DP
> The New Statesman Interview
> Johann Hari Monday 15th October 2001
>
> War on Terror - The exile who despairs of his "ignorant"
> homeland denounces the war and its hawks. Gore Vidal
> interviewed by Johann Hari
>
> The United States has been forced to reimagine itself this
> past month. So who better for the New Statesman to track
> down in his obscure mountain hideaway (no, not Bin Laden)
> than the man who has dedicated his life and writing to
> telling Americans their real, non-sanitised history: Gore
> Vidal. This is a man, after all, who knew and influenced the
> icons that defined 20th-century America. He was a close
> friend of more than one president (not forgetting that
> Eleanor Roosevelt urged him to run for elected office), was
> sucked off by Jack Kerouac, was attacked (both in print and
> to his face) by Norman Mailer, was a confidant of the
> Oklahoma bomber and Bill Clinton, and had to tell Tennessee
> Williams to stop trying to cruise Jack Kennedy. Now that the
> 20th century has truly reached its symbolic end, this is
> surely the ideal man to help us understand the new, battered
> America.
>
> When asked if he is sleeping well, knowing that the US is in
> Dubbya's hands, he replies: "Let's just say I'm in a total
> state of insomnia." Unlike those who are rallying behind the
> president, Vidal retains his withering contempt for the man.
> His father was a "failure", and "when you get a bad gene
> pool, you don't necessarily enlarge it for high diving, if I
> may complete the grotesque metaphor". Bush has, in Vidal's
> eyes, failed to rise to the occasion since the attacks. "For
> those with an eye and ear for the false note, every note is
> truly false." It is not his mangled and incoherent words
> that appal Vidal, however. "No, I'm judging by actions.
> Obviously, requesting all those special powers pushes us
> even further along the path towards Hitler's Enabling Act of
> 1933. That is the worst that he could do."
>
> Vidal sees the new powers that Bush has claimed to combat
> terrorism as completing the destruction of the Bill of
> Rights. "They're now going to lock up anybody they want to,
> silence anybody they want to. Those powers are now theirs,
> the dreamed-of powers for the state. The state will come out
> of this very, very powerful, and we the people, in or out of
> Congress assembled, will come out much weaker. That said, we
> glory in the fact that we are the United States of Amnesia.
> We won't remember a thing the next day." What has emerged is
> nothing less than "a police state. There's no euphemism for
> it . . . Now the attorney general can act against terrorism,
> which has never been defined. It's like 'un-German
> activities' under Hitler - what's an un-German activity?"
>
> This fits into Vidal's wider history of an American republic
> progressively destroyed since the Truman administration,
> when the branches of government began to be owned and
> controlled by increasingly repressive corporations. It is
> this historical framework that leads him to damn the new
> American imperialism that is spearheading the invasion of
> Afghanistan. "I don't see that anything can come from a
> country that is so beautifully right that we would want to
> impose, either by suggestion or by fiat, our way of life on
> anyone else. And particularly so with the United States of
> America, the most corrupt political system on earth.
>
> "How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our
> form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. It's far
> worse than anything that occurred in the Roman empire, until
> the praetorian guard started to sell the principate. We're
> not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the
> world in the way of political ideas or political
> arrangements. God knows, the mention of justice is like a
> clove of garlic to Count Dracula."
>
> His scorn for what his homeland has become knows no bounds.
> He suggests, for example, that the United Nations would be
> "stronger if they kicked the US out of it: the US would be
> in quite a separate orbit". He is also unafraid to carry on
> drawing attention to the illegitimacy of President Bush. "At
> least five members of the Supreme Court should have been put
> on trial [for installing Bush] by the Senate, which is in
> charge of that under the constitution. Two certainly should
> have recused themselves. Clarence Thomas's wife was working
> to recruit people for the Bush administration; he should not
> have sat in judgement. Antonin Scalia's son was working for
> the law firm that represented Bush before the Supreme Court.
> That isn't done. Without those two, the decision would have
> gone for Gore."
>
> All these criticisms could easily be used to portray Vidal
> as unpatriotic or, that laziest of cliches, "on the side of
> the terrorists". Yet he is plainly disgusted at the callous
> nature of the 11 September attack: "I am against the death
> penalty in general, and I am certainly against privatising
> it." He tries to see beyond the sensational pictures, both
> of the initial attack and the US retaliation. "My task is to
> try to get people to understand why something happens. I
> live in a country where everyone is trained from birth never
> to ask why. 'That man is evil - that's why he did it. That's
> the answer. He's evil.' Only with the fundamentally, totally
> uneducated could you get away with this sort of
> rationalising. I'm a true protest-ant, so I do protest at
> the ignorance. And that's my unpopular role, alas."
>
> Vidal has been a fierce critic of America's support for
> Israel in the past, leading to predictable accusations of
> anti-Semitism. Does he feel that the attacks are the price
> the US is paying for supporting the Zionist cause? "Partly.
> But in Bin Laden's case, it's more complex . . . What
> triggered him was the Gulf war and the Saudi royal family
> allowing American troops to set up base . . . For Bin Laden,
> this was sacrilege. This was the holy land of the Prophet,
> and under no circumstances should the infidels be there . .
> . So I would think that he's far more angry with the royal
> Saudis than he is with George W Bush, or any Americans.
> We're just an outside instrument that is feeding heretical
> elements in his world."
>
> He does not share the prevailing media depiction of Osama
> Bin Laden as a fanatic. "He has shown no sign of fanaticism
> in any of the stories I've been able to get on him: he seems
> rather secular. Which means that maybe he is part of a
> group. He seems more like a CEO to me, an organiser who
> raises money, does the salesmanship and so on, and then he
> has the crazies who go up there and run their aeroplanes
> into buildings."
>
> Vidal displays a certain amount of detached admiration for
> Bin Laden's timing when he speaks of "the brilliance of it,
> to hit the moment that depression has just hit the US, and
> we're letting go hundreds of thousands of workers. Europe is
> about to experience the euro, which I think will be the
> biggest mess we've seen in years. I mean, what a moment of
> awful confusion that Osama decided to do his programme over
> Manhattan and the District of Columbia."
>
> There also remains the possibility that Bin Laden was
> provoked. A Pakistani diplomat has claimed that the US
> threatened to enter Afghanistan to seize Bin Laden in July,
> which may mean that the World Trade Center attack was in
> fact a pre-emptive strike. Vidal has dedicated the past few
> years to showing that Franklin D Roosevelt knowingly
> provoked Pearl Harbor. So does he believe that the next
> great attack on American soil, 60 years later, may be
> similar?
>
> "Well, that's what we went through when Kennedy got shot.
> Those of us who knew him and who knew Washington knew that
> he and Bobby had been trying to kill Castro ever since the
> Bay of Pigs. Our first thought was that Castro beat them to
> it - he killed him. And Bobby, who was then attorney general
> and remained so for a year, which meant he was in charge of
> the FBI, never investigated it. He didn't want to go near
> it, for fear that the Kennedy brothers would be involved. So
> that murder case was never investigated." So it's plausible
> that there was a similar provocation by George W Bush?
> "Perfectly plausible, yes."
>
> There is just a hint - although Vidal doesn't state it
> explicitly - that this makes the attack much more
> understandable. "To understand why a man did it is a very
> important thing to do. Same thing with Timothy McVeigh [the
> Oklahoma bomber]. And if Castro had been behind the Kennedy
> killings, which he wasn't, one would have to say he had a
> motive. They kept trying to kill him all the time." So Bin
> Laden, in Vidal's view, is responding to US foreign policy.
>
> The terrorist actions seem to have reinforced Vidal's
> isolationism. He has consistently argued that the US should
> withdraw from its commitments in Nato, Kosovo, the Middle
> East and other trouble spots. His vision is diametrically
> opposed to Tony Blair's of a "world community". Vidal
> dismisses Blair's plans as "positively viceregal", and
> impractical "unless you're going to work out a kind of
> blueprint for world government". He says that the Prime
> Minister thinks "the Brits would like to see themselves as a
> major player, with a great empire . . . You know, he's an
> actor, and that's a very good role. It's fun to play that
> and he has no responsibility at all. Dubbya's going to have
> to have the bombers go through the White House. Dubbya is
> really at risk now."
>
> The best America can do, Vidal believes, is retreat. He
> believes that "elements south of the Russian border" are
> "susceptible to religious mania", and it "might be just as
> well that we are forewarned, and never provocative. Do not
> provoke. That's the message I really have to say about US
> policy. [The problem] is the endless provocation that the US
> goes in for - generally out of just sheer ignorance."
>
> His homeland, he reminds me, has no sense of history. This
> may be Vidal's tragedy. He now lives in self-imposed exile
> atop an Italian mountain. He occasionally lobs intellectual
> grenades across the Atlantic: keenly polished ideas that
> expose the bland dishonesty of so much American culture. Yet
> even now, when the US might at last be forced to re-examine
> its identity, his countrymen are deaf to his erudite
> arguments. Perhaps, on second thoughts, this is America's
> tragedy, not Vidal's.