Les fusils sont braqués dans l’autre sens

“Les fusils sont braqués dans l’autre sens” (“The guns are pointed the other way”) names the historical reversal Noam Chomsky sees in the September 11 attacks: violence long exercised by powerful states beyond their borders had, for the first time in modern history, reached the United States on its own territory. In the book, the phrase becomes more than a description of the attacks. It frames a discussion of empire, historical memory, and the possibility that the response to an unprecedented blow would consolidate rather than unsettle American power.

Meaning and historical contrast

The expression appears as the title of a section based on an interview conducted on September 19, 2001, and is restated in the interview as the guns being pointed in the other direction. Chomsky argues that the attacks were unprecedented not because of their scale or character, but because of their targets. He contrasts them with the Attack on Pearl Harbor: the military bases attacked in 1941 were on U.S. colonies, he argues, not on the national territory of the United States.

The phrase compresses a longer historical comparison. Chomsky recalls the destruction of Indigenous populations, the conquest of half of Mexico, U.S. interventions across surrounding regions, and the conquest of Hawaii and the Philippines. He also emphasizes the extensive use of force abroad during the twentieth century and the enormous number of its victims. Against that history, an attack on U.S. soil signals a reversal in who is exposed to violence, not a claim that the violence itself has become new.

The book extends the comparison to Europe. European powers experienced devastating wars among themselves while conquering much of the world with extreme brutality; with rare exceptions, Chomsky notes, they were not attacked in return by the people they had conquered. The examples include England and India, Belgium and the Congo, Italy and Ethiopia, and France and Algeria. This history, in his account, helps explain Europe’s shock at the September 11 crimes while distinguishing their novelty of target from their scale.

A new kind of war

In a later interview exchange, the phrase is used to explain what Chomsky means by a new kind of war: the guns are now pointed in the other direction, a development he describes as entirely new in the history of Europe and its offshoots. The formulation shifts attention away from treating the attacks as an isolated rupture. It places them within an unequal history in which industrial powers had long held an overwhelming advantage in the use of violence.

The book’s postscript qualifies the claim of historical rupture without diminishing the attacks’ importance. It says that new technologies had made it foreseeable that industrial powers would lose their near-monopoly on violence, even while retaining overwhelming preponderance. No one, the postscript observes, could have anticipated the specific form this possibility would take. The attacks therefore made a latent change concrete: the old imbalance persisted, but the capacity to strike had crossed a boundary.

Reversal and its aftermath

The phrase does not imply that the attacks’ consequences would necessarily weaken U.S. power. The postscript identifies a major consequence as the establishment, for the first time, of substantial U.S. military bases in Central Asia. Chomsky connects those bases to the projection of American-dominated multinational business interests, control of the region’s considerable resources, and the wider effort to encircle major energy resources in the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he notes, Diego Garcia had been the safest base in a system extending from the Pacific to the Azores; the new position, he argues, made forceful intervention easier.

The postscript presents the Bush administration’s new phase of the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce its already overwhelming military superiority and pursue global dominance. It recounts how Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the administration to take greater account of Arab reactions to U.S. support for Israeli repression and violence. The response described in the text was dismissive. A senior official invoked the scale of U.S. power demonstrated in Afghanistan, while a former military official predicted that firmness would command respect. These remarks make the expression’s reversal double-edged: the United States had become a target, but its leaders used the moment to demonstrate and extend their capacity to act.

Chomsky presents the proposed strategic purpose of the Afghanistan bombing as an interpretation, not as a conclusion established by confidential documents. He says that it seems reasonable to imagine the consequences had been calculated and that the principal objective was to warn the world about the cost of failing to follow U.S. rules. He compares this reading with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which, he says, was conducted for similar reasons: Blair and Clinton had described its purpose as ensuring NATO’s credibility, meaning the credibility of the United States and its leading arms client. The phrase thus connects the reversal in exposure to a continuity in the exercise of power.

A rupture with unresolved consequences

The book neither treats the attacks as ordinary nor claims that their longer-term effects can be known in advance. In the September interview, Chomsky says that no one can yet say what they portend, while insisting that they are radically new. The postscript likewise calls September 11 an event of historical importance because innocent people were targeted and because established patterns were violently disrupted; it anticipates far-reaching repercussions.

“Les fusils sont braqués dans l’autre sens” holds those judgments together. It marks a genuine break in the history of violence directed at the United States, but measures that break against centuries of violence beyond its borders and against the possibility that the response will strengthen U.S. military reach. The postscript concludes that most underlying international problems remain, even as September 11 introduced changes that could have significant and unpleasant consequences. The guns have changed direction; the structures that give some states vastly greater power than others have not thereby disappeared.