ANGER AT “AMERICANS”
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
September 15, 2012
Better
watch out, you might get what you wish for.
In my last blog post, I wished that the USG and news media ask
themselves whether under our law, the video trailer caricaturing Mohammed didn’t
constitute a hate crime as surely as the federal prosecution’s position is on
Amish beard and hair cutting. Wow, did I
get my wish. The alleged author of the
video has been interviewed by the FBI and is back in court to show cause why
his probation shouldn’t be revoked. The
news media are falling all over who these “rioting” Muslim mobs are and why
they get upset over one obscure video.
My president and my media are once again showing the world that “Americans”
take crime seriously and detest the video, while showing that unlike some
countries, we staunchly defend the right of politically and religiously
offensive speech. The message is
consistent, and earnest, as in the sadness “Americans” feel over the loss of
four of our people (in contrast to people who throw their lives away in suicide
bombings), and in the fear we feel that for the first time in this generation,
our diplomats have been murdered inside a compound flying our national
flag. And from our president, we expect
and appreciate the seriousness with which our president is quietly but firmly
bringing all our military and economic might to bear to ensure that no foreign
government ever let’s this happen again.
In criminologists’ terms, we are doing all we can to prevent recidivism.
As luck
would have it, just before the invasion of the US consulate, in a post on “criminology
as diplomacy,” and in a preceding post on “peacebuilding v. peacemaking,” I
proposed that from victim-offender mediation to gang violence, we shift our
frame of reference from turning once and future criminals and their young
cohorts into model citizens, to mediating among opposing individuals (as in
victim-offender mediation) and in groups (horizontally, as in negotiating and
maintaining truces between gang leaders by respecting them; or vertically, as
between employer and employee, or prisoners and guards). That is, that we apply the principles of
diplomacy rather than of military strategy to violence we call crime by
principles diplomats employ as between warring parties. Now, having gotten my wish that we attend to
who is upset by our video and why, I return from diplomacy in the streets to
international diplomacy, and wish that US politicians and media would shift
from diplomacy that focuses on identifying and bringing individuals on all
sides who are guilty to justice, to looking at how on earth that absurd little
video trailer could have sparked such an over-the-top response by Muslims from
Cairo and Benghazi to Sydney so far. I
think it’s a cop-out to dismiss the scale of the reaction of morally inferior
outlaws drawn together by a fanatic willingness to kill over cartoons. As pioneering family psychologist Virginia
Satir proposed in the late sixties that we look beyond treating the “identified
patient” like a problem child to treating the child as the equivalent of the
canary in the coal mine. I think characterizing
any outpouring of violence as irrational is an irrational way, a self-defeating
way, to respond to violence that no one is in a position to stop.
I see
the collective violence against symbols of US government presence as a
mini-explosion of pent-up anger and indeed terror of all the “American” suppression,
surveillance, and repeated anti-Islamically directed invasions, and of the
greatest reign of military against concentrations of Islam since, to borrow
President Bush II’s words in a state of the union speech and elsewhere, the
last Christian Crusade, where on “American” front lines, Muslims became “towel
heads,” where once Filipino and Vietnamese national liberation fighters had
been called monkeys and “gooks.” I can’t
stop it, but for years what I see as a US military, cultural and economic war
that is to me blatantly built on stereotypes of followers of a religion,
despite the fact that from my community through the Mideast to Asia, Muslims
keep trying to tell us that Islam means followers of the path of peace, and
that those who terrorize “Americans” in the name of Islam are to them as foreign
and repugnant as the idea of killing for Christ would be to almost all
Christians.
I won’t
bother here to go through another litany of what I consider US military
terrorism and willingness to embrace “Muslim” despots for the sake of global
hegemony in the name of defending democracy, which through the superiority of
US military technology and spending, is gaining mastery of the art of killing
anyone the president openly or secretly declares to be on the US most-wanted
list, to say nothing of the political culture that gives rise to a furor at the
gall and insensitivity of building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero. In the Geometry of Violence book published in
1991, in a chapter written in 1989, I pointed out that even before the Cold War
ended, an axis separating East from West shifting to an access between North
and South, where the prevailing differences were between a Christian region
dominated by whites, and a Muslim stronghold in a hemisphere dominated by
people of color. I’m not a Muslim, but
the prevailing anti-Islamic attitude in my country’s political culture has
angered me, especially because it is so absurd for “Americans” to believe that scaring
and terrorizing our “enemies” as mightily as we have made “Americans” at home
and abroad, as now in Benghazi. Notice
that I keep putting “Americans” in quotes.
We in the US get that name from the first European ship’s captain to set
foot in Latin America. To call our
country “America” and ourselves “Americans” connotes what President John Monroe
declared in 1815, that the US is and “under God” deserves to be the political
and economic center that speaks for the “democratic” interests of both Western
Hemispheres. For those who attack our
citizens, property and symbols, calling us “Americans” is a tribute to our international
hegemony—all the more dangerous because it is so much more than a little land
mass of 4 or 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants. That is why I refer to my country instead at
the US.
I see
the wave of anti-US street violence as a brushfire flaring up of anger at US
anti-Islamic political, military and economic domination. And here in the US, we do seem to be
determined to remain recognized as being the world’s Number One at whatever we
do.
Many
are the ways that US inhabitants choose to serve their country, including those
who out of love of homeland gives their lives and limbs for their country. I speak from an enviable position of personal safety and
privilege. Perhaps my way of serving my
country is a product of my life of luxury and privilege, although I know, and
international critics of US policy like Arundhati Roy affirm, that there are
many “Americans” who share her resistance to what the world sees as “being
American,” especially so in a time of national frenzy over which candidate for
president most epitimozes the personal qualities we want the world to see as
truly “American,” in the service of “God’s” will. For my own personal safety’s sake at home and
abroad, and to serve what I perceive to be the interests of the people of my
country, I want to be as clear as I can to foreigners that I am a radical
critic of the politics and fiscal management that prevail in my homeland. When I do so, I want to be known more for the
attention to foreign concerns and knowledge of “their” thinking than for
self-condemnation of my people for their xenophobia and chauvinism. I want them to know that I will not take it
personally if any “outsider” criticizes my people any more than I do. There was a period when I felt deep guilt and
shame for being an American. I think I’m
pretty much past taking US violence so personally. In another positive sense, I do feel
responsible for the privileges of US citizenship in where my family and I live
and thrive. When I am a guest abroad, I
am wary of coming across as a foreign expert who knows what good for people in
other countries, but I do want to be able to talk about violence and
peacemaking wherever I am invited or visit outside my country. At this moment, I want to be known as among
those who figure that while publication of the notorious video may be highly
improbable, the outpouring of anger it has sparked is understandable. And to raise among my US neighbors the belief
I share that as a nation, from genocide of indigenous “Americans” and
enslavement of Africans on, we have a lot of bloodshed and economic
exploitation to atone for. Love and
peace--hal
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