Press Action ::: Same As It Ever Was

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Same As It Ever Was

By Jordy Cummings

With all of the talk of Ward Churchill’s post-9/11 remarks and the resulting McCarthyism, I got to thinking how I myself responded to that “fateful day when everything changed.” (sic) I was 24, lived in Montreal at the time, in my last year at Concordia’s august, if increasingly corporatized journalism school. I don’t watch TV, haven’t had cable for years, nor was I in the permanent news-junkie space that dictated getting onto the computer first thing. I woke up around 9 or so, didn’t have a class until far later in the day, made my coffee and breakfast and tried to phone up a pal. The phones didn’t work, so I ventured out to see if the super knew what was going on. Cops were in the hallway of my floor—I lived in downtown Montreal, where there are lots of Arab Canadians, so I later assumed that they were trying to question a Palestinian neighbor of mine, though I never asked. Getting on the elevator with the mustached, relatively kind and normal Montreal cops, one of them put their hand on my shoulder and said “its gonna be okay.”

I had no clue what he was talking about. Wandering into my building’s lobby, I saw my landlady, an aging “Yenta” (loudmouthed Jewish spinster) who looked incredibly frazzled and asked her if I could use the building phone. She asked if I had relatives in New York, and I told her I didn’t, and asked why. Didn’t I watch the news, she asked. “The Palestinians just attacked New York.” This seemed to be a stretch. Why the hell would Palestinians attack New York? I decided to call my pal, who told me what had happened, and my first thought was not “Palestinians,” let alone “Osama” or anything else. As I thought after the bombing of Oklahoma City, I immediately actually used the words that Mr. Churchill is considered even by some mushy liberals as being “Fascist” for using. “The chickens had come home to roost.” Part of me thought, and still thinks, that it may have been an inside job, but my overarching response was that it was a tragedy, I was scared shitless that there’d be more attacks—though felt safe in Montreal. But my immediate response was that I was not surprised.

In his critique of Ward Churchill, Anthony Lappe of the Guerilla News Network, not only uses a Hitchensian/Stalinist “eliptical” critique to prove that Churchill was “fascist,” he also says that similar statements made by Noam Chomsky on Sept. 12 were “ill timed.” On Sept. 12, Peter Beinart, editor of the “Kill Arundhati Roy” rag, the rag in question of course being The New Republic, stated that “any dissent is at this point immoral,” followed closely by Christopher Hitchens’ nervous breakdown, in which he categorically states that if one immediately didn’t feel they were at war with an invisible enemy, if one talked about root causes, then one was “soft on fascism.” When the late Su san Sontag made the same point as Churchill and Chomsky, in The New Yorker, she became the target of actual fascists, spending the last few years of her life better known for her qualities as a “traitor” then as an aesthetic pioneer. That she later qualified herself in an interview with Salon, saying she was not the “same as Chomsky,” may have been her own opinion, likely it was influenced subtly—especially in the liberal circles Ms. Sontag traveled in—by liberal jingoism, by her son David Rieff, a liberal bomber.

I’m sure that just about anyone with any knowledge of the history of US foreign policy had similar feelings to myself, whether on the left or in the foreign service who invented the phrase “Blowback.” In fact, Michael Schneur who was until recently a counterterrorism majordomo at the CIA, one of whose major intellectual influences is Robert Fisk, made the same points as well. One does not need to mention of course that there were a few Americans who did blame their own country for the attacks, those like Robertson, Falwell and others. Then there was Benji Netanyahu who called the attacks a “channukah miracle” because it would draw America closer to Israel, and similar statements by the then-ruling Anti-Muslim BJP party in India.

The day after 9/11, I went to what turned out to be one of the most fascinating classes I took in university, the second session in Dennis Murphy’s great “Seminar in Propaganda.” The week before, serendipitously, we had discussed propaganda, Murphy reminiscing about the Vietnam war and how we were all lucky not to have to live in an “age of propaganda.” What a difference a week makes. It was a fascinating laboratory, that classroom, 60 or so odd students, mostly from journalism, communications or film, discussing their responses to Sept. 11.

I made the “chickens coming home” point uncontroversially, and predicted—correctly—that civil liberties were dead. International students could especially contextualize the experience, whether it was a Latin American who immediately reminded us of the first 9/11, or an Israeli student about how they can identify with the experience, as did one Lebanese student who lived through the siege of Beirut. The attitude was that the attacks were predictable, and sad—so sad. Everyone seemed to still feel stoned on confusion. Very few people, from any political stripe, seemed vengeful, except when one woman said “right on” to the attacks and was firmly reprimanded by many of us.

Churchill was not saying “Right On” to the attacks. Even if one does not totally accept his contention that bourgeois/capitalist Americans are knowingly complicit in Empire—my own thoughts are more complex, influenced by Lukacs and others’ notions that those within the bourgeois and capitalist class are as “caught up” in reified social reality, if not more, than workers—one cannot deny that he was spot on in regard to the legitimacy of targeting, if one uses the same yardstick as the United States. As well, unlike what some of his critics have said, the role that bankers play for US hypercapitalism is the role that Eichman played for the Nazis. And many Americans in the ruling class are far less shy than Nazis, even about their penchant for murderous rage. I remember thinking a lot, while driving home the day of that class, about Thomas Friedman’s unforgettable remarks during the criminal Kosovo war, something to the effect of “12 weeks of precise bombings aren’t enough, barbarian Serbs? How ‘bout six months of non-precise bombing....you want 1389, I’ll give you 1389.”

The debate about human agency on which Churchill and I are on opposite sides has nothing to do with politics, but if one assumes as Churchill seemingly does, that humans have a capacity for critical knowledge and thinking, even within an oppressive social context and what Judith Butler calls “linguistic vulnerability” built into the English language, then of course they were “Little Eichmans.” On another level, though, one can speculate that not even Eichman was a little Eichman. If one assumes contingency over essentialism, then everyone’s got both a “little Eichman” and a “little MLK” in them, so to speak. The German superstructure produced the substructure of Eichmans as the American superstructure produced the substructure of capitalists. The point that needs to be remembered though is not that these people, in Churchill’s or in anyone’s thinking, deserved to die. I often say in anti-death penalty debates, that to truly be against the death penalty, then one must even be against it for Eichman.

Rather, Churchill, a fierce and independent thinker who has criticized Chomsky for his free-speech defense of Faurrison, and one of the few philosophers to understand the Holocaust’s social context outside of either the Zionist abuse of holocaust memory, of the attitude, as exemplified by the historian Eric Hobsbawm or the liberal philosopher Hannah Arrendt that it was “banal.” Churchill asserts, in his writings about the holocaust and genocide in general, that once one accepts evil as “Banal” as opposed to the individuals, one accepts evil as normal.

Eichman was banal, but Arrendt was stretching when she claimed that evil is a “Banal” side to the “human condition.” Arrendt’s sometimes nemesis Theodor Adorno once put it that once one “codifies” genocide as one of the “crimes” of humanity—as opposed to calling it for what it is, an unnecessary, spectacular mechanized evil, then humanity is doomed to more genocide. In other words, to truly understand war crimes, genocide and evil, one has to be able to make a universal, if constructed judgment; in other words, in regard to being complicit in the machine. This isn’t simply “collective responsibility” that would dictate “right on” to an attack on even a legitimate military target like the Pentagon. It is class-consciousness.

Only about 10 days after 9/11, I went to see David Byrne, one of my favorite artists, perform live at a little club. A New Yorker, this was Byrne’s first show of his first tour after 9/11. While not as wild as he was in the days of Talking Heads, Byrne is an incredibly emotional performer. When he took to the stage, the crowd—still stoned on confusion, it seemed—went apeshit. Byrne literally broke down in tears, before playing “Life During Wartime”—“This Ain’t no Party, This ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around,” while talking between songs about oil and capitalism. Later in the show, he played “This must be the place” While singing about wanting to be “home,” the lyric being about an idealized feeling of being at home, we all realized that we would never be going back.

As my friends Ron, Shiri and I walked into the Montreal night after the show, Ron turned to me and said “That really made me feel better. For the last week, I felt like the world was gonna end.” I turned back and repeated Byrne’s line “This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around.” I got on my computer late that night and read about the round-ups taking place already in New York, of hundreds, if not thousands of Muslims and Arabs, even before the rubble was clear. To quote another David Byrne lyric, “same as it ever was.” For thinking Americans, and Canadians, 9/11 served to remind us that we were part of the planet that was under attack by a rapacious capitalism, that we too couldn’t hide out any longer in our doldrums, “letting the days go by.”

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

More from Jordy Cummings