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Originally Posted by Seaver
No. Our country and our loyalty TO the country does not stem from a direct justification of the destruction of other countries and a plan to completely eradicate other people (though what we did to the Natives was despicable, it was not part of the charter that started us).
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I think i'm at least slightly more sympathetic than you seem to be assuming here...
I'm at least nominally an American, a member of the lucky sperm club born into relative prosperity in the first world. But i'm enough of a cultural outsider to see that it's that luck that's primary to me having an American ID, and not some ontological difference between me and others.
So yes, i understand that our nation has a different national mythos (a term i use as a non-perjorative description of the world-view and sense of history and kinship that produces ethnic or national idenity) and historical character than al-queda does.
But they both form in reaction to imperial power...the difference is that we do so by usurpation, the redefining of primarily British values as now "American" values. We look fairly similar, and later become allies, etc.
They too are reacting to imperial presenece, but do not do so from within, and so have a very different vocabulary and appearance. But functionally, they still have to mediate the process of being on the outs with the major world power of the day.
So how do we respond? I don't think the answer is to say there's no difference between us...and that it's all basically the same. I don't think that.
But there's a claim that seems to be substrate to our discussion here that they will understand violence. I don't know that they will. As i tried to say, we didn't "understand" their violence on 9/11. We reacted against it.
They didn't "understand" our actions previously, and they do not "understand" our actions in Iraq now. Violence, like other forms of communication, is proving to be fairly unintelligible.
War alledges that it provides a resolution to dispute, whose authority is not external to it's nature...namely that war really decides things in a way that other dispute resolutions cannot. But the failure of war to provide this irrefutable resolution to the cultural conflicts between western nationalism and Arab unrest seems to me to be rather damning of it as a authoritative tactic.
I'm asking...what does work? We have these cartoons being used by both sides to reinforce the boundaries of both groups. Is that desirable? Are we content to fire back at one another? Because the promise of violence and escalation to relieve the tension is an empty one.