Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear Judith Butler
The left response to the war currently waged in Afghanistan has run into serious problems in part because the explanations that the left has provided to the question, "why do they hate us so much?" have been dismissed as so many exonerations of the acts of terror themselves. This does not need to be the case. I think we can see, however, how moralistic anti-intellectual trends coupled with a distrust of the left as so many self-flagellating first world elites has produced a situation in which our very capacity to think about the grounds and causes of the current global conflict is considered impermissible. The cry that "there is no excuse for September 11th" has become a means by which to stifle any serious public discussion of how U.S. foreign policy has helped to create a world in which such acts of terror are possible. We see this most dramatically in the suspension of any attempt to offer balanced reporting on the international conflict, the refusal to include important critiques of the U.S. military effort by Arundhati Roy ( The Guardian , 9/29/01) and others within the mainstream U.S. press, the unprecedented suspension of civil liberties for illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists, the use of the flag as an ambiguous sign of solidarity with those lost on September 11th and with the current war, as if the sympathy with the one translates, in a single symbolic stroke, into support for the latter. The raw public mockery of the peace movement, the characterization of anti-war demonstrations as anachronistic or nostalgic, work to produce a consensus of public opinion that profoundly marginalizes anti-war sentiment and analysis, putting into question in a very strong way the very value of dissent as part of contemporary U.S. democratic culture. | |
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