March 24, 2003
Loving Peace & Detesting America
What makes the antiwar movement thrive.
By Paul Hollander
— Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Do we need a special explanation for the recent rapid increase in peace movements around the globe? The start of the American attack on Iraq has inspired a vast outpouring of antiwar protest both at home and especially abroad, as we are seeing this weekend. The war is likely to have little personal impact on foreign protesters even if their countries are supporting it; in most cases, only token forces (if any) are being sent, though civilians might be temporarily inconvenienced by a rise in the price of gasoline. It is also unlikely that a wave of terrorism is likely be unleashed in their countries.
It is of course possible that the antiwar protesters — and especially the committed pacifists among them, both abroad and in the U.S. — are so energized and outraged for purely humanitarian reasons, because of the sufferings this war could inflict on innocent Iraqi civilians. Still, one then has to wonder why the huge amounts of political violence around the world in recent times failed to elicit similar outpourings of concern and outrage. Bloody and brutal conflicts during past decades — between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Vietnam, China and Vietnam, Iran and Iraq; in Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Congo, and Chechnya, etc. — all failed to inspire impassioned protests and affirmations of the value of peace. The Iran-Iraq War in particular — lasting for several years and exacting millions of casualties — was seen as morally unproblematic and uninspiring by those same Germans, Italians, French, and Britons, and others who now cannot contain their moral outrage over the U.S.-led war with Iraq. Likewise, Americans currently horrified by the current war failed to gather in front of the embassies of Iran and Iraq to protest and condemn their bloody and long-lasting war in the 1980s.
The love of peace in and of itself does not appear to be sufficient to account for the vehemence, emotional intensity, and popularity of the current antiwar protests — especially considering that the hardships of such a war would be balanced by the relief it would bring to the people of Iraq, by removing their exceptionally brutal and repressive rulers.
So it seems that the love of peace intensifies exponentially once it is (or seems to be) threatened by the United States. Why should this be the case? Some of the reasons were already apparent during the Vietnam War. Then, as now, it was common to view the U.S. as a technological-military superpower impersonally raining destruction from the air, an immoral Goliath destroying poor and virtuous people. The Vietcong could plausibly be idealized as heroic guerrillas — as tenacious and brave underdogs, small in stature, supposedly poorly armed, and fighting amidst great hardships. Still, it should be far more difficult to project anything positive upon the brutal police state in Iraq and its pathologically ruthless, devious, and grotesquely self-aggrandizing leader.
There has been an unmistakable confluence of the increased anti-Americanism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union (leaving the U.S. as the only remaining superpower) and the spread and tone of the recent peace protests. September 11 and its aftermath also contributed to these attitudes because it led to new American assertions of power: in Afghanistan, in the global fight against terrorism, in the policies of homeland security. Nothing stimulates anti-Americanism more effectively than the display of American military power, and such display tends to obscure the purposes for which this power may be used. On these occasions, well-worn anti-American stereotypes instantly reemerge: the U.S. as the arrogant, crude, insensitive, uncivilized bully; the cowboy nation with the cowboy leader; the greatest terrorist state; the great Satan; the greedy, profit-hungry monster intent on trading the blood of its youth for oil.
The personality and political style of the current president no doubt is also stimulating anti-American sentiments and stereotypes.
These impulses and attitudes help to explain how the peace activists can so easily ignore the character of the regime in Iraq — one of the most brutal, corrupt, and repressive in recent history. It is the conviction that the U.S. is the most destructive and amoral force in the world that bests accounts for the discrepancy between the volume of the venom and indignation directed at the United States and the peaceniks' apparent indifference toward Iraq.
Should not the character of the falling Iraqi regime have some bearing on the tone of the peace protests? Even if one forgets about the weapons of mass destruction (which Iraq has already used against its own people), the nature of the Hussein regime should still give some pause to those who insist on the immorality of removing him by force.
It should have been possible, if not easy, for this peace movement to dissociate itself from the visceral anti-American impulses and sentiments it has come to carry and reflect. Likewise, it was not incumbent on these peace movements to open their ranks, as they have, to all those who hate Israel, to the hard Left, and to Islamic extremists. The enemy of the U.S. need not always be the friend of the demonstrators for peace.
It is profoundly unseemly for the antiwar activists to have rushed to Baghdad and given their benediction to this repellent regime and its leader (an activity in which Ramsey Clark has excelled) by respectfully conferring with its officials, appearing at official functions and in the official media, offering themselves as "human shields," and generally allowing themselves to be used for Iraqi propaganda. It would be interesting to know how the "human shield" volunteers reconcile having befriended a mass murderer with their high-minded moral mission?
I am not suggesting that either foreign or domestic expressions of apprehension about this war with Iraq (or any other threat to peace) are illegitimate and should cease. I do, however, believe it should be possible to separate the cause of peace from the hatred and vilification of the U.S. It should also be possible and reasonable to combine moral indignation over the threat to peace with a comparable indignation directed at an inexcusably repressive and mendacious political system, such as has been imposed on the people of Iraq.
An authentic peace movement should not be influenced or captured by groups and individuals whose political, ideological, and emotional agenda is not necessarily dominated by a single-minded pursuit of peace.
— Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His last book >Discontents: Postmodern and PostCommunist, was published earlier this year by Transaction Publishers. |
