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Edward Said: Global Crisis
(Edward Said, ZNet, March 17, 2003)
As I write, much of the world is being bludgeoned into a restive submission by (or, as with Italy and Spain, an opportunistic alliance with) the US, as it readies itself for a deeply unpopular war against Iraq. But for the demonstrations and protests that have erupted at popular level around the world, the war would be a brazen act of un opposed domination. The degree to which it is contested by those many Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who have taken to the streets suggests that at last some have awakened to the fact that the US, or rather the few Judaeo-Christian white men who currently rule its government, is bent on world hegemony. What are we to do? . . . The difference between the US and the classic empires of the past is that, although each historical empire has asserted its determination not to repeat the overreaching ambitions of predecessors, this latest empire astonishingly affirms its sacrosanct altruism and well-meaning innocence. This alarming delusion of virtue is endorsed, even more alarmingly, by formerly leftwing or liberal intellectuals, who in the past opposed US wars abroad but who are now prepared to make the case for virtuous empire (the image of the lonely sentry is favoured), using styles from tub-thumping patriotism to cynicism. . . . The liberal hawks do not refer to the Christian right (so similar to Islamic extremism in its fervour and righteousness) and its massive, decisive presence in the US. Its vision derives from mostly Old Testament sources, very like those of Israel, its close partner and analogue. There is a peculiar alliance between Israel's influential neo-conservative US supporters and the Christian extremists, who support Zionism as a way of bringing all the Jews to the Holy Land to prepare for the Messiah's second coming, when the Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or be annihilated. These rabidly antisemitic teleologies are rarely referred to, and certainly not by the pro-Israeli Jewish phalanx. . . . The US is the world's most avowedly religious country. . . . There is unconditional reverence for the founding fathers, and for the constitution - an amazing document, but a human creation. Early America is the anchor of authenticity. . . . In no other country I know does a waving flag play so central an iconographical role. You see it everywhere, on taxicabs, on jacket lapels, on the front, windows and roofs of houses. It is the main embodiment of the national image, signifying heroic endurance and a sense of being beleagured by unworthy enemies. Patriotism remains the prime virtue, tied up with religion, belonging, and doing the right thing at home and all over the world. Patriotism is now represented, too, as consumer spending: Americans were enjoined after 9/11 to shop in defiance of evil terrorists. . . . It is as if no one cares whether the corporate structure, in alliance with the federal government, which still has not been able to provide most Americans with decent health cover and a sound education, needs change. News of the stock market is more important than any re-examination of the system. . . . The growing resistance to war, which the president has minimised and pretended to ignore, derives from that other and less formal US that the mainstream media (newspapers of record such as the New York Times, the broadcast networks, the publishing and magazine industries) always tries to suppress. Never has there been such unashamed and scandalous complicity between broadcast news and the government . . . Because it is managed, the consensus operates in a timeless present. History is anathema to it. In public discourse even the word history is a synonym for nothingness, as in the scornful phrase "you're history". History is what as Americans we are supposed to believe about the US (not about the rest of the world, which is "old" and therefore irrelevant) - uncritically, unhistorically. . . . If we examine the components of the impressively strong resistance to the proposed war against Iraq, a very different picture of the US emerges, more amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue and action. . . . Many other groups and individuals who joined rallies, protest marches, and peace demonstrations have resisted the mind-deadening patriotism post-9/11. They have clustered around civil liberties, including free speech, threatened by the USA Patriot Act. Protest against capital punishment and at the abuses represented by the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, plus a distrust of civilian authorities in the military, as well as a discomfort at the privatised US prison system that locks up the highest number of people per capita in the world - all these disturb the middle-class social order. . . . I have tried to suggest another way of seeing the US, as a troubled country with a contested reality. I think it is more accurate to apprehend the US as a nation that is undergoing a serious clash of identities, similar to other contests in the rest of the world. The US may have won the cold war, but the results of that victory within the US are far from clear and the struggle is not yet over. Too much of a focus on the US executive's centralising military and political power ignores the internal dialectics that continue, and are far from settlement. Abortion rights and the teaching of evolution are still unsettled issues. . . . Cultures, and especially the immigrant culture of the US, overlap with others; one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests - the human rights, women's and anti-war movements. The US is not insulated from this, but we have to go behind the intimidatingly unified surface of the US to see the disputes to which many of the world's other people are party. There is hope and encouragement in that.

posted by Lorenzo 11:16 AM