“Why can’t we see ourselves as we are?”
The ‘apocalyptic blindness’ of Americans.
This is the first of two essays on the question of collective sight and its opposite. We note the passing of Ward Churchill, who died of a stroke, at 78, on 11 August.
18 AUGUST—The other night I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the coup that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister of Iran in the year the film notes in its title. Taghi Amirani, the director, has produced a superb piece of work, narrated in part by the estimable Steve Kinzer. Tomorrow, 19 August, marks the 73rd anniversary of Operation Ajax, as M.I.–6 and the C.I.A. named their covert assault on Iran’s first democratically elected government. A link to the film is here.
How well I recall learning of the Iran coup during my teenage years, when my eyes were just opening upon how, by the mid–1960s, the United States (and in this case Britain) treated those in foreign lands whose misfortune was to possess resources the world’s newest imperium sought compulsively to control. And how well I recall discovering at the same time the remarkably pervasive ignorance of this conduct among all but a very few Americans.
Late one evening, I must have been 18 or so, this topic came up in conversation with my dear mother. “But no, we wouldn’t do that!” she exclaimed in a tone of anxious disbelief.
“But we did, Mother. If you know where to find the record, what we did is in it.”
My mother lowered her eyes and glanced away. I could see her mind was simply incapable of absorbing the information I had put before her. There was a sort of psycho-emotional blocage. The subject never again came up.
I have long been preoccupied, maybe since those days, indeed, with the question of seeing. And just as much if not more, with the question of not-seeing. This is only natural, it seems to me, given that seeing and not-seeing, the latter vastly more prevalent than the former, is so defining of who Americans are and what makes them so different from other peoples. In a recent interview in Consortium News, Patrik Baab, the conscientious and beleaguered-because-conscientious Berlin correspondent, writer, and podcaster, referred to the “apocalyptic blindness” he finds among Germans. I know this is so, especially among West Germans, having traveled among them recently. But in the way of collective blindness, I must suggest to my friend and colleague, no people are more addicted to total darkness than Americans.
What I saw in my mother all those years ago was a refusal—a refusal to see that could not even understand itself as an act of refusal. I cannot say whether this condition has worsened in the decades since the conversation I had with her in the mid–1960s, but I don’t think this matters much one way or the other. If I have to offer an answer, I think it is both: People see more now than then, people see less now than then. The though requires explanation, obviously.
Among those who watch Taghi Amirani’s film, and I hope many do, I imagine few will be as surprised to learn of Operation Ajax as my mother was. America’s lawless barbarism and all its messes are easier to see now. The plain-as-day defeats of April 1975 have something to do with this. So do digital technologies and the emergence of independent media. The invasion of Venezuela and the blockade of Cuba, the killings-from-the-air of fishermen in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the installation of a murderous jihadist in Syria, the genocides in Gaza and the West Bank, the illegal bombing of Iran: There is no missing any of this.
But there is one failure to see that remains, and its persistence is symptomatic, it seems to me, of an empire in its late, desperate phase. This is the steadfast refusal among most Americans to see their complicity in the imperium’s conduct. The two phenomena, the seeing and the not-seeing, go together in this case. People see more, but few are able to see, are honest enough to see, themselves—to see that Americans comprise “a perpetrator population,” a term I cite with admiration and which I will shortly explain.
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I do not know how many readers will have noticed the death on 11 August of Ward Churchill, the clear-eyed scholar whose forthright honesty landed him in all sorts of trouble over the years. The New York Times published an obituary in its 12 August editions, written in the insidious language The Times uses when the intent is to cast doubt on someone’s integrity. Counterpunch ran an appreciation by one of his attorneys yesterday. I have not seen much else.
I will dwell on Churchill for a time, as he understood as well as anyone I have read the consequences of America’s collective blindness.
Churchill was a tenured professor of Native–American Studies at the University of Colorado when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred 11 September 2001. He must have stayed up all night, as the following day, 12 September, he published a 5,200–word essay he called “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” Passionately written, white-hot with anger, the piece first appeared in an online site called ratical.org. The Anarchist Library continues to make it available, as here.
Churchill took his title from a remark Malcolm X made after the Kennedy assassination: His murder was merely “chickens coming home to roost.” I do not accept Malcolm’s interpretation of 22 November 1963, but Churchill’s use of the phrase is exactly right. The 11 September attacks did not begin any kind of “War on Terror,” as the Bush II regime instantly declared: They were a just response—measured, indeed, when put in historical context—to aggressions that went back, depending on how we count, to the First Gulf War in 1990–91 and the deadly embargo that followed (denounced at the U.N. as genocide), or to L.B.J., who first lent U.S. support to the Zionist regime’s dispossession of Palestinians in the early 1960s, or… or going back to the Christian Crusades against Islam a millennia ago.
Here is Churchill working with available facts to clear them of the propaganda that instantly arose to obscure them. I will quote a few passages at length so readers can hear his voice and understand his argument.
On the Iraqis’ pre–11 September suffering:
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered—are still suffering—a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st “freedom-loving” father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: “The world must learn that what we say, goes,” intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere….
From a section subheaded, “On Matters of Proportion and Intent”:
As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, “Arab terrorists” have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That’s about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you’ll get something nearer an actual 1%).
They’ve managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they’d surrendered and/or after the “war-ending” ceasefire had been announced).
In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they’ve knocked down a half-dozen buildings—albeit some very well-chosen ones—as opposed to the “strategic devastation” visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq’s entire economy….
On the intentions of those who led the 11 September attacks. It is well to recall, à propos the following, the endless post–11 September histrionics in corporate media to the effect that the attacks were driven by an abiding hatred of “our freedom” and an envy of “our stuff”:
… they’ve given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine. This might be seen as merely a matter of “vengeance” or “retribution,” and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.
The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage—the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory—they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people….
In sum one can discern a certain optimism—it might even be called humanitarianism—imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.
Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name—indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it—mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Now they do.
That was the “medicinal” aspect of the attacks.
To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they’re now experiencing first-hand is no different from—or the least bit more excruciating than—that which they’ve been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.
More bluntly, the hope was—and maybe still is—that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as “stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe”….
And to conclude these extracts, a paragraph here that precedes those above, wherein Churchill tips the whole of the post–11 September discourse upside down:
Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the “news” media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast “aren’t like” Americans, not least because they don’t “value life” in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life—all lives, not just their own—far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.
A full-scale assault on American hypocrisy is one of Churchill’s purposes, plainly. To rehumanize the dehumanized is another. But to me, and the reason I fasten onto Churchill’s essay as I do here, is his attack on the near to criminal triviality of American life in the face of their nation’s incessant crimes. In this connection, I love this passage, which concerns public indifference as the consequences of the Gulf War and the post–War embargo became known:
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” and “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays—for “our kids,” no less—as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
It is Churchill’s eloquent bitterness I find so very right, his piercing sense of proportion and disproportion —his stone-solid charge that Americans are willfully blind to their responsibility for their nation’s crimes.
I well recall, of those first months after 11 September, that some number of Americans—a minority, certainly, but some—took the attacks as an occasion to reflect honestly on U.S. conduct in West Asia and elsewhere in the non–West. There was a search for causality, at last. I honored this brief interim in a book I later published. But Churchill had no more time for the self-examiners than he had for the parents of Jeremy and Tiffany. “Those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions,” he wrote, “and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing “moral witness” as legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark…”
Churchill’s pithiest observations, to continue a little further with his essay, concerned the prevalent presumption that those directly involved in the operations of empire the day of the attacks were innocent. “There is simply no argument to be made,” he wrote, “that Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fit that bill.” What could be truer? As to those in the Twin Towers:
Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire—the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved—and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance”—a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore”—counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in—and in many cases excelling at—it was because of their absolute refusal to see.
The absolute refusal to see. I detected this same 13 years later, when the 9/11 Memorial Museum opened at the site of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan. How can you work for Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, or Cantor Fitzgerald and consider yourself innocent of the imperium’s aggressions and exploitations, I wondered in the piece I wrote at the time. The museum, it seemed to me, was a morbid monument to the obsessive individuation of “victims” and the racist dehumanization of “perpetrators.”
It is greatly to Ward Churchill’s credit that he turned this equation hourglass upside-down long before I did, defending in his searing prose his description of Americans as “a perpetrator population.” What phrasing, even after all these years. And it is to the late scholar’s credit also that he demonstrated the vital connection between empire and blindness—the former requiring the latter of its citizens for the exercise of its power.
With the vigor evident in every sentence of “Some People Push Back,” Churchill condemned all “pious Americans”—especially those directly serving the empire, whom he called “little Eichmanns”—just as Americans vigorously condemned, post–1945, those Germans who were silent during the years of the Reich: “If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans.”
It was these remarks that got Churchill in trouble—so it is generally understood. The University of Colorado fired him on the pretext of scholarly misconduct, a decision he had reversed in a court case some years later. But I don’t think the “little Eichmann” passages account for Churchill’s treatment, or the storm of controversy the essay prompted. No, it was his charges of shared responsibility, of purposeful blindness, of “an absolute refusal to see.”
As Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, “Go, go, go said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”
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Ratical.org, where “Some People Push Back” first appeared, now publishes a journal called Rat Haus Reality. The clipped, concise mot atop its home page reads, “Exercising our intelligence with clarity and coherence.” I cannot think of a better summation of the responsibility Americans bear if they are to overcome their late-imperial neurosis and, so, learn to see.
The reigning orthodoxy has it that the Pentagon and its obscenely immense armies, along with America’s obscenely powerful intelligence apparatus, are the nation’s guardians, protecting all 340 million of us from “threats”—threats, threats, threats everywhere. This is preposterous on the very face of it, given the United States’ serial military and intelligence failures.
No, it is when we learn to see that we will enable ourselves to make our way in the world unthreatened by others.
Nietzsche published The Gay Science, which he considered the most personal of his books, in 1882. To know ourselves truly, to see ourselves as we are, he urged, we must board our boats and sail beyond our shores, there to turn back to see how it is we have lived. “We have forsaken the land and gone to sea!” one translation—there are others—has him writing. He meant—although interpreting Nietzsche is always a little perilous—we must unmoor ourselves of all we have presumed to be so, accepting the dangers that come with true freedom.
To surrender the illusory safety of blindness in favor of risk and clear sight: It is we who are our greatest threat until we get this done, so discovering that in the embrace of risk lies a truer future, the possibility of the freedom of which Nietzsche wrote.