[Marxism] Badri Raina : we become what we hate

["Nasir Khan" <nasir.khan@xxxxxxx>]

braina@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




We Become What  We Hate

By Badri Raina

After the shockingly questionable wiretap regime ordered, without 
Constitutional sanction it would seem, by President Bush, it is now the turn of 
young vigilantes.  As reported by Guardian News Service, the Bruin Alumni 
Association has made the following offer to students at the University of 
California, Los Angeles: "Do you have a professor who just can't  stop  talking 
about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party, or any 
other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter?  
If you help. . . expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work."

For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students 
are being offered  $100.  Lecture notes without a tape recording net $50, and 
even non-attendance at class while providing copies of the teaching materials 
is worth $10.

The idea behind this 21st century version of McCarthyism is to discipline and 
punish teachers who express themselves negatively on the Bush Presidency and 
Republican recasting of American policy generally. Like their predecessors of 
the mid-twentieth century, these vigilantes must believe that the reds have 
landed, this time in the garb of the extenuators of 'Islamic' terrorism. How 
entirely voluntary their initiative is must remain a subject of suspicion.

Freedom-loving American citizens who have been either supportive or tolerant of 
the Bush regimes' ostensible project of carrying the light of democracy to the 
dark corners of the world may need to consider whether America may not be 
paying a rather high price for the mission. Is it perhaps the case that in 
making democracy its chief export, stocks at home are depleting dangerously?

One legitimate inference from such a circumstance is that far from there being 
a clash of civilizations underway, the world may be witnessing a rather satanic 
convergence, as America inexorably takes on the colour and hue of what it 
assumes to be opposing. If yes, the proceedings might be seen to underscore the 
truth of the old adage "we become what we hate."

It has been the argument of the Bush administration that the attack on the twin 
towers was a gratuitous act of barbarism (which it no doubt was), since nothing 
that America had done previously could have justified it. Thus, the "war on 
terror" came to be constructed as a righteous response to an evil act. The 
theoretical underpinning of that argument was supplied by the neocon think-tank 
who hold that the "Islamists" do not act out of any identifiable historical 
wrong but are impelled by the jihadi project to destroy the "western way of 
life."
It seems about time that this informing political text is revisited - something 
that has repeatedly been suggested by adherents of the Enlightenment whose 
values are generally regarded to constitute the philosophical grounds of 
American republicanism. For example, the Bush administration is to this day 
unable to explain to its own citizens, let alone to the "international 
community" (meaning here the world that lies beyond the Anglo-Saxon 
persuasion), why it chose to attack an admittedly secular Iraq where no jihadis 
existed, and which had neither intended or done harm to America. Or, why within 
hours of the September 11 tragedy (whose perpetrators turned out to be American 
citizens of Saudi extraction) but  one aircraft was allowed out of America, 
carrying the Bin Laden clan.  To compound the ironies, it will need to be 
remembered that the Laden "Islamists" were at one time pressed into service as 
allies of  freedom in Afghanistan, just as the Saddam regime was encouraged 
with full military support to launch an attack on Iran where a popular 
political change had taken place.

Such facts of history reinforce the suspicion that the administration lauds 
only such regimes in the rest of the world  as are willing to buttress American 
interests, be they democratic, or autocratic, or "Islamist." For example, here 
in India, it remains a question as to why democracy is not sought to be 
exported to Pakistan with quite the same vigor as to selective places in the 
Middle East. Or to Nepal, for that matter.

If these are indeed troubling posers, then freedom-loving Americans need to 
ponder without blinkers whether, after all, what is designated "Islamism" may 
not be a purely political phenomenon, unleashed to free West Asia chiefly from 
what is perceived as an imperialist axis between America and the Zionists. 
Exactly as the "crusade" that emanates from the Bush administration is not so 
much concerned with a defence of an evangelist Christendom, or the "western way 
of life" as it is with shoring up the ever-expanding greed of Corporate America.
Furthermore, it is obvious everyday that the doctrine of "full-spectrum 
dominance" spawns, world-wide, a contrary political yield. In Latin America, 
for example, country after country turns away from Classical Liberal democracy 
to one form or another of Socialism. Americans need to ponder whether the best 
principles of neighbourly accommodation, as enshrined in the Sermon on the 
Mount, may not, in the end, be better politics than  the unchristian hubris of 
the Bush regime that seems guaranteed to land both America and the world into 
an Armageddon from which no victors may emerge.



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