A devious plan
by half...
Today we commemorate the brilliant move by yours truly more than 200 years ago to divide the American body politic by forcing it to choose between Britain and France, and so to make a mockery of the pious neutrality of the young Republic.
Americans are older now and long ago ceased having a republic. Today they face the difficult task of winding down a world empire. It appears that they have found a clever way to do it.
It has been said that the favourite theorist of the George W Bush administration and its ‘with-or-against-us’ ideology was Carl Schmitt. One doubts that Bush or his people ever read much Schmitt. Their thinking came instead from the good ol’ frontier, the railroad tracks, the ‘gated community’, Mason-Dixon, and the colour line. Everyone should be on one side or the other.
This modern caricature of Manichaeism has, of course, gone global. Barack Obama, half-playing the part of the rootless cosmopolitan, took the baton of ‘uniters versus dividers’ from Bush and gave it a clever twist. He replaced ‘us’ with ‘me’, as in ‘with-me-or-against-me’, and added that, if you were against him or his policies, you were, by definition, a ‘divider’. Obama’s conceit of unity and temporal virtue (‘being on the right side of history’) extended the whim of ‘red and blue states’ to the whole world and furthered a process of ‘decoupling’, lately having culminated under his two successors. Is it permissible to be pro-Ukraine but not anti-Russia? Pro-Palestine but not anti-Israel? Good luck with that. Yet, the official line of pro-Ukraine + pro-Israel makes little ideological (or logical) sense.
Laying down lines carries on tous azimuts. Even America’s Calvinist saint, Woodrow Wilson, the man who did more than anyone else to expand and solidify its world empire a century ago, has been tossed over the moralising fence. Who will go next?
This is decolonisation by reductive division, akin to a retroactive application of divide-and-conquer or a retrospective exfoliation of opposing parts. It’s a pretty devious strategy for relieving a nation from its imperial burden. So long as it ain’t over, over there, it ain’t happening over here. But that, too, is a dangerous conceit.
Now the American secretary of state has gone to Israel where he was given one job: to build a fence around today’s conflict so many more thousands won’t die. Instead, he has personalised it with remarks that stamped a US seal of approval on the equation of Hamas with Hitler. For a man who never passes on a chance to remind people of his family’s hardship in the Holocaust, he should know something about it.
What has happened during the past week is not the same as the Final Solution. Hamas may want to destroy Israel and retake its land, but those goals are significantly different from erasing the Hebrew people from the face of the earth. As horrible and ugly as the attacks on Israeli civilians have been, they are retribution against a state that has been persecuting Palestinian civilians for three quarters of a century.
Well done, Tony. You’ve now given rise to the charge of placing a target called ‘Bibi’ on the back of any American and any Jew, anywhere. Cynics will say that some zealous hand-holding is again necessary to save the Israelis from their worst instincts. But don’t be surprised if they and others also start saying that the one thing worse than being tossed to the other side of the fence is seeing one of the few proper remaining fences torn down by irresponsible people who ought to know better.