Thursday, September 09, 2004
They Hate Us Because We Hate Them
If you're going to read just one thing on the Web today, read the introduction to Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's book Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, which is posted at Alternet. It's as insanely great an essay as you're ever likely to see. Taking Bush's post-September 11 reference to "this crusade, this war on terrorism" as his departure point, Carroll observes:
For well over a year, I've been referring to the 2004 election as the most important the country has faced since 1860, because in no election since has the choice between possible futures been so stark. But maybe this isn't 1860 we are reliving. Maybe it's 1096.
If you're going to read just one thing on the Web today, read the introduction to Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's book Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, which is posted at Alternet. It's as insanely great an essay as you're ever likely to see. Taking Bush's post-September 11 reference to "this crusade, this war on terrorism" as his departure point, Carroll observes:
Here is the deeper significance of Bush's inadvertent reference to the Crusades: Instead of being a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence was established then as the perfectly appropriate, even chivalrous, first response to what is wrong in the world.And also:
Religious war is the danger here, and it is a graver one than Americans think. Despite our much-vaunted separation of church and state, America has always had a quasi-religious understanding of itself, reflected in the messianism of Puritan founder John Winthrop, the Deist optimism of Thomas Jefferson, the embrace of redemptive suffering that marked Abraham Lincoln and, for that matter, the conviction of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that Communism had to be opposed on a global scale if only because of its atheism. But never before has America been brought deeper into a dynamite-wired holy of holies than in our President's war on terrorism. Despite the post-Iraq toning down of Washington's rhetoric of empire, and the rejection of further crusader references--although Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word this past March--Bush's war openly remains a cosmic battle between nothing less than the transcendent forces of good and evil. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited and open-ended, and so justifies radical actions--the abandonment, for example, of established notions of civic justice at home and of traditional alliances abroad.I often lament the way we learn nothing from history. Carroll laments it also.
A cosmic moral-religious battle justifies, equally, risks of world-historic proportioned disaster, since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict is to be measured not by actual consequences on this earth but by the earth-transcending will of God. Our war on terrorism, before it is anything else, is thus an imagined conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history
The problem [our abandonment of international cooperation to stop nuclear proliferation] has its roots in a long-term American forgetfulness, going back to the acid fog in which the United States ended World War II. There was never a complete moral reckoning with the harsh momentum of that conflict's denouement--how American leaders embraced a strategy of terror bombing, slaughtering whole urban populations, and how, finally, they ushered in the atomic age with the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars have debated those questions, but politicians have avoided them, and most citizens have pretended they aren't really questions at all. America's enduring assumptions about its own moral supremacy, its own altruism, its own exceptionalism, have hardly been punctured by consideration of the possibility that we, too, are capable of grave mistakes, terrible crimes. Such awareness, drawn from a fuller reckoning with days gone by--with August 6 and 9, 1945, above all--would inhibit America's present claim to moral grandeur, which is simultaneously a claim, of course, to economic and political grandiosity. The indispensable nation must dispense with what went before.The consequences of the 200-year epoch of the Crusades altered civilization in ways uncalculable for more than 800 years to come. "The Crusades, one could argue, established basic structures of Western civilization, while undermining the possibility that their grandest ideals would ever be realized."
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner said. "It isn't even past." How Americans remember their country's use of terror bombing affects how they think of terrorism; how they remember the first use of nuclear weapons has profound relevance for how the United States behaves in relation to nuclear weapons today. If the long American embrace of nuclear "mutual assured destruction" is unexamined; if the Pentagon's treaty-violating rejection of the ideal of eventual nuclear abolition is unquestioned--then the Bush Administration's embrace of nukes as normal, usable weapons will not seem offensive.
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
For well over a year, I've been referring to the 2004 election as the most important the country has faced since 1860, because in no election since has the choice between possible futures been so stark. But maybe this isn't 1860 we are reliving. Maybe it's 1096.
