From the issue dated September 28, 2001
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Our Legacy of WarBy CATHERINE LUTZ
While this long war has sometimes drawn on elevated ideals like antifascism, more often it has been carried on in the name of stability for any regime that would don an anticommunist mantle and allow American business access, hiding a rotten core of systematic terrorism against its own people, often with our weapons and training. Those terrorists were labeled realists, and the long reign of nuclear terror by the Soviet Union and the United States -- who together took aim at millions of people in skyscrapers and hovels -- was called defense, or even peace. Its architects were called men of honor. This new war that President Bush has declared can draw on the decades-long public-relations campaigns intended to convince us that the larger the American arsenal, the safer we are, and on the idea that war elevates moral character in its supporters. But my research has shown me that many American soldiers and veterans are not nearly so sure. Some have been among war's most ardent critics, and some remain soul-wounded and attached to each other in fellowships of affliction. Their experiences will never match the rhetoric and safety of the elites now planning a conflagration. As Bush talks about hunting the terrorists from their holes, and begins to elide terrorists and whole populations, I am reminded of the racial hatred that has preceded, stoked, and been inflamed by nearly every one of the 20th century's wars. But over the past several days, hope has overtaken my pessimism as I've talked with students. So far, they have refused the simplicities and the vengefulness of the voices on television, whose framing devices overwhelmingly ask when and where the United States will strike, not how that could possibly accomplish a safe future. Instead, students are questioning and seeking meaning in these events. The instructor of one class I attended as a guest speaker described how angry she was at the perpetrators and asked people to say if they were, too. Many hands went up along with mine, but when asked why, their reasons were many and nuanced. One was angry that the New York and Washington victims had not been protected (despite a $300-billion military budget), another that human beings continue to stoop to violence, another that her world had lost its security. While the administration has reduced all this into a single feeling, with one swift sword attached, those students' thoughtful, passionate varieties of anger are openings to reflection, learning, and a response more ethical than indiscriminate force. The parallel of this day of infamy is not Pearl Harbor -- in 1941, a colonial outpost in a once-sovereign Hawaiian nation. It is 1947, when a new kind of war was also declared, via executive orders and the National Security Act -- a war, it was said, in which the enemy would no longer fight in the open, a war requiring the sacrifice of some freedom and principle. It gave birth to McCarthyism, to slaughters in places like Vietnam and Guatemala; and it took the fruits of our labor and our children. The perpetrators of this latest terror should be identified in an open process and imprisoned. If one is Osama bin Laden, send the international police for him, and pick up Henry Kissinger and Augusto Pinochet on the way home. The weeping, surviving families of New York, Washington, Chile, Haiti, South Africa, the Somme, Ukraine, Cambodia, and Vietnam call us to bring their murderers to account, not to send legions more to join them in their grief. Catherine Lutz is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B14
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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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