From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed Jan 16 2002 - 15:08:57 MST
http://www.motherjones.com/magazine/JF02/blaming.html
Blaming America First Why are some on the left, who
rightly demand sympathy for victims around the world, so
quick to dismiss American suffering?
by Todd Gitlin January/February 2002
{PRIVATE}As shock and solidarity overflowed on September 11, it
seemed for a moment that political differences had melted
in the inferno of Lower Manhattan. Plain human sympathy
abounded amid a common sense of grief and emergency.
Soon enough, however, old reflexes and tones cropped up
here and there on the left, both abroad and at
home”smugness, acrimony, even schadenfreude,
accompanied by the notion that the attacks were, well, not
a just dessert, exactly, but¦damnable yet understandable
payback¦rooted in America's own crimes of commission
and omission¦reaping what empire had sown. After all,
was not America essentially the oil-greedy, Islam-
disrespecting oppressor of Iraq, Sudan, Palestine? Were
not the ghosts of the Shah's Iran, of Vietnam, and of the
Cold War Afghan jihad rattling their bones? Intermittently
grandiose talk from Washington about a righteous
"crusade" against "evil" helped inflame the rhetoric of
critics who feared”legitimately”that a deepening war in
Afghanistan would pile human catastrophe upon human
catastrophe. And soon, without pausing to consider why
the vast majority of Americans might feel bellicose as well
as sorrowful, some on the left were dismissing the idea
that the United States had any legitimate recourse to the
use of force in self-defense”or indeed any legitimate
claim to the status of victim.
I am not speaking of the ardent, and often expressed,
hope that September 11's crimes against humanity might
eventually elicit from America a greater respect for the
whole of assaulted humanity. A reasoned, vigorous
examination of U.S. policies, including collusion in the
Israeli occupation, sanctions against Iraq, and support of
corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, is badly
needed. So is critical scrutiny of the administration's
actions in Afghanistan and American unilateralism on
many fronts. But in the wake of September 11 there
erupted something more primal and reflexive than
criticism: a kind of left-wing fundamentalism, a negative
faith in America the ugly.
In this cartoon view of the world, there is nothing worse
than American power”not the woman-enslaving Taliban,
not an unrepentant Al Qaeda committed to killing civilians
as they please”and America is nothing but a self-seeking
bully. It does not face genuine dilemmas. It never has
legitimate reason to do what it does. When its rulers' views
command popularity, this can only be because the entire
population has been brainwashed, or rendered moronic, or
shares in its leaders' monstrous values.
Of the perils of American ignorance, of our fantasy life of
pure and unappreciated goodness, much can be said. The
failures of intelligence that made September 11 possible
include not only security oversights, but a vast
combination of stupefaction and arrogance”not least the
all-or-nothing thinking that armed the Islamic jihad in
Afghanistan in order to fight our own jihad against Soviet
Communism”and a willful ignorance that not so long ago
permitted half the citizens of a flabby, self-satisfied
democracy to vote for a man unembarrassed by his lack of
acquaintanceship with the world.
But myopia in the name of the weak is no more defensible
than myopia in the name of the strong. Like jingoists who
consider any effort to understand terrorists immoral, on the
grounds that to understand is to endorse, these hard-liners
disdain complexity. They see no American motives except
oil-soaked power lust, but look on the bright side of
societies that cultivate fundamentalist ignorance. They
point out that the actions of various mass murderers (the
Khmer Rouge, bin Laden) must be "contextualized," yet
refuse to consider any context or reason for the actions of
Americans.
If we are to understand Islamic fundamentalism, must we
not also trouble ourselves to understand America, this
freedom-loving, brutal, tolerant, shortsighted, selfish,
generous, trigger-happy, dumb, glorious, fat-headed
powerhouse?
Not a bad place to start might be the patriotic fervor that
arose after the attacks. What's offensive about affirming
that you belong to a people, that your fate is bound up with
theirs? Should it be surprising that suffering close-up is felt
more urgently, more deeply, than suffering at a distance?
After disaster comes a desire to reassemble the shards of
a broken community, withstand the loss, strike back at the
enemy. The attack stirs, in other words, patriotism”love of
one's people, pride in their endurance, and a desire to
keep them from being hurt anymore. And then, too, the
wound is inverted, transformed into a badge of honor. It is
translated into protest ("We didn't deserve this") and
indignation ("They can't do this to us"). Pride can fuel the
quest for justice, the rage for punishment, or the pleasures
of smugness. The dangers are obvious. But it should not
be hard to understand that the American flag sprouted in
the days after September 11, for many of us, as a badge of
belonging, not a call to shed innocent blood.
This sequence is not a peculiarity of American arrogance,
ignorance, and power. It is simply and ordinarily human. It
operates as clearly, as humanly, among nonviolent
Palestinians attacked by West Bank and Gaza settlers and
their Israeli soldier-protectors as among Israelis suicide-
bombed at a nightclub or a pizza joint. No government
anywhere has the right to neglect the safety of its own
citizens”not least against an enemy that swears it will
strike again. Yet some who instantly, and rightly,
understand that Palestinians may burn to avenge their
compatriots killed by American weapons assume that
Americans have only interests (at least the elites do) and
gullibilities (which are the best the masses are capable of).
In this purist insistence on reducing America and
Americans to a wicked stereotype, we encounter a soft
anti-Americanism that, whatever takes place in the world,
wheels automatically to blame America first. This is not the
hard anti-Americanism of bin Laden, the terrorist logic
under which, because the United States maintains military
bases in the land of the prophet, innocents must be
slaughtered and their own temples crushed. Totalitarians
like bin Laden treat issues as fodder for the apocalyptic
imagination. They want power and call it God. Were
Saddam Hussein or the Palestinians to win all their
demands, bin Laden would move on, in his next video, to
his next issue.
Soft anti-Americans, by contrast, sincerely want U.S.
policies to change”though by their lights, such turnabouts
are well-nigh unimaginable”but they commit the grave
moral error of viewing the mass murderer (if not the mass
murder) as nothing more than an outgrowth of U.S. policy.
They not only note but gloat that the United States built up
Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan as a counterfoil to
the Russians. In this thinking, Al Qaeda is an effect, not a
cause; a symptom, not a disease. The initiative, the power
to cause, is always American.
But here moral reasoning runs off the rails. Who can hold
a symptom accountable? To the left-wing fundamentalist,
the only interesting or important brutality is at least
indirectly the United States' doing. Thus, sanctions against
Iraq are denounced, but the cynical mass murderer
Saddam Hussein, who permits his people to die, remains
an afterthought. Were America to vanish, so, presumably,
would the miseries of Iraq and Egypt.
In the United States, adherents of this kind of reflexive
anti-Americanism are a minority (isolated, usually, on
campuses and in coastal cities, in circles where reality
checks are scarce), but they are vocal and quick to action.
Observing flags flying everywhere, they feel embattled and
draw on their embattlement for moral credit, thus roping
themselves into tight little circles of the pure and the
saved.
The United States represents a frozen imperialism that
values only unbridled power in the service of untrammeled
capital. It is congenitally, genocidally, irremediably racist.
Why complicate matters by facing up to America's self-
contradictions, its on-again, off-again interest in extending
rights, its clumsy egalitarianism coupled with ignorant
arrogance? America is seen as all of a piece, and it is
hated because it is hateful”period. One may quarrel with
the means used to bring it low, but low is only what it
deserves.
So even as the smoke was still rising from the ground of
Lower Manhattan, condemnations of mass murder made
way in some quarters for a retreat to the old formula and
the declaration that the "real question" was America's
victims”as if there were not room in the heart for more
than one set of victims. And the seductions of closure were
irresistible even to those dedicated, in other
circumstances, to intellectual glasnost. Noam Chomsky
bent facts to claim that Bill Clinton's misguided attack on a
Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in 1998 was worse by far
than the massacres of September 11. Edward Said, the
exiled Palestinian author and critic, wrote of "a superpower
almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all
over the Islamic domains." As if the United States always
picked the fight; as if U.S. support of the Oslo peace
process, whatever its limitations, could be simply brushed
aside; as if defending Muslims in Bosnia and
Kosovo”however dreadful some of the
consequences”were the equivalent of practicing gunboat
diplomacy in Latin America or dropping megatons of
bombs on Vietnam and Cambodia.
>From the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who has
admirably criticized her country's policies on nuclear
weapons and development, came the queenly declaration
that "American people ought to know that it is not them but
their government's policies that are so hated." (One
reason why Americans were not exactly clear about the
difference is that the murderers of September 11 did not
trouble themselves with such nice distinctions.) When Roy
described bin Laden as "the American president's dark
doppelganger" and claimed that "the twins are blurring into
one another and gradually becoming interchangeable,"
she was in the grip of a prejudice invulnerable to moral
distinctions.
Insofar as we who criticize U.S. policy seriously want
Americans to wake up to the world”to overcome what
essayist Anne Taylor Fleming has called our serial
innocence, ever renewed, ever absurd”we must speak to,
not at, Americans, in recognition of our common perplexity
and vulnerability. We must abstain from the fairy-tale
pleasures of oversimplification. We must propose what is
practical”the stakes are too great for the luxury of any
fundamentalism. We must not content ourselves with
seeing what Washington says and rejecting that. We must
forgo the luxury of assuming that we are not obligated to
imagine ourselves in the seats of power.
Generals, it's said, are always planning to fight the last
war. But they're not alone in suffering from sentimentality,
blindness, and mental laziness disguised as resolve. The
one-eyed left helps no one when it mires itself in its own
mirror-image myths. Breaking habits is desperately hard,
but those who evade the difficulties in their purist positions
and refuse to face all the mess and danger of reality only
guarantee their bitter inconsequence.
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