5.10.02

VVV

Chesterfield Gives Witch The Broom Eager to share her recognized faith with others, [Wiccan priestess Cyndi] Simpson recently asked Chesterfield to add her name to the list of ministers and priests who give invocations at county meetings. "Based upon our review of Wicca, it is neo-pagan and invokes polytheistic, pre-Christian deities," Steven L. Micas, the county's attorney, wrote in a letter addressed to Simpson. "Accordingly, we cannot honor your request." "I believe that this shows bias not only against my faith but against Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, Native Americans and any faith outside the Judeo-Christian religion. In a public area, government sponsored, we should all be welcome," she said. via WitchVox

The article is clearly slanted in favor of Simpson (we don't even hear the Board's rationale until halfway down), but given the quotes from board members I have sympathy for the journalist.

Simpson's probably wrong about Micas's statement discriminating against Islam -- Islam is not neo-pagan, it's vehemently monotheistic, and was established after Christianity (though Islam would be out according to Board Chairman Kelly E, Miller, who dismissed Wicca as being "not any religion I would subscribe to."). But based on Micas's own words, Christian and Jewish invocations are not permissible either, since the Judeo-Christian god was worshipped by the Jews for thousands of years before Christ.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:23 -- link --

4.10.02

VVV

Who Says We Never Strike First? And the United States entered Vietnam not to avenge two attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (one of which didn't occur) but because President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to prevent the spread of Communism. This is not to suggest that the United States was necessarily wrong to enter these wars; the Mexican War, Spanish-American War and Vietnam War all had large elements of moral purpose. The point is simply that we have often sought out battle, not waited for it to come to us. Many such interventions have been undertaken as part of America's long-standing commitment to act as a global policeman.

I think it says something about how different the premises of the pro- and anti-war factions are that someone could use Vietnam and sundry other US interventions during the Cold War as evidence of why preemptive strikes have been beneficial in the past.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:45 -- link --

1.10.02

VVV Conventional wisdom holds that Ariel Sharon's recent attack on Yasser Arafat's compound was a failure. Sharon's stated goal was to marginalize Arafat and force the handover of some of his lackeys wanted by the Israelis on charges of terorrism. But the attack turned world opinion against Sharon, forcing him to withdraw without the prisoners he wanted. Further, it made Arafat more of a martyr, rallying the Palestinians behind him and squashing attempts by other moderate Palestinian leaders to force democratic reform of the Palestinian Authority.

But I wonder if Sharon's attack might not have been a success, from his point of view, for some of those same reasons. It seems clear that Sharon has little interest in negotiation with the Palestinians. Negotiation implies some degree of equality, of two aggreived parties coming together to work out a mutually beneficial solution. Rather, he wants to be able to dictate terms, a powerful victor laying down the law for his adversary. His proposals at the Camp David summit have been widely hailed as groundbreaking concessions (and they did go farther than previous Israeli proposals). But they were issued like ultimatums, and the rhetorical use of this story has subtly emphasised this fact by casting Arafat as merely reactive, faced with a simple option to take or leave Sharon's offer.

But to do this, Israel needs the moral high ground. The story hawks tell themselves says that Palestinian nationalism is inherently an illegitimate uprising pursued through unconscionable means. Therefore Israel -- as the defender of justice and right -- must be able to dictate the terms of the solution, lest their morality be compromised by the Palestinians. This story requires that a despotic terrorist sympathizer (Arafat) be the focus of Israel's struggle and Palestinian hopes for self-determination. An assertive Palestinian leadership not tainted by despotism or terrorism would complicate the issue, sapping the hawks' black-and-white vision of the conflict and leaving them uncertain how to proceed.

I don't mean to suggest that Israeli hawks would encourage terrorism in order to undermine Palestinian legitimacy -- that's far too cynical an accusation to make without evidence. What I am suggesting is that by seeing the situation through a certain prism, and acting accordingly, they prevent any alternative visions from gaining ground. Focussing on Arafat makes him the avatar of Palestinian nationalism, thus justifying their focus on him.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:09 -- link --

30.9.02

VVV

U.S. vs. Them But the final reason has to do with America's unique national experience and the sense of exceptionalism that has arisen from it. Americans believe in the special legitimacy of their democratic institutions and indeed believe that they are the embodiment of universal values that have a significance for all of mankind. This leads to an idealistic involvement in world affairs, but also to a tendency for Americans to confuse their national interests with universal ones. Europeans, by contrast, regard the violent history of the first half of the 20th century as the direct outcome of the unbridled exercise of national sovereignty. The house that they have been building for themselves since the 1950s called the European Union was deliberately intended to embed those sovereignties in multiple layers of rules, norms and regulations to prevent those sovereignties from ever spinning out of control again.

I ran across this old column by Francis Fukuyama today, and I think the point I quoted highlights something interesting about the way Americans and Europeans view World War II, and the impact that has on how they think about the current war with Iraq. The two continents drew very different moral lessons from the conflict.

Americans tend to see World War II as the archetype of the just war. It was a case of people willing to die in the name of freedom and justice, in the face of all-consuming tyranny. Hitler has become our new Satan, an enemy that cannot be reasoned with or appeased, but only fought and destroyed. In Europe, however, the war is seen as a clear example of the problems of nationalism. The very real sense that "it could happen here, again" drives Europeans toward union and peace.

There are a number of reasons that these differing narratives came about. First is how the nations got involved in the war. Europe saw the war spring out of its own self, generated by social conditions like poverty, anti-Semitism, and fierce nationalism. Americans, on the other hand, came into the war from outside. To Europeans, Hitler was fearsome because he was one of their own, a product of Western civilization. But to Americans he was fearsome because he was an alien Other, sweeping down on the civilized world like the Huns. The Nazis were already in Europe, but America (after an attempt at isolation) had to cross the Atlantic to fight (it's interesting to note how the Pacific theater is downplayed in the popular conception of the war, except when talking about the atomic bomb -- and that story is generally used for very different purposes than the evil-Hitler narrative). For Europe the war was a pragmatic necessity, whereas for Americans it was a moral necessity. The element of the failed appeasement of Hitler fits nicely into the American narrative -- when faced with Evil, all you can do is try to destroy it. Europeans, meanwhile, would see the story of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles as more significant, drawing from it lessons about how enemies are created by treating others as irredeemable sworn adversaries.

Second, America and Europe had very different postwar experiences. America emerged triumphant, the premier power and dominant economy in the world (largely because it got involved late and never had to fight on home turf). This, combined with the success of the Marshall Plan, fed Americans' messianic sense. The war confirmed that the United States was the bringer of freedom and justice to the world, a model for civilization. And we soon embarked on the road of "development" of third-world countries, casting ourselves as the savior of the oppressed. Europe, on the other hand, was devastated. The horror of the war crippled Europeans' confidence in the rightness of Western civilization. The post-war period saw the final dismantling of Europe's colonial empires, ending their long project of civilizing the world and remaking it in a European image.

So today we see America, buoyed by its victory over Hitler, taking a thoroughly modernist approach to foreign policy. Modernism assumes that there is a universal moral order that can be dictated from on high by a supreme power, a power trusted to act for the common good. Europe's policy, meanwhile, is colored by postmodernism -- the idea that all truths are partial because nobody has a God's eye view of the world, and that the world is better run through negotiation between parties than by fiat because no power can be trusted to determine what's right.

America was founded in a deep distrust for absolute power, as the colonists saw the negative consequences of allowing the King to make decisions on behalf of his people. The founders did such a good job of constructing a system that prevents tyranny (or at least tyranny widespread enough to impact the national consciousness, as plenty of groups have been oppressed over the years) that Americans have come to think of tyrants as alien, incomprehensible monsters that can only be destroyed. So we don't notice when we buy into the principle that one power can be trusted to enforce right and wrong.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:42 -- link --

VVV

Unasked Questions Williams, a career Marine who insists that his thoughts are his and not to be linked to George Washington University, says he learned in Beirut and South Vietnam that his government didn't always have better information than he had -- not because officials lied but because critical details were filtered out as communiques made their way up the chain of command. "That experience," he said, "convinced me that the most senior leadership does not always have the best counsel."

And yet we're supposed to just trust that the Bush administration has good but secret reasons to attack Iraq. More and more it seems like the military is the peace movement's best friend.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:22 -- link --