The Fall of the Berlin Wall appears in Noam Chomsky’s September 2001 interview not as a self-contained account of the Wall’s collapse, but as a point of comparison. Chomsky calls it a major event that changed the geopolitical scene while warning that its significance is not what is generally assumed. Against that familiar turning point, he sets the September 11 attacks: their distinctive force, he argues, lay less in scale or character than in the fact that they struck the United States at home, reversing the usual direction of violence.

A Turning Point, Disputed

Asked whether the September 11 attacks might reshape geopolitics as the Fall of the Berlin Wall had, Chomsky accepts the Wall’s importance but rejects the premise that its meaning can be taken for granted. He says he has addressed the subject elsewhere and does not rehearse that argument in the interview. The distinction matters: the Wall functions here as a recognized marker of geopolitical change, while the interview leaves open—and challenges—the conventional interpretation attached to it.

The Contrast with September 11

Chomsky describes the September 11 attacks as unprecedented for the United States because of their targets. In his account, the comparison often made with Pearl Harbor is misleading: the 1941 attack struck military bases on two American colonies, whereas the United States’ mainland territory had not been attacked or even threatened since the War of 1812. The difference between an assault on military installations abroad and an attack on the national territory gives the comparison its political charge.

That contrast also turns the interview’s historical lens around. Chomsky recalls the destruction of Indigenous populations, the conquest of half of Mexico, interventions across neighboring regions, and the conquest of Hawaii and the Philippines, where hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed. He then places these examples within a broader account of American force abroad, used across much of the world during the preceding century. Against that history, he calls the September 11 attacks a spectacular reversal: for once, the guns were pointed the other way.

History Beyond a Single Event

The Wall and September 11 therefore occupy different roles in the interview. The Wall is named as a momentous geopolitical change whose accepted interpretation Chomsky declines to restate; September 11 becomes the occasion to question what counts as a historical rupture. Rather than treating the attacks as detached from prior events, he traces the networks involved back to the 1980s, when American, Pakistani, Saudi, British, and other intelligence services recruited, trained, and armed militant Islamists to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Chomsky further argues that the later network associated with Osama bin Laden was connected to forces created and supported by the United States and its allies when those forces served their interests. He cautions that personifying an enemy can distract from examining the origins of violence and the role of earlier policy. In this structure of argument, the Fall of the Berlin Wall marks a familiar account of geopolitical transformation; the reversal of violence after September 11 instead demands a reckoning with the longer history that such turning-point narratives can leave out.

The Aftermath and the Limits of Change

Chomsky does not present September 11 as having remade the basic problems of international politics. He argues that many underlying conditions remained largely intact even as the attacks produced changes with potentially significant and unwelcome consequences. Among those changes, he identifies the establishment of major United States military bases in Central Asia, linking the new reach to regional resources and the energy reserves around the Persian Gulf.

The interview’s comparison thus ends without treating either event as a simple break with the past. The Fall of the Berlin Wall remains a major geopolitical event, but its conventional meaning is questioned rather than explained. September 11, meanwhile, is both a shocking reversal in the direction of violence and an event whose aftermath, in Chomsky’s account, extends earlier patterns of power instead of replacing them.