In the two-month-old war in Afghanistan, the US last week capped its campaign to topple the Taleban from power, sent its pilots to pound “suspected terrorist strongholds” from the air-conditioned cockpits of their B-52s, and arranged, under the putative sponsorship of the United Nations, for Afghan factions meeting in Germany to agree on the framework of an interim government to rule in post-Taleban Afghanistan. It promised billions of dollars for the future reconstruction of the country. And, yes, you remember, it dropped food packages to starving people there from 30,000 feet.
The United States may be the world’s only superpower, but, hey, we have to see it as a benign superpower, to see it in Homeric metaphors, as it were, like a “becalming sea,” and a “soft dawn whispering to the ear,” not as subjugated peoples had seen, say, ancient Rome and colonial Britain.
Sure, sure, the US did indeed strike a handsome Roman pose here and there, at one time or another, and its hegemonists toyed with the dream of an empire, from Iran to Vietnam, and from Cuba to Nicaragua, but did Rome ever worry about famine in Egypt and human rights in ancient Palestine, or Great Britain about pestilence in India and civil unrest in the colonies? No sirree.
From day one after it became a superpower six decades ago, soon after its soldiers waded ashore on Omaha Beach in June 1944, America the beautiful proved itself generous to a fault by introducing the Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of a ravaged Europe, and democratic institutions for the political transformation of a prostrate Japan. In later years, the US gave, and gave some more, to the less fortunate around the world, and not just after natural disasters but political upheavals as well.
Yes, indeed, the world’s only superpower has shown that it has a knack for humanitarian aid, an aptitude for the task, as it were. Without its interventions all these years, you might say everything would have come unstuck.
So what’s there not to love about America?
Glad you asked.
I’m talking about the hectic waving of flags these days, that’s what — and it’s not because I’m a child of the 1960s who didn’t wave these darn things but burned them. (It’s my constitutional right, silly.) I’m talking about a national mood gripped by unabashed patriotism (the kind that is “the last refuge of a scoundrel) telling you, in no uncertain terms, to “love it or leave it”. I’m talking about Charles Krauthammer, the right-wing but prominent Washington Post columnist, blowing a bugle to the nation: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”
I’m also talking about military courts and incarceration of suspects without due process — respectively the ability of the president to order a trial in a military court for any non-citizen he designates, without the right of appeal to the courts or the protection of the Bill of Rights, and of holding suspects (mostly “swarthy men”) without charges or even access to legal counsel.
And I’m talking about how journalists, politicians and commentators, including eminent ones among them, have sprinkled rose water on the Northern Alliance, choosing to forget that this group, when it held power in Kabul between 1992 and 1996, managed to chalk up the most hideous set of brutalities against its perceived enemies, and recently, back in power, showed few legal niceties for its prisoners.
I am, above all, talking about how in the current public debate, commentators are now openly (and make no mistake about it, it is becoming as increasingly open as egregious) writing about the “propensity” of Islamic culture to produce violence and hatred, because presumably violence and hatred are inherent in it.
This is truly lamentable not just because it is all bunkum, but because I ask you to look at who is leveling these accusations against Islam: American commentators, who are the vanguard of Western culture.
How could anyone from Western culture, I ask, the culture that caused 80 million deaths between 1914 and 1945, including those that took place in the gas chambers, seriously suggest that any other culture in the world has greater potential for brutality? And I refuse to believe that that catastrophe was a purely German phenomenon, or some aberration rooted in the persona of one or another totalitarian ruler. That catastrophe — a calamitous breakdown in the pivot of civilization — did not spring up in the Middle East, in the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia or in the rain forests of the Amazon. It rose from within the very core of Euro-American, that is, Western, civilization.
That catastrophe was simply the culmination of 400 years of a colonial experience that resulted in tens of millions of subjugated people being murdered, tortured, starved or worked to death in North America, South America, Africa and Asia.
Thus given the magnitude of their world’s crimes, I say when commentators in the West consider other societies — and in these difficult times, we mean Muslim societies — a certain measure of humility is called for, don’t you?
Those jingoists who were shouting “love it or leave it” at us young protesters in the 1960s did not realize at the time that we, as the adversarial current in society, were in fact the conscience of America, for without our protests the carnage in Vietnam would have gone on unimpeded.
In this century, there were always Americans around who protested injustice not because they hated their country but because they cared. They protested because they, idealists and libertarians one and all, knew that by not taking a stand they would be giving their approval to the prevailing order.
They protested the deportation of anarchists in the 1920s, the crackdown on labor unionists in the 1930s, the repression of suspected communists in the 1940s and 1950s, and the destruction of a little peasant community in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Today, we could see with our own eyes, how the midnight knock has come on innumerable doors in recent weeks, and many a “swarthy man” was dragged off to jail.
That’s not the America we love to love. That’s the America whose excesses we have, once again, to protest.
And, no, we ain’t leaving it.
