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Blaming America by Ken Sanes Susan Sontag has been attacked so many times for her recent criticism of America's leadership, I assumed that what she wrote was a significant statement in opposition to our current foreign policy. When I finally read her work on the web site of the New Yorker, I was surprised to discover that all the controversy was generated by a three-paragraph item by her in the column, "The Talk of the Town". But what was even more surprising was the odd disconnect between the style of Sontag's piece and its content. The style is powerful and angry. It is clearly an expression of something deeply felt, by a writer who knows how to use words to make her point. But much of the content is evasive, apparently because Sontag is afraid to say what she really means. A good example is this excerpt in which Sontag tries to explain why the terrorist attack of Sept. 11 took place: "The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." What is striking about these comments is that they imply that America was attacked because it engaged in wrongdoing. They depict a "self-proclaimed superpower", full of arrogance, that kills in a cowardly way from afar and that suddenly has had the killing brought home. But, if you look closely, Sontag never exactly says this. Instead, she merely accuses the news media and government of failing to explain that the attack was "a consequence of specific American alliances and actions". And when she suggests that America's military action has been cowardly, she presents her point as a lesson in semantics on the words "cowardly" and "courage". The rest of Sontag's piece is similarly indirect when it comes to her belief in America's guilt. For example, Sontag complains that many public figures "are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration", but they are afraid to speak out. But she doesn't say what those policies are or that she too is opposed to them or, for that matter, that she too is concerned about speaking out. In another comment, Sontag accuses America's leadership of stifling the disagreement on which democracy depends. But once again she doesn't reveal the kind of disagreement that is being suppressed, except to say that it can offer an "historical awareness" we can use to understand the terrorist attack. As she puts it, the nation's leaders, "consider their task to be a
manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the
politics of a democracy - which entails disagreement, which promotes
candor - has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve
together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical
awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may
continue to happen." In many ways, the piece is also a plea for a more open debate that would allow Sontag and others of like mind to state their criticisms without fear of retaliation. In other words, the piece is an effort at self-liberation: it pleads with the reader to let it come out from behind its veil. But, even in this less direct form, Sontag's piece evoked a good deal of ridicule, which indicates why she didn't say everything she meant. Boston Globe columnist Martin Nolan wrote that she is "high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense", while a column on the National Review web site referred to her as a member of "the anti-American Left". At the same time, at least one columnist, Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post, appears to have been taken in by Sontag's lack of directness. According to Cohen, "Sontag, while indelicate, hardly called for the United States not to respond." Another writer who has said something much like Sontag is the well-known author and media critic on the left, Robert McChesney. In a Sept. 24 interview in LiP Magazine, McChesney too criticized the media and government for failing to educate the public on America's guilt. But unlike Sontag's well-wrought evasions, McChesney's words are direct and blunt. What Sontag weaves her words around, he comes right out and says. As he puts it: "...Americans have no idea of the United States' own history in the world as a supporter of terrorism. The United States is, I think, by any honest account, the leading terrorist institution in the world today. I think it was Amnesty International, just a few years ago in one of its reports, that wrote that on any given day, some government or private organization is torturing, abusing, or killing people anywhere in the world, and chances are, more often than not, that it's a US-sponsored group or government. This part of our history is totally unknown to the American people. It's outrageous!" And again: "One example of this that is most striking in the case of the Middle East is our support of sanctions against the government of Iraq, which, by the UN's own reckoning, has led up to the death of up to a million civilians, including perhaps as many as 500,000 children. All in an effort to make life basically so unbearable for the poor people of
Iraq - the weakest people of Iraq - that they'll rise up and revolt and overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. In these comments, McChesney doesn't merely say that America is morally equivalent to the terrorists. In blaming America rather than Saddam Hussein for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, he suggests that America is far worse than Osama bin Laden. He goes on to say that America is blameworthy because of its support for Israeli attacks on Palestinians and for its support of "extraordinarily corrupt and vile governments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait". When you add all this together, he says, "you begin to see that, gee, there might be grounds for some people in the Middle East and the Islamic world not to think that the US is the font of all wonderfulness". McChesney's accusations are obviously unacceptable. In the case of America's relationship with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for example, they fail to take into account that America is forced to interact with all kinds of nations in a very imperfect world. But he and Sontag do point to something essential, which is that America has to educate itself about its past mistakes in foreign policy. The abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout; the decision to remain dependent on foreign sources of oil; the failure to press for a settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict and to better communicate with the Islamic world, and the failure to lead a world movement for the containment of weapons of mass destruction are only a handful of the mistakes America needs to understand. But McChesney and Sontag, as well as others on the left, want to go considerably beyond this, I suspect, because their position is ultimately based on opposition to the way America exercises its power. What they would have us learn is that the attack of Sept. 11 was a response (although not an excusable response) to American aggression. When they suggest this, they buy into at least part of the terrorist line and probably also project their own opposition to American policies onto bin Laden. The reality is that bin Laden's form of murderous fanaticism probably would have emerged with or without America's presence in the region. It merely picked America as its target because we are there. What we are dealing with here is something that is essentially irrational. No policy America adopted would quiet its fanaticism, which is part of an inevitable and extreme reaction to modernity. If America had never been in the region, bin Laden or others like him would be aiming their attacks at New Delhi, Moscow or Tel Aviv because their mindset is expansionist and intolerant. And, if America were to publicly confess guilt and abandon its policies in the region, as Sontag and McChesney want, the terrorists would be closer to their ultimate goal of imposing a new tyranny amid the rubble of civilization. ------ Note. Sontag and the National Review are part of a larger trend in which activists on the left and right are fighting old battles in what appears to be a new phase of history. Some on the hard left are once again opposing military action and, like Sontag, they accuse America of engaging in wrongdoing. And some on the hard right are again calling the left unAmerican, while mainstream thought similarly rejects the left's accusations. This is a battle we've seen before, but it is now being fought out in the new arena of post-Sept. 11 politics. LiP Magazine responds to "Blaming America"
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