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November 07, 2005
Two Perspectives on America in the West
Two high-brow American boutique publications - Harper's magazine and the New York Times magazine - have recently published two radically different takes on the ambivalent place of the United States in the Western community of nations.
The New York Times' James Traub starts with the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Harold Pinter, a British playwright who "views the United States as a moral monster bent on world domination." The Swedish Academy's decision, Traub argues, is emblematic of the mood in Europe, where "the anti-American left is far more intellectually respectable" even in "the highest reaches of European culture." He names names - John Le Carée, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy - and cites the harsh criticism of these "implacable ideologues" to US intervention in Serbia, Iraq and elsewhere as proof of "a virulent strain of anti-Americanism."
He suggests the route cause is the resentment of the European left when confronted by the "socialist debacle" at home and American power and prosperity abroad. His solution? Broadening the war of ideas being waged in the Middle East to now-hostile European territory.
William Pfaff, writing in Harper's, takes an almost opposite approach. Rather then beginning with the fact of European hostility towards the US (prevalent, at least, among the intelligentsia), he starts instead with specific parts of US policy, most significantly the use of torture in the war on terror.
Pfaff notes that there are few significant value differences between America and the other Western nations. One concerns international law - most Western nations view international organizations as legitimate and beneficial, and multilateral agreements, especially on human rights questions, as sacrosanct, while the US tends to view these things instrumentally and suspiciously, preferring to safeguard its sovereignty. Conversely, there seems to be a consensus on the human rights protected - on both sides of the Atlantic, these rights are considered to represent the highest ideals of the West. Under normal circumstances, these differences would not cause severe friction - there is more keeping the West together than pulling it apart. But, Pfaff argues, after Sept. 11 normal circumstances came to an end in the United States.
Instead, he describes a Manichean worldview held by American political leaders, pitting their country against an objectively "evil" terrorist threat. The depravity and seriousness of this threat justified anything in the effort to counter it - disregard for international law, undermining traditional institutions and alliances and, most seriously, the widespread use of torture. Pfaff's accusations are not new - he cites the existence of secret prisons abroad, the practice of extraordinary rendition and, of course, the indefinite detainment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Iraq - but his conclusions, in light of the brazenness of US authorities - are startling.
International illegality, the deliberate repudiation of international law, and torture, gratuitously employed in defiance of the moral intuitions of ordinary people, all show that the Bush Administration has chosen to place itself outside the moral community of modern Western democratic civilization.
If this is being published in Harper's, maybe Traub's war of ideas needs to be taken to the home front as well.
Posted November 7, 2005 01:11 AM
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