A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. Maybe it helped to be able to smell the fires that were still consuming the dead – you could do this from Washington Square Park. At approximately the same time, at a college a bit over the city line, where the dead could neither be smelt nor, perhaps, fully imagined, white ribbons instead signaled solidarity with those “faculty and students of color” who felt unsafe in the face of American racist violence.
If one was in a jaundiced mood, that latter use of white ribbons was an implied assertion: “neither six nor seven thousand murdered in an instant, among them the hundreds who died trying to save the others, nor the many more left grieving for them, shall dislodge our faculty and students of color from the pinnacle of the most piercing victimhood. What spurious moral claim do the dead and their mourners have the audacity to press, given the fears of these purer victims, who can sense the lynch mobs massing behind the dorms?” But while there were no lynch mobs behind the dorms, within a couple of days, when around the country some people were murdered, and others were being harassed, it seemed less delusional, and the politics less mad. Solidarity with people one knows, who may need it, rather than with those already beyond all aid, was not an obviously foolish or wicked response – except that “feeling unsafe” remains a less dreadful thing than being unsafe, or dead, or widowed. One felt that those conditions ought to have excited more sympathy than seemed to be the case.
For after all, the people under the rubble were not yet beyond all hope, nor were their survivors. But concern (let alone just anger) for the dead, the missing and the bereaved seemed pretty perfunctory in the teach-ins, and in the faux-Left organs of opinion. The rhetorical sequencing became drearily predictable: a rather terse acknowledgement that this was an awful thing, then a long and leisurely trawl through the reasons why the country to one degree or another might have deserved it – or been imagined to have deserved it, by people who weren’t entirely crazy to think so.
From the faux-Left’s paladins, the Chomskys and the Pilgers, there was stronger stuff, or perhaps the argument was simply made with greater clarity: the awful thing done to us was not nearly as awful as the awful things we regularly did to them, to the Iraqi or Sudanese or Palestinian or Afghan or Vietnamese children: tu quoque, with bells on. Our direct victims were computed to total millions in these increasingly ingenious calculations, so six thousand, the initial number given for the American dead, wasn’t after all a very big deal; certainly not a big enough deal to rethink the dystopian narrative that has passed for history in this sturdy tradition.
At home, you generally had to hunt a bit to find this stuff – although it did at least break the surface in a couple of distinguished national magazines. Abroad, such tones could be detected in less obscure places. In the UK, two quality dailies, the Guardian and the Independent, ran rather a lot of it. Two examples, selected from an embarrassment of riches, must suffice, one from the Guardian and the other from the New Statesman: the Guardian‘s Charlotte Raven, insisting that “anti-Americanism” remained irreproachable, compared the US to “a bully with a bloody nose”. This was a pretty simple extended metaphor: the World Trade Center was our nose, and the blood, less imaginatively, was our blood. Since a bully with a bloody nose is normally considered a very cheering sight, an outmatched but plucky fellow drubbing his tormentor against the odds – Tom Brown thrashing Flashman at Rugby – Ms. Raven’s laconic expression of distress over the dead seemed imperfectly convincing.
Over at the New Statesman, the leader writer conceded that while bond traders might be thought to have as much of a right to life as Iraqi or Palestinian children, we should remember that the bond traders, unlike the children, had been given a chance to vote for Ralph Nader, but had declined to do so (at least in sufficient numbers to retain a strong argument against being crushed, asphyxiated or incinerated). While it seems that the actual social composition of the labor force at the World Trade Center was unknown to the New Statesman‘s editorialist – who presumably wrote without having seen the color Xeroxes taped to the mail boxes and lamp posts all over town – one cannot be certain that among the scientific socialists at the New Statesman, those immigrant busboys, waiters, custodial staff and file clerks might not have been a price worth paying for a crack at entombing or immolating a few bond traders – omelets, eggs, etc. But this reaction was the harsher end of respectable printed opinion in North Western Europe. What was more common was what we heard at home, as well: we must seek to learn why we are so hated, and mend our ways. Complicity in violence done to the Islamic world, we are told, is consistently high on the list; if we cease to so offend, we shall cease to be hated.
But some journalists at the leading Greek newspaper (Kathimerini) apparently cheered when they saw the footage of the attack on the WTC, and in Athens a large crowd at a soccer stadium jeered through a moment of silence for the American dead – then burned an Israeli flag, and tried to set alight a less-flammable American one. In Greece, as it happens, the US is hated not only for supporting the Colonels, but for more recent crimes: for the military assistance we rather belatedly rendered to Bosnian and Kossovar Muslims, and for the protection we let Turkey extend to Cypriot Muslims in 1974. In Greece we are hated for being pro-Islamic. And when you think about it, Islamic rage at complicity in killing Muslims is pretty hit or miss. The Soviet Union’s very direct Muslim-killing operations in Afghanistan – where the dead probably exceeded a million – seem to have aroused less anti-Russian rage than our supplying the Israelis with cluster bombs produced anti-American rage – yet over the course of both intifadas, the Israelis’ total of Arab dead is down several orders of magnitude from the Russian’s Afghan score. When you think about it a bit, that seems curious. Leave aside Stalin’s murders of, say, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other Muslims, which approached a million, and look only at the recent killing of Chechyns – which arouse far less fury than does our complicity in much less bloody Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.
And it’s not just the Russians who are, relatively speaking, off the hook. Chinese torment of Muslim Uighurs does not arouse audible protest, and while Hindu torment of Muslim Kashmiris enrages Pakistanis, it does not seem to feature too prominently in Arab, Indonesian or Turkish politics. Tormenting Muslims does not invariably arouse general fury unless an American or an Israeli is the offender. Further reflection only deepens this puzzlement. From the moment of the massacres at Shatila and Sabra, Sharon’s derelictions, which permitted Maronite Lebanese to mass-murder Palestinians, have been accounted rather more vile than have been the direct actions of the mass murderers themselves: the Maronite Lebanese who did the killing are almost never mentioned, while Sharon’s infamy remains notorious. Twenty years on, there are prominent newspapers where one is hard-pressed to find reference to Sharon that does not mention this crime; the nearly contemporaneous destruction of a city in Syria, when Hafez al Assad shelled Hama and successfully terrorized Sunni Islamists, killing around 10,000 of his fellow Syrians, remains comparatively obscure. In parallel, Turks, American allies, killed Kurds in the course of suppressing the PKK, and became the object of odium all over Western Europe; by contrast, Saddam Hussein’s employment of nerve gas against other Kurds did not seem nearly as offensive, in either Europe or the Middle East. Jordanian and Kuwaiti killings of Palestinians have proved very much less memorable than have Israeli killings. American killings of Iraqis, done to safeguard Saudis, are apparently unforgiven by the Saudi beneficiaries themselves. And all this suggests that the helpful advice to mend our ways, and thus be less hated, derives from a bad case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The hatred seems to some degree independent of our stated crimes, which suggests the possibility that our enemies cannot be appeased: the well of grievance may be bottomless. And if we cannot appease our enemies, it logically follows that we must deter or destroy them.
On the faux-Left there has been no great rush to acknowledge this possibility. Almost all “Left” discourse on the question, here and abroad, has instead focused on explanations of why we are by no means blameless, followed by shrill denials that we have any effective military response to the devastatingly effective violence which has been wielded against us. These are followed by jeremiads about the hecatombs of Third World innocents our government are preparing to deliberately slaughter, and especially of the vast numbers who are soon to be pitilessly slain by our air force, to perverse political effect this while the military authorities repeatedly promise to avoid precisely such a policy. We are also warned that a new Korematsu decision hangs over us, as the authorities meditate just how they will herd masses of Americans into camps. The repeated and admirable pleas to protect our fellow citizens from violence and discrimination, by politicians unused to making such pleas, go unheard, while the initial and apparently continuing paralytic indecision of the civil and military authorities goes unseen. President Bush, who in many people’s estimate initially looked and sounded like a frightened child, and who subsequently seems to have adopted a policy formulated by a State Department desperate to minimize the use of military force, is instead depicted as a deranged and blood-crazed militarist, and not, as seems vastly more likely, a man out of his depth, surrounded by people notorious both for avoiding hard decisions, and for hopeless bureaucratic factionalism.
So, in the phrase Claude Raines made immortal, the faux-Left has been rounding up the usual suspects. The Americans are criminals, not victims, and this distinction must be established before the dead are cold in the ground. The use of violence is permitted our enemies, or at least excused in them, but reprisals are beyond the pale. We are in no way obligated to come up with a plausible strategy for deterring the mass murder of our fellow citizens: that is not what politics is about, not our politics, anyway. But stopping foreigners from mass-murdering one’s fellow citizens is the very beginning of all politics, which is why it should be obvious that in addition to being dishonest and otherwise immoral, the faux-Left position is a disastrous political strategy. There is no surer route to perfect irrelevance than telling the rest of the country that you have nothing useful to say about their fears for their very lives, other than to imply or declare that they deserve whatever happens to them.
From November, 2001