Divided We Stand
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is
a statistic," Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians
in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when
they count up their numbers. Compound death is more
than a statistic; it is incomprehensible.
The banal media coverage of September 11 grapples
with a story too big to tell that can only be broken
down into human fragments of personal stories.
This is true for most of the dark footprints of
history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there
are only countless personal stories of survivors and
the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine.
These perspectives never come together into a single
story only human fragments and procedural details,
the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams
of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person
and how many people can be loaded on a train in how
much time.
The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same
mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped,
the families of the dead relating how they reacted
to the news, the stories of firefighters and
officers, and the procedural questions, how long it
takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity
and what happens to the human body when it breathes
in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the
killers who plotted and planned, checked flight
schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and
killed thousands for Allah.
The story of the attacks cannot be told because
there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with
a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a
scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with
Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich
propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of
Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca?
All but the last are incomplete, and even the last
leaves too much out.
When a murder happens we trace back the motives of
the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the
authorities fail to act in time, what made a once
sweet boy turn into a killer? To do the same for
September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years
and still come away with few answers except that
sometimes human evil can be congealed into an
ideology and passed along from generation to
generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.
"Where were you when the planes hit," attempts to
orient us in time. But the question is only an
attempt to make the impossible seem real. The
businessman covered in ash and stumbling over the
Brooklyn Bridge and the Seattle housewife waking up
to see news coverage of it on television are more
human fragments of a thing that is more than human.
War.
War fragments perspectives, and though we have grown
used to formal stories of war which began with a
legal declaration of war and end with a surrender,
these things have as little to do with war as a
coroner's statement has to do with death. The laws
of war, the treaties and the formalities are ways
that human civilization attempts to make the wild
force of human nature into a manageable thing.
Europeans and their colonial descendants may pen
laws of war, but only they are constrained by them.
In the real world outside the dinner parties of
Washington D.C. and Brussels, there are no laws in
war. Islamic law which has regulations for which
foot to use when entering a bathroom (the left foot)
and which side to sleep on (the right) has very few
laws of war that cannot be nullified by necessity or
even whim. On the battlefield, Islamic jurisprudence
is boiled down to, Do what thou wilt in the cause of
Allah, that is the whole of the law.
The West has tried to make war into a moral force by
governing its means, without regard to its ends. But
in the Muslim world, war is moral so long as its
ends are Islamic-- the means are a technicality that
Islamic scholars may squabble over the way they do
over every petty matter, but in practice it's
anything goes so long as it serves the Ummah. And
even those technical debates over civilians in war
and terrorism are governed by the ultimate welfare
of the Ummah.
What happens when people who believe that the ends
justify the means fight against people who believe
that the ends never justify the means? In
Afghanistan and Iraq the people who believed that
the ends justify the means have gained their ends--
while we have lost both the ends and the means, not
going far enough for the hawks and going too far for
the doves.
This is the broken way of war that we practiced
in Vietnam and Korea, constrained by invisible
boundaries of our own making that did not prevent us
from bombing cities, but did keep us from wiping out
entire villages. To our enemies, these morals of
ours seem every bit as senseless as their foot
washing regulations seem to us. Why do the people
who bombed Dresden beat their breasts over Mai Lai,
and why was Shock and Awe acceptable, but not Abu
Ghraib?
The answers invariably come down not to some
externally consistent philosophy or divine law, but
our need to feel good about ourselves by setting up
a code that makes us seem moral in our own eyes.
That makes us feel good about war. And the first law
of that code is that killing en masse without really
meaning to is more moral than pointing a gun at a
man and pulling the trigger. This is the plausible
deniability morality of the firing squad which uses
enough dummy cartridges so that no one can be sure
who fired the shot. No wonder drone attacks are a
favorite of an anti-war administration putting as
much automation and distance as possible between the
soldier and his target.
Laws tell much about a people. Our need to legislate
the use of force, and their need to legislate
everything but the use of force. We have learned to
be afraid of our lurking potential for evil.
It is a fear absent in Islam where a man who serves
Allah cannot be a devil no matter what he does, but
we know all too well that the devil can come wrapped
in a saintly cause. We know it so well that we
sometimes forget that while devils do occasionally
come wearing halos, mostly they come wearing horns.
To our great pain and woe, we have forgotten that we
are not our own enemies.
A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11
would have marked the beginning of a war, but in
this century they only marked a day of pain and
sorrow, and years of a war that was never truly a
war. It is this conflicted un-war that the
anniversary marks. A war that never ends, because it
never began.
War is a framework for violence, which the Muslim
world hardly needs. While we search for an enemy to
declare war on, all they need is a Fatwa with a
clerical argument dubbing us the enemy, our nation,
our soldiers, our civilians and our children. All of
us.
We have no comfortable war framework except nation
building which pretends that war is really the Peace
Corps with bombs, habitat for humanity with the
homes blown up before they can be rebuilt.
Are we fighting because they attacked us or because
girls in Afghanistan can't go to school or for some
figment of regional stability in a country where
stability isn't even a word. That lack of clarity is
fragmentation. And fragmentation makes all stories
seem senseless.
The pain and shock of the attacks gave us a measure
of clarity. We were hit hard enough that we felt
once again that justice was on our side and we no
longer had to feel guilty for standing up for
ourselves. In a society whose highest morality has
become that of the victim, we were suddenly victims
and entitled to defend ourselves.
The need to question ourselves temporarily went away
and it felt good. For a brief shining moment the
country became aware of external enemies and was
united. We stopped being fragments warring with each
other and we became Americans.
Had that clarity been sustained, the country today
would be a dramatically different place. But it
diminished and fell apart, and our identity went
with it.We were once again our own enemies and the
real enemy went unrecognized. Now the anniversary of
the attacks has become like the memory of an old war
that was fought once, but no longer really matters.
The nation is at war, but it doesn't know that it's
at war. And those who know that we are at war, often
can't even state who the enemy is.
Without that clarity and unity, all we have are
fragments, individual stories without the means to
wrap them together. Stalin was right, a million
deaths is a statistic unless you find a way to bring
together what it means to an entire people. For the
Holocaust, it was "Never Again." For 9/11 it was a
more ambiguous, "United We Stand", but what do we
stand for and what do we stand against?
The anniversaries have long since been reduced to a
national therapy session, with pain released and
healed in the media's own talking cure. But it isn't
the pain that matters, it's what we do with it that
counts. We have not yet lost the war-- but we are
losing it, and unless we decide as a nation what we
stand for and what we stand again, then we will
lose. It will take time, like our banks we are too
big to fail, but given enough appeasement, enough
immigration and enough terrorism-- it will come.
Over a decade of war has passed, and before that
a thousand years of war with lulls and pauses, but
the din of the scimitar being sharpened for war
never truly stopped. Each year that passes is a
chance to learn the lessons of the years that have
gone by and to remedy their mistakes. The best way
to pay tribute to the dead is to unlearn our
mistakes so that what happened to them will not
happen again. Everything else is the fragmentation
of self-indulgence, the therapy of tears, the
sensitivity of grief, that will ease our pain, but
not our fate.
Every man and woman must defeat their own doubts
before they can defeat the enemy. Only then they can
they battle the false reasonableness of the
consensus that denies war and the enemy, with a
consensus that briefly formed after the attacks and
that forms even more briefly after every attack, to
see ourselves in relation to the outside enemy. To
unite against that enemy and to rebuild our identity
around a common conflict with those who want to
subjugate and destroy us. It may be ten more years
before we are ready to do that, but as long as it
takes-- that unity is our only hope.
The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the
true one and the more distance we put between
ourselves and that reaction also increases our
distance from the truth.
The years of war have added layers of distancing
between that first raw reaction when we saw the
towers fall. And it is important this day to return
not only to the emotion of that moment, but to the
clarity that is our greatest weapon. Only that
clarity will end this war.