Les 9/11 du passé

Chroniqueur du Boston Globe, James Carroll est un de nos excellents observateurs de la crise américaniste. Il a, de l’extérieur, une grande expérience des questions militaires US, du point de vue de la psychologie qui les caractérise, qui explique essentiellement les tendances et les politiques des USA. Cet enseignement vaut particulièrement aujourd’hui.

Carroll publie un livre où il examine la question du complexe militaro-industriel de ce même point de vue de la psychologie : House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. Le livre suit comme un fil rouge l’histoire du Pentagone depuis sa création en tant que bâtiment, — ce même bâtiment qui fut attaqué le 11 septembre 2001. Extrait d’une interview à Democracy Now !, le 10 mai, voici le rappel par Carroll de deux 11 septembre précédents, avec leur signification symbolique et historique.

« One of the things we love about history is the way in which one event takes on new meaning when understood in the context of another event, and I was struck, not in a mystical way, particularly, but I was struck by the coincidence that the building itself, the Pentagon, the ground was broken for it in a ceremony on the morning of September 11, 1941, 60 years, perhaps almost to the minute, before the building was hit by that hijacked airplane.

» Once my attention was drawn to that date, I began to notice others. On September 11, 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had just presided over the military victory over Germany and Japan, and who had also presided over the creation of the atomic bomb, proposed after Nagasaki to President Truman that, “The United States, in order to,” as he put it, “head off an armament race of a rather desperate character,” his phrase, “should share the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union and enter into an international agreement for its control.” And Truman took that memo, that recommendation from Stimson, seriously enough to make it the subject of a full Cabinet meeting. A majority of the Cabinet officers thought it was a good idea.

» The person who carried the day in the argument was the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, whose paranoia about the Soviet Union soon enough showed itself to be rooted in his personal paranoia. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, the man who did more to shape the American attitude toward the Soviet Union after World War II than any other single person, wound up, tragically, a suicide in 1949. Well, his suicide should have been a revelation of something to the American people that the perceptions we had put in place by then about this world enemy that threatened us so grievously that we had to then be prepared over the coming decades to oppose it in every way, including with the creation of a massive disastrously overlarge nuclear arsenal, that all of that began in an act of political paranoia that was rooted, tragically, in a personal paranoia of the man who was in charge of it. »

Mis en ligne le 11 mai 2006 à 08H29