WHO ARE WE? THE ENEMY WITHIN
R.K.Kent
The fight for the White House was getting hot in the middle of last
year�s Summer but two major subjects were virtually missing from the
debates. By some silent convention, foreign policy was taken off the
table. It was widely held that the American People were basically
disinterested in what was going on out there, beyond the two Oceans
which provided an endless shield against ground invasions. The other
missing issue might be called the need for Introspection. There was only
one major political person that brought it up, Senator Joseph
Lieberman. He made references to foreign policy more than once as well.
As he was the Vice-Presidential Candidate I was moved to write him an
Open Letter (16 August,2000) with the ensuing extract.
�Dear Senator, you have the charm and the appearance of a good man, a
decent man, and when you said that the next frontier is not in front of
us but within us you spoke the most fundamental truth so hidden by a
wealthy and prosperous America. Yes, we need to know who we are, what
we are becoming and where we are going vis-�-vis the rest of the
changing world. We must have a serious foreign policy discussion. We
must shed the foreign policy arrogance of the Clintonites. We must get
rid of the Punishing Culture as God has not appointed us to judge all
the others. We must once again come to respect the U.N. Charter and
International Law instead of urinating on both. We cannot have a
convincing Human Rights policy by being semi-blind in Africa and
brutally selective in ex-Yugoslavia. We must not devalue Human Rights by
using it as a foreign policy tool of our own Imperialism. Believe it or
not, Senator, we have become the New Evil Empire as our imperial mask
came off the face in Serbia and Kosovo. We are widely hated and we are
misleading ourselves into thinking otherwise.�
Nothing ever came by way of an attempted answer and nothing was expected
either. Senator Lieberman was one of the leading exponents of the very
same Punishing Culture I had been trying to address, to no avail, for
at least five years of sustained writing. In May of this year I
disseminated over the Internet the urgent notice that a most Dangerous
Gap is on hand already. It is between the way our leaders perceive us
and the world and the way the rest of the globe�s leaders and
populations, with relatively rare exceptions, perceive us. Both
foreign policy and Introspection disappeared with the debilitating
spectacle as to who really won the election of last November. In
addition, it left the nation badly divided on this issue and more
disunited than ever since the war in Viet Nam. It has taken the
magnitude of a gruesome and bloody jolt at home to return foreign policy
closer to the central concerns of the American People and it would
appear that Introspection has started to unfold with such a basic
question as to why we are hated. The immediate signposts are , however,
most disheartening..
One of the more serious criticisms I had received on more than one
occasion is that my criticism of our behavior abroad is based mainly on
what we did to the Serbs and that the whole spectrum of our foreign
policy cannot be evaluated in a solipsistic fashion. Some have called me
a �Serb apologist.� On the second count I make no apologies for being
an apologist for a people under a terrible ten-year cerebral terror and
open racism. . On the first count, my answer could not be less clear. I
minored in Balkan History, I am fluent in what used to be called
Serbo-Croat, I am also a Historian by craft. I am no longer acutely
concerned with Serbia. Its people cannot sink much lower on their own
after what was done to them both externally and internally. Serbia can
only go up. Not down. Unless our governors continue to regard and
treat the Serbs as an enemy.
The constant stress on one area impacted in a major way by our foreign
policy derives not from my ethnic origin but from the simple fact that
this is the most egregious and best documented example of our repeated
Imperialist foreign policy stupidities and the most tell-tale example
of manipulation of the American People since the Viet-Nam war. To bring
this into the mainstream of our intellectual and political life has been
a Mission Impossible. My printed articles in pursuit of proximity to
truth had to migrate abroad, to France, a land in which conformism does
not have deep roots.
Our Black September revealed what is best in America as a nation. Some
300 firemen and policemen gave their lives to save anyone within the
confines of fiery hell. Our bulldozers removed almost a 100,000 tons
of debris in a week. The capacity for human sacrifice to save others and
the awesome technology brought to bear with organizational skills
revealed the true American Character. We even found a new and very real
and very American Hero. His name is Rudolph Juliani, not George W. Bush.
Yet, the very best was followed by the very worst. The Hawks who now run
the U.S. might are using it externally to pursue a foreign policy even
more extreme in its proposed content. President Clinton�s
foreign-policy Hawks were rank amateurs compared to the team around
George W. Bush. Under the guise of fighting terrorists everywhere
(and implants are some 60 countries) the �team� has abrogated for
itself the license to do whatever it wishes to do abroad in terms of
economics, politics, diplomacy and use of military power, primarily to
punish. More than that, it is reshaping the country internally by
demanding the unanimous support of the American People in every sphere
of life while being accountable to no one in reality. It is a sure sign
of emerging Totalitarianism, supported by Nationalistic corporate media
and the flag-waving super-patriots who demand to �bomb�em to hell out
there.� Ugly and racist attacks are already taking place against
American Arabs and Muslims or even anyone with a turban on the head. To
be sure, leading figures and officials are all speaking out against such
acts and the FBI is threatening to arrest all the perpetrators. Any
other approach in a country as ethnically diverse in origin as America
would be catastrophic and shure to �Balkanize� us beyond repair. No
doubt, the contemptible and cowardly acts will diminish unless more
attacks are brought home. Yet, there is emerging a most frightening
element of change.
It comes in the Sunday edition of the New York Times� �Week in Review,�
front page. Its message is that anyone who does not support the
President and the
Government is either a foreign-born person unassimilated into the
American fabric. Or, else, is an unpatriotic, un-American, almost an
enemy of the American People and State. Free hand at home and abroad,
with unquestioned support and lack of any real accountability with teeth
in it spell the end of a Democracy that lasted for over 230 years.
Others may hate America for the behavior of its leaders abroad but the
real enemy of American Democracy is within. It resides in all who
substitute obedience and conformity for the capacity and the will to
think independently of the pack. Since this is the beginning of a season
on those deemed to be �less� American because they are hyphenated,
foreign born, openly critical or simply dissenting, let this writer
outline what this American looks like. I embody all of the components
under assault sooner or later. I am a dissenting and critical
foreign-born .naturalized American citizen. On top of that I am an
egghead. To think that I served in the U.S. Army intelligence, posted on
the border of my native land, with a secret clearance, and solid
anti-Communist credentials, only 47 years ago, should make me even more
an object of disapproval.
First, the credo. As an �ethnic Serb� I do not hate the Croats because
of what their Nazis did to the Serbs in World War II and even more
recently. I do not hate Bosnians of Muslim faith because some of them
committed gruesome crimes against the Serbs between 1992 and 1995. I do
not hate the Kosovo Albanians because of their would-be �Liberation
Army�and its ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and
other from Kosovo, amid kidnapping and murders. I do not hate the
Germans because of their SS and Gestapo, Nazi concentration camps and
butcheries in the Balkans, in Russia, in Poland and elsewhere. I can not
hate �the Arabs� some of whom have struck my adopted and beloved land.
Years ago, in a Lebanon just out of French Colonial rule, during the
government of Bishara el-Khoury, its Arabs, both Muslim and
Christian-Maronite, extended their hospitality and kindness over some
four years to this writer as a young foreigner who strayed into the
Middle East. I cannot be �anti-Semitic� in respect to �the Jews.� I am
unhappy when I hear �the Jews� used as an undifferentiated
collective. There are Noble Jews and Shanty Jews, Zionists and
anti-Zionists, Great Intellects and small men, Lovers of Humanity and
its Abusers, Israelis and Americans of Jewish faith, religious
individuals and anarchists, blonds, redheads and brunettes of Jewish
faith against whom I could not possibly have been oriented in my younger
days. I am partly Jewish-American by culture and learning if not by
religion.
I do not hate some of the members of the previous Administration in
Washington because they carried out stupid policies and allowed the
might of America to scramble their brains, with worse to come. I have
fought valiantly within myself not to translate dislikes of individuals
and groupings into HATE. I love America because its roots are
anti-Imperialistic and I find UN-American all efforts to become an
Imperialist and neo-Fascist state in some modern form. There is nothing
Patriotic in it, only the will-to-power.I have no difficulty loving both
Serbia and America or vice-versa, with or without hyphens. My mind has
no nationality, only my heart and loyalty. How did I express it? I spend
a quarter of a century in one of our leading Universities teaching
students the History of Africa. I got into the subject with one of the
earliest PhDs at home and I got into it because I wanted to return
dignity to fellow-Americans of African descent roundly deprived of
their ancestral past. I learned from Africa something about how
histories are written by the Victors and the Herrenvolk. In the case of
Africa their past was either denied or of no �value.� In the words of an
English Twentieth-century Historian of Europe, �we� in the Civilized
West have no right to amuse ourselves by studying the gyrations of
wild tribes in remote and irrelevant parts of the globe. When asked once
by a reporter what he thought of Western Civilization, Mahatmas Ghandi
said �I am glad they have one.� I have seen and am still running into
pundits who dabble in the history of Serbia, mostly without any deep
qualifications, freshly-minted, who demand that the �Serbs confront
their past,� on the one hand and �escape� from some sort of �historical
straight-jacket � defined by
the Victor. Only two choices. Externally imposed history or
historical amnesia and, with it, loss of identity.
Yet, my most profound and sustained acts of loyalty to the American
People consisted of teaching an entire generation of students how to
think in historical terms in order not to repeat mistakes of the past,
in order to know where Wrong and Right happen to be CONTEXTUALLY
and how they intersect over time, in order to learn to think for
themselves. I will put up that kind of Patriotism against any flag
waving. I may have fallen in the attempt to infuse historical thinking
in most of my students, undergraduate and graduate, but I am confident
that the critical acumen will surface to stop our leaders from
perpetuating the Wonderland in which everything is good and righteous at
home and all the evil resides abroad. Maybe they will even create a
network of Citizens Committees to make those who make our foreign policy
accountable. As a people that still retains elements of Democracy we
must persuade our leaders to change the Punishing Culture and abandon
arrogance as a method of dealing with friends and foes alike. A whole
set of concrete steps comes to mind but that is a subject for another
article if widely asked for by the mighty.controllers of thaught in
America.
Raymond Knezevich Kent,
Emeritus
History Department,
University of California,
Berkeley, CA. 94720
(510/642-1971)
. .
Serbian News Network - SNN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.antic.org/
