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“Anonymous” strategy
The author of the coming book “Imperial Hybris” writing as “Anonymous” because the CIA didn´t want his name outed, has an OpEd in todays Los Angeles Times, Seeing Islam Through a Lens of U.S. Hubris. Suggesting that there is something like American hybris will allready upset some readers. But there is more:
Al Qaeda actually is more dangerous today than it was before what Osama bin Laden calls the “blessed attacks” of 11 September.
To say the least, Americans are getting mixed and confusing messages from their leaders. Are we headed toward a victory parade, Cold War bomb shelters or simply straight to the graveyard?
I believe the answer lies in the way we see and interpret people and events outside North America, which is heavily clouded by arrogance and self-centeredness amounting to what I called “imperial hubris.” This is not a genetic flaw in Americans that has been present since the Pilgrims splashed ashore at Plymouth Rock, but rather a way of thinking that America’s elites acquired after the end of World War II. It is a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.
Our political leaders contend that America’s astoundingly low approval ratings in polls taken in major Islamic countries do not reflect our unquestioning support of Israel and, as such, its “targeted killings” and other lethal high jinks. Nor, they say, are the ratings due to our relentless support for tyrannical and corrupt Islamic regimes that are systematically dissipating the Islamic world’s energy resources for family fun and profit, while imprisoning, torturing and executing domestic dissenters.
Thus, because of the pervasive imperial hubris that dominates the minds of our political, academic, social, media and military elites, America is able and content to believe that the Islamic world fails to understand the benign intent of U.S. foreign policy.
I’m saying that when Americans — the leaders and the led — process incoming information to make it intelligible in American terms, many not only fail to clearly understand what is going on abroad but, more ominous, fail to accurately gauge the severity of the danger that these foreign events, organizations, attitudes and personalities pose to U.S. national security and our society’s welfare and lifestyle.
I have long experience analyzing and attacking Bin Laden and Islamists. I believe they are a growing threat to the United States — there is no greater threat — and that we are being defeated not because the evidence of the threat is unavailable but because we refuse to accept it at face value and without Americanizing the data. This must change, or our way of life will be unrecognizably altered.
The last sentence is the essence and the problem. If the evidence would be accepted at face value and not Americanized, would not this in itself alter the American way of life unrecognizably?
1.) This I know for sure: we can’t get very far with the issue of “imperial hubris” if we don’t also touch upon the topics of Israel, Palestine, and “Plymouth Rock”–metonyms all for “the Holy City of Jerusalem” (itself a metonym for the great labyrinth comprising our own particular world with its own peculiar past: other metonyms might be “the Messiah,” “Abraham,” “Moses” and “Mohammed”).
2.) We have to let this labyrinth delimit its own horizon; it may, in its own good time, surprise us by revealing its congruity with the labyrinths of the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Aztec or the Incan. But we mustn’t take this for granted; we mustn’t presume to speak from a global, cosmopolitan perspective. We haven’t found it yet.
3.) It’s not that we really want to discuss the Holy City of Jerusalem, or have any particular skill in the arts of doing so. I’ve never been to Jerusalem, and I don’t speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic. But Jerusalem remains our great, our unavoidable point of reference in the most human, in the most ordinary, ways: though my family, for example, happens to be more or less Christian, one of my brothers is married to an Egyptian, and one of my sisters is married a Jew.
4.) If we ignore or marginalize the “the Holy City of Jerusalem”, we find that it promptly overwhelms, paralyzes, trivializes and destroys any further discussion of the topic we meant to discuss (“imperial hubris,” for example). Best, then, to remember Herman Melville. When the Civil War was over, Melville wrote a book of poems called “Battle-Pieces” (1866). Somehow it missed the point it was aiming for, and so Melville spent his next ten years writing “Clarel” (1876). One of the longest poems in English, it’s about a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem, and was surely prompted by the torment, the “terror,” of the Civil War.
5.) It’s impossible for anyone in our world to analyze the topic of “election,” political or spiritual, without passing through the streets of Jerusalem. Our body politic is a theocratic entity, and we have to deal with this fact. Intelligently, but obstinately. Though we may not wish to admit it, we have to recognize that the American Constitution is patterned after Calvin’s “Institutes”.
6.) Our “imperial hubris” is indissolubly bound up with our sense of the word “election”. I certainly don’t know how to parse this problematic state of affairs, and that’s why I’ve posted this message. We need all the help we can get, and we need the time and space it takes to wander from error to error.
7.) Bernhard, you’ve put together a most impressive site! Imagine the awkwardness of trying to post a message here when your name is “alabama” (the lower-case “a” is meant to indicate all the humiliation connected with the name). Just for the record, I should say that I picked this name because I happen to inhabit the state it designates. Berthold Brecht happened upon that name long before it cast its lunar light on my own reflections–long before I discovered the hospitality of “the Whiskey Bar”.
8.) And yes, Bernhard, you’re right about the fun of this site. It reminds me of a wonderful anecdote about John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General. Convicted of a felony some thirty years ago, Mitchell was sentenced to do time in the low security Federal Penitentiary at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. When he stepped off the plane to begin serving his sentence, he greeted his welcoming committee of prison-guards and politicians with a big broad smile, saying “Gentlemen, it’s nice to be back in Alabama!”
Posted by: alabama | Jul 2 2004 20:28 utc | 8
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