Click above to visit the entire site
Friday Fronts
11 April 2008:
Tony Judt on American Amnesia, in The New York Review of Books
In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, historian Tony Judt asks, "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" He poses the questions, specifically, to Americans — Americans who, in his view, have quite prematurely and without properly understanding its significance put the Twentieth Century (formerly "the American Century") behind them.
The belief that that was then and this is now embraced much more than just the defunct dogmas and institutions of cold war–era communism. During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.
Americans are probably predisposed, genetically, to regard novelties not as passing fads but as truly millennial developments. Descended from people who were possessed of the immense faith and hope that it took to venture across a rough ocean to a new land, they find more traction in the future than in the past, and seem to be unhappy if there's no reason to believe that something remarkable and new isn't in the works right now. As Mr Judt points out, too, Americans have been very fortunate. In addition to the manifold blessings of the New World's resources, they have enjoyed its distance from most wars. It's to this bit of luck that Mr Judt attributes modern American swagger.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
(Mr Judt puts his finger on what makes me so uncomfortable with those little flag pins that seem to stand, on so many suit lapels, for the military uniforms that civilians are not entitled to wear.)
Finally, he is horrified by the consequences of the lack of clear thought behind the "war on terrorism."
This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with "Islamofascists," "extremists" from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant "Islamistan," who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy "our way of life"—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.
The worst of these consequences is, of course, torture. A rogues' gallery of distinguished professors and jurists asserts that torture, although regrettable, is sometimes permissible. That it is never permissible used to be a cornerstone of the American Way — or at least that is what many writers, Mr Judt included, suggest if they do not state. My own view is that torture has always been part of the American Way, provided that it was limited to clearly demarcated victims, namely, African-Americans. When that outlet was plugged, xenophobia sought another target, and eventually found it in Muslims*, whose potential for exoticism, like that of American slaves, had been drained by long interacted with Europeans. Much as I hate to say it, I draw comfort from this view, which at least counters the idea that civic morality has suffered a steep decline in recent decades.
The sad answer to the question in Mr Judt's title — "Not much; maybe nothing" — suggests another question: how badly will the United States need to be chastened before Americans accept the peculiar past that cannot be left behind, because it has piled up on these shores?
* By 9/11, American bigotry had shifted its enmity toward the defenders of African-American civil liberties, namely, liberals.
Copyright (c) 2008 Pourover Press