Ranting to /dev/null

Being anti-antiwar

I've been slowly reaching that position, but Tom Bissell's recent article in the April 2004 issue of The Believer pretty much clinched it. He starts with a long analysis of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipeligo. (Quick note: all those of you who think it's cool to endorse the USSR: words can't describe the unendurable shame you should feel for praising the flag that sent twenty million people up through chimneys in black smoke. Hitler failed to kill this many people, and he was actively trying to.) and launches into a discussion of his feelings towards the current conflict in Iraq.

Key passage:

“Here are words that all of us today might pause to consider, for we are all, as Solzhenitsyn insists, capable of evil. I am capable of evil, you are capable of evil. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn himself are capable of evil. Our capacity to recognize this is what separates us from all the beasts of the field. And I, too, would prefer not to think of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Ayman al-Zawahiri as “evildoers,” a childish word inappropriate to these frighteningly unchildish times, though all of them have certainly crossed Solzhenitsyn’s threshold magnitude for evildoing and then some. (Some will no doubt quibble over this apparent blending of secular socialist Baathism with Al-Qaeda’s agnostic and fanatical Islamism – until one realizes that both philosophies are, in the words of Paul Berman, “totalitarian death cults,” and that both have received crucial Muslim support by harkening back to the emotional fountainhead of a restored Islamic Caliphate.) But by making “evildoer” a central concept in the war on terror, George W. Bush has succeeded in doing virtually the impossible: he has transformed the struggle between those who believe in freedom and those who believe in fascist theocracy – a profoundly important struggle, simultaneously subtle and explosive, currently playing out in the hearts of human beings across the whole sweep of our planet – and turned it into little better than a comic book. In the evident theater of his mind, Bush himself is clumsy Billy Batson by day and soaring Captain Marvel at night. His thoughtless, his artlessness, his seeming disregard for the complexity of evildoing, his refusal to apprehend and honor a different sort of threshold magnitude toward which – thanks to real doers of evil and, yes, thanks to him – we all have been carelessly flung, has sullied and dishonored what any thoughtful person must now recognize as the central struggle of our time: to what extent can we be expected to alleviate the suffering of others? And if one believes we do have a responsibility to alleviate the suffering of others, how do we do so without going to war, which itself causes tremendous suffering? And how does one answer this question without succumbing to cavalier He-Manism or moral infantilism?”

“It was my fear that a good number of antiwar protestors in the United States were being fooled. In fact, it was my fear that the majority of them were being fooled. I fear they were being fooled by a false and self-congratulatory protest mythology that takes as its emotional secret a belief in the unquenchable evil of the American military. I fear they were being fooled by Michael Moore, whose film Bowling for Columbine notes at its opening that “The United States bombed another country” – which got an irritatingly knowing laugh from every audience with whom I saw the film – without pointing out that the bombing to which Moore referred saved the lives of several hundred thousand innocent Kosovars skinnied and started in preparation for their butchering at Serbian hands. I feared they were being fooled by Noam Chomsky, who, so far as I know, has never once apologized for or explained his 1977 Nation article, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” cowritten with Edward Herman, which argued that what were then still only rumors of a systematic massacre being carried out by the Communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were merely Cold War propaganda, another false pretext for the United States to meddle in the affairs of Southeast Asia. We did not wind up meddling in the affairs of Cambodia, of course. Two million people died. I fear they were being fooled by misleading and inaccurate comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, and I fear they were being fooled by some of the major antiwar organizers.”

As it turns out, one of the biggest antiwar organizing groups is ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and Racism), which turns out to be essentially a subsidiary of the Workers World Party, an organization unabashedly Stalinist in its leanings. These are the people whose leader “went screaming over his threshold magnitude in a supersonic jet when he took up the cause of defending Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal and mass murderer, as a brave opponent of US imperialism”.

Final money quote:

“I believe that the war in Iraq was morally wrong, tactically dubious, and probably illegal, while, at the same time, and very nearly impossibly, I believe that the removal from power of Saddam Hussein was a great moral accomplishment, however large the windfall for Halliburton, and however insincere and dishonest the Bush administration’s motives for doing so. The war is far from over, of course, and all I can do now is hope for its success and freedom and peace for the Iraqis, which they are not likely to get without us and the reluctant cooperation of many other countries. That I detest the man conducting the war is immaterial. There is no other option. I may not like it, in fact I may hate it, but we as a nation have crossed a different kind of threshold magnitude, one of great potential good, and only skeptical and determined benevolence will prevent us from turning to vapor.”

So this then, is it: it’s line in the sand time. The question? Do we have an obligation to alleviate the suffering of others? And if you say yes, and you're a self-described liberal, then you have absolutely no business opposing the current Iraq war, sympathizing with Islamist extremists, or thinking that Communist Russia was simply a failed experiment in anti-capitalism.

Furthermore, if you even think about calling our current government totalitarian, your naivete is massive. Our country has a speckled past. We locked up Japanese-Americans in WWII. We treated the Native Americans really badly. There are allegations of atrocities in Vietnam. We now have documented war crimes in Iraq. But does this mean that we are morallty equivalent to those we are currently fighting? Absolutely not. But our government has never operated death camps, has never summarily executed political prisoners, and in fact, does not have many political prisoners to speak of. The current official figure on the number of people thought to have been abused by US soldiers in Iraq is less than 100. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of thousands if not millions of people. Stalin, his ideological predecessor, is single-handedly responsible for the deaths of more human beings than anyone in history. If you want to say that we are equivalent to them, then your moral sense is twisted to the point that I don't want to have anything to do with you.

All that to say that this article is the best thing I've read since yesterday, when I read The End of the Affair, and it has really stirred and solidified my opinion on the current political landscape. There are people out there who really believe that the West is no different than the dictators we have deposed. This seems to be the line which divides the political spectrum in America today. May God have mercy upon us.

Posted by ryan at May 5, 2004 3:21 PM | TrackBack