Comments interjected below:
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/25/01 03:21PM >>>
Dear Comrades,
Here is something that I hope you will find useful in the Great Debate about how
to react to the Sept. ll tragedy.
Bertell Ollman
EXPLANATION YES; JUSTIFICATION NO
By Bertell Ollman
One of our biggest problems in trying to account for what happened on Sept.
llth is how to keep our explanations from sounding like a justification. Most of us
will already have experienced this sleight of hand, and once it happens there is
little chance of convincing your listeners of anything. Worse, many of them will now
think of you as being on the side of those who perpetrated this horror and treat you
accordingly. This is enough to keep a lot of people silent, who would otherwise be
raising some much needed questions.
What is the mechanism at work here? And what can we do to avoid this
misunderstanding, or, at least, to minimize its effects? Leaving aside the willful
twisting of what we have to say by those who don't want other people to hear it, there
would appear to be two main reasons for our difficulty. First, most people are hurting
badly right now and are understandably very angry at the people who attacked the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. They have a great emotional need to express these
feelings and to hear from others who feel the same. It is largely a way of
establishing a sense of solidarity with the victims of this terrible tragedy. Any
attempt to broach the subject of why the attack took place that bypasses the silent
cry for emotional bonding allows these strong feelings to interfere with the reception
of what you are trying to say, and, in the worst of cases, to render you suspect as an
insensitive outsider who is trying to justify what happened. So, BEFORE wading into
any social-political explanation of events, we must make sure that our audience knows
that we share their pain and anger.
((((((((((
CB: I agree with your analysis of the emotions here.
Must say that this situation throws into relief a type of alienation ( sorry ) I have:
I hate America ( even though I am an American). So unfortunately, I literally don't
share my audience's pain and anger. I can empathise, but not sympathize with 'em.
After hearing about murders and tragedies regularly on the daily news for years,
hearing of wars and mass deaths in distant places regularly, one has to develop a
hardness and thick skin in response to bad news in general , otherwise one would be
perpetually depressed. So, not having anyone close to me who actually died in the
events of Sept. 11, I am not feeling pain and anger. I'm feeling like "what goes
around comes around" and "(Cruise) missiles out, ( hijacked airplane) missiles in", "
you reap what you sow ".
Maybe I am not the one to be giving speeches. Perhaps it will just take a while before
most Americans will be able to "hear" the truth: Your government is the biggest
terrorist organization in the world , and unless you get it out that business, you
become more and more personally at risk for revenge actions for your government's
crimes. As I say below, my approach is more the reason not to go to war now, is that
eventually they will get us back again.
Who was it that said the truth hurts sometimes.
((((((
Second, as for the relation between explanation and justification, it must be
admitted that one can sound a lot like the other. In ordinary life, for example, an
explanation of an event is often undertaken in order to arrive at a judgement of the
persons involved in it. Many people tend to listen to explanations as they would to a
court case leading up to a verdict of guilt or innocence. In common parlance, too, to
say that some act is "understandable" is at least to suggest that the people who did
it were acting rationally, that is from reasons we can uncover, and that what they
did, therefore, cannot be rejected out of hand. I am not saying that this is what
follows from understanding any event, but rather that calling it "understandable"
often suggests just this to others. My guess is that this is what lies behind the
hostility of many people for any attempt to try to explain the Holocaust.
Given the slippery slope on which the connection between explanation and
justification lies, I am afraid there will always be some who mistake any effort to
explain the bombings as collusion with the enemy. Still, a lot can be done to minimize
this danger. We can, for example, make explicit the sharp distinction laid out above
between explanation and justification. We should then reverse the usual procedure of
leaving judgement for last by leading with a strong statement condemning without any
qualification the murder and the murderers of so many innocent people. Having issued
our judgement of the event at the start, far fewer people are likely to misunderstand
our search for an explanation as an indirect defense of the perpetrators.
((((((((
CB: From a rhetorical standpoint, you are correct of course,as is your whole point
here. However, I can't bring myself to make an official declaration that I am against
mass murder. It is a slanderous insult to me to even imply that I am not against it.
As I told someone who engaged me along the lines you discuss, I have been struggling
for peace and against war, violence and mass murder more than anyone. I have been at
more peace and anti-war demos than most through the years. So, don't try to connect me
with these terrorists ( not you , the person I was talking with).
I threw in to be clear that I am opposed to political murder and assassination , and
support a mass peaceful movement for radical and revolutionary change of the country.
(((((
Next, in making the transition to explanation, it is important to stress why
this step is so important. If condemning the bombings as murder of innocent people is
all we need in order to punish the guilty parties, only an adequate understanding of
why it happened will enable us to bring about the changes necessary to ensure that it
will not happen again. Judgements are oriented toward the past. They are attempts to
categorize things in the past so we know where to place them in our thinking about the
present. However, without an accompanying explanation, judgements are poor guides to
developing policies for the future. Explanations, on the other hand, are oriented
toward the future. They are attempts to understand what went wrong in the past so that
changes can be made and the same mistakes are not repeated. Today, as we know, most
Americans have accepted policies based largely on their judgement of WHAT happened in
New York and Washington (laced with a heavy dose of emotions) rather than on any
reasonal explanation of WHY it happened. With the main causes of the tragedy untouched
because unexamined, the results of these policies are likely to prove catastrophic.
Is there still a chance to halt this descent into hell by - as we said in an
earlier crisis - "speaking truth to power"? Only if we find a way of making the
"truth" digestible, and this means, above all else, keeping our explanations from
sounding like justifications. In pursuit of this end, I have suggested - l) sharing
the pain and anger of our audience before we do anything else; 2) distinguishing
explanation as sharply as possible from justification; 3) presenting our condemnation,
our harsh judgement, of what happened before we set out to explain it; and 4) when we
begin our explanations, emphasizing the fact that only by understanding WHY this
terrible event occurred, only by finding its actual causes, will we be in a position
to construct a future that gives us the peace and security we all crave.
(((((((((
CB: I take a slightly different tact: Scare the bejeezes out of them. Look I say,
there is no way to guarantee there won't be any other opportunities for this type of
micro-terrorist-organism attack. Already the national and local news lead stories are
spilling the beans that there could be anthrax attacks. They haven't even gotten to
nuclear bombs in suitcases ( that I have seen) , which wouldn't even require hijacking
an airliner or the suicide of the perpetrator. And everytime the U.S. bombs and
murders thousands it creates thousands of survivors, many of whom a prime candidates
for someone who has only one purpose: get revenge. So, the only rational course for
the U.S. is to sue for peace. Martin Luther King and Jesus are right on this one. I
actually called for people to follow Jesus' law against revenge and not the Old
Testament law of revenge. I asked what Martin Luther King would say.
So, my approach is sort of extracting the pragmatism from within the peace doctrines
of the Christian religion of most of the "audience".
(((((((
There is still a fifth step worth taking before launching into our
explanations proper, and that can be posed in a couple of simple questions: Why has
our Government paid so little attention to WHY this event occurred, and restricted its
few answers to talk of evil and the craziness and jealousy of the parties involved? Is
there something in its own practises, past and present, far from the metaphysics and
the pop psychology that we have been offered, that it is trying to hide? Once we have
established the importance of looking for serious explanations, and once we have
cleared up the static that interferes with people hearing any serious explanation, the
contribution, past and present, of our own Government to this disaster will begin to
receive the widespread scrutiny it so richly deserves.
Having tried to frame some of the discussion that is getting underway, I am
now content to leave the rest to readers in the belief that the "facts" in this case
argue so eloquently in favor of peace that - if only they could be heard, and heard
properly - only Bush, Sharon and perhaps Bin Laden would favor war.
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