How did we get here?
, as always (always, always, always), is a must-read:
Any decent, civilized person watching scenes in Mumbai of extremists shooting indiscriminate machine gun fire and launching grenades into civilians crowds — deliberately slaughtering innocent people by the dozens — is going to feel disgust, fury, and a desire for vengeance against the perpetrators, regardless of what precipitated it. The temptation is great even among the most rational to empower authority to do anything and everything — without limits — to punish those responsible and prevent repeat occurrences. That’s a natural, even understandable, response. And it’s the response that the attackers hope to provoke.
It’s that temptation to which most Americans — and our leading media institutions — succumbed in the wake of 9/11, and it’s exactly the reaction that’s most self-destructive. As documented by from Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India, the Indian Government — in response to prior terrorist attacks — has been employing tactics all-too-familiar to Americans: ”terrorism suspects have been picked up at random and denied legal rights”; “allegations of torture by police are routine”; “suspects have been held for years as their court cases have dragged on. Convictions have been few and far between”; Muslims and Hindus are subjected to vastly disparate treatment; and much of the most consequential actions take place in secrecy, shielded from public view, debate or accountability.
As Padgaonkar details, many of these measures, particularly in the wake of new terrorist attacks, are emotionally satisfying, yet they do little other than exacerbate the problem, spawn further extremism and resentment, and massively increase the likelihood of further and more reckless attacks — thereby fueling this cycle endlessly — all while degrading the very institutions and values that are ostensibly being defended. The greater one’s physical or emotional proximity to the attacks, the greater is the danger that one will seek excessively to empower and submit to government authority and cheer for destructive counter-measures which allow few, if any, limits.
What happened in the U.S. over the last eight years is about much, much more than what “the Bush administration” did. It begins there, but responsibility in the post 9/11-era is much more diffuse and collective than that. Shoveling it all off on the administration that is leaving, while exonerating our culpable media and political institutions that remain, isn’t merely historically inaccurate and unfair, though it is that. Allowing that revisionism also ensures that the critical lessons that ought to be learned will instead be easily and quickly forgotten when similar episodes occur here in the future.
Do you remember what the days and weeks following 9/11 were like? I can remember going down to the water and watching streams of thick black smoke rising into the sky like marble columns, and people buying a hundred newspapers at a time from me where I worked, hoping they would sell for something some day in the future, if there was a future. People kept saying the air smelled like burning bodies, one of the tricks grief can play on the mind. I remember the glass storefronts of Sikh business owners being shattered by bricks (“towelheads”), and some people waiting for another cashier to check them out other than me, one who had chosen to take off a gold pendant with the Arabic word for “god” on it in light of the way things were. A friend doing clean-up laughed about some of the crew making marionettes from a few stray limbs they uncovered in the rubble, betraying a hurt so deep it needed to be divorced from the working mind. He’s never been the same since. I remember being spit on by passing drivers in Getty Square; I was holding a sign that was asking to stop the indiscriminate, reactionary bombing of Afghanistan.
I don’t know if I feel the same as I did then, maybe not at all. But I will never forget the way some people let fear and the incredible sadness of unknowable loss turn them heartless and mindless, make numb their care for the future to avenge the pain of the past. As if that could ever be of true relief, as if that hadn’t been the plan all along.
