THE
GREATEST GENERATION,
PART II
The
atrocity of September 11 is being likened to the Japanese
attack on Pearl
Harbor, and that is far from the only analogous evocation
of the "good war" that has been celebrated and glamorized
in books and films over the past year. As a continuous stream
of propaganda blares, uninterrupted, from the media, citizens
are urged to donate, volunteer, and join together in the spirit
of "national unity": in other words, shut up, put
up, and stand up – or face isolation, and worse. That is
always the wartime message of any and all governments, from
democracies to totalitarian regimes, and it underscores what
Randolph Bourne,
the great turn of the 20th century classical liberal, had
to say about the nature of war: it is "the health of
the State."
IN
WARTIME
In
wartime, all the problems of the regime – all centers of
political, economic, and cultural resistance – are effectively
repressed. The restraints that normally govern monetary policies
disappear, as government intervenes to inflate and regulate
production. The dust had not yet settled before Alan Greenspan
had already assured the markets that the government's
money-printing machine was fully prepared to go into overdrive.
On the political front, all dissent was immediately quashed
in an orgy of "national unity," and the martial
spirit was immediately infused into everyday life. Blood drives;
citizen vigilance; the reporting of news replaced by endless
"human interest" stories (both inspiring
and maudlin); and, here in New York, a policeman on every
corner, cop cars patrolling what seems like every street,
while on the subway a woman wears an American flag as a head
kerchief, and Old Glory adorns the faces of buildings from
the chichi Upper West Side to the humblest South Bronx tenement.
TRAPPED
IN A TIME WARP
I
have always taken an interest in the period leading up to
World War II: when I was writing my
first book, I had to steep myself in that era, and, for
a while, it seemed I had managed to somehow transport myself
back in time. Now, it seems, no such self-induced transport
is necessary: we are all the prisoners of some mad scientist's
invention, traveling back (albeit involuntarily) in time.
CAN
I SEE YOUR PAPERS, COMRADE?
As
before, the rage of the populace and the ire of the authorities
are unleashed on dissenters and, especially, on racially-defined
minorities. During World War II it was Japanese-Americans,
today the victims are Arab-Americans. Here in New York, anyone
who even looks Arabic walks the streets at his or her own
risk. The other day, a friend of a friend, a very dark-skinned
Italian guy, was stopped on the street by a policeman,
who asked to see his identification and asked him what he
was doing there.
SUBURBAN
TERROR
The
day after the WTC terror attack, I was standing outside the
local Post Office, waiting for my mother to finish mailing
a letter, when a woman pulled up in her yuppie-mobile and
parked right in front of me. It was a young mother with her
two young children in tow, a hard-faced lady with short blonde
hair and a determined, rather grim air. I wondered if she
had lost somebody on September 11: perhaps, I thought, that
accounts for the hardness and the sadness in her eyes. She
glanced up at me, suddenly alert, as if some telepathic signal
had passed between us, and shot me a look of pure hatred.
Hmmmm. I took a long drag on my cigarette and tried to look
as friendly and nonthreatening as possible, all the while
asking myself: What's up with that?
SUSPICION
As
she approached the door to the Post Office, Mrs. Suburban
Housewife turned her face conspicuously away, but not before
glancing at me with that same sharp look, exuding an air of
unmistakable hostility so tangible that I half expected her
to say something, perhaps something along the lines of "Go
back to your own country!" I stood there, dumbstruck:
had I done something wrong? When she came out, I was still
standing there, and this time she looked at me openly, a questioning
look spreading across the sharp – too sharp – features of
her face, as if she suspected that I might have an explosive
device secreted somewhere on my person. Oh, but of course,
one of the first things Osama bin Laden is likely to target
– right after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that
is – is a tiny little post office in Westchester County,
New York.
A
REAL LOUT?
Okay,
so maybe I imagined all that, and simply made up a story in
my head: this, after all, is what writers tend to do. Maybe
the b*tch just didn't like the look of me, standing there
with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, leaning against
the mailbox like some streetcorner lout. Readers of this column,
which comes illustrated by a photo of the author in a characteristic
pose, can see for themselves that I have a certain gangsterish
look. But this same photo clearly shows that if anyone looks
like an Arab – the dark skin, the high cheekbones, the dark
hooded eyes – it is the author of this column. At any rate,
there is more than anecdotal evidence to show that anti-Arab
hysteria is rampant.
ETHNIC
CLEANSING
A
mob attacks a mosque somewhere in Illinois: Pakistani cabdrivers
are pulled out of their cabs in the streets of New York, and
the news kiosks in the subways (mostly run by Arab-Americans)
are closed. Across the country, reports of violence and mayhem
directed at Arab-Americans pour in. Unlike Roosevelt, Bush
is not about to herd "enemy aliens" and other suspected
collaborators into concentration camps: he won't have to.
During the course of the long war our rulers are promising
us, and the elites are clamoring for, the Arab-American community
will either go underground or else be forced to emigrate.
FEMINISM
AND THE THIRD WORLD WAR
What
is shaping up is a war against the Taliban, a war long called
for by professional interventionists and feminists, who hold
up the fierce Islamic theocracy of Afghanistan's rulers as
the epitome of evil. The razing of the ancient Buddhist statues
was the climax of a series of actions on the part of the Taliban
that might almost have been designed to enrage Western elites.
The last straw, of course, was when they smashed all the televisions
in Afghanistan in a (televised) display of contempt for modernity,
but the real trouble started with Western feminists, horrified
by the regime's treatment of women. The feminists, you'll
remember, also played a key role during the period leading
up to the Kosovo war, by alleging that the Serbians had set
up "rape camps" – stories that later turned out
to be so exaggerated that they were essentially untrue. In
justifying the coming invasion of Afghanistan to the American
public, the do-gooders and social uplifters of all stripes
will play their part, but let the feminists be remembered
for their vanguard role.
I
HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO
I
will leave it to those of you who follow
this link to research how many times I predicted a US
invasion of Afghanistan, and readers with long memories (over
a few months, that is) will remember the last spate of talk
that an "anti-terrorist" strike force must be launched
to take Kabul. That they really intend to do it, at long last,
after months and even years of preparing the public, is readily
apparent. We are in for a protracted conflict – just how
protracted the public, used to instant victories by remote
control, has yet to realize.
GLOBALIZATION
AND WAR
Whether
Americans are willing to pay the price remains to be seen.
When they find out what the price is – perhaps as
high as a few more terrorist incidents, on a scale equal to
the WTC attack. The American public must be willing to turn
the US, as well as the mountains of Afghanistan, into a battlefield
in the pursuit of victory: this is what the elites are counting
on to prosecute their war. Furthermore, this is the real meaning,
albeit only implied, of the World War II analogy. Unlike all
of the other wars we have fought in the post-cold war era,
this is one that will take on truly global dimensions. And,
unlike even World War II, where the territory of the continental
US was never for a single moment in danger of attack, the
first battle of World War III was fought on American shores.
WERE
THEY WARNED?
A
flurry of reports have hit the news wires that the US government
received all sorts of warnings, including from the terrorists
themselves, that the Enemy was about to strike. The Federal
Aviation is said to have alerted the military that a commercial
airliner was headed for the Pentagon 12 minutes before impact,
yet no evacuation was ordered. A man held in a German deportation
jail contacted American authorities to warn them that a terrorist
attack on the US was imminent days before September 11, but
was ignored. And
now even the Mossad is getting into the act, with the
Israelis claiming that they sent a team of operatives to Washington
last month to convince the Americans to prepare for the worst.
Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis were said to be behind the
plot, although the Israelis were vague on details. Here, again,
the World War II analogy jumps out at us, this time in a particularly
eerie and ominous way….
THAT
WAS THEN…
The
evidence that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and certain members
of his inner circle had plenty of advance warning of the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor has given rise to a whole genre of
scholarship which, in my view, convincingly shows that FDR
knew when and where the attack would take place. The President
wanted that war, and he and his advisors worked assiduously
to drag us into it, as Robert
Stinnett and others have shown. Today, as the death toll
mounts, and the war cries resound from coast to coast, you
don't have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to believe
that a certain suspicion of foreknowledge, in this case, seems
to be implied.
…THIS
IS NOW
Who
knew what, and when did they know it? This is the question
that must preoccupy any congressional or journalistic investigation
of the matter. Did certain government officials know, or believe,
that the attack was imminent, and, if so, where and why did
their arguments fail to convince? Did the Mossad know more
than it was telling? What are we paying out billions
for "anti-terrorism" programs and the whole national
security-intelligence
apparatus, anyway? Do you mean to tell me that someone,
somewhere, hadn't gleaned some small bit of information that
pointed to the existence of an operation 5 years and more
in the making? So
many questions, that mostly haven't even been asked yet,
and so few answers. Will we ever get an answer?
THE
FIFTY-YEAR WAIT
Yes,
probably 50 years after the event, when some scholar somewhere
unearths documents that give us some context in which to understand
the events of September 11, 2001, much as Robert
Stinnett unearthed a cache of documents through the Freedom
of Information Act that prove FDR's culpability for Pearl
Harbor. At any rate, such a scenario – necessarily speculative
– is not all that inconceivable. In the meantime, however,
all such questions are drowned out in the chorus of cries
for "national unity" and the great big orgy of American
"togetherness" that envelops us all like a wet blanket.
THE
POLITICS OF UNANIMITY
Among
the many casualties of World War III will be the vigorous
debate about the future of the nation that has dominated the
politics of the decade past. The politics of the new millennium
will worship unanimity, and the parameters of the politically
permissible will be considerably narrowed. On the liberal-
left, largely converted to interventionism by their hero and
champion, Bill Clinton, dissent is almost completely absent:
on the right, the isolationist tendency is completely silenced:
even
the Buchananites have come out and said, in answer to
a flood of complaints from their own followers, that "now
is not the time" to bring up the question of whether
US foreign policy played a key role in the death of the thousands
of people who perished in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As to when that time will come, the editorialist for Buchanan's
group, the American Cause, does not say.
STAMPEDE
TO WAR
I
can't say I'm surprised. Why, even the Cato Institute, which
opposed the Gulf war, has
fallen into line, with a statement from Cato foreign policy
maven Ted Galen Carpenter solemnly endorsing a US strike at
– well, at wherever.
Word has it that the Libertarian Party is being torn
apart by an internal debate over what position to take
on The War – and I have the sinking feeling that, after
all these years, the party is about to be stampeded into supporting
the biggest US military mobilization since the invasion of
Nazi-held Europe during World War II. A war which, as secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, would "end states"
that "harbor" or in any way encourage groups the
US governments has classified as terrorist. But if you put
an end to certain
states, then what do you put in their place?
CONSTITUENT
SERVICES
This
is the ultimate goal of the "allied powers" – to
impose the equivalent of the so-called MacArthur regency on
the most troublesome areas of the Middle East, not only Afghanistan
but also Iraq. A long-standing dream of the US oil companies
– the seizure of the Iraqi oil fields, and the military occupation
of the richest oil-producing region in the world – will have
been accomplished. Not only that, but the door to the oil-rich
Caspian Sea area, where Iran and Russia are contending with
the West, will be opened – and the troops are sure to pour
through this breach, and perform the same service for certain
Western corporate interests. This is what we call in the United
States "constituent services" – for which our legislators
and other leaders, including opinion leaders, are always amply
rewarded.
BACK
TO THE FUTURE
Yes,
it's just like old times again. Soon we'll be buying "Victory
Bonds." Ever since the New York Stock Exchange was closed
down the Internet chat rooms devoted to stock-watching have
been full of people solemnly declaring that anyone who sells
on Monday is less than patriotic.
We'll see if they're buying that on Wall Street – we'll find
out probably just as most of you are reading this – and as
a good libertarian I have to say, in this limited sense, "let
the market decide." But the market's fluctuations over
a single day are no real indicator of a long-term trend: in
the long run, I believe, the backlash is bound to occur, perhaps
in tandem with a general economic crisis – and with a force
equal to that of the initial war hysteria. That, at least,
is one possible future that awaits us. But until then, we're
stuck in the past, just like I'm stuck here in New York until
I can get a plane out, reliving the darkest days of World
War II.
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