I had a piece in Salon yesterday, which may have drawn more feedback than I saw, since the boilerplate at the foot of the article points to an address I shut down years ago because of the spam. The letters on the site were only about 30% ignorant or nuts, which is pretty good for the internet. None were particularly abusive, which makes a refreshing change after Comment is Free. There was one classic paragraph, from”Anonymous”:
Probably because I’m a stupid, boorish American but this article didn’t clear anything up for me. It only leaves me feeling like there is no solution to any of this and if so, what’s the point of trying to understand? What a depressing and hopeless piece.
There are some things we understand better than you guys do and some things we don’t understand. Most importantly, we understand how to integrate and assimilate immigrants. We do such a good job of it that “multiculturalism” in the US is innocuous: Stanley Fish’s “boutique multiculturalism.”
What we don’t understand is that war can be, and usually is, non-ideological–that conflict can be motivated by a complicated complex of factors: grabs for land and resources, entangling alliances, quests for regional hegemony, tribalism or the interest of local dictators in maintaining power. Everything gets plugged into the Cold War template as a clash of ideologies. That’s why Bush can still get away with rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy,” and why he may have actually believed that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators.
When I was growing we assumed that Russia was a huge prison camp, where all but a small group of crazy Communist ideologues wanted nothing more than to “escape”–the word always used–or to have their countries invaded by us and liberated. Now substitute “Islamofacism” for “Communism” and tell the story again. That’s also why we can’t fathom the idea of home grown terrorism–these are people who’ve escaped.
We also don’t have as significant a population of Muslim immigrants as most Western European countries and even though there are lots from the Middle East in a few urban areas, we just don’t see them as The Immigrant Group. It’s very difficult for us to understand the dynamic in the UK and other countries where Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia are The Immigrant Group because our current mass immigrant group is Hispanic–Catholics, who speak an easy Romance language, from countries that are our allies, or at least in our sphere of influence. Still as an American I guesse I’m not as pessimistic as Anonymous. Immigrants do assimilate, despite efforts to promote “community” and political log-rolling with self-appointed “community leaders.” Historically, this political dynamic played out in Eastern cities with large European immigrant populations, with Irish political machines, Italian community organizations, ethnic voting blocs, politicians pandering to them as “communities” and lots of corruption and then gradually dissipated.
I liked your Salon piece, and particularly the analysis of the process of cooptation leading to permanent groups and leadership cadres. A personal note: High Wycombe to me — I’ve never been to the UK, these places are just names and associations — is the home of Bomber Command during the war, the center of the modern dilemma of means and ends.
I think an established pressure group could mobilize against and punish a politician who tried to go around them and appeal to individuals; the trick would be to do both: have an explicit appeal to all citizens which specifically appeals to the members of the group as individuals, whilst simultaneously at least going through the motions of respecting and conferring with the established leadership. Squaring the circle is what the witchcraft of politics seems to call for, which we would think absurd if we didn’t know that it sometimes seems to work.