[Even—perhaps especially—recent,
painful, and controversial events and topics demand our AmericanStudying. So
this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy September 11th,
2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to a special memorial post
this weekend.]
On wartime
excesses, and whether our current ones will ever end.
I’ve written before in this space
about the World War II firebombing
of Dresden, and through that horrific and largely forgotten (here in
America at least) event about the ways in which event the most “good” of wars
can bring out the worst in us, as a nation and as humans. The same can of
course be said for another, more extended, more explicitly chosen and intended,
and perhaps even more horrific home front policy during World War II: the internment
of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. And if we examine any
other American military conflict, the
Civil War for example, we can find plenty
of equally troubling and terrifying such wartime excesses, none more so than Lincoln’s
suspension of habeas corpus for the duration of the war. Lincoln’s unconstitutional
policy applied not only in Confederate states, but throughout the nation; and it
targeted not only Confederate soldiers or those citizens actively fighting
against the Union, but also those who “discouraged volunteer enlistments,” among
other activities.
Compared to most of the other
excesses and horrors in American history, though, those wartime ones have
consistently been ameliorated by one key fact: when the wars in question ended,
so too did nearly all of the excesses. Habeas corpus was restored after the
Civil War; the US stopped bombing European and Japanese cities after peace
treaties were signed with those nations; the interned Japanese Americans were
freed and allowed to return home; and so on. Such definite endpoints don’t of
course make up for or erase the horrors that have come before, nor do they mean
that the aftermaths and effects of the excesses don’t linger for decades or
longer still (as any visitor to 21st
century Dresden can attest), but nonetheless, a horrible and brutal past
policy or action beats the heck out of a horrible and brutal continuing one. Moreover,
these briefer wartime excesses are at least somewhat easier to recognize as the
horrors they are than long-term and so more ingrained policies—as evidenced by
the US
government’s formal apology and reparations for the internment, only forty
years after the war’s end, compared to the complete official silence on the century
of institutional and legal support for segregation (in a wide variety of arenas)
that followed the end of slavery.
I have plenty of problems with the
way the US government specifically and Americans more broadly have responded to
9/11—with what has sometimes come to be called the 9/12 mindset—but certainly at
the very top of the list would be the concept of the
“war on terror.” Such a war would seem to be a parallel to other
non-declared governmental wars—the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on
crime—but in fact, both as the Bush administration intended the phrase and as
it has been deployed and hardened over the decade and a half since, the war on
terror has been treated quite exactly like a full-blown, declared, shooting
war. That means, again not surprisingly to anyone with a knowledge of American
and human history, a whole range of excesses and horrors, from Guantanamo and
Abu Ghraib to the murders
of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, from warrantless wiretapping and the
darker corners of the Patriot Act to torture and extraordinary rendition to CIA
black sites, and much else besides. But in this case, because the war is one
that may well never end, so too is it difficult to imagine an end to the
wartime excesses—if anything, the last few years seem simply to have added new and
just as horrifying ones to the mix, including drone strikes and the idea that the
president has the authority to assassinate American citizens with alleged
terrorist affiliations.
To put it another way: Roosevelt responded to the
attack on Pearl Harbor by terming December 7th, 1941 a “day that
will live in infamy,” but when the war with Japan ended three and a half years
later, much of that antipathy was forgiven; but when Americans say about 9/11
that “everything changed” and that we will “never forget,” the phrases seem
more darkly and troublingly prophetic than we could ever have realized. Next
AmericanStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?
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