers of aporias dont see that they themselves are working from an aporia that they never question, the absolute relativism of all values. It is would be better if they defended it a little better than with a simple rhetorical affirmation.
Nor is it a matter of, I repeat, to silence the opposition and to do away with their lamentable ramblings: no, we just need to re-inject respect for the facts into the public discourse of the media and the university. Failing this, we must prepare ourselves for future onslaughts of barbarity and terrorism: their ascent will be inescapable.
(Translation Allison Roark)
Baton Rouge, November 17, 2001