One of my old professors at the Sorbonne, who has passed to the eternal Orient, justified the irredeemable recourse to history as follows: “When the law is flouted, economies destabilized, and human references erased, fortunately, there is always history.” For this specialist in contemporary conflicts, history assured the human being of his or her intangible humanity. It guaranteed the inscription of his or her consciousness in time. The incessant recall of history, he concluded, could only anchor humanity in a perfectible objective. Would he maintain this optimistic vision today?
September 11, 2001, belongs to immediate history, not yet settled into the depths of the mind. Five years later, in the United States, the wounds remain raw. “9/11,” as it is customarily called, might not withstand the undertaking of a malevolent genius of modernity: denial, which is more disgraceful than forgetfulness. It wouldn’t be an isolated case. Across the world, there are countless examples of rewriting history for undisclosed reasons of minor political “convenience,” ignoring the risks of this shortsighted practice. Initially, there’s a belief in negotiating over “symbols” deemed insignificant. Celebrations of the Battle of A…… are prohibited in full regalia to maintain social peace. There’s a conscious effort to avoid offending a portion of the electorate that, drawing on ancestral and victim references, seeks an identity denied otherwise. The utterance of the word of c……… is avoided, suddenly burdened by some with a singular sense of guilt. The underlying stakes surrounding this distortion of the lexicon are easily discerned.
However, the “symbolic” easily transitions into the “unbearable reality.” A danger looms over the Holocaust, as with all other great tragedies of the world: the “detail” of numbers comes to dispute the nature of the fact. Under the guise of explanation after the fact, there is a tendency to relativize, even rewrite. In reality, this technique is only suitable for old films. For history, “remastering” often serves as a pretext for sanitization. In these circumstances, we should no longer be surprised by movements that tend to deny events whose horror is challenged only by their irrefutability. After all, denial comes to the aid of pain: one would so much like those moments in history never to have occurred.
Despite the terrible images that will accompany the commemoration of this date, there is a fear that September 11 may one day suffer the same fate. Hatred harbors a thousand stratagems to thrust responsibility onto the other and turn the victim into the villain. Regardless of the reflections provided after the fact on the New York attacks, no matter the sometimes justified criticisms of the responses given by the American administration, let us not forget that in some parts of the world, people applauded and celebrated on this September 11, 2001.
