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CounterPunch
November
16, 2002
Waiting on a
Countervailing Force
Europe Versus America
by EDWARD SAID
Although I have visited England dozens of times,
I have never spent more than one or two weeks at a single stretch.
This year, for the first time, I am in residence for almost two
months at Cambridge University, where I am the guest of a college
and giving a series of lectures on humanism at the university.
The first thing to be said is that life
here is far less stressed and hectic than it is in New York,
at my university, Columbia. Perhaps this slightly relaxed pace
is due in part to the fact that Great Britain is no longer a
world power, but also to the salutary idea that the ancient universities
here are places of reflection and study rather than economic
centres for producing experts and technocrats who will serve
the corporations and the state. So the post-imperial setting
is a welcome environment for me, especially since the US is now
in the middle of a war fever that is absolutely repellent as
well as overwhelming. If you sit in Washington and have some
connection to the country's power elites, the rest of the world
is spread out before you like a map, inviting intervention anywhere
and at any time. The tone in Europe is not only more moderate
and thoughtful: it is also less abstract, more human, more complex
and subtle.
Certainly Europe generally and Britain
in particular have a much larger and more demographically significant
Muslim population, whose views are part of the debate about war
in the Middle East and against terrorism. So discussion of the
upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and
their reservations a great deal more than in  America, where Muslims and Arabs are
already considered to be on the "other side", whatever
that may mean. And being on the other side means no less than
supporting Saddam Hussein and being "un-American".
Both of these ideas are abhorrent to Arab and Muslim-Americans,
but the idea that to be an Arab or Muslim means blind support
of Saddam and Al-Qa'eda persists nonetheless. (Incidentally,
I know no other country where the adjective "un" is
used with the nationality as a way of designating the common
enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely
American confections that claim to prove that we all "love"
our country. How can one actually "love" something
so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?).
The second major difference I have noticed
between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play
a far greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent
poll taken in the United States reveals that 86 per cent of the
American population believes that God loves them. There's been
a lot of ranting and complaining about fanatical Islam and violent
jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of course
they are, as are any fanatics who claim to do God's will and
to fight his battles in his name. But what is most odd is the
vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core
of George Bush's support and at 60 million strong represent the
single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas church
attendance is down dramatically in England it has never been
higher in the United States whose strange fundamentalist Christian
sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush's
government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously
condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.
It is the coincidence between the Christian
Right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuel
the drive towards unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine
mission. The neo-conservative movement began in the 70s as an
anti-communist formation whose ideology was undying enmity to
communism and American supremacy. "American values",
now so casually trotted out as a phrase to hector the world,
was invented then by people like Irving Kristoll, Norman Podhoretz,
Midge Decter, and others who had once been Marxists and had converted
completely (and religiously) to the other side. For all of them
the unquestioning defense of Israel as a bulwark of Western democracy
and civilisation against Islam and communism was a central article
of faith. Many though not all the major neo-cons (as they are
called) are Jewish, but under the Bush presidency they have welcomed
the extra support of the Christian Right which, while it is rabidly
pro-Israel, is also deeply anti-Semitic (ie these Christians
-- many of them Southern Baptists -- believe that all the Jews
of the world must gather in Israel so that the Messiah can come
again; those Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved,
the rest will be doomed to eternal perdition).
It is the next generation of neo-conservatives
such as Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza
Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld who are behind the push to war against
Iraq, a cause from which I very much doubt that Bush can ever
be deterred. Colin Powell is too cautious a figure, too interested
in saving his career, too little a man of principle to represent
much of a threat to this group which is supported by the editorial
pages of The Washington Post and dozens of columnists, media
pundits on CNN, CBS, and NBC, as well as the national weeklies
that repeat the same cliches about the need to spread American
democracy and fight the good fight, no matter how many wars have
to be fought all over the world.
There is no trace of this sort of thing
in Europe that I can detect. Nor is there that lethal combination
of money and power on a vast scale that can control elections
and national policy at will. Remember that George Bush spent
over $200 million to get himself elected two years ago, and even
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York spent 60 million dollars
for his election: this scarcely seems like the democracy to which
other nations might aspire, much less emulate. But this is accepted
uncritically by what seems to be an enormous majority of Americans
who equate all this with freedom and democracy, despite its obvious
drawbacks. More than any other country today, the United States
is controlled at a distance from most citizens; the great corporations
and lobbying groups do their will with "the people's"
sovereignty leaving little opportunity for real dissent or political
change. Democrats and Republicans, for example, voted to give
Bush a blank check for war with such enthusiasm and unquestioning
loyalty as to make one doubt that there was any thought in the
decision. The ideological position common to nearly everyone
in the system is that America is best, its ideals perfect, its
history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels
of human achievement and greatness. To argue with that -- if
that is at all possible -- is to be "un-American" and
guilty of the cardinal sin of anti- Americanism, which derives
not from honest criticism but for hatred of the good and the
pure.
No wonder then that America has never
had an organised Left or real opposition party as has been the
case in every European country. The substance of American discourse
is that it is divided into black and white, evil and good, ours
and theirs. It is the task of a lifetime to make a change in
that Manichean duality that seems to be set forever in an unchanging
ideological dimension. And so it is for most Europeans who see
America as having been their saviour and is now their protector,
yet whose embrace is both encumbering and annoying at the same
time.
Tony Blair's wholeheartedly pro-American
position therefore seems even more puzzling to an outsider like
myself. I am comforted that even to his own people he seems like
a humourless aberration, a European who has decided in effect
to obliterate his own identity in favour of this other one, represented
by the lamentable Mr Bush. I still have time to learn when it
will be that Europe will come to its senses and assume the countervailing
role to America that its size and history entitle it to play.
Until then, the war approaches inexorably.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony Gancarski
Disarming
Christian Soldiers
Kurt Nimmo
Crimes
Plotted in Windowless Rooms:
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Tom Barry
Frontier
Justice
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Robert Fisk
Bin Laden:
Back and in Saudi Arabia?
Chris Floyd
Taking
the Fifth
Bush's Extremist Agenda Goes into Overdrive
Tarif Abboushi
The Political Theology of Tom Delay:
Advocating Crimes Against Humanity?
New
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to Subscribers:
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- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
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- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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