Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [237]
23
Coda
I
Biographies end with the subject’s death. Autobiographies have no such natural termination. However, this one has the advantage of ending at the moment of an undeniable and dramatic caesura in world history, in consequence of the attack of September 11 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Probably no other unexpected event in world history has been directly experienced by more human beings. I saw it on a London hospital television screen as it happened. For an old and sceptical historian born in the year of the Russian Revolution, it had everything that was bad about the twentieth century: massacres, high but unreliable technology, the announcements that a global struggle to the death between the causes of God and Satan was now taking place once again as real life imitated Hollywood spectaculars. Public mouths flooded the western world with froth as hacks searched for words about the unsayable and unfortunately found them.
Magnified by the worldwide images and rhetoric of the American age of media and politics, a sudden gap appeared between the way the USA and the rest of the world understood what had happened on that awful day. The world merely saw a particularly dramatic terror attack with a vast number of victims and a momentary public humiliation of the USA. Otherwise the situation was no different from what it had been since the Cold War ended, and certainly no cause for alarm for the globe’s only superpower.1 Washington announced that September 11 had changed everything, and in doing so, actually did change everything, by in effect declaring itself the single-handed protector of a world order and definer of threats against it. Whoever failed to accept this was a potential or actual enemy. This was not unexpected, since the strategies of US global military empire had been in preparation since the late 1980s, indeed by the people who are now applying them. Nevertheless, September 11 proved that we all live in a world with a single global hyperpower that had finally decided that, since the end of the USSR, there are no short-term limits on its strength and no limits on its willingness to use it, although the purposes of using it – except to manifest supremacy – are quite unclear. The twentieth century is over. The twenty-first opens on twilight and obscurity.
There is no better place than a hospital bed, quintessential locus of a captive victim, to reflect on the extraordinary inundation of Orwellian words and images that floods over print and screen at such a time, all of it designed to deceive, conceal and delude, including those who produce it. They ranged from simple lies to the dynamic evasiveness with which diplomats, politicians and generals – and indeed all of us today – fend off public questions that we do not want or are afraid to answer honestly. They ranged from the patently disingenuous, such as the pretence that Sadam Hussein (admittedly an inviting target) must be overthrown because of Iraq’s world-threatening ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the justifications of US policy by those who should know better, on the grounds that it got rid of Stalinism in the past. That the policy-makers and strategists of Washington are today talking in terms of the purest politics of power – one has only to listen to them off, and sometimes even on, the record – accentuates the sheer effrontery of presenting the establishment of a US global empire as the defensive reaction of a civilization about to be overrun by nameless barbarian horrors unless it destroys ‘international terrorism’. But, of course, in the world where the borders between ENRON and the US government are hazy, believing one’s own lies, at least at the moment of telling, makes them sound more convincing to others.
As I lay in bed, surrounded by sound and paper, I concluded that the world of 2002 needs historians more than ever, especially