Home Free: Waging war on ourselves
Posted by Ethan Casey on December 4, 2011 · 12 Comments
A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the U.S. about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. … What the U.S. is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these U.S. attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in U.S. domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry, everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
We’re all guilty of this, that, or the other. I know I am. As Russell Baker (bless him for sticking around among us so long; the old guy is a national treasure) noted in reviewing Clint Eastwood’s new film about J. Edgar Hoover:
The FBI chief trafficked in fear, which flourishes best when the fog is thickest, the uncertainty deepest, and people who have always thought themselves above suspicion begin to wonder if perhaps there is some long forgotten incident in their distant past that might be dug up, exposing them to public humiliation, Congressional investigation, criminal indictment, destruction. It is a rare life that hasn’t a few deplorable incidents in its chronicle. As Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and “passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” and when someone looks deep enough for dirt, “There is always something.”
The ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs is that we don’t mind horrible things being done to people in our name, as long as they’re done to other people. This is the truth Grisham identifies in pointing out that white Southerners still support the death penalty, but black people know better.
Analogously, many Americans apparently don’t mind if the U.S. military is used to arrest U.S. citizens within U.S. borders, so long as those U.S. citizens are Muslims or other brown people. One non-Muslim who does mind is Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL). As he wrote last Thursday in a letter to constituents: “This week, the Senate considered legislation specifically authorizing our military to arrest and detain anyone, including U.S. citizens inside America, who the President suspects may be connected to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In my view, American citizens inside this country have inalienable Constitutional rights that can only be removed by a civilian jury of your peers.”
In taking such a stand, Senator Kirk is behaving like a patriot, in the true sense of that word. If I lived in Illinois, I might even vote for him. What he understands is that we can’t take away others’ freedom without taking away our own. And, as the dawn of the domestic drones should bring home to us, we can’t wage war on others without also waging it on ourselves.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
A few years ago my child came home from school with a book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, about a Japanese girl who was 2 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Subsequently she developed leukemia (related to the atomic bomb). According to a Japanese belief, if you create a thousand origami cranes your wish will come true. Her wish was just to live. Unfortunately, she dies before folding 1000 cranes. The question posed to me was: “Mom, I want to know who are the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in this book.”
How can we live with ourselves by labeling people as good guys or bad guys? How can we sleep with a Japanese camp in our backyard knowing that they are just regular Americans? (from book “Tall Grass” by Sandra Dallas). Of course we Americans have learned from history. We are more tolerant towards Muslim Americans as compared to the Japanese Americans, but not everything is “pooh” under the perfectly manicured suburban lawns. Many Pakistani Americans are afraid of being stripped of their rights, property and deported from the country. Right now America does not tolerate racism, but that does not include Pakistanis and Muslims. It is okay to bully brown people.
How can you wage a war against yourselves?
Pakistanis are more intolerant to each other than the Americans are to Pakistanis.
More people in Pakistan are killed in
1) Shia -Sunni conflicts ,
2) Sind racial wars ,
3) Baluchis war.
Kabir use to say
‘bura jo jehan ma chal to bura na milya koya.
Apne andar dekhya to mujse bura na koi.
May Allah give wisdom to all of you
Ethan, I love your comprehensive and well-thought-out article. You make so many pertinent points. Since you wrote it, I believe, the Congress or the Senate is trying to pass a law which would allow for US citizens with suspicion of links to Al Qaida or terrorism to be detained without trial indefinitely. This is blatantly unconstitutional. “Suspicions” can encompass unimaginably horrendous abuses, and would inevitably target the US Muslim community, who are typically law-abiding and exemplary citizens. Even in Britain under the tyrant Henry VIII in the 1530s, in the terrible days of torture and beheading, accused citizens were entitled to trial. Also, I appreciate the analogy drawn in the previous comment with the internment of blameless Japanese citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bapsi Sidhwa
Bravo. Very good and thought-provoking article.
Being a Pakistani, I agree with one of the comments above that Pakistanis are more intolerant to each other than the Americans are to anyone inside their borders.
I hope and expect that things will get better in Pakistan. I am committed to do my best to make sure that this land becomes in a true sense “the land of the free” as my expectations from America are much higher.
Here are two quotes from Thomas Jefferson:
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”
Americans need to think hard about this because they are slowly losing their liberty and freedom not to outside enemies but to those who are entrusted to protect it.
Shahnaz Khan
A very balanced and thought-provoking article.
An interesting discussion ensued though I couldn’t quite understand why Harinder and Muzaffar felt the need to point out that Pakistanis were worse to each other than Americans were to Pakistanis. Does the fact that other people are committing worse crimes justify the one you set out to commit? So if you are convicted of murdering one person, your justification is “but so-and-so murdered ten?”
Both the article and the ensuing discussion demonstrate, once again, that the powerful (in any society) will not restrict their abuse of other human beings to the “other” alone.
The most fatal struggles are inter-familial. In the struggle for power, it is family members who are targeted. Mughal Emperors killed their brothers in order to inherit the throne. European emperors inherited the throne via primogeniture but the biggest threat to their power also came from their brothers’ families. Internecine power struggles were common.
The First World War was conducted by European countries whose emperors were first cousins to each other.
Americans ignore this truth to their peril. Having honed the skills of the powerful amongst them, they need to be careful that these skills are not turned against “members of the family”, so to speak.
Mixing sugar with Castor oil still leaves the patient being forced to swallow Castor oil and for those too young to know, Castor oil is rather ghastly in taste although supposedly, good for you.
House Bill HR.1547 and Senate Bill S. 1867 are Defense Appropriations bills into which sections (1031 and others) have been inserted to permit the indfinite “detention” without charges or trial, of “Homegrown Terrorism suspects” for as long as the “War!” on terror continues . Immediately, one has to ask, who is a terrorist? who is the “enemy”? Where is the “War!” being fought? how does one define “victory” or, “defeat”?
Obviously, there is no answer to any of these questions. This fact itself, should make every American think and act against our gutless Congress that allows such laws.
The other interesting although frightening fact of these bills is that in spite of references to Islam and Muslims being sanitzed out (the sugar in the Castor oil), they are specifically designed against us “Muzlems”. I can say this with confidence because the bills address “Al-Qaeda and related groups”, not the many other, very real, non-Muslim terorrist groups in America that thrive under our constitutional protections.
The House modified its bill to limit the measures (of “detention”) to non-citizens, meaning, Green card holders are in for it. The Senate modified its bill to exclude US citizens and all “lawful residents”….more sugar in the Castor oil.
Somehow, current thinking makes it acceptable to brutalize anyone we like, as long as US citizens are exempt. Even our Congress has started to suggest in the post-9/11 era, that the US constitutional protections apply to US citizens ONLY. One Congressman made this statement to me in a public meeting, but changed the subject when I asked him if it would be okay to bring slaves into the US because, since the constitution did not apply to them, it would not matter that their freedoms have been taken away from them.
The US constitution was NOT written for the benefit of US citizens, it was written for the entire country and EVERYONE who was in it, legally or not. We must realize that as we hand over more and more local authority to our military and as we militarize our law-enforcement agencies, we may soon be serving them, instead of the other way around.
Those who care, need to call their Senators and their Representatives and TELL them to take strong positions against House Bill HR 1547 and Senate Bill 1867 until ALL references of “Homegrown Terrorism” and “detention”, have been removed from the bills.
Shahnaz Khan: First of all, my comment that Pakistanis were worse to each other than Americans were to Pakistanis was not to justify that if other people are committing worse crimes, than you can commit a crime as well.
I just want to show mirror to Pakistani-Americans like me reading these articles.