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The Fundamentalist Left: "Blame America First"
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Progressive Portal
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Jan 27, 2002 11:19 PST
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[From Mother Jones <http://www.mojones.com/>. Thanks to Merrill for
forwarding this.]
This article may be read in full at:
http://www.mojones.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
Mother Jones
January/February 2002
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?
[Complete article is at:
<http://www.mojones.com/magazine/JF02/blaming.html>. At the bottom of
that page is a link to a discussion forum where you can post your
views.]
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