File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0203, message 1


Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 19:33:45 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com>
Subject: [Fwd: [CSL]: Edward Said: Thoughts about America]


enjoyed this from edward said...

----
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875.
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/575/op2.htm
------------------------------------
Thoughts about America

Edward Said warns against the return to a shameful episode
in the US's intellectual history

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not
now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that
being in the United States at this moment provides us with an
especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread,
quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional
official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are
not enemies of the United States, everything else about the
current situation argues the exact opposite.

Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning
and, in far too many
cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name
is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security
checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour
against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in
public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have
run far too
many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose
endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents
our
history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more
than an arm
of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the
case
with the projected attack to "end" Iraq. There are US forces already in
several
countries with important Muslim populations like the Philippines and
Somalia, the
buildup against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective
punishment
of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in
the
United States.

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than
what
Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resent the
notion
that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a "just war"
against
something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war
that has
assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who
should
be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are
different:
America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of
laws
passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated
native
Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American
citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else,
even
Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of
Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour,"
including things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American"
statements or
attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate
speech
and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former
rulers of
Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in
America,
he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for
everyone
when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America
and himself. The Constitution expressly separates church and state.

There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and his
compliant
Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections of the
First,
Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal procedures that give
individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or a fair trial, that
allow secret
searches, eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given the treatment
of the
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branch to abduct
prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether or not they
are
prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them --
which is not a decision to be taken by individual countries. Moreover, as
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech
given on 17 February, the president and his men were not authorised to
declare
war (Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason,
were
not authorised to increase military spending to over $400 billion per year,
were not
authorised to repeal the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the first
such
statement by a prominent, publicly elected official -- "we did not ask that
the blood
of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood
of
innocent villagers in Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep.
Kucinich's
speech, which was made with the best of American principles and values in
mind,
be published in full in Arabic so that people in our part of the world can
understand
that America is not a monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney,
but in
fact contains many voices and currents of opinion which this government is
trying to
silence or make irrelevant.

The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and
unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no secret
of
the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in
the pursuit
of what a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its
interests. So
far as the Middle East is concerned, it does seem that since 11 September
there
has been almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon
and his
associates have cynically exploited the single-minded attention to
"terrorism" by
George Bush and have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy
against
the Palestinians. The point here is that Israel is not the US and,
mercifully, the US is
not Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for the moment,
Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state
in the
midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not
infinite
dependence on the US, but rather on accommodation with its environment, not
the
other way round. That is why I think Sharon's policy has finally been
revealed to a
significant number of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis
are taking
the reserve officers' position against serving the military occupation as a
model for
their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from
the
Intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting
occupation
have finally brought fruit.

What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been escalating
towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people
identify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation
Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest
destiny, its
external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world
press in
the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are both
mystified by
and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right
to imagine
and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without
much
regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal,
or, worst
of all, the legality of such actions. What does it mean to defeat "evil
terrorism" in a
world like ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an
infinite and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world
map to suit
the US, substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil creatures like
Saddam
Hussein. The radical simplicity of all this is attractive to Washington
bureaucrats
whose domain is either purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind
desks in
the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for the US's very
real and
virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known
evil
state and you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft
carriers, and
dozens of submarines, plus a million and a half people under arms, all of
them
willing to serve their country idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush
and
Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the chances are that you will be
willing
to use all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if the administration
keeps
asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to be added to the already
swollen
defence budget.

>From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few
exceptions
most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country have tolerated
the
Bush programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases, tried to go beyond it,
toward more self- righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery, more
specious
argument. What they will not accept is that the world we live in, the
historical world
of nations and peoples, is moved and can be understood by politics, not by
huge
general absolutes like good and evil, with America always on the side of
good, its
enemies on the side of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to
Arabs that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything he says
is the
slightest tone of self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11
September
entitle him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered such
terrible losses,
and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world were not worth lamenting quite
as much
or drawing as large moral conclusions from.

One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals
concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much
greater
suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or an air
force, or a
proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering at the hands of
Israel
continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort of moral blindness, this
inability
to evaluate and weigh the comparative evidence of sinner and sinned against
(to
use a moralistic language that I normally avoid and detest) is very much the
order
of the day, and it must be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into
-- indeed,
actively to campaign against falling into -- the trap. It is not enough to
say blandly
that all human suffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's
own
miseries: it is far more important to see what the strongest party does, and
to
question rather than justify that. The intellectual's is a voice in
opposition to and
critical of great power, which is consistently in need of a restraining and
clarifying
conscience and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not, as is
often
the case, be blamed and real power encouraged to do its will.

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of a
declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the major
French,
German, Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear in the
US at
all, except on the Internet where few people took notice of it. This
declaration took
the form of a pompous sermon about the American war against evil and
terrorism
being "just" and in keeping with American values, as defined by these
self-appointed interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by
something
called the Institute for American Values, whose main (and financially well-
endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families, "fathering" and
"mothering," and God, the declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington,
Francis
Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written
by a
conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its main arguments
about a
"just" war were inspired by Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist
who is
allied with the pro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is to
justify
everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In signing
this
declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism and, like Sharon,
allies
himself with an interpretation (and a questionable one at that) of America
as a
righteous warrior against terror and evil, the more to make it appear that
Israel and
the US are similar countries with similar aims.

Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of
its citizens
but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly only the state
of its
citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to state boldly that in
supporting
Israel he is supporting a state structured by ethno-religious principles,
which (with
typical hypocrisy) he would oppose in the United States if this country were
declared to be white and Christian.

Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really
addressed to
"our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand that America's war is
not
against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts of principles, which it
would
be hard to disagree with. Who could oppose the principle that all human
beings are
equal, that killing in the name of God is a bad thing, that freedom of
conscience is
excellent, and that "the basic subject of society is the human person, and
the
legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the
conditions for
human flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns out to be the
aggrieved party and, even though some of its mistakes in policy are
acknowledged
very briefly (and without mentioning anything specific in detail), it is
depicted as
hewing to principles unique to the United States, such as that all people
possess
inherent moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths exist and are
available
to everyone, or that civility is important where there is disagreement, and
that
freedom of conscience and religion are a reflection of basic human dignity
and are
universally recognised. Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say it
is often
the case that such great principles are contravened, no sustained attempt is
made to
say where and when those contraventions actually occur (as they do all the
time),
or whether they have been more contravened than followed, or anything as
concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and his colleagues set
forth a list of
how many American "murders" have occurred at Muslim and Arab hands,
including those of the Marines in Beirut in 1983, as well as other military
combatants. Somehow making a list of that kind is worth making for these
militant
defenders of America, whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including
the
hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel with US
support,
or the hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions against the
innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor
tabulated.
What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by Israel, with
American
complicity and even cooperation, and where is the nobility and moral
conscience of
saying nothing as Palestinian children are killed, millions besieged, and
millions
more kept as stateless refugees? Or for that matter, the millions killed in
Vietnam,
Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with American support and acquiescence?

All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by
American
intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a statement of
real
conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant use of
power, but
rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US in full
ironic
cooperation, it would seem, with those Islamists who have argued that "our"
war is
with the West and with America. Speaking as someone with a claim on America
and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly
objectionable. While
it pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of values,
it is in fact
exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with a
patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics,
real history,
and real moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking in great "principles
and values,"
it does none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed
to
cow foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that this document
wasn't
published here for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely
criticised by
American readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was
designed as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon
scheme
to put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore intended for
foreign
consumption.

Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" augurs a
new
and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when the
intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world align
themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case instead
of
urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and understanding, we
are back
to the bad old days of the intellectual war against communism, which we now
know brought far too many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on
the
part of intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether
different role.
Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which
went as
far as providing for the subvention of magazines like Encounter, underwrote
scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions),
those
militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the
1950s and 1960s
brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and complicity a new and
disastrous dimension. For along with that effort went also the domestic
campaign to
stifle debate, intimidate critics, and restrict thought. For many Americans,
like
myself, this is a shameful episode in our history, and we must be on our
guard
against and resist its return.
---------------------------
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly
Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm
local time
weeklyweb-AT-ahram.org.e

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