The Sign of the Beast

The day when the two towers that used to dominate Manhattan went down caused a personal crease for me as well. From that day on, the world, as well as myself, have not been the same. Five years have passed and the shadow of that day on me hasn’t got any smaller.

It has been much more than a terrorist attack. It has been one of the turning points of history. The fall of the Berlin wall should have brought the end of the last century horror, of the world tearing apart depending on monstrous ideologies. I have honestly believed in the end of the ideologies.

The European-American bourgeois civilization seemed to have won the Third World War, the cold war. After the victory on the Soviet Union and its disappearance it seemed the human kind had managed to get out of the terrible strait that had threatened to annihilate it with an atomic war. Many of us believed then in the ideas of Francis Fukuyama, who talked about the "end of history", the end of a nightmare that is. Actually, the American and European democracy had defeated its greatest enemy in the same way it had done with Hitler in the past. The postmodern world of the high-end technologies, of the internet and of the multi-culturalism seemed to have no more enemies. It was like a collective utopia, like an extremely attractive dream. That was the time when I wrote "Postmodernismul Romanesc" ("The Romanian Postmodernism"), the book in which I embraced the most advanced ideas of that times: pluralism, tolerance, the minorities’ emancipation, equilibrium between localism and globalization. Today’s readers might find my book, as well as the one of Fukuyama and many others, as naive.

This kind of books didn’t take into account that, in a world with different speeds of life and development, huge resentments towards the faster and the more developed ones appear at each second. The people of the countries that realize they have already lost the race from the political, economical and cultural point of view become the people that feel a radical rejection towards the world that makes them the retards of history. These forces take "reactionary" positions based on old sets of values that proved their importance as far as the survival is concerned, which represent only intense fear for the future: nationalism, tribalism, religious fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, primitive anti-Capitalism. It is not the religion that pushes the Arabian fundamentalists to war. Religion is just a symbol for their desperate feeling of being far behind other people, for their honor of proud people, retarded from the educational and technological point of view, which cannot see a way to make up for the lost time. They are usually seen as the aggressors, but they are also the victims of their own violence, in a tragic vicious circle. Terrorism has never solved the social or educational problems. On the contrary, it has made them more serious in a bloody and useless manner.

In 1989, we sent it away, but the ideologies’ era came back darker than it ever was, in 2001. Therefore, the illusion and the utopia lasted only 12 years. What is the era we entered after 9/11? The nuclear escalade in the years of the cold war looks like a little boys’ game with toy tanks and missiles in this era. This is the era of the viruses sold at the corner of the streets, of anthrax, of the hand-made nuclear weapons, of the hackers, of the fanatic suicides.
After 9/11, the sign of the Beast started to be clearer up in the sky.