http://www.truth-out.org/farewell-modernity-new-age-surveillance67257As has been said, probably rightly, the 19th century did not end until 1914, when the First World War broke out; similarly, the 20th century did not end on New Year's Eve 2000 or New Year's Day 2001, as the calendar would suggest, but continued for another few months. I daresay that the 20th century finally ended only on September 11, 2001, when suicide bombers succeeded in attacking the World Trade Center. Naturally, terrorism had been known for a long time. It was known all too well to 19th-century Europe. It also existed in the 20th century, and in plenty of shades. There was the terrorism of the leftist hit squads and there was Islamist terrorism. There was separatist terror in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country. There was Palestinian and Chechen terrorism. It was experienced by the rich, stable societies of the West and by the countries of the Middle East. It was known in Latin America and in distant Japan.
Terrorism was connected to a variety of ideologies and served a variety of purposes. Every now and then, bombs exploded in the world, hostages were taken and airplanes hijacked. Every now and then, innocent people were dying somewhere. It always caused terror and made it hard for those responsible for security to sleep at night, forcing them to develop ever-newer techniques and ways of protection against terrorism. It caused worry, and, moreover, forced the introduction of ever-increasing limitations of freedom in the name of improving security. Gradually, terrorism changed our mentality. Step by step, we have become accustomed to limitations of freedom undertaken for the sake of improving security. After the assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square, where the bullets of the Turkish hired gun hit the pope, the pope moved from an open car to a bulletproof display carriage - the popemobile - and we soon considered the strange vehicle to be normal. Years later, nobody remembered that it used to be otherwise, that the pope had driven in an open car and shaken the hands of random people, and that those who managed to push through to the front of the crowds could get close enough to touch his cassock. In the same way, we got used to personal control at the airports.
All of this, however, was somewhere on the margins of the liberal world. It did not affect its essence. The attack on the World Trade Center made us aware that even a superpower may be defenseless in the face of terrorism.
One may chance the claim that, together with the destruction of New York's towers, the world that they symbolized collapsed as well - a world that had grown from the experience of the cruelties of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the genocide dispensed in the name of deranged Nazi and Communist ideologies, from the experience of the Soviet gulags and German death camps, from the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a world that was to be built on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in line with the Charter of the United Nations, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; a world whose main feature Karl Popper <1> believed to be the pursuit of humanity and reason, equality and freedom; a world moving away from closed, tribal society and pursuing open society, triggering the critical powers of reason; a world that - after the fall of the Soviet empire, after the Berlin Wall was torn down, after the bloodless revolution of Solidarity and the uniting of Europe - realized en masse that Marxism was, in all its aspects, not only the largest, but also the most costly fantasy of our century.
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