The heading asks if the left is blaming the victim.
The article claims the cruellest sickets response is by two American
superpatriots. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I hadn't realised they were
left. The authors apparently are not aware that both have apologised.
Grief and patriotism can quickly become a weapon of the most reactionary
forces. Bush's grief did not stop him from the policy announcement that he
would punish not only all the terrorists but any state that harbored or gave
support to them. So not criticising immediately is to let Bush off scot
free. An orgy of jingoism. It is fortunate that the president and many
officials have condemned any racist backlash. What if they had not? Would it
be unpatriotic to point out that a Sikh was murdered?
The line between explaining an atrocity and justifying it is fuzzy.
Really? Why? We have seen what vigilant policing means. It means calling any
explanation a justification. The distinction is easy. When a person thinks
an act is justified they would say things like so: I think the terrorist
acts were justified retaliatiory acts because of X, Y, and Z acts of the
US. If you were explaining them you should say it like so: One can make
sense of or explain the acts of the terrorists by understanding that they
see them as justified retaliatory acts because of X, Y, and Z. The
difficulty is this. In a situation where the vast majority both
intellectuals and others are shocked, outraged, and have strong feelings of
solidarity with thier fellow citizens there is also a strong tendency to
demand solidarity behind leaders. Now if X, Y , and Z are also horrendous
acts that in a cooler moment any citizen could understand as obviously evil,
this makes ones response much more problematic. It does not mean that we
blame the act upon the US but it does mean that the US could be a
contributing factor and that the US is not representing civilisation,
freedom, democracy against the forces of evil. Now it is possible that an
explanation might cause a person to see an act as justified. However, I
doubt that any explanation would convince any but certain like-minded
fundamentalists that the direct killing of thousands of innocent people were
justified. However, an explanation might very well show that the US might
have been a contributing factor in creating the conditions that are apt to
spawn the particular outlook of these terrorists. The problem with critical
analysis at a time of great emotion is not that it is in bad taste. It is
inevitable that to some degree it will be seen as such. The problem is that
it puts into question part of the emotional response: namely that the
terrorists are pure evil and that we are purely victims of that evil. If
they are purely to blame then the only problem is just retribution and of
course this means getting a leader dead or alive and punishing not only
individuals responsible but states. To bring up critical questions such as:
Is this a war? Why? Doesn't an accused deserve a trial? Where is the
evidence? Is the US to be the accuser, judge, and executioner. How are
states punished without killing many innocents? What will be the response of
the terrorists if we do this rather than that..? All this is to wait until
emotions cool down. But you didnt notice that this is a war. All our focus
should be the war effort. Criticism, especially criticism that points to any
reasons that the enemy might have for their responses especially if those
response cause further grief and innocent deaths will be seen again as
giving aid and comfort to the enemy since they would indicate there were
faults in the US. We would be blaming the victim according to the logic
posted here. This stuff is not worth wasting more time on.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message -----
From: Ian Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Lbo-Talk@Lists. Panix. Com <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 10:11 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:17383] Is 'the left' blaming the victim?
> Blaming the victims
>
>
> < [EMAIL PROTECTED] >
> Jonathan Freedland
> Wednesday September 19, 2001
> The Guardian
>
> The cruellest, sickest response to the calamity of September 11 has
> come from an unexpected quarter. Not from America's traditional
> enemies, but from within. Voiced not by Muslim radicals consumed with
> hatred for the Great Satan, but by two self-styled American
> super-patriots.
>
> Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the grand old men of America's
> Christian right, were swift to tell Americans who was to blame. "The
> abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will
> not be mocked," Falwell, onetime leader of the Moral Majority, told
> Robertson as they sat together on the latter's Christian Broadcasting
> Network. "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and
> the feminists and the gays and lesbians... I point the finger in their
> face and say: 'You helped this happen'."
>
> Of all the multiple uglinesses of that diatribe, perhaps the worst is
> Falwell's cardinal moral error, blaming the victims. Most people know
> that, when a woman is raped or an ethnic minority is persecuted, there
> is nothing more insidious than asking questions about the prior
> conduct of those who suffered. It implies a causal connection: you
> behaved like this and that was the result. It says, you had it coming.
> We can see the horror of that suggestion when it comes from the likes
> of Falwell and Robertson. But we may not be so vigilant when those we
> admire on the liberal left edge close to the same, victim-blaming
> terrain. For just as the televangelists held America responsible for
> last week's American tragedy, so have a procession of progressive
> luminaries and their supporters (including on these pages) - albeit
> for radically different reasons.
>
> To the audience of last week's Question Time, for example, it was not
> America's permissiveness toward abortion and gay rights that was the
> problem, but US foreign policy in the Middle East and the developing
> world. Of course the former view is bonkers while the latter has logic
> and considerable evidence on its side. Even so, the anger,
> self-righteousness and sheer insensitivity directed at America has
> been a match for the callousness of those TV preachers. Glance at the
> New Statesman editorial this week, which asks whether the Americans
> incinerated in the World Trade Centre were "as innocent and as
> undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants" and answers,
> "Well, yes and no."
>
> The offensiveness here rests on three counts. First, the timing
> stinks. Only hours after the catastrophe, surely it was time to do
> what most Britons were doing: standing in the shoes of the bereaved.
> The immediate aftermath of the attack felt like a moment for mourning,
> reflection and grief. Those first, dazed days were not the right time
> for a searching analysis of US foreign policy - let alone for a finger
> wagged in the face of the American people, telling them they are
> loathed the world over.
>
> The second, related offence was tone. Almost any argument can be made
> without lapsing into bad taste - but one needs to keep an ear
> especially open to language when the rubble is still smouldering and
> more than 5,000 loved ones are still missing. Too many on the left
> forgot the first task of the progressive: to feel compassion for their
> fellow human being. The vitriol hurled at Americans, even while they
> still wept, should be a source of shame. The line between explaining
> an atrocity, which is an essential task, and excusing it is fuzzy and
> requires vigilant policing - a vigilance lacking these last few days.
>
> But the most serious flaw in this "blame America" critique is its
> substance. It's not that the US record abroad is not filled with
> appalling atrocities - coups planned and executed, whole continents
> destabilised, vile regimes propped up. But the claim that it is these
> specifics which have driven the Islamic world insane with rage is
> shaky at best.
>
> Take the first two charges on the anti-American rap sheet: the
> decade-long US war on Iraq and the US military presence in Saudi
> Arabia. They sound like convincing provocations until one remembers
> that America was branded the Great Satan long before either
> development: the stars and stripes were burned and US embassy
> officials taken hostage in Tehran 22 years ago. Also: if the US army's
> presence in Saudi Arabia so incenses Islamic fundamentalists then why
> do they never target the Saudi royal family, which invited the
> Americans in as protectors against Saddam Hussein in the first place?
> Nor do these advocates ever address those bits of the US record which
> don't fit the America-against-Islam thesis. The Americans intervened
> twice in the Balkans in the last decade - both times on the side of
> Muslims who faced ethnic cleansing. (When the US did that,
> incidentally, the same crowd opposed them then, too.)
>
> Above all, we're told, it is American support for Israel which so
> enrages the developing world. Yet that argument hardly seems to stack
> up. It was George Bush Sr who took the hardest line on Israel -
> denying $10bn of loan guarantees in pursuit of a freeze on settlement
> activity - and yet he was as hated across the Middle East as any other
> US president.
>
> No, there is a naivete in all these attempts to explain the fury that
> burst forth on September 11. They seem to suggest that if only the US
> pursued a different foreign policy, the hijackers would never have
> boarded those planes. Yet if Washington dropped the sanctions against
> Baghdad and pulled out of Saudi tomorrow, would it really make any
> difference? Wouldn't the hatreds on display in Iran in 1979 still be
> there?
>
> Equally, would a change of tack on Israel really alter much? The
> commentators may believe it is US support for Israel's 34-year-old
> occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that so angers Islamic
> fundamentalists. But, once again, they are naive. Last Tuesday's
> hijackers and the people who inspire them are not opposed to the
> post-1967 occupation: they are opposed to Israel's very existence,
> which they regard as an alien Jewish incursion into what should be
> Muslim lands. Only American support for that position - total
> eradication of the Jewish state - would begin to placate them.
>
> There is a kind of comfort in imagining the fault for last Tuesday
> lies in America's hands, because so then does the solution. That was
> Falwell's gospel and it is the New Statesman's too. The US merely has
> to shake off its evil ways and all will be well. But this is a false
> comfort. The harsher truth may be that America's offence consists of
> things it cannot do much to alter: its wealth, its modernity, its
> centrality in the global capitalist order, its brash westernness, its
> existence as an opposite pole to everything fundamentalist Islam
> stands for. Sure, it could tweak its foreign policy and it would be
> cosy to think that would prevent future atrocities. But the scarier
> truth might be that America is hated just for itself. And there is
> little it can do about that.
>
> Progressives need to recognise this, and tone down the anti-American
> invective, if they are to make headway in the struggle to come. We may
> well want to challenge a wrong-headed response to September 11, should
> President Bush stick to his "wanted dead-or-alive" and "crusade"
> rhetoric and make a dangerous move. But mainstream US ears will be
> closed to our pleas if we can be dismissed as callous critics who were
> never capable of sympathy, only blame.
>
