Remembering 9/11

The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn’t confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. Is the US really so disliked? If so, why?

In Granta 77: ‘What We Think of America’, twenty-four writers drawn from many countries described the part America has played in their lives – for better or worse – and delivered their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world’s supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.

‘An attack on the civic freedoms that America embodies is an attack on my own freedoms too’, wrote Ivan Klima.

‘The USA will not last in its present form,’ argued James Hamilton-Paterson.

‘Quietly, almost imperceptibly, another America is being born,’ proposed John Gray.

‘America holds out a radical promise to its citizens,’ wrote Ian Buruma.

‘We have broken America’s tantalizing spell by turning it into our own,’ suggested Fintan O’Toole.

According to Michael Ignatieff, America is ‘the only country whose citizenship is an act of faith, the only country whose promises to itself continue to command the faith of people like me, who are not its citizens’.

Two years later, in Granta 84: ‘Over There’, American writers described their encounters abroad and how they were affected by them.

Eric Schlosser explored the ‘new imperialism’.

Chris Hedges protested the Iraq war and America’s involvement in the Middle East.

A.M. Homes witnessed the World Trade Center collapsing.

Adam Hochschild discussed what he valued about America, ‘perhaps the most vibrant civil society on earth’.