Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id VAA26912 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 16 Jan 2002 21:57:13 GMT Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 13:52:44 -0800 Message-Id: <200201162152.g0GLqii18666@mail18.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [216.76.255.72] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Blaming America First (from Mother Jones magazine) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
>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
>http://www.motherjones.com/magazine/JF02/blaming.html
>
>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, butdamnable yet
>understandable paybackrooted in America's own crimes of commission and omissionreaping 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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