From the issue dated October 5, 2001
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Ignorance Is a Luxury We Cannot AffordBy MICHAEL BERUBEI met my classes the day after the terrorist attack on the United States.
And what, exactly, was I going to tell them? Penn State, like many American universities, was offering counseling, prayer, and candlelight vigils, but what about serious discussions of the historical or political context needed to comprehend this kind of atrocity? My students' most pressing concerns, it seemed, had to do with the future of civil liberties at home and the possibility of indiscriminate and counterproductive military action abroad -- standard, well-justified, liberal responses that one might expect from English majors, sure enough. But these students, by no means a homogeneous group, also wanted to discuss those searing images of cheering Palestinian children. And, while both classes contained skeptics who interrupted discussions about anti-Americanism in the Middle East with caveats about Timothy McVeigh, the consensus was that our responses to the attack are guided, consciously or unconsciously, by our responses to what we believe about Israel and Palestine, about suicide bombers and so-called Islamic fundamentalists, and about the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden. Many students also had already turned their outrage to the instant spin that followed the attack. Yes, I admitted, there was something not merely unseemly but obscene about the rush to judgment, the political "analyses" that were written even before the World Trade Center towers had collapsed. We talked about the response on the right -- from Mark Helprin, for instance, a Republican speechwriter who had claimed in Wednesday morning's Wall Street Journal that the attack was the fruit of years of U.S. "appeasement"; later in the week, we registered our collective disbelief at Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who somehow blamed feminists, gays, and abortion providers. More troubling to my mind, though, because closer to my heart, were the emerging analyses of the attack from the political left, some of which were coming uncomfortably close to justifying the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. Many students immediately connected the attack to various American operations in the Middle East, and I wanted them to be very careful about how they made those connections. Of course, I said, of course the attacks must be placed in the broader context of the history of U.S. foreign policy in Asia and the Middle East. But any analysis that did not start from a position of solidarity with, and compassion for, the victims, their families, and the extraordinary rescue workers in New York and Washington was an analysis not worth time and attention. If you're on the political left and you grieve for what U.S. sanctions have done to ordinary Iraqi citizens since 1991; if you condemned Clinton's deluded and unprincipled bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in 1998; if you have opposed Israeli treatment of Palestinians since 1982, 1967, or 1948; and if you speak of all those things as "crimes against humanity," then you simply cannot countenance the murder of innocent civilians as some kind of appropriate payback or global comeuppance. Very well, some students replied, but what does it mean to "place the attacks in the broader context of U.S. foreign policy"? Here, not surprisingly, what my students wanted and needed most was basic background information. Was it true, they asked, that the CIA once financed and trained bin Laden? Well, yes, I said, but at the time, in the 1980s, we financed just about anyone who showed up and offered to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. No, we didn't have the same kind of relationship to bin Laden that we had to Noriega or Pinochet or the Shah or Somoza or any of the other dictators we'd propped up in the course of waging the cold war. As to why we had tried to bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan, it certainly hadn't had anything to do with feeding or housing the Afghan people. The discussions were difficult. In one class, the talk reached back to 1979 (the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the prelude to war between Iran and Iraq); in the other, to 1952 (when Britain and the United States first hatched plans to overthrow Iran's Mohammed Mossadeq). Many students were already wracked with depression and disbelief at the unfathomable images of the towers collapsing, their occupants leaping to their deaths. Such talk of U.S. foreign policy ran the risk of adding to the sense of dismay, anger, and bewilderment. For some, the talk seemed to exculpate the attackers' crimes against humanity; for others, to compound their grief with anger at their own government, for acts and policies about which many of them had had no knowledge. Were these turning into discussions about how to apportion blame? "Wait a second," I said. "We all have to learn, as Americans, what our government has been doing in our name. But this attack is not a simple vindication or repudiation of anybody's beliefs or policies. The terrorists left no messages -- they did not speak of jihad or Palestine or Kuwait or Mossadeq. We can only guess why -- and no guess can justify the attack." Finally, I said to my students, it is not enough to mourn, nor even to take comfort from the fact that the world has been shown what New Yorkers always knew -- namely, that New York firefighters are indeed superhuman. We will have to inform ourselves as never before. Not only about cheering Palestinians, but also about the history of our dealings with Pakistan -- and the problems they might pose for our future dealings with Pakistan. We should listen not only to the interviews on mass media (for surely this attack was designed with mass media in mind), but also to the full range of responses -- from heads of state of Arab nations and of Israel; from Pakistani intellectuals and from the (anti-Taliban) Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, and much more. You may not have subscriptions to foreign newspapers, but you all have computers. Use them to read. And one last question before we leave: How many of you have been keeping track of recent allied bombing raids on Iraq, or of the effects of the sanctions since 1991? No hands go up. So I reminded my students: Public ignorance is at once a luxury and a travesty. We can no longer afford to leave such matters to our elected officials and a small handful of foreign-policy "experts," whose capacities for moral judgment and historical reflection may, in fact, be no greater than our own. For if democracies are going to respond to terrorists as democracies, then we all have the right -- and the obligation -- to determine what form that response should take. Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B5
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education