Steve Russell: Fear influences our freedom after September 11

Even if the tragedy on September 11, 2001 was not a conspiracy to arrogate more power to the federal government, it has still enabled exactly that. Americans have not betrayed the values they profess out of fear to this degree since the Cold War ended.

George W. Bush said of Al Qaeda, “They hate us for our freedom.” So did the Soviet Union. The former with a fundamentalist religion and the latter with a fundamentalist politics considered the U.S. soft and decadent. Any culture where the government does not bother to tell people what to think will appear decadent and foreign enemies often take the deep isolationist current in U.S. politics as softness, so the error is understandable.

What scares me about Mr. Bush’s diagnosis is what follows from it. If we take away our own freedom, they will no longer hate us. This is a bit like the way some Indians responded to zealous missionaries. I can name no Indian tribe that proselytized others, but plenty of our peoples tied their sacred ceremonies to success in war, which made a military defeat into a spiritual defeat.

Humans have always gravitated from the weak to the strong in politics and in religion, so those Indians who took up with monotheistic patriarchal desert cults were just acting the way humans act. So, too, when the U.S. responds to an attack from a fundamentalist ideology by empowering our domestic fundamentalist ideologues, the U.S. is just acting the way humans act.