> UNFORTUNATELY, THE POLITICAL LEFT has also shirked its
> responsibilities and just as equally avoided learning anything from
> this catastrophe.
I thought that the Adam Shatz piece in The Nation showed that a lot of people
on the left are trying very hard to learn something from the catastrophe.
People think one thing today, and something else tomorrow. It's hard to
puzzle out, and it's going to take some time.
>
> September 11 revealed America, for once, as victim instead of
> victimizer. The left's Manichean view that only two forces --
> American imperialism and appropriate reaction against it -- shape
> world events was no longer viable.
September 11 revealed American *citizens* as victims (and I don't mean to slight the many non-Americans working in the twin towers who also died in the 9/11 attacks). "America" is a big and complicated place--there's the state, and the corporate oligarchy, and the millions of us who want to get by and have relatively decent lives. Why is it out of the question to ask if the actions of the American state, and the American oligarchy who most influence what that state does, might have had something to do with setting off the events of 9/11? Exactly who on the left holds this "Manichean view" that Cooper speaks of?
>
> The left might have seen that American military deployment is not a
> priori evil. Virtually none of the dire predictions the left made
> about the war in Afghanistan have come to pass. The U.S. has not
> (unfortunately) occupied the country. Millions were not driven out or
> killed or forced into famine. American ground troops have not been
> dragged into a Vietnam-like quagmire. The regime we have put into
> power is not worse than -- or the same as -- the Taliban. It's
> backward and corrupt, but it's better. Civilians were killed -- as
> they are in all wars. (The Salvadoran guerrillas -- heroes to the
> left -- once boasted of their successful assassination of dozens of
> civilian mayors of poor rural towns.) But there was no targeting, no
> carpet-bombing, of Afghan civilians.
It seems to me that there was a general consensus throughout the "broad left" that the surviving perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes deserved to be brought to justice. People differed about what the most appropriate methods might be. People on the left tended to favor a truly international effort, and one more oriented towards police action rather than a military assault. Why do you think the US military even cares about civilian casualties? Why was there no indiscriminate carpet bombing a la Vietnam? That's an achievement of the US left, and a legacy of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Why not try to build on that?
>
> If it wished, the left could have seen an America that had matured
> and progressed over the last 50 years. It could have taken pride in
> an America that didn't lock up millions of Arab-Americans, where the
> level of hate crimes barely flickered upward. And while Attorney
> General Ashcroft has strained to stretch and snap constitutional
> guarantees, a resilient American civil society and a democratic, if
> flawed, court system have offered effective resistance. Two American
> citizens have been stripped of their legal rights and declared enemy
> combatants. That's two Americans too many. But it is only two. This
> is not martial law. This is not fascism. This is not Chile or
> Argentina or East Germany -- not even close.
Few have said it was like Chile or Argentina or East Germany. Things could easily trend that way, though, if no one offered resistance. Left to themselves, the Ashcrofts of this world would be more than happy to pursue their own "dirty war." It's the "job" of the left to offer resistance. I think we've done a decent job under the circumstances. I agree that America has "matured and progressed over the last 50 years." The fact that it has done so is almost entirely owing to the effort and dedication of the American left.
>
> Especially for the left, September 11 offered a unique opportunity to
> come back home, to find commonality and identification with a society
> from which too many progressives and radicals have felt alienated and
> estranged. In the suffering of September 11, the American left might
> have taken the hand of its fellow Americans and together searched --
> at least for a moment -- for what unites rather than divides us.
OK. There are a lot of good reasons to feel alienated and estranged from this society, but no one can help but feel human solidarity with the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and identification with the many millions who sympathized with them. Plenty of commonality and identification there. The problem is that the right sought almost from the outset to cynically exploit those natural human emotions in furtherance of their own agenda of war and domestic repression. What's the best way to fight that?
>
> But American leftists are surprisingly ready to brand those who
> depart from their views as "fascists." The left, already tiny and
> isolated, has too frequently derived its industrial-strength
> self-righteousness from its own marginality. The left actually fears
> engagement with the broader society around it. It chooses
> self-loathing. Or, better, the loathing of all those common folk in
> whose name and interests it claims to be "struggling." So when
> millions of ordinary Americans, shocked and frightened by September
> 11, and moved by the scale of the human tragedy, and wanting to do
> something, put out a flag, the American left responded too often not
> with compassion, but with scorn.
This is just a canard. The left "loathes" common folk, does it? Perhaps
Cooper has simply internalized the caricature of the left that the right has
so successfully drawn. (Note that I do not assume that whoever may be
posting on LBO-talk at any given moment is at all representative of the
American left).
>
> What has been truly staggering over the past year has been the
> dogmatic refusal of much of the left to simply say "yes." Yes,
> America was attacked. Yes, we unequivocally mourn the unprovoked
> death of 3,000 fellow citizens. Yes, the window washers, the cooks,
> the secretaries and, yes, even the stockbrokers who were incinerated
> that morning a year ago were guilty of absolutely nothing, except
> showing up to work on time.
>
> Instead, from the left, we get a steady stream of "yes/buts." Yes, to
> all the above -- but we killed more people in Vietnam. Or yes, but we
> created Osama bin Laden (a patent lie).
OK, "created" might be a bit strong, but so is "a patent lie."
>Or yes, but we starved more
> babies in Iraq. Or yes, but . . . well, you fill in the blank: But
> what about the oil pipelines? But what about covering for the Saudis?
> And so on and so forth ad nauseam. Every possible explanation from
> the left except the one obvious and true explanation right before our
> eyes: that a conspiracy of highly educated, religiously motivated
> zealots -- as opposed to impoverished and oppressed freedom fighters
> -- ruthlessly massacred 3,000 of us a year ago. And would have just
> as easily killed 10 times as many in the same barbaric onslaught.
> Period.
"Yes, but" goes with the territory. It's the "job" of the left to say "yes,
but." And who says that these AQ right wing religious fanatics were
"impoverished and oppressed freedom fighters"? They were nothing of the
kind. I hate their fucking guts. But how did this conspiracy come into
being, anyway?
>
> On this anniversary of September 11, without guilt or hesitation, I
> mourn their deaths. And I mourn a political culture whose moral
> compass has been driven awry by ideological rigidity from all sides.
I too mourn their deaths without guilt or hesitation. Is Cooper trying to suggest that leftists "hesitate" to mourn for people who died horrible deaths jumping out of skyscraper windows from 90 floors up? The hell with this "plague on both your houses" stuff from people who are supposed to be on the left side.
Jacob Conrad