Sasha Abramsky has written a very interesting
piece in
Open Democracy on the left's unfortunate tendency to blame "the West" for everything bad in the world, specifically in this case Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. I don't entirely agree with his take--I think attacks of terrorism are overrated as a genuine military-type threat--but I certainly believe he's right on the politics. The more extreme and vocal members of the left threaten to give credence to Karl Rove's comments about the reaction of "liberals" to 9/11. And if that notion fully takes root, encouraged by liberals themselves...well, then we're really, really fucked.
Below the fold, some choice excerpts from the piece.
Some of my friends and relatives tell me I've changed - that my politics aren't as "leftwing" as they used to be during the anti-nuclear movement in Britain back in the 1980s. In a way, they are right...Unlike my compatriot Christopher Hitchens, however, whose break with erstwhile comrades on the left over foreign policy has resulted in a wholesale swing rightward, I still hope that my rethinking of some foreign policy questions can be incorporated into a vibrant progressive movement. Indeed, I'd argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today's world.
One would think it already would be! But unfortunately:
The problem, [Naomi] Klein argues in a widely-circulated column (the Nation, Guardian, Common Dreams), is that the west is virulently racist and neo-colonial: "What else can we call the belief - so prevalent that we barely notice it - that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims?"
Pilger, Fisk, Klein, Galloway, and Klein grasp the undeniable fact that shortsighted western policies and alliances of convenience over the past century have contributed to today's mass alienation of young Muslims, to a climate in which millennial groups such as al-Qaida flourish.
These advocates understand - in a way the cartoonish "good versus evil" language in which George W Bush frames world events certainly cannot - the rage the Iraq war in general has stoked among Muslims, and in particular, how searing are the images of humiliation rituals and torture emanating out of Abu Ghraib. They rightly recoil at the news-in-brief references to "collateral damage" when Iraqi civilians are killed compared with the oceans of ink generated whenever a western target is hit by terrorism.
But theirs is also a truncated analysis. They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.
It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional "third-world" liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.
Yet I was just recently told by someone on this board that Barack Obama should be loudly proclaiming that Islamic extremists, though they may use the wrong tactics, are essentially correct in their worldview. WTF?!?
Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it. If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force. But given the fundamentalist prejudices that are so much a part of bin Ladenism, the cry of western racism is a long way from being a case-closer.
[...]
Indeed, what al-Qaida apparently hates most about "the west" are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment. These values stand in counterpoint to the tyrannical social code idealised by al-Qaida and by related political groupings such as Afghanistan's Taliban.
[...]
For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women's rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.
Think about this, people. Do you think the Taliban would be down with the Daily Kos, or any of the people who populate it? What do you think Osama bin Laden's judicial nominees would be like?
The head-in-the-sand response (epitomised by Ward Churchill) that argues, in essence, that because America funded bin Laden in the 1980s we should sit back and take whatever his organisation throws at the country, or the world, today, is as flawed as arguments pre-second world war that because Hitler was a product of the Versailles treaty and the devastation wrought on Germany during and after the first world war, Britain and France should suck up the Nazis' increasingly brazen outrages and simply hope for better times ahead.
I know so many people who think Ward Churchill is the bees knees, and that is fucking scary (and pathetic).
That doesn't mean that questions as to the origins of the current crises shouldn't be asked, and answers sought. But it does mean those questions alone can't serve as an end-point of the discussion.
If Osama bin Laden is the Trotsky of irredentist Islam, preaching a wacky, bloody notion of a roving, permanent Islamic revolution, how do we progressives respond? How do we propose to preserve political freedoms and pluralism while protecting the fabric of society? How do we safeguard against terror without applying, as do the Patriot Act and similar laws proposed by the Blair government in Britain, a wrecking-ball to constitutional rights and legal protections?
These are questions people on the activist left need to tackle just as urgently as people on the right. For once we opt out of this debate, hoping that retrenchment alone will restore the status quo ante-9/11, neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol and old-style hawks such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can frame the terms of the discussion as they see fit.
And that's the real threat we face, as I see it. Abramsky sees Al Qaeda itself as a great danger, but as I said I think that's overrated. But since the public overwhelmingly believes in that danger, it becomes a political imperative to have a reaction beyond "it was our fault, we deserve it". That's not going to get us very many votes!
Abramsky points out that Democrats have proposed getting tougher on protecting chemical plants and securing "loose nukes", both of which the Bush admin has refused to deal with seriously. He then takes on the issue of civil liberties vs. security measures:
In terms of laws to tackle terrorism, instead of activists denouncing any and all special legal powers granted courts and governments in this fight, how about acknowledging that organised terrorism does pose certain tricky legal questions and, from there, attempt to craft responses that, unlike those proposed by the right, don't result in the creation of legal black holes for terrorism suspects? How about, for example, recognising that in wartime there might be legitimate grounds for pre-emptively detaining a person for a prescribed and limited period of time on a suspicion of plotting a major attack, while still denouncing the notion that such a person doesn't have the right to an attorney or to a speedy trial?
I think this would be a great idea. We need to prevent cases like Jose Padilla, but without appearing to be for "letting the terrorists go free".
One more point that I think is the most important, though I would change it slightly by adding four words, which I'll place in brackets:
Out of power, a left that ignores the [public's perception of the] magnitude of these threats risks reducing itself to irrelevance, and, in so doing, ceding power to conservatives who will fight their wars on terror in a deeply destructive, dirty way, who will leap upon the opportunity to clamp down on civil liberties and undermine non military, non security-related government spending, and who will use the fear of terror to reshape societies according to their own illiberal sights.
And of course that's just what we're seeing, isn't it? We have a chance to get it back before it's too late, but won't get there by appearing "soft on terror" any more than we will by appearing "soft on crime". In both cases, we have to be vigilant about issues of justice and civil liberties (particularly once we get power), but we have to be careful in our political campaigning not to give our opponents ammunition that allows them to paint that "soft on ___" picture for voters. Because as we've seen, swing voters might get disillusioned with Republicans for various (quite understandable) reasons, but if they are convinced that Democrats won't protect them, they'll run back to the GOP anyway.