The Enemy At Home
Page 3
In other cultures—China, Nigeria, India—there are similar concerns that American culture and values are destroying the moral basis of those traditional societies. This resistance is summed up in a slogan often used by Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew: “Modernization Without Westernization.”15 What this means is that traditional cultures want prosperity and technology, but they don’t want to become like America. The Islamic fundamentalists are the most extreme and politically mobilized segment of this global resistance. What distinguishes them is the depth of their repulsion and their willingness to fight and to die to eradicate American influence from their part of the world.
Their main motive is the belief that the fate of Islam is at stake. Bin Laden in one of his videos said that Islam faces the greatest threat it has faced since Muhammad.16 How could he possibly think this? Not because of U.S. troops in Mecca. Not even because of Israel. The threat bin Laden is referring to is an infiltration of American values and mores into the life of Muslims, transforming their society and destroying their religious beliefs. Even the term “Great Satan,” so commonly used to denounce America in the Muslim world, is better understood when we recall that in the traditional understanding, shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Satan is not a conqueror; he is a tempter. In one of its best-known verses, the Koran describes Satan as “the insidious one who whispers into the hearts of men.”
THESE CONCERNS PROMPT a startling thought—are the radical Muslims right? Is America a threat to the traditional cultures of the world? Is American culture a worldwide destroyer of morals? Do American values undermine the traditional family and corrupt the innocence of children? Many Americans are likely to indignantly answer, “No.” Conservatives are no less reluctant than liberals to admit that some radical Muslims may have valid objections to American society. Patriotism itself seems to demand an American response that highlights the horrors of Islamic behavior: “Look how your religion inspires terrorists to kill women and children!” “Look how you oppress women!” As broad judgments on Muslim society, these charges reflect a narrow and somewhat prejudiced view of Islamic culture. But even if the charges were true, they would hardly constitute a vindication of American culture.
We should not dismiss the Islamic or traditional critique so easily. In fact, as our own domestic and cultural debate shows, we know that many of the concerns raised by the radical Muslims are widely shared in our own society. Many conservative and religious Americans agree with the Islamic fundamentalists that American culture has become increasingly vulgar, trivial, and disgusting. I am referring not merely to the reality shows where contestants eat maggots, or the talk shows where guests reveal the humiliating details of their sex lives. I am referring also to “high culture,” to liberal culture that offers itself as refined and sophisticated.
Here, for example, is a brief excerpt from Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, a play that won rave reviews and Hollywood accolades and is now routinely performed (according to its own publicity materials) in more than twenty countries, including China and Turkey. In the book version of the play—now sold in translation in Pakistan, India, and Egypt—Ensler offers what she terms “vagina occurrences”: “Glenn Close gets 2,500 people to stand up and chant the word cunt…. There is now a Cunt Workshop at Wesleyan University…. Roseanne performs ‘What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?’ in her underwear for two thousand people…. Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing the cunt piece.”17 And so on. If all of this makes many Americans uncomfortable and embarrassed—which may be part of Ensler’s objective—one can only imagine how it is received in traditional cultures where the public recitation of such themes and language is considered a grotesque violation of manners and morals. Nor is Ensler an extreme example. If the garbage heap of American excess leaves many Americans feeling dirty and defiled at home, what gives America the right to dump it on the rest of the world?
The debate over popular culture points to a deeper issue. For the past quarter century we have been having a culture war in this country, which has, until now, been viewed as a debate with only domestic ramifications. I believe that it has momentous global consequences as well. When we debate hot-button issues like abortion, school prayer, divorce, and gay marriage, we are debating two radically different views of liberty and morality. Issues like divorce and family breakdown are important in themselves, yet they are ultimately symptoms of a great moral shift that has occurred in American society, one that continues to divide and polarize this country, and one that is at the root of the anti-Americanism of traditional cultures.
The shift can be described in this way. Some years ago I read Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation, which describes the virtues of the World War II generation. I asked myself whether this was truly the “greatest” generation. Was it greater than the generation of the American founding? Greater than the Civil War generation? I don’t think so. The significant thing about the World War II generation is that it was the last generation. Last in what way? It was the last generation to embrace an external code of traditional morality. Indeed, this generation’s great failure is that it was unable to inculcate this moral code in its children. Thus the frugal, self-disciplined, deferred-gratification generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s—the Clinton generation.
From the American founding until World War II, there was a widespread belief in this country that there is a moral order in the universe that makes claims on us. This belief was not unique to Americans. It was shared by Europeans since the very beginning of Western civilization, and it is held even today by all the traditional cultures of the world. The basic notion is that morality is external to us and is binding on us. In the past, Americans and Europeans, being for the most part Christian, might disagree with Hindus and Muslims about the exact source of this moral order, its precise content, or how a society should convert its moral beliefs into legal and social practice. But there was little doubt across the civilizations of the world about the existence of such an order. Moreover, laws and social norms typically reflected this moral consensus. During the first half of the twentieth century, the moral order generated some clear American social norms: Go to church. Be faithful to your wife. Support your children. Go when your country calls. And so on. The point is not that everyone lived up to the dictates of the moral code, but that it supplied a standard, accepted virtually throughout society, for how one should act.
What has changed in America since the 1960s is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half century. I am not saying that most Americans today reject morality. I am saying that there has been a great shift in the source of morality. Today there is no longer a moral consensus in American society. Many Americans locate morality not in a set of external commands but in the imperatives of their own heart. For them, morality is not “out there” but “in here.” While many Americans continue to believe in the old morality, there is now a new morality in America, which may be called the morality of the inner self, the morality of self-fulfillment.
Here, at the deepest level, is the divide between conservatives and liberals, between Red America and Blue America. Conservatives believe in traditional morality. Liberals believe in personal autonomy and self-fulfillment. And liberals have been winning the culture war in the sense that they have been able to produce a massive transformation of American society and culture along the lines of their new moral code. My point is not that liberals would approve of all the grossness and sensuality of contemporary popular culture, but that the liberal promotion of autonomy, individuality, and self-fulfillment as moral ideals make it impossible to question or criticize or place limits on these cultural trends. In the moral code of self-fulfillment, “pushing the envelope,” or testing the borders of sexual and moral tolerance, becomes a virtue, and fighting for traditional morality becomes a form of repression or vice.
To American liberals, the great social revolution of th
e past few decades—with its 1.5 million abortions a year, with one in two marriages ending in divorce, with homosexuality coming out of the closet and now seeking full social recognition and approval—is viewed through the prism of an expansion of civil liberties, “freedom of choice,” and personal autonomy. Thus it is seen as a moral achievement. But viewed from the perspective of people in the traditional societies of the world, notably the Muslim world, these same trends appear nothing less than the shameless promotion of depravity. So it is not surprising to see pious Muslims react with horror at the prospect of this new American morality seeping into their part of the world. They fear that this new morality will destroy their religion and way of life—and they are quite right!
Osama bin Laden chose his words carefully when he said that 9/11 was an attempt to scorch “the head of the snake.” In the view of the Islamic radicals, America is the embodiment of pagan depravity. According to bin Laden, this is why religious Muslims must stop fighting local battles and concentrate on destroying Satan’s empire on earth. This is seen as nothing less than a divine mission. In bin Laden’s words, 9/11 showed “America struck by Almighty God in its vital organs.”18 For the Islamic radicals, 9/11 was a message to America that said: Your America is a repulsive sewer. This sewer is now pouring itself into the rest of the world. We will fight to the death to keep it out of our part of the globe. In fact, we will fight in any way we can until every vestige of your sick, demented culture is eradicated from the holy ground of Islam. We may be poor and oppressed, but we would rather be poor and oppressed than become the immoral, perverted society that America has become. So get the hell out of the Middle East, because you represent the values of the Devil.
THUS WE HAVE the first way in which the cultural left is responsible for 9/11. The left has produced a moral shift in American society that has resulted in a deluge of gross depravity and immorality. This deluge threatens to engulf our society and is imposing itself on the rest of the globe. The Islamic radicals are now convinced that America represents the revival of pagan barbarism in the world, and 9/11 represents their ongoing battle with what they perceive to be the forces of Satan.
I have focused so far on American cultural depravity and its global impact. But there is a second way in which the cultural left has helped to produce 9/11. In the domain of foreign policy, the left has helped to produce the conditions that led to the destruction of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. First, under Jimmy Carter, the liberals helped to get rid of the shah and to install the Khomeini regime in Iran. The pretext was the shah’s human rights failings, but the result was the abdication of the shah and the triumph of Khomeini. The Khomeini revolution, which has proved the viability of Islamic theocracy in the modern age, was the match that lit the conflagration of radicalism and fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world. It is Khomeini’s success that paved the road to 9/11.
During the Clinton administration, liberal foreign policy conveyed to bin Laden and his coconspirators a strong impression of American vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice. When Al Qaeda attacked and killed a handful of marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from Somalia. When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, President Clinton responded with desultory counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These American actions, bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike directly at America on September 11, 2001.
Now that America is fighting back, seeking to uproot the terrorists and transform the political landscape in the Middle East, the left is fighting hard to prevent that campaign from succeeding. It does so not simply by resisting at every stage whatever actions are proposed and implemented to win the war, but, just as important, by unceasingly fueling the hatred of American foreign policy among Muslims. It is a common belief among Muslims, for example, that the main reason America consistently sides with Israel is that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim lawyer I interviewed in Tunis puts the matter this way: “I keep hearing,” he says, “that countries base their foreign policy on self-interest. The self-interest of America is in obtaining access to oil, and we are the ones who have all the oil. The Israelis don’t have any oil. So why is America always on the side of Israel and against the Muslims? Please don’t tell me it’s because Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East. After all, Israel is one of the main reasons why so many Muslims are America’s enemy. So I am forced to conclude that there is only one reason why America acts against its self-interest and backs Israel. The reason is that Americans hate Muslims. America is violently opposed to Islam. So the Christians are making allies with the Jews to get rid of Islam.”
This is a relatively articulate expression of one of the central themes of fundamentalist propaganda. The argument is that America is a bigoted nation that wants to take over Muslim countries and steal their oil. In reality this claim is absurd. Americans do not hate Muslims, and America does not want to occupy the Muslim world or seize its natural resources. America supports Israel for complex reasons of history, common ideology, and the domestic political influence of Jewish Americans. So this Islamic perception of American foreign policy is utterly wrong. But it is routinely confirmed by the American left. The writings of leading leftists affirm that, yes, America is a racist power that wants to conquer and plunder non-Western peoples. Political scientist Anne Norton writes that anti-Muslim bigotry is now “the unacknowledged cornerstone of American foreign policy.” Legal scholar Mari Matsuda insists that “the history of hating Arabs as a race runs strong in the United States,” where Arabs are “reviled even more than blacks.” Rashid Khalidi contends that America’s actions are based on “wildly inaccurate and often racist stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East.” Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, Edward Said claims that “for decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam” and that America’s Middle East policy is based on blind hatred for stereotypical “sheikhs and camel jockeys.”19 By confirming Muslims in their worst prejudices, the American left has strengthened their conviction that America is evil and deserves to be destroyed.
To repeat—because this is a point on which I do not wish to be misunderstood—I am in no sense suggesting that the left is disloyal to America. To say this is to confuse the success of the Bush administration, or even of American foreign policy, with the interest of the country as a whole. As we saw earlier with Senator Byrd, the left has its own view of what’s good for America, and it is fiercely loyal to that ideal. So disloyalty is not the issue. The issue is why the left is so passive, reluctant, and even oppositional in its stance in the American war on terrorism. My answer is that the cultural left opposes the war against the radical Muslims because it wants them to succeed in defeating President Bush in particular and American foreign policy in general. Far from seeking to destroy the movement that bin Laden and the Islamic radicals represent, the American left is secretly allied with that movement to undermine the Bush administration and American foreign policy. The left would like nothing better than to see America in general, and President Bush in particular, forced out of Iraq. Although such an outcome would plunge Iraq into further chaos and represent a catastrophic loss for American foreign policy, it would represent a huge win for the cultural left, in fact the left’s greatest foreign policy victory since the Vietnam War.
The notion that the American left seeks victory for Islamic radicals in Iraq may at first glance seem implausible. One person who does not think so, however, is bin Laden. In his October 30, 2004, videotaped message, apparently timed to precede the presidential election, bin Laden drew liberally from themes in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to condemn the Bush administration. Bin Laden denounced Bush for election rigging in Florida, for going to war to enrich oil companies and contractors like Halliburton, for curtailing civil liberties under the Patriot Act, and for reading stories to school-children while the World Trad
e Center burned.20 Apart from the rhetorical flourishes of “Praise be to Allah,” bin Laden sounds exactly like Michael Moore. And why not? In opposing President Bush and American foreign policy, they are both on the same side.
Moreover, several leading figures on the left are very candid about what they are fighting for. Moore writes, “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Author James Carroll commends the insurgents for exemplifying “the simple stubbornness of human beings who refuse to be told what to think and feel.” Writing in salon.com, Joe Conason calls on Bush to enter into a “negotiated settlement” with the Iraqi insurgents, an outcome Conason concedes would be a “defeat for the United States and a perceived victory for Al Qaeda and its allies.” Gwynne Dyer states in a recent book, “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.” Activist Arundhati Roy declares on behalf of the left, “We must consider ourselves at war.”21 What she means is that the left is fighting a political battle not against Al Qaeda or Islamic fundamentalism but rather against the Bush administration.