My long post vs Roger's long post

[Connie Clark]

"Soft anti-Americans and blowback"

http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=98&DocID=723


10 October 2001

The ordinariness of American feelings
Todd Gitlin

Much of the world outside America has reacted to 11
September with criticism of the country as well as
sympathy. Some of it seems impelled by a denial of the
human normality of Americans’ post-disaster emotional
cycle. A global conversation between equals is
precluded when rational political criticism falls
before the confirmation of prejudice.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 


As the thick gray ash of the World Trade Center poured
down on Manhattan, Americans were moved by messages of
solidarity from every land. “We Are All New Yorkers,”
we heard, and an American could be forgiven for
imagining that new understandings might be pouring in,
too. Here and there, yes. Along with straightforward,
unqualified condemnation of terrorism came the
passionate hope that 11 September’s crimes might
elicit from Americans a stronger feeling for the whole
of assaulted humanity. 

The Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman, would recall that
another 11 September – this one in 1973 – was the day
of the American-supported coup that installed a
dictatorship there. He added: “One of the ways for
Americans to overcome their trauma and survive the
fear and continue to live and thrive in the midst of
the insecurity which has suddenly swallowed them is to
admit that their suffering is neither unique nor
exclusive, that they are connected – as long as they
are willing to look at themselves in the vast mirror
of our common humanity – with so may other human
beings who, in faraway zones, have suffered similar
situations of unanticipated and often protracted
injury and fury.”

Breaking the chains of reflex

Dorfman wrote with compassion and without bitterness.
But from others there have come reversions to old
reflexes and tones – smugness, acrimony,
Schadenfreude. Long before the attacks on the Taliban
regime, the world’s fellow-feeling began to subside,
displaced by apprehension about the scale and focus of
the impending war – legitimate apprehension, in my
view – but other feelings, too: that the attacks of 11
September were – well, not a just desert, exactly,
but… damnable yet understandable payback… rooted in
injustice… 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 the Cold War Afghani jihad rattling their
bones? 

Then too, were not Americans, having been jolted into
the world of the vulnerable, quickly settling back
into their damnable ignorance? Indeed, from
Washington, for ten days, spasms of jingo rhetoric
sounded like the irrepressible return of the
repressed. Didn’t George W. Bush speak loosely of a
“crusade”? Didn’t the Pentagon float the label
Operation Infinite Justice? Were there not highly
placed American howls to “end states,” to pulverize
Kabul, to make someone – anyone – pay? 

Bush repented of his Texas-Christian excess, probably
having been told it sounded as though his remark had
been telepathically scripted by Osama bin Laden. His
speechwriters, and some reality principle, took over
(no doubt with his gratitude). Flagrant errors
receded. Rumsfeld backed down, at least rhetorically,
and Powell spoke sense. The branding brigade reverted
to the blander, less euphonious Operation Enduring
Freedom. Everyone in authority rejected indiscriminate
retaliation. 

But writers who identified America as the unswerving
world bully took little note. Like certain American
jingos who thought the effort to understand terrorists
immoral – on the ground that to understand is to
endorse – they disdained understanding. Because
thought can be burdensome (as if the absence of
thought were not), they preferred, rhetorically, to
shoot first and ask questions afterward. This is not
the first time such know-nothing spasms have been
heard in American history. Neither is it the first
time America has been equated with vulgar interest and
brute power – by those who fear both and those who
boast of them. 

Of the perils of American ignorance, our fantasy life
of pure and unappreciated goodness, much can be said.
The failures of intelligence that made 11 September
possible include not only security oversights but a
widespread combination of stupefaction and arrogance,
from the all-or-nothing thinking that armed the
Islamic jihad in Afghanistan to fight our own jihad
against Soviet Communism, to a general disrespect for
the intellect that not so long ago permitted half the
citizens of a flabby, self-satisfied democracy to vote
for a man unembarrassed by (even proud of) his lack of
acquaintanceship with the world. 

Still, know-nothing sentiments are not unique to the
United States. What are we to make of the fact that
some who beg us to understand terrorism, or bin Laden,
or Islamic fundamentalism, do not trouble themselves
to understand America? You must not only know your
enemy. You must also know your well-meaning, tolerant,
short-sighted, liberal, selfish, generous,
trigger-happy, dumb, glorious, fat-headed,
on-again-off-again friend.

Thinking the worst

Not a bad place to start is America’s current,
reluctant warmindedness. Is it 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, defeat the enemy. So wounds
inflame the identities closest at hand. The attack
stirs, in other words, patriotism – love of one’s
people and 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 protestation (“we didn’t deserve this”), and
pride (“they can’t do this to us”). Pride can go
toward the quest for justice, the rage for punishment,
the pleasures of smugness. The dangers are obvious.
But it should not be hard to understand that the
American flag sprouted first, for many of us, as a
badge of belonging, not a call to shed innocent blood.

This sequence is not an artefact of American
arrogance, ignorance and insularity. It is simply and
ordinarily human. It operates as clearly, as humanly,
among nonviolent Palestinians attacked by West Bank
and Gaza settlers and their soldier-protectors, as
among Israelis suicide-bombed at a nightclub or a
pizza joint. Yet those who, by argument, tone, and
emphasis, are ready with automatic arguments against
American policies and dislike of American wealth,
vulgarity, arrogance, and ignorance are slow to
acknowledge that Americans, too, suffer from this
sequence. 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, at best,
gullibilities (the best the masses are capable of).
Those who are quick to read the mind of the
executioner – crediting him with the longest possible
list of legitimate grievances – forfeit understanding
of the victim. 

The style of anti-Americanism I am writing about is
different from the terrorist’s logic that because,
say, the US maintains bases in Saudi Arabia, because
your symbols in Mecca and Medina have been (in your
mind) traduced, God calls you to slaughter innocents
and crush their own temples to dust. The terrorist
logic of Osama bin Laden is transpolitical – that is
to say, nihilistic. Issues are fodder for his
apocalyptic imagination. He wants power and calls it
God. Were Palestinians to win all their demands, he
would move on, in his next video, to his next issue. 

The soft anti-American, by contrast, sincerely wants
US policies to change, but lays even the mass murderer
(if not the mass murder) at the door of the US itself.
The soft anti-American not only notes but gloats that,
after all, the US built up Islamic fundamentalism in
Afghanistan as a counterfoil to the Russians. The US’
part in arming these legions is undeniable and
important. But what follows? American policy has often
been vile (in the name of Islam in this case, but
never mind), but must we then be righteously condemned
to blowback forever? Since there were American
companies and rightists who welcomed Hitler, should
America not have (belatedly) declared war on Nazi
Germany? Since the US tilted toward Saddam Hussein
against Iran, was his invasion of Kuwait to be
cavalierly accepted? Is America some frozen essence
perennially condemned to be worthy of condemnation? 

Occidentalist radicalism

So we move quickly past a condemnation of mass murder
to a cascade of whataboutism. Americans died on 11
September, that’s terrible, but what about the victims
of American foreign policy? In the present,
Palestinians and Iraqis. Half a century back, Iran.
For decades, Soviet apologists were quick with their
riposte to Americans: “What about the Red Indians?”
Whataboutism is the stuff of feuds, not politics. It
is not an engagement with reality, but a retreat from
it into stampeding certainty. 

And the seductions of closure are irresistible even to
those dedicated, in other circumstances, to
intellectual glasnost. Edward Said, for example,
writes of the “depressing” reality that in American
commentary “little time is spent trying to understand
America’s role in the world”, then (in the passive
voice, which would seem to not to require any
evidence) of “the vague suggestion that the Middle
East and Islam are what ‘we’ are up against, and that
terrorism must be destroyed” (of the first, only
yahoos are guilty, and of the second, what is wrong
with it as a goal, were it possible?), and then adds
(with revealingly odd inverted commas): “You’d think
that ‘America’ was a sleeping giant rather than a
superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort
of conflict, all over the Islamic domains.” 

Any enlightened American shares Said’s disgust with
American ignorance. But even as a characterisation of
American action in relation to “the Islamic domains”,
this is breathtakingly skewed. And in two directions –
for in flattening a US role in which the complex
stories of Suez, Kuwait, the Oslo agreement, Bosnia
and Kosovo also figure, it also reduces “the Islamic
domains” to homogenised, supine victimhood. Elsewhere,
Said has deplored the intellectual slovenliness of
reducing all Islam to a single solid substance. Here,
he indulges in precisely that: an intellectual
legerdemain that dissolves historical truth into
exoticising fantasy. 

>From the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who has
admirably criticised her country’s nuclear weapons and
development policies, there is a tender concern that
“American people ought to know that it is not them but
their government''s policies that are so hated.” One
reason why Americans are not exactly clear about the
difference is that the murderers of 11 September did
not trouble themselves to make such a nice
distinction. (Just what were some 300 firefighters’
views of American bases in Saudi Arabia?). This
extends to a fear that if America “doesn''t find its
enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it
will have to manufacture one”. 

Does Arundhati Roy really need reminding that the
enemy does not need to be manufactured? And when she
describes bin Laden as “the American president’s dark
doppelganger….the twins are blurring into one another
and gradually becoming interchangeable”, is she aware
how the lazy, patronizing coupling demeans its author?


What links Roy and Said is what demarcates
anti-Americanism, that peculiar empire of the
one-eyed, from reasoned political opposition to US
policies. Real, not gestural politics must worry about
the breadth of the brush; but anti-Americanism is one
of those prejudices that musters evidence to suit a
conclusion already in place. For it, ordinary
Americans can never be just that. They can certainly
never just be victims, a status already monopolized
elsewhere. Americans, or ‘the West’, are blithely
dehumanized into the molecules of a structure, what
bin Laden calls America’s “vital organs”. As for their
government, its policies amount to a condition, an
essence. The actions of various mass murderers (the
Khmer Rouge, Bin Laden) must, rightly, be
“contextualized.” But to the anti-American, American
policy never has “context.” It is. 

The presumptive certainty here, the sneeringly
sovereign gaze, the casual contempt for the ordinary
humanity of the “other”, is all the more astonishingly
unreflective from writers who elsewhere anatomise
sensitively the duplicities of imaginative
colonisation. 

Insofar as Arundhati Roy and Edward Said genuinely
want Americans to wake up to the world – to overcome
what Anne Taylor Fleming called our serial innocence,
ever replenished, ever absurd – they must speak to
Americans, in recognition of the common perplexity and
vulnerability, now globalised forever. Toward this
end, myopia in the name of weak is no help to the
weak. Behind the crude clichés about America and its
people can be glimpsed a deeper truth: that we are not
alone in either our narrowness or our ignorance


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