<Eloquent post from "An Englishman in New York"
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.
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, 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. 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 wordview 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.
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