Obama’s remark that the IS is nihilistic has been bothering me
ever since he made it, but not for the reason that it is a false
statement. Indeed, it is obvious to anyone with access to a dictionary
that the IS has political-religious objectives and that it is not
nihilistic. The problem with Obama’s statement is that it fails to
recognize and acknowledge the cause of the IS, and by not seeing the
cause it misapprehends the inflammation and chooses a course of action
that throws gasoline on the fire and spreads the conflagration further.
Like Bush before him with Saddam Hussein and Iran, Obama’s impulse is
to view the IS in moral terms as an evil organization and to affix
responsibility and blame for its evil actions upon those who lead it and
adhere to it. He judges them, and this moral judgment is prone to
result in a sentence and a punishment inflicted by him or assisted by
him with the cooperation of other states and peoples in the region.
However, calling something evil and seeking to exterminate it or its
perpetrators doesn’t necessarily get at the cause of the evil and
doesn’t necessarily stop it from spreading further. It does exactly the
opposite, attracts fuel to the evil fire. World War II cannot be used as
a model scenario for exterminating evil. That required unbelievably
barbaric bombing and destruction. The temptation to do the same and
widen the war occurred in Korea but was averted. However, in Southeast
Asia the bombing of Cambodia alone exceeded that dropped on Japan in
World War II, and it failed in its goal.
Obama and Bush before him have both made a great effort to separate
their attacks on evil from attacks on the Muslim world in general, and
they have been exactly correct in doing so. Nevertheless, the methods
they have used, military methods, have occurred in Muslim lands and have
severely damaged innocent Muslim people as so-called collateral damage.
Even if a person perpetrating evil has been eliminated, justice has
been severely undermined by the American methods of operation. America
has done evil, but this is the basic fact that Bush and Obama and the
American people following them are ignoring. Evil easily begets evil,
and this has occurred. American evil has caused the retaliation on
American soil. This has caused the blowback. It has caused the threats
against America. It has provided the sparks leading to bigger and bigger
fires, first al-Qaeda and now the IS.
I know that most Americans will reject what I am saying out of hand.
To admit that one’s country has done unimaginable evil is very
difficult, and especially difficult when one has heard the opposite for
years on end, when one is patriotic, when one empathizes with the
Americans killed and injured in what was advertised as a noble effort to
remove some threat or some evil. The inability of America’s leaders to
see the evils they have perpetrated, much less acknowledge them and
change their behavior, is symptomatic of a disorder of the mind in which
one fails to see reality. Instead one discards certain facts and
selectively emphasizes certain other facts, the result being to create
an illusory image of reality and what one has actually done. Bush and
Obama cannot recognize and admit to themselves that they are murderers.
The large numbers of senators and representatives who have participated
in the murders likewise cannot admit this fact. How far down or how
deeply this illusory reality has spread among members of government and
within the American people is something I do not know. I only know that
the U.S. government in the name of the American people has done great
evil. I say this with no hatred in my heart for this country or its
people. If anything, my emotion is the opposite. I say it not as a
judgment but to state a fact that contradicts the basis of righteousness
upon which American leaders have been proceeding.
The specific evil that got me writing for LRC was the propaganda
campaign of Bush prior to attacking Iraq. That period of time,
2001-2003, was when the full impact of the American empire first hit me.
My consciousness had been awakened earlier, a good deal earlier, but
the scope of the lies being told and the aggression being perpetrated
were so great and so blatant that I could only maintain my own sanity by
objecting. Fortunately, LRC provided a means.
What is the source or the sources of the evil that grips
Washington? This is lost in the fogs of history. It is enough if we
recognize the psychopathology, the disorders of the mind, that are now
prevalent in Washington and among Americans and that continue over and
over and over to construct a fantasy version of reality that breeds evil
in response.
It is true that the behavior of the IS stands miles apart from
that of others who also are Muslims and who do not identify people as
apostates and kill them. It is true that those doing this bear
responsibility for their actions. However, although they have chosen to
murder, they are not solely the cause or causes of their decisions. They
didn’t create the context from which their evil has sprung. They didn’t
intervene in the Middle East for decades on end. They didn’t apply
sanctions to Iraq for years on end. They didn’t attack Iraq. They didn’t
attack Libya and Afghanistan. They didn’t undermine Syria. They didn’t
supply arms and training to various groups in these countries that they
laid their hands on. They didn’t look the other way as various other
Arab nations, allies of the U.S., supplied arms. Americans did all this
and more.
It’s always been a source of wonder to me that peoples on the
receiving end of America’s foreign and war policies in these lands were
not more radicalized as they have been as in the IS. Maybe this was
simply a matter of time.
The clock is ticking. America keeps adding fuel to the fires it
has sparked. American leaders and Americans have to recognize their own
guilt and part in causing something like the IS to form. They have to
recognize that their interferences in the Middle East, Afghanistan and
parts of Africa have been evil and a failure, and, if possible, they
need to recognize the sources of that evil and root them out of their
thinking. The same sources have brought America into Ukraine and that
conflict. A kind of insanity, a kind of psychopathology, is prevalent.
There is excessive fear of the foreign. Senators excite the population
with images of members of IS flying into the U.S., ready to wreak havoc,
just as earlier propaganda collated Saddam Hussein with mushroom
clouds. Paranoid leaders hold the matches in their hands, ready to start
more fires overseas.
No comments:
Post a Comment