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 or
those who imagine that anti-American posturings are confined, among
Europeans, to the venomous British press, the Talk of the Town in
this week's New
Yorker (the heart of Sontag-land, no less) offers a depressing
postcard from France. Writes Richard Brody, "At noon on Friday,
September 14th, France joined the rest of Europe in observing three
minutes of silence in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks
in Washington and New York. It proved to be the noisiest three minutes
of silence imaginable. In the center of Montparnasse, trucks and
motorcycles blazed and blared through the intersection; horns honked;
people talked on their cell phones; waiters shouted through the
noontime rush at cafes." Meanwhile, members of the Communist
Party gathered to gripe that there had been no moment of silence
"for the victims of American crimes, for the Vietnamese children
who were napalmed ... [or] for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
or for those of the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila."
(Or for the countless millions slaughtered by Communism — but
never mind them.)
Notes Brody,
"the reluctance to pause over the American catastrophe would
be insignificant if it had been limited to a meeting of political
marginals, but that was not quite the case." He cites a story
in Le Monde "on the 'American extreme right,' which
warned readers that it was still possible that white supremacists
had been behind the hijackings," and an editorial from the
same paper in which an academic from the National Center for Scientific
Research asked her readers to consider "who profits from the
crime? The Palestinians? Of course not. The Afghans? . . . The poor?
The oppressed? Of course not. . . . Those who come out more arrogant
and stronger than ever are Bush, Putin, and Sharon. What a success!"
Meanwhile, "four of the eleven candidates competing for the
French Presidency — three on the far left, and one, Jean-Marie
Le Pen, on the far right — told the local press that the United
States essentially had itself to blame for the attacks."
And as for
the man on the boulevard, well, Brody reports that "the
French men and women I talked with — cartoonists, computer
programmers, professors — often joined their words of concern
to critiques of American policy. The critiques were familiar, but
the tone and the point were now hard to take. Over baklava and sweet
mint tea at a cafe outside a mosque, friends of mine from Iran and
Algeria, who knew at first hand the agonies of war, warmly expressed
sympathy and asked me for news of my family in Manhattan. As I began
to answer, a French filmmaker at the table cut me off to complain
that, with all the talk about the Twin Towers, everyone forgets
about Bhopal."
Still, amid
all the predictable blame-America-first sentiment, Brody does find
a glimmer of sanity. Returning to the pages of Le Monde,
he uncovers an editorial penned by two old-guard Lefties, veterans
of the Parisian upheavals of the 1960s. They write: "The master
terrorist has no conditions. He wants our unconditional surrender.
He wants our enslavement." With this in mind, "we must
avoid justifying" their crimes, and recognize that America's
flaws are beside the point, since "the nihilist offensive follows
its own logic." In closing, Brody reports, the authors discuss
the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, who fought the
hijackers and brought down their plane before it could reach Washington.
"Nihilism," they conclude, "is not invincible."
Even, mercifully, among the French.
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