Hey France, don't do what we did after 9/11

We, as you know, have a political party that is extremist, revanchist, and xenophobic. You are European, and you are more sophisticated than—well, scratch that. Your extremist, revanchist, and xenophobic political party is even worse than ours, except that I suppose it won’t go around starting wars, which is no small thing. In any case I read that it stands to be the great beneficiary of these events. Please—you cannot let this happen. Keep your heads.

Keep your heads: This is what we did not do. And this, this loss of moral compass, this defenestration of our best traditions (many of them learned from you!), this prostration before our rage, is what allowed everything to happen—the wars, the surveillance measures, the “you’re either with us or against us” mentality. We were told, and too many of us accepted, that we were in a state of “war.” Do not succumb to this metaphor. It’s a dead end. This “war,” as we know all too well 14 years later, has no end point. It’s one of those Escher drawings, a staircase constantly circling back onto itself. We have not escaped it, and if you choose this path, neither will you.