War & Peace Quote by Adam Michnik

Michnik is doing something risky and revealing here: treating 9/11 not only as a geopolitical rupture, but as a personal one. When he says war was started against "my own work and against myself", he’s staking a claim that the post-9/11 climate didn’t merely reorder borders; it also attacked the conditions that make liberal editorial life possible: nuance, skepticism, and the slow labor of persuasion. The line reads like a preemptive defense against a world that suddenly demanded loyalty tests.

The subtext is that the War on Terror became a war on interpretation. For an editor formed by dissident politics in communist Poland, the reflex to read state narratives as potentially coercive is muscle memory. So his "even though we are not sure of the links" functions as a pointed aside: uncertainty is acknowledged, then immediately overwhelmed by symbolism. That is the quiet indictment. The public story doesn’t need evidence so much as cues.

The flag detail is key because it exposes how thin the moral accounting can be. A nation’s mourning ritual becomes a proxy for guilt. Michnik isn’t just noting Iraq’s behavior; he’s showing how easy it is to convert optics into casus belli, to turn a failure of solidarity into a justification for violence. Coming from an editor, it’s also a warning about media logic: images of flags at half-mast can weigh more than messy intelligence. The sentence carries a dissident’s dread that once symbolism is weaponized, dissent itself becomes suspect.