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were warned that there were thousands of charred babies in the cities
of Afghanistan, but instead see citizens thankful to be freed from
fascism. Our leaders express not triumphalism, amid news of battlefield
victory, but increased concern for feeding and protecting the poor
and weak. Rather than facing ostracism from the world community,
America is given support and token gestures of material aid. And
while there is plenty of fighting ahead in Afghanistan and elsewhere,
America has proven itself terribly powerful and humane — and
not, as alleged, weak and craven. Terrorism is not the new unfathomable
and unconquerable plague upon civilization, but merely another scourge
to be met and trumped by the Western way of war. The Muslim world
is not engulfed in flames and on the move against the West, but
ever more isolated, troubled — and far too late in grasping
the vast damage bin Laden has done to its reputation and stature.
Strong nuclear democracies like India and Russia seek our friendship
and welcome our action, even as corrupt theocracies and autocracies
grow silent in their criticism. The frenzied and frothing of Pakistan
are not flocking to the caves of Afghanistan, but are more likely
to be seeking out barbers. Bin Laden posters will not continue to
flood the streets of the Middle East, but will shortly be tucked
away, in the manner of swastika armbands circa 1946.
If the world abroad has been turned upside down, so it has here
at home as well. Moral equivalence, cultural relativism, and anti-Westernism
on the cheap have been discredited as the conceited indulgence of
the affluent and bored. Our Left has not been principled in its
criticism of the military response, but rather shallow, ethically
bankrupt, and dead wrong; the poor in Kabul amid the bombs seem
to like what we have done far more than do the wealthy and comfortable
of Berkeley, Madison, and Cambridge in their faculty lounges. In
truth, throughout this crisis the predictable protesters have had
real trouble hitting the keys to the usual five easy pieces of fashionable
anti-Americanism. Some, like Oliver Stone, Susan Sontag, and Alice
Walker, have tried, but they sounded so shrill and dissonant —
and silly — that the rest of the symphony simply threw away
their usual sheet music, and have now quit playing altogether. Why
is this so?
I. Fascism — not Socialism.
We are fighting fascists, not Communists or leftists. If it proved
difficult to mobilize public opinion during the Cold War, against
the mass murdering of the Soviet Union and of Mao's China, it was
often because of the Communists' propaganda about egalitarianism
and concern for the working classes. Those embarrassed by the genocide
and gratuitous killing by Stalin, Mao, or the North Vietnamese grimaced,
but perhaps felt that to make the omelet of a class, race, and gender
paradise, one simply had to break a few reactionary, capitalist
eggs. Communism, after all, professed to use force only to force
others to justice. Decades ago, thousands of naïve young college
students — in safety and leisure and far from the gulag —
hung North Vietnamese flags in their dorm rooms because they fell
for the lie that Ho Chi Minh was a Jeffersonian, or that his theft
of the Western nomenclature of "republic" and "liberty"
really meant elections and freedom — rather than a totalitarian
police state to jail, kill, and exile millions.
But the Taliban and the terrorists? They offered no such rhetoric
and so started bad, and will end worse. The Taliban and their henchmen
will kill you at home, not shatter your idealism thousands of miles
away. It is hard to make these creepy torturers — who kill
homosexuals, debase women, murder the learned, and root out the
bones of infidels in their graves — into real reformers. These
murderers are no different from Nazis in their hatred of Jews, similar
to Jack-booted book-burners in their destruction of cultural icons,
and near identical to the Gestapo in their hunt for the nonbelievers
in hiding. So it is nearly impossible for America's feminists, gay
activists, progressive Christians, and connoisseurs of art to sympathize
with these savage enemies of civilization.
II. Jews — Not Just Israel.
It is fashionable on campus, and in elite circles, to damn Israel
and promote the Palestinian cause. But the Taliban and bin Laden?
They and their American supporters are simply too much to stomach
— for their rhetoric is not political and principled, but anti-Semitic,
racist, and lunatic. Unlike most of their Palestinian supporters,
they slander not even with the term "Zionists," but openly
with the word "Jews" — I suppose in theory that must
mean everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Barbra Streisand. The domestic
agents of the Taliban — on national television and in prime
time, no less — openly spread lies that Jewish agents had destroyed
the World Trade Center, and fled the building minutes before the
crash to sell off their airline stocks. That invective was surely
a loathsome example of what we know as "hate speech";
and if "words matter," then we haven't heard voices of
revulsion like this since Radio Berlin in the 1930s. So it is hard
for America's usual critics of our policy in the Middle East to
enter the fray, when these monsters, in the manner of Hitler, are
not merely frothing to incinerate Israel, but really do wish to
murder Jews in general.
III. Us — Not You.
Cultural utopianism, more than political revolution, was the great
arena of Leftist energy in the 1980s and 1990s. But the Taliban
and the terrorists have discredited nearly all of it. African-Americans
are said to be overwhelmingly in support of anti-terrorism racial
profiling — the purportedly odious idea that an easily-identifiable
group might be given special police scrutiny if its members statistically
violated particular laws at particular places not otherwise commensurate
with its own proportion of the general population. With 19 of 19
killers from the Middle East, young, male, and self-prescribed Islamic
fundamentalists, things apparently do change. College deans and
trial lawyers alike on planes feel uneasy, when three or four men
from the Arab world board in groups. As terrorist threats increase,
very few from the ACLU or Earth First on planes are staring at Norwegians
or Vietnamese.
But it is not just that even the liberal and progressive feel apprehensive
among young males from the Middle East on planes; those now shouting
in the Arab street see us too in monolithic terms, as a group rather
than as individuals. It was once reassuring to the Left that at
least our enemies could spot sympathetic voices in our midst. The
Vietcong welcomed solidarity with Jane Fonda and Bill Ayers. Fidel
Castro made it clear that he could distinguish good from bad Americans
— say, a Noam Chomsky from William Buckley — as did Mr.
Arafat. But the Taliban and their ilk? They apparently hate Dan
Rather as much as Rush Limbaugh. Their supporters even boo the cosmopolitan
French as much as they do the hick Americans. They kill alike immigrants
in lunchrooms at the bottom of the Twin Towers, and the Wall Street
grandees atop with the power views. Indeed, I think — should
Eleanor Smeal and Gloria Steinhem visit Afghanistan — the Taliban
in their caves might cut them off at their first stanza of, "Race,
class, gender…" instead to cover them in burqas and with
special dispensation, sell them off as the fifth and sixth wives
of bin Laden.
IV. Here — Not There.
The antiwar movement told us in past conflicts — Vietnam,
Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Bosnia — that we had the choice
not to use force. After all, did any of these nations or tribes
attack the United States? In all these cases, critics pointed to
the real culprits of interventionism: colonialism, racism, and the
military-industrial complex — and ridiculed any notion that
our mission could end totalitarianism, misery, murder, or even genocide.
No, we were in Vietnam for oil and pride, in Grenada to squeeze
Cuba, in Panama for the canal, in Iraq for yet more oil, in Bosnia
because we just liked to bomb. But the Taliban? There are over 5,000
dead in our streets, germs at one time or another have shut down
the chief buildings of our government, and nearly a million Americans
are out of work. Civilians, not soldiers, have been killed, at home,
not abroad, in peace, not at war. Bin Laden's mass murder is not
a repartee or a desperate slap from the oppressed, but a calculated,
massive act of war — with more purportedly on the way. How
do you play that piece as interventionism abroad?
V. The Top and Middle — Not Just the Bottom.
The Left tells us that America's wars grind up our own poor, as
the engine of racism, class exploitation, and gender discrimination
puts the most vulnerable on the front lines to fight and die for
the affluent and privileged to the rear. Yet Afghanistan is not
as easy to mischaracterize as was Vietnam. Our bombers are professional
pilots, pros in their late 20s and 30s — to use an odious term,
perhaps "overrepresented" by white males — who brave
hostile fire and know their capture can mean certain death or worse.
The dead so far are civilians of every class, many of them the
captains of industry at the top floors of the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center. Germs blow into not only the noses of our working
poor but also those of the upper echelon. Class struggle and the
mantra of racism, sexism, and colonialism are not melodies but cacophonies,
after the mass murder by the spoiled multimillionaire bin Laden.
Can it really be that the man who incinerated Puerto Rican emigrants,
working-class Asians, single mothers, gay art dealers, and African-American
shopkeepers was himself a polygamist, a pampered brat who grew up
in affluence with an occasional bored toe-dipping into the eddies
of Western "decadence," a fop of sorts who has siblings
in the Ivy League, who likes his watches expensive, his cell phones
crisp, and his photogenic side prominent in his tacky infomercial
videos, replete with Flintstone-like backdrops?
Like the fairy tale of the naked emperor, we in America these past
few weeks have seen a few pathetic pianists playing what we were
told were the same old melodies, but the pieces have produced no
sound. And so we in the audience are at last learning that those
on stage were never musicians — and there was never really
any music — at all.
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