In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he leaves them…
-Alexis de Tocqueville
One of the more remarkable moments in what has turned out to be a dismal
political cycle came early on, in the May 2007 Republican debate, when
Congressman Ron Paul challenged the common wisdom about the Islamic
militants who carried out the 9/11 attacks:
Have you ever read why they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been
over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years. They don’t come here
to attack us because we are rich and free. They come here to attack us
because we are over there.
There was an audible gasp, like when the child in the fairy tale proclaims that the emperor is, in fact, naked.
Rudy Giuliani spoke up, and one sensed that he spoke for an outraged America:
That is an extraordinary statement…I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us he really didn’t mean it.
The congressman did not withdraw his comment, and the wagons circled. Dr. Paul was never taken seriously again by the media or the other candidates, who took to smirking when he spoke at later debates. His candidacy has long since been marginalized, and its promise has faded. And the Official Story stands again unchallenged: madmen attacked America because they hate our freedom and our way of life.
Curiously, though, one searches in vain in the writings of Osama bin Laden or
other Al Queda pronouncements for such a notion. Rather, they state that their struggle is a defensive jihad against the anti-Muslim aggression of the USA and its allies. And they cite American presence in the Arabian peninsula (the Islamic Holy Land), American support of oppressive police states in Muslim countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, etc), unconditional American support for Israel, American
invasions of Muslim countries and exploitation of Muslim oil resources, and American support for nations that oppress Muslims (China, Russia, and India). The Islamist makes a case that Muslims are under siege and are simply fighting back. While polls show only a minority of Muslims supports the tactics of Al Queda, the vast majority agrees that Islam is under attack by America and its European and Israeli allies.
So, who are you going to believe about the motives of the Salafi and Shia jihadists? Our professed enemies and those whose support they seek? Or our political leaders and pundits?
For starters, if you look to those making our foreign policy decisions, you will note an appalling lack of historical knowledge or analysis. Early in the Iraq war, an interviewer asked leading congressmen and senators, who had just voted for the invasion, to define the difference between a Shia and a Sunni Muslim.This drew blank looks and fumbled answers. Yet to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Islamic history the factional strife that the American invasion unleashed was no surprise.
Indeed, it is hard to see how the US could have intentionally designed a worse scenario for offending Muslim sensibilities than the one we pursued, even apart from Abu Ghraib and war’s “collateral damage”, ie, someone’s dead friends and neighbors.
We are being ruled either by fools or villains, and it is no comfort knowing that it is probably the former.
And yet the myth persists, that we are hated because we are good, because we are free. This is blindly self-flattering. It is like the man with the black eye, punched by his neighbor. When asked why he was struck, he responds, “Well, he has always resented my good looks, you know.”
When it is pointed out that the neighbor says he smacked him because he
had burgled his home, assaulted his wife and slashed his tires, the man
says, “Well, that is what he says, but the truth is he has always
resented my good looks.”
Tocqueville, again:
…the power that dominates [the majority paradigm] does not intend to be made sport of… The slightest reproach wounds it, the least prickly truth alarms it; and one must praise it from the forms of its language to its most solid virtues. No writer, whatever his renown may be, can escape the obligation of singing the praises of his fellow citizens. The majority, therefore, lives in perpetual adoration of itself; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach the ears of Americans.
And sometimes, not even foreigners and experience.
–Daniel Nichols
Yes, you and Tocqueville are right.
Daniel,
Please accept this in the spirit in which it is offered: isn’t this post a bit too Holden Caulfield? The they-hate-us-for-our-freedom narrative strikes me as the same sort of compulsive niceness that causes every mundane transaction to be concluded with a wish for me to ‘have a nice day’. Point being, most of the time I’m pretty sure the well wisher doesn’t much care if the remainder of my day is nice or not. Both parties know this and yet we conclude our business and go our separate ways neither faulting the other for overlooking the obvious. Which is basically my problem with Congressman Paul. Like Salinger’s protagonist he has figured out that the exchange is a pointless bit of politeness but can’t resist calling everyone a phony. In his desire to be contrarian or irascible, he seemed to grant a justice to bin Laden’s cause which it does not deserve.
Christopher,
It is not a harmless “compulsive niceness” if it blinds a nation to a real danger.
American hubris may destroy us all. And to grant that the world’s Muslims have a legitimate grievance is not to endorse the murderous “solution” offered by the Wahhabists, anymore than acknowledging the existence of injustice and oppression meant the endorsement of Marxist revolution.
Indeed, to not acknowledge the legitimate grievances of the downtrodden is, in the end, self-destructive.
Daniel,
True, if it indeed blinds a nation to a real danger. My point is that I think anyone that gives the matter much thought sees it as a nicety and little else. Anyways, my two cents. Thanks for the reply.
“…a nicety and little else”?
With all due respect, it is a nicety that is costing us dearly.
Daniel,
We tend to see things differently and that I suppose is a matter of temperament and personality. I’m not at all certain it is important that you see things my way. It is worth considering, given your post, that American political discourse is full of vague and nigh-upon-meaningless shorthands and that what costs us dearly is not our devotion to flowery, self-flattery. Were that true we would scarcely be able to look away from our own beautiful reflection to worry about brutes in far off lands. I think our problem is we haven’t the slightest inclination of how to be peaceable or the meanest notion of why. A poverty of expression being but a hangnail on the American body politic.
Daniel, I think your point is exactly right.
It is the history of our aggression in the middle east that few Americans seem to be aware of. But it is not just the aggression of the west, it is also the larger cultural threat of the predominately secular/materialist west, what the Holy Father calls the “Enlightenment culture” that offends the religious sensibilities of the rest of the world. In “Christianity and the Crisis of Culture”, written in 2005, Ratzinger makes clear his criticism of this impoverished western culture.
In speaking about the refusal to mention the Christian roots of Europe in the preamble to the European constitution on the grounds that it would offend the many non-christians who live in the continent, Ratzinger says: “Who would be offended by this? Whose identity is threatened thereby? The Muslims, who so often tend to be mentioned in this context, feel threatened, not by the foundations of our Christian morality, but by the cynicism of a secular culture that denies its own foundations.” Again, in criticizing the arrogance of the inflated concept of reason that we have in the west, Ratzinger says:”Above all, we must affirm that this Enlightenment philosophy, with its related culture, is incomplete. It consciously cuts off its own historical roots, depriving itself of the powerful sources from which it sprang. It detaches itself from what we might call the basic memory of mankind, without which reason loses its orientation, for now the
guiding principle is that man’s capability determines what he does…Man knows how to build atomic bombs, and therefore he makes them, and he is willing in principle to use them, too. Even terrorism is ultimately based on this modality of man’s “self authorization”, not on the teachings of the Qur’an.”
I hope that the Holy Father’s words to the United Nations will wake up some Americans to realize that we need to build real consensus among all nations through dialogue and respect rather than let a few powerful countries(like the US) act only in its own self interest.