Post 9/11 American Claims of Innocence in Ward Churchills The Ghost of 9-1-1 - Article Example

The Ghosts of 9 1 Ward Churchill’s “The Ghost of 9 1” is an exhortative essay that argues against the post 9/11 American claims of innocence. It interrogates the various incidents that led to the assaults on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, and demands a close introspection of the burgeoning ideologies of terrorism and their roots. Churchill’s views are clear and strong and all his statements in the essay exude a fearless irreverence. Though a passionate treatise in itself, the essay is analytical descriptive nature, following the basic argument that morals and ethical evaluation applies to all, on equal terms. Many similar arguments have surfaced before and after the publication of the essay, from theorists/writers in America and outside it. Noam Chomsky talks of the American idea of preventive war as “the use of military force to eliminate and imagined or invented threat” and states that “it falls within the category of war crimes” (12). The subjective, self-justifying perspective of American people regarding the 9/11 incident, often expressed through media, is criticized by Churchill in the beginning of the essay. The succeeding arguments that follow a logical cause and effect motive states persuasively that the American people in general need to look deeper into the situation and comprehend the real state of affairs. Referring the “aura of wide-eyed innocence” that the media tried to associate to the American people in general, Churchill attacks the thoughtlessness behind the Newsweek Cover that asked “Why do they hate us so much”. In an effort to make clear who the ‘we’ and ‘they’ meant in the question, a lot of background history is presented, with all its shocking details. The negative responses by the Americans to the proposition of Good Germans after the holocaust is brought to the debate as an analogy to the supposedly innocent Americans against a good lot of barbarian terrorists from all parts of the world. The basic presumption that there are some innocent professions that distance common people from the crimes committed by the state is questioned here. Churchill recounts the “Nuremberg Trials of a collective guilt inhering in the German populace itself” and suggests that at least the US officials who are directly responsible for the numerous instances of genocide promulgated by the state have to be brought for trial. Churchill holds America responsible for the lives of half a million Iraqi children, who “were starved to death or forced to die for lack of basic sanitation and/or medical treatment during the past ten years”. By alluding to the kind of justice that American “peacekeepers” envisage in the death and devastation of the many possibly innocent Germans, Churchill highlights how the rest of the world can adopt such a measure against Americans. The presumptuous claim of innocence by the American public is thus thwarted in this direct argument. Churchill’s essay is self-defensive, in that it foresees the possible criticisms of it. It can be accused of oversimplification or reductionism, and even be seen irrelevant as it “compared apples and oranges” in the analogy of Germans and Americans. It can be claims that America is multicultural and democratic unlike Germany fifty years ago. People see it as a positive effect that “there is a discernible opposition in the US, an active counterforce to the status quo”. However, Churchill demolishes this argument by pointing out to the general insensitivity and lack or responsibility towards the “wholesale destruction of Iraqi children”. There is no record of a single demonstration in protest of this. The unjustifiable focus of the intelligentsia and the progressives to relatively less shocking yet exaggerated effect of tobacco smoke, and the installation of speed-bumps in suburban neighborhoods makes the impression that the lack of interest in a major genocide of which their state happens to be the culprit was deliberate. The tendency to ignore the ugly side of American policies that result in the well-being of American citizens and eventual hardships and even death of other less fortunate people around the world qualifies America a perpetrator of terror. Churchill’s statement that the ghosts of Iraqi children and also the ghosts of many peoples whose life had been threatened and terminated by the American government policies are an integral part of the twin-tower mishap. The claim for innocence does not stand a chance when one takes into consideration the numerous instances where other innocent people, including children died under the iron will of American sovereignty. The tendency to cloak material, capitalistic endeavors and war crimes in armchair intellectualism through which the American consciousness can be projected as an innocent, moralistic one is questioned by Churchill. He observes that the postmodernist discourses and the growing post-colonial discourses attendant to it can only serve the purpose of deviating from the real issues and focusing on shadow wars with regard to cultural issues. He disapproves of Homi K Bhabha’s “preposterous 1994 contention that writing, which he likens to “warfare”, should be considered the only valid revolutionary act” , and goes to the extent of saying that the postmodernist and post-colonial theorists “are finding berths at elite universities at a truly astounding rate”. Theory and activism may not always go hand in hand, and the reactionary public may not wait every time to be intellectually guided the elite theorists, especially when the rules of equality and sustenance are so starkly questioned. Churchill sees the American people as so intoxicated in exceptionalism that “they’d lost all touch with laws as basic and natural as cause and effect”. The perpetrator of the American New World Order, George Herbert Walker Bush is seen as the mastermind behind the mass murder of Iraqi children. Churchill implores the contemporary amnesiac American people happily led under the leadership of George Bush junior to open their ears to a pronouncement by a Prohibition-era gangster Bumpy Johnson in a 1984 movie: “When you puch people around, some people (will eventually) push back”. He goes on to state that the “ghosts of Iraq’s wasted children were by no means alone in their haunting”. He recounts the others who have died due to the American terror. There are 800,000 Iraqi adults, who have died with the children as a direct result of the US sanctions. There are also 150,000-or-so Iraqi civilians who are often discounted as “collateral damage” during the US aerial bombardment. Then, there are the soldiers who died in the ‘Highway of Death’ and some 10,000 Iraqi guardsmen in Basra. To add to it are many “thousands of Palestinians shredded over the years by Israeli pilots flying planes purchased with US funds and dropping cluster bombs manufactured in/provided by the USA. The victims can be numbered in shocking propensities from Guatemala, Indonesia and so on. The ghosts of victims from all these places can also be linked to the fate of those who died in the twin-tower attack. The political interference of America in Palestine, Asia and South America has led to many shocking massacres and carnages. Churchill points out: “For all its official chatter about the necessity of preventing weapons of mass destructions from “falling into the hands of rogue states and terrorists,” the US remains the only country ever to use nuclear devices for that reason”. The many instances of terrorism in the international sphere aided by the USA for its selfish reasons and for destroying other world powers reflect the capability of the country for relentless violence, which will eventually have to be reciprocated by violence, as far as the idea of consequences go. It is a known and neglected fact that the famous American dream is built on the blood of the land’s original inhabitants. Various Native American people and their mass murder can also have a ghostly presence around the twin tower, according to Churchill. He mentions the eradication of Wappingers by the Dutch “in their founding of New Amsterdam, now New York, the victim’s severed heads used for a jolly game of kickball along a street near which the WTC would later stand”. Churchill confronts the Newsweek question “Why do they hate us so much” and says: “The very question is on its face absurd, delusional, revealing of an aggregate detachment from reality so virulent in its evasiveness as to be deemed clinically pathological”. From the instances of mass murder and lack of concern for human lives from the part of America, he presents the strong possibility and legitimacy of other queries: “How could ‘they’ possibly not hate ‘us’?” and “Why did it take “them” so long to arrive?” and also, “Why, under the circumstances, did they conduct themselves with such obvious and admirable restraint?” Thus, the attitude behind the misleading question on the cover of News week and the ostensible innocence of the American masses is deconstructed by Churchill, proving that the 9/11 incident is just an opportunity to own up the criminal acts that lie behind the building of the nation and the future possibilities of such attacks which are in fact a natural outcome the previous acts from the part of the state. Churchill goes to the extent of stating that the 9/11 incident does not even bring a balance in when it is taken as a retaliation by any of the fractions that had been wronged by the state. He says: “The US population is about fifteen times the size of Iraq’s. Hence, for the attackers to have achieved a proportionally equivalent impact, it would have been necessary that they kill some 7.5 million Americans.” And he suggests, adopting a cold-blooded sense or reality for arguments sake, to keep the proportion exactly, they should have killed 7.5 million American children. Churchill’s aim is apparently not to promote a culture of violence by these factual references and analogies. Rather, he tries to expose the American media’s exaggeration and misrepresentation of the impact of 9/11 and the way the suffering and death of people from other parts of the world, even as America holds a direct responsibility to them, are neglected. By alluding to the suffering of people because of America, and referring to a “genuine equivalency in suffering”, Churchill shows how the American people have chosen not to care for the suffering of others and brood on their personal losses, and try to generate a worldwide movement against their ‘enemies’. Churchill refers to the counter-war polemic of Noam Chomsky and reiterates his formulation that “if you really want to put an end to terrorism, you have to begin by no longer participating in it.” The post 9/11 American idea of checking and controlling terrorism worldwide is also mentioned in the essay. The idea of absolute power and its infallibility blinds any nation from the possibility of respecting other cultures. Even as America claims to be a multicultural nation, the minority and gender issues are the most raised there, showing how it has not yet alleviated the bad effects emanating from power. In attempt to interrogate the nature of terror in a metaphysical manner, Terry Eagleton observes, “Absolute power is mad with desire, seized by an insatiable lust to dominate and destroy” (24). The false sense of justice in American minds as their surrogates in Afghanistan “have been gleefully castrating and otherwise mutilating captured enemy soldiers before summarily executing them” shows their insensitivity towards criminal behavior and its counter effects. The tendency of the general public to see the war crimes of the sate as ‘immaculate genocides’ are countered in the essay, quoting the philosopher Karl Jaspers. The categorization of criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt and metaphysical guilt, shows the variations in the responsibility involved in crimes committed on a large scale like a state-incited genocide. This realization and owning up phase is a significant one that Churchill envisages, after the sensitization of the profundity and horror of war crimes committed by the US government in the past few decades. Relying on the basic precepts of the International Criminal Court, Churchill demands the need to convict all those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. He says that at least three present/former US officials must be brought under trial, as a preliminary sample. The names he mentions are that of the former Secretary of State Albright, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the (current) North Caroline Senator Jesse Helms. The unconventional and daring way in which Churchill perceives the cause and effect of 9/11 is reflected in the following words by him: Should it turn out that Americans were prodded by the pain inflicted on 9-1-1 to finally begin shouldering the responsibility of forcing their government to obey the law – with all that this implies – it may be said that a world historic corner was turned on that date. Should this not prove to be the case, however, others, especially those Others most egregiously victimized by American lawlessness, will have no real alternative but to try and do the job themselves. And, in the collectivity of their civic default, Americans, no more than Good Germans of 1945, can have little legitimate complaint as to how they may have to go about. The entire question of retaliation from those who had been at the receiving end of war crimes and crimes against humanity by America is related to the double-edged feature of forgiveness. Forgiveness, according to Jacques Derrida, is beyond the power that we associate with it. The meaning of the word is problematic, as real forgiveness can exist only if we forgive the unforgivable. The association of power with forgiveness makes it redundant. As he says, What I dream of, what I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty. The most difficult task, at once necessary and apparently impossible, would be to dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty. (59-60) It is still debatable whether violence must be met with violence in retaliation, but the main point that Churchill makes here is that it is not a good idea to stop the violence that is reactionary. The origin of violence has to be revealed first. And, if Americans find out that the origin of the violence that they have propagated has an effect that is destructive in nature, they have to stop propagating it again, through the oppression and unnecessary interference in other countries/communities, in the name of peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is not an idea that can be incorporated to the quest for revenge and action against unforgivable crimes from others, bothering only about their immediate effects and not root causes. If this realization does not come along, even after a catastrophic event like the assault of the Pentagon ad the Twin tower, any attempt to remain at the top of a New World Order and ascertaining the power attendant to it will only serve as fodder for future violence. References Chomsky, Noam. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001. Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Read More