Antonio Navalón
Some days mark the milestones of historic events. In the twentieth century, there were several attempts to show that human evolution had reached a point of no return. The first of September of 1939 was proof of this. The 20th century was a century that had witnessed many things, such as the great technological development, the territorial readjustment, or the reconfiguration of the maps through the experiment of genocide and the attempt to destroy the human condition, of the confrontation of one against another as it was the first World War. In the midst of that, the revolutions, the great revolutions arose – how could it be otherwise but as a consequence of the exhaustion of the systems -. Starting with the Mexican, continuing with the Soviet and, after misusing the lessons and the opportunity of the victory of the First World War, came the revolution of hatred and resentment with the arrival of the Nazis to power and the second and last attempt to evolve the technics for human extinction through World War II. In that ranking of atrocities carried out by the confrontation of one against the other, there were also attempts to defend ourselves, such as the creation of atomic power and the use of the first nuclear bombs since, in one way or another, the Second World War had to end.
Each day has a name assigned, and the truth is that the 20th century, with more than one hundred million deaths, was a golden opportunity to build not only the United Nations or to carry out the prosecution of crimes against humanity, of genocides and the experiences carved into events as unfortunate for us as the Holocaust or what the Nazi power entailed.
Everything seemed to indicate that the 21st century would be the century of enlightenment and knowledge. Since the Library of Alexandria, never before in the history of humanity has there been such an orderly, uniform, massive, and comprehensive collection of information as that offered by new technologies. The total culture change that meant the displacement of hardware by software and the placing of all power in the palm through the technological developments created by the empire of communications is an unprecedented fact. All this should give us a hegemony of culture, of knowledge, and, ideally, of peace. However, it has not happened.
Twenty years have passed since the greatest catastrophe of this century. Twenty years that, as we commemorate them, it can be deduced that the century really began on the morning of September 11, 2001. If that day could be defined, it would be the day of bitterness. 20 years ago, the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon was attacked, but most of all, America was humiliated. And all due to a fundamental factor that has been repeated on multiple occasions: we do not learn or understand the past. I want to avoid the commonplace of the fact that the Taliban today are celebrating their return, after twenty years that our dead, our freedoms, our culture, but above all, the fact that so much investment in intelligence, military resources, and techniques of defense was not enough to prevent what happened. We could not understand an enemy who knows us so well that he has all the tools to destroy us at any moment.
We did not understand September 11, 2001. We still do not understand. We do not know the origin of extremism and all its manifestations. Extremism is radically at odds with the ideology and way of life of the Western world. First was the attack on the United States, which was a way of attacking us all. Then there were the attacks in Spain, England, France, and other Western countries. These acts were and are perpetrated to remind us that there is no space for forgiveness or forgetting, nor is there the possibility for them to not consider us to be unfaithful beings.
In this commemoration, it is not that we are stronger; we have already lost the war. A war in which the problem was not to keep throwing money away or keeping young Americans in combats to death on Afghan soil. The problem was that none of this really helped to root out the problem. A problem that in these times, twenty years later, resurfaces. The first lesson of September 11 is that, incredibly, there was no contingency plan in place in the event of the victory of the Mujahideen and the evolution that the regime might follow in Afghanistan. Their victory was possible, first, due to the social and religious structure of the Afghan extremists but second, because of the support and training provided in weapons and specialized training by the United States.
In addition to teaching them how to use the Stinger missiles, teaching them to use weapons, and instructing them infinite ways of defense, the Americans and the whole world underestimated them. We never thought that all that training could be used against us. Today, when they have already won the war, and while we are trying to rebuild everything that has been lost, the question arises again: in reality, how capable are we of learning from what happened? In honor of the deaths of September 11, I believe that it is important to criticize and point out all our failures and reiterate and reaffirm the commitment to establish the foundations to create stronger societies.
On the 20th anniversary of the day the 21st century truly began, America is more alone than ever. It does not have the solidarity of its allies, and it does not have a plan B to foresee the next attack. Nor does it have an efficient containment or response system that can improve the current situation. So much investment, effort, pain, and blood has allowed us to know who is really in a position to be a true counterweight.
The eleventh of September is a sad, bitter day and a day in which we not only remember the dead but, above all, we reconstruct the origin of how many more victims there may be for one supreme reason: we are not capable of learning anything.
