The first historical analogy – repeated in thousands of media outlets – was obvious: America had a new Pearl Harbor! The next association seemed even more obvious: a culture war had broken out, a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington and Benjamin Barber evocatively predicted a few years ago. But very quickly, these two metaphors were undermined. However, many American and European essayists and commentators compare September 11, 2001 to another date and another war: the attack on Sarajevo in the summer of 1914.

Instead of a clash of civilizations, we are increasingly talking about a war of civilizations against murderous barbarism, a global civil war, provoked not only by Islamic fundamentalists, but by all those who take to the barricades against the globalization of the economy. , against the neutralization of entire regions of the world and the progressive Americanization of our civilization.

The murderous energies of modern times

In one row, next to the Islamist assassins, there would be young anti-globalizationists, ecologists, leftists who threw stones in Seattle, Gothenburg and Genoa at the powerful of our planet who were meeting there (or rather at the police who protected meetings), and alongside them, Third World delegates who played cat music for the Americans and Israel at an anti-racism conference in Durban. Such a translation might seem too simple. And even. Just as there once existed a common thread – the Marxist vision of a brave new world devoid of exploitation and inequality – linking, for example, socialist reformers of capitalism to radicals demanding revolutionary fire in the steppes and the introduction of a new system, today, after the attack on Manhattan and in the shadow of military preparations for the attack on the nests of Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan, a much more in-depth debate is gaining momentum.