Europe is presented as both a continent scarred by its own wars and a center of imperial power whose victims rarely struck back at the metropoles. That contrast, Noam Chomsky argues, helps explain why the September 11 attacks deeply shocked Europeans: the unprecedented element was not the scale of the crimes, but the reversal of a familiar direction of violence. The passage also places Europe within debates about media, military intervention, and who gets to speak for the “international community.”

Conquest and the Shock of September 11

Chomsky distinguishes Europe’s internal destruction from the violence European powers inflicted abroad. Europe had endured terrible devastation through wars among its own countries, while its powers conquered large parts of the world with extreme brutality. With only very rare exceptions, he says, the conquered peoples did not in turn attack the imperial powers at home. He points to England and India, Belgium and the Congo, Italy and Ethiopia, and France and Algeria; France, he notes, did not regard Algeria as a colony.

Against that history, the September 11 crimes were new to Europeans, but not because of their scale. The attacks brought violence to a center that had long projected it outward without facing comparable retaliation from those it conquered. Chomsky says it was therefore unsurprising that Europe was profoundly shocked. What the attacks presaged remained unclear, but their radical novelty was plain.

Media, Public Response, and Power

In discussing coverage of the attacks, Chomsky challenges the impression that American media presented a uniform response. He observes that European assessments may rely heavily on The New York Times and national public broadcasters. The Times itself acknowledged that opinion on the streets of New York differed from the positions conveyed in its pages: calls for peace outweighed demands for punishment at an outdoor memorial to the victims. Chomsky describes a widespread desire to find and punish those responsible, alongside strong opposition to an indiscriminate attack that would kill many innocent people.

He sets that response against what he sees as a recurring crisis pattern: major media and intellectual classes rally behind political power and encourage the public to mobilize for its cause. He cites the intense support surrounding the NATO bombing of Serbia and says the Gulf War followed the same pattern. In this account, Europe’s public shock and its elite response are not identical: grief and aversion to further civilian deaths coexist with a political culture in which powerful institutions can align quickly with state action.

The “International Community” and Military Action

Chomsky questions the claim that Western states act on behalf of a global community. Although that community, in his formulation, opposes terror—including mass terror committed by powerful states—and the September 11 crimes, it does not act as a single political body. Western governments and intellectuals often use “international community” to mean themselves. The NATO bombing of Serbia was described in Western rhetoric as an action by that community, even though, Chomsky says, much of the world opposed it, often openly.

The term’s boundaries, he argues, are political: those who do not support the actions of the rich and powerful are left outside the supposed community. He draws a parallel with the conventional use of “terrorism” to mean violence directed against Western states and their allies. Europe consequently appears not only as a historical imperial center but also as part of a discourse that can present Western military action as internationally representative while marginalizing opposition elsewhere.

Strategic Interests and the Wider Consequences

Chomsky’s account links military policy to strategic interests rather than treating official rationales as self-explanatory. He says Washington sought alliances with governments across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia after September 11, offering political, military, and monetary measures in return for support. Yet the stakes extended beyond Afghanistan: major energy reserves lay in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf, with significant resources also in Central Asia. Afghanistan, he says, was a lesser piece on that board, although proposed pipelines there had figured for years in efforts to control Central Asian resources.

He also argues that the coalition drive was unlikely to transform longstanding policy. In his description, the United States expected coalition partners to support it quietly rather than share decision-making, while reserving the right to act as it chose and avoiding reliance on international institutions. The resulting alliance could soften the rhetoric without changing the underlying approach. Europe’s place in this argument is therefore unsettled: European states may be enlisted in a coalition framed as international, even as the decisions and strategic priorities remain concentrated in Washington.

The essay’s closing analysis returns to the difference between the scale of violence and its direction. The September 11 attacks did not erase the history of European conquest or the continuing role of powerful states in global conflict. Rather, they made the customary distance between imperial centers and the violence experienced elsewhere harder to sustain. For Chomsky, the shock in Europe is inseparable from that reversal—and from the political struggle over whose actions count as terror, whose interests define security, and who is entitled to speak for the world.