I can’t help thinking about it when considering the recent events. They are absurd and tragic, tragic and absurd, such is the material negative utopias are made of. And so it was gone. That marvelous American illusion that made America so like a Hollywood movie; the ultimate chimera that good always triumphs and evil is always punished was gone. We Europeans had always made fun of American optimism and the naïveté of Hollywood movies. We enjoyed comparing it to our own gloomy, absurd, and desperate art, which made us feel so much more sophisticated. But now, when it is gone, we realize that the American illusion was the planet’s main source of optimism on which we have all been feeding. It was the one exception to the tragic human condition, the science-fiction land you hope is the present proof of a future evolutionary stage every society will eventually reach.

And now we’ve lost it. And looking only at my own experiences the months before it happened, I am not surprised it happened after all. In 2001 alone, I faced angry anti-Americanism from both politicians of the Newly Independent States and French diplomats, as a chairperson of OSCE debate sessions on government accountability; angry Indian intellectuals at the Carnegie Endowment, arguing against the World Bank, which was seen as acting on behalf of American capitalism to ruin India; a Harvard librarian who thought to help me out of my European ignorance of a real hero by praising the life and work of Malcolm X and bashing America, his country of choice, as he was Portuguese by birth; a couple of my Romanian intellectual friends who had toured America on USAID money without knowing any English and who wrote long columns to prove that America is not a civilization and who explained to me that Americans are all idiots because the journalists they met had been nice enough to say “yes” to all their nonsense; and finally my distant Greek cousins who explained to me in perfect English that during the Kosovo war they watched only Milosevic’s state-television stations because CNN was too biased (they don’t speak Serbian). The night before the WTC, a party a friend was throwing for me in London (I had just crossed the ocean) turned into a violent dispute with a London-based Canadian NGO activist over the US. The man denounced NATO as an imperialist alliance and told me how happy he was Canada was not following in the steps of US foreign policy so it could befriend Cuba.

Those who believe America is disliked for what it did wrong are blind. America is disliked for what it is doing best-success mostly, achieved through normal and decent ways-and for that it is made to pay dearly. Anti-Americanism is the business of people low on self-esteem, and those are many-from the poor of the Third World to the ambitious intellectuals of the first-all united by the same anticapitalist bonds. The latter are the authors of theories bought by terrorists, the enemies from within of the open society. We see them in the streets rallying for peace, in fact for surrender, for we no longer have a peace to keep; we see them in newsrooms writing appeals to negotiate with terrorists as if there is a middle ground between freedom and terror, between life and death. We see them on reputable boards awarding Nobel prizes to organizations that stand as symbols of compromise between democracy and its enemies, and to a man who, having been a part of that, watched the genocide in Rwanda without intervening. Why? Because even after September 11, they still feel America is the enemy that must be humiliated and brought to a compromise over the values our world stands by. Of all the shameful things that have happened since September 11, the awarding of the Nobel prize for peace, which was never more than a propaganda tool, had for the first time made me feel I do not want to be a part of Europe, if Europe is reduced to this ailing fifth column of Soviet propaganda that survived the Cold War.

It is high time we stand up everywhere in the world for those who kept democracy alive for all of us throughout the last century and to have the courage to say that whenever essential human values come under threat everything, war included, is worth undertaking to defend them. We Europeans have relied on America since 1918, and this is the first time America seemingly needs us. The most peaceful man in Eastern Europe, Vaclav Havel, acted on behalf of everyone in the region by rushing to offer full support, including the lives of young East European soldiers. For the first time in eleven years, we can feel proud to belong to long-battered Eastern Europe, which knows the value of freedom, and not long-cushioned Western Europe, where many still have doubts that freedom is something worth dying for. Strangely, this tragedy put a last, finishing touch on our identity.