Who
are we?
At
the end of the recent orgy of self pity that was the long drawn out
commemoration of 9/11, the Boston Globe published a story of a CIA agent ordered to torture a member of
Al Qaeda. The agent refused both
because the thought torture did not produce reliable evidence, and
because he thought that we – Americans – do not torture. We are
above that sort of thing. The CIA agent is noted as saying: "when
we torture people we are not… what we believe we are."
This
story clearly rests on the belief shared by many of us that we,
Americans are somehow different from the rest of the world, that
we are better.
We are better because we we don't torture, we are better
because we live in a democracy, and we are better because we are
morally superior to the rest of the world.
The
weeks before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 would have been a good time
for all of us to ask ourselves: who are we really? Clearly different
people give different answers to that question. It would have been
very healthy for us as a nation to reflect together about who
we are.
It would have been good for us to consider our history, to look at
what we have done, and what we have not done. Had we engaged in that
sort of self examination we might have come up with a more careful
and detailed account of who we are than the common one that we are
better than everyone else.
What we have done is not a
secret. It is there for all to see. We kept slaves until 1864; black
people were not allowed to vote until 100 years later. Today poor
people are overwhelmingly and disproportionately people of color. We
took the country away from the Indians. According to one historian
"the United States made 373 treaties with Indians and broke them
all."
We attacked and devastated
Vietnam on the basis of a cockeyed theory about dominoes. We attacked
and devastated Iraq on the basis of false information. We attacked
and devastated Afghanistan because Osama bin Laden lived in Pakistan.
Our governments have been
careless of American lives and utterly unconcerned about the
suffering of people abroad.
These facts that are obvious;
everybody knows that. But our journalists and academics keep
perpetuating the myth that we are different from other people and
better. There is absolutely no evidence for that.
Other nations have acted no
better. Nations who built empires have always believed themselves to
be superior. First the Greeks called all the people who did not speak
Greek "babblers" – barbarians. The Romans too thought
that they were better than everybody else. The British believed they
brought civilization and enlightenment to benighted, primitive
peoples in Asia and Africa--not to mention our continent. ( Of course, they became rich doing that.) If you are going to
conquer the world by force of arms and dominate the countries
conquered, you need to believe that you are entitled to do so or even
have an obligation to do so. Hence we talk about "manifest
destiny."
But that is, of course, a
monumental self-deception. Its effect is that we, like the other
empires before us, are in fact more warlike, more oppressive, more
brutal than many other nations.
Instead of using the 10th
anniversary of 9/11 to reaffirm our our supposed superiority, our
leaders should have encouraged us to look into our own face, and into
our own hearts to recognize who we all are really are – a part of
the human race, superior to none.