From the issue dated September 28, 2001
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Why We Shouldn't Call It WarBy CHRISTOPHER PHELPS
I can recall a certain sniggering in the 1980s about "terrorism," as if it were merely a pretext for U.S. interventionism -- almost an invention of the military-industrial complex. I have a sinking sense that we were wrong on some elemental level about how the matter should be treated, as if it were sufficient to minimize it by listing the more egregious contrary cases of state-sanctioned violence, from the Nicaraguan contras to Israel. I do not deny that terrorism has been used, like communism before it, to justify endeavors that had more to do with the assertion of American state power than with anything else. Just as Stalinism was no bugaboo, however, the practical and moral reality of the phenomenon should have been confronted. Still, I have deep reservations about the way the news media are casting the issue as well as about the direction of the administration's response. To call what we are experiencing "war" speaks to the acts' aspects of aggression, force, terror, and violence -- all features of war. However, this rising "war on terrorism," strikes me as rife with danger and unintended consequences. I worry that such talk gives advantage to the perpetrators. To me, what is significant about the attacks is precisely that they did not follow definitions of war. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack, but it was by a hostile regime on the key U.S. naval installation in the Pacific. The attack on the World Trade Center, unlike Pearl Harbor, can have no military rationale whatsoever. The Pentagon is a military command center, but to use commercial airliners full of civilians as weapons makes it not an act of war but a crime against humanity. The attacks have been claimed by no state. To speak of those assaults on human life and liberty as "war" legitimizes the terrain sought by the perpetrators. I fear that it will inadvertently mean an open invitation to destroy innocent American civilian lives, with every casualty a "victory." To repeatedly emphasize the "Attack on America," as the news media are doing, I also worry, risks inflaming the very sort of particularistic and ethnocentric sentiments that motivate the groups willing to do this sort of thing. The moral significance of the conflict is the indiscriminate murder of innocent people. Nationality, from a moral point of view, is beside the point, especially since we now know the tremendous variety of nationalities represented among the victims. The answer to bigotry and barbarism is insistence upon international solidarity, democracy, and humane principles, not jingoism. As an American historian, I am wary of wars framed for freedom, which in general have produced the exact opposite effect. During the cold war, the "Communist menace" became the basis for hysterical McCarthyist attacks on civil liberties. Woodrow Wilson's "war for democracy" resulted in the crushing of the left and, with it, liberal reform. Watergate, which threatened American democracy itself, grew directly out of Vietnam. Even during World War II, which resulted in the defeat of the fascist powers, Japanese-Americans were confined to internment camps and Trotskyist dissenters imprisoned without basis. Those domestic violations are matched by the history of American interventionism abroad, which often resulted in human-rights catastrophes, from Hiroshima to Chile. I find myself torn a bit between myself as a citizen and as a trained historian. I have felt unspeakable revulsion about the acts and admiration for those engaged in rescue operations, but on the other hand I have a resistance to lines that I have often heard spoken on the radio that before September 11 we were all safe. Forgotten are Oklahoma City, the postal attacks, Columbine, the crime scares of the 1970s and 1980s, the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, the massacre at Wounded Knee -- a long list could be constructed. Loss of innocent civilian life is nothing new to this country. To recognize this is important for historical memory; it should not diminish the horror and importance of the events. This is violence of a new magnitude and type. But Americans are forever losing their innocence in ways that their historians may find a bit disconcerting. It reflects the weakness of historical knowledge -- or, to be more precise, historical understanding -- that people can speak in such oblivious ways about a national innocence when, along with our many finer qualities, our history is shot through with violence and terror. Christopher Phelps is an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Reflections on the Fractured Landscape |
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