[extropy-chat] FWD (PvT) Englishman in New York

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Fri Jul 15 20:49:39 UTC 2005


  http://pdberger.com/?p=394\

Englishman in New York
11 Jul 2005 01:59 pm

On London

I have been preoccupied over the past few days with a tangle of 
questions and thoughts connected by the London bombing. Not thoughts 
of the why they did it, how they did it, or who did it variety. I 
have been wondering why and how this has affected me. Selfish, I 
know. But also, it is the only way I can feel myself a part of this 
whole, sorry situation.

My thoughts and ideas about the War on Terror, US Foreign Policy, and 
European Foreign Policy (if it can be called or characterized as 
such) has been in a state of flux for the past six months or longer. 
It is no coincidence that the last four books to enter my apartment 
were Peter Bergen's Holy War Inc, Christopher Hitchens' Love, 
Poverty, and War, Scott Anderson's The Man Who Tried to Save the 
World, and Bob Dylan's Chronicles (Chronicles, the exception, I hope 
proves the rule).

Warning: there follows a list of gratuitous admissions.

1. I have been on two anti-war/anti-Bush marches in New York (2003/2004)
2. I believed that the September 11 attacks on America were the 
ghosts of US     foreign policy coming back to haunt it.
3. On September 11, 2001, and on July 8, 2005, (and on all the 
bombings in between) I acted as though it had nothing to do with me.

The first admission is no source of shame. I still believe that the 
way the US invaded Iraq was wrong; the Bush administration falsely 
linked Saddam and September 11 [Wrong, Bucko, but you've got time to 
learn that, too--BW], the UN was brushed aside and terribly weakened, 
the electorate in the US and the UK was misled on the road to war, 
and plans for running the country post Saddam were not thought 
through.

Hussein was a dictator. I support his removal just as I would the 
removal of Robert Mugabe. But if you have to lie to your electorate 
in order to go to war, then perhaps you are not going to war for the 
right reasons in the first place.
On the second admission I confess that I feel woefully uneducated. 
There is a school of thought which points to "US imperialism" and 
draws a winding line from the mountains of Afghanistan during the 
1980s to the man behind the attacks on September 11. They view the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, US backed despots in the Middle East 
and the presence of US troops and oil interests there, as the obvious 
explanation for these people's hatred of Western society. Among the 
second school of thought, writers like Christopher Hitchens point to 
the rise of Islamofascism over the past 40 years and argue that 
Islamic terrorists would attack Western Democracies no matter what:

But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, 
and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate 
about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals 
don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do 
like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific 
inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

The contrast between these two world views has been my main 
preoccupation during the past few days. I spent so long believing in 
the first school of thought, and the shift that I have made towards 
the second camp has been so gradual, that I think it has been 
perceptible to everybody except myself. While not wholeheartedly 
agreeing with School Number 2, I can no longer agree with School 
Number 1. I am in the unfortunate position of not knowing anything 
anymore-of being somewhere in between.

If living in New York has had one major effect during the past year 
and a half, it is to open my eyes to a different world view. To put 
it another way. When I immersed myself in Russia for five years 
between 1995 and 2000, it opened my left eye. Living in America is 
opening my right eye. And my vision is still pretty much a blur.

The BBC that I used to love for its impartiality, I have 
"discovered," is far from impartial. [NO KIDDIN? BW] I don't love it 
any less for this. And I think that the license fee is the surest way 
keep the world's greatest (and I mean this) news/current affairs 
institution at its best. But I do wish that they would admit that 
news output is only as impartial as the people who produce it. And I 
am yet to meet an impartial human being--especially an impartial 
journalist.

Likewise, the great British Press, the envy of the world, contains a 
mass of half-truths, deliberate omissions, undeclared interests, and 
regurgitated press releases. It chases its tail to produce almost a 
dozen national newspapers that carry the same story, albeit of 
varying lengths, each and every day. And regional journalism, at 
least as I knew it, has been reduced to filling space.
The result is not a lie on the scale of Pravda. But it is still a 
false world view masquerading as the truth.

So, after 12 months of living in New York is it any surprise that 
Israel starts to look a little less evil? And that Europe starts to 
look a little more parochial? That the US starts to look a little 
more like it is trying to solve some of the world's problems, and 
that it is doing so despite the sometimes unfair criticism of its 
allies? If in England it always looked like the US was the playground 
bully, then from the US it looks a lot more like an embattled 
headteacher in a problem school.

So what does any of this have to do with me?

Like many Englanders abroad I received the phone calls and emails 
last Friday. I reproduce one below:

'Paul, heard from your London friends? Hope they are all safe.
So after having been abroad for both the 9/11 attacks as a UK resident, and
today's London attacks as a New Yorker, do you still feel somewhat distanced
from the reality? I remember you said that you felt indifferent, maybe even
unfazed in 2001.'

Indifferent and unfazed are exactly the qualities I expressed 
throughout Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I don't have to express them 
any more because we are past the point when people will ask. But what 
bothered me was the fact that while I expressed both qualities to a 
frustrating degree in front of my wife, I was in fact neither 
indifferent nor unfazed within.

The reason for this is at the heart of the gradual metamorphosis I 
have just attempted to explain. On September 11, I thought I knew the 
reasons why the attacks had taken place. And it was not my fault. 
Moreover, it was somebody else's fault - the US's - and they were 
reaping what they had sown. But in the past 12 months I have slowly 
come to understand that the worldview I held was tainted by a media 
that sees the problems in the world (dictatorship in Iraq, 
authoritarianism/terrorism in the Middle East, the 
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, global warming) as being the fault of 
the United States. All of this from a country and a continent that 
seems to have done little itself to try to redress the balance in a 
world which it has corrupted/manipulated to a gargantuan degree 
during the past 100 years.

"We know that," comes the cry. "But the US has the power to do so 
much good and yet it chooses to do the opposite."

Really? Should the US have stayed out of Kosovo? Should it have 
stayed out of Afghanistan and Iraq? Should it leave North Korea and 
Iran to their own devices? Is it the US alone that has not done 
enough to stop the killing in Darfur? Or is Britain, Europe, Africa, 
just as much to blame? Why are we not rushing headlong into Zimbabwe 
to get rid of Robert Mugabe? Is it worse to do something? Or is it 
worse to do nothing?

At this moment, I am proud to be a citizen of a country that has done 
more than most to help the US get rid of the Taliban and Saddam 
Hussein. And I think that it would do other Europeans some good to 
think again about what their countries have achieved, if anything, to 
try to stem the tide of dictatorships and terrorism around the world. 
They should wonder whether they are really asking themselves the hard 
questions. Or whether they are shrugging their shoulders and blaming 
America because that is what they have been brought up to do.
Would the world be a safer place if the people who bombed Bali, New 
York, Madrid, and London, were in power in Africa and the Middle 
East? If not, how do we stop them? If we lived in Israel would we 
believe that a return to our 1967 borders would mean the chance of a 
life lived in peace? If not, how can we ensure that for them?

This weekend I took my first trip to Washington DC, where I had to 
suffer the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's terrible 
exhibition The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. If it had been 
simplified any further it would have just had the words "The Good 
Guys Won and the Bad Guys Lost. We were the good guys." under each 
exhibit. I was further sickened by the prevalence of "Freedom is not 
free" T-shirts being sported by passers-by on the Mall, and by one 
woman's remark at a service station on the freeway who said "It seems 
like all the coaches in the free world have stopped here at once."

The sooner Americans detach themselves from the delusion that they 
are the sole arbiters of freedom and democracy in the world the 
better. Countless countries could give America a lesson in those two 
subjects, especially on human rights.
But by the same token, Europe and the rest of the world must accept 
that far from being playground bullies, Americans are actually 
do-gooders with very heavy hands. A few decades ago, they would have 
backed any despotic ruler if it meant they could have their way. 
Well, they learned their lesson. Nowadays they hope that planting 
democracy in the Middle East will reap its rewards for generations to 
come. It's time they were lent a more willing hand.



-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
     Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB *
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