(Originally Printed
in the
Reflections
on
Untying the emotional from the logical and practical has been especially difficult for me in the last week. I grew up in Manhattan, attended school there until I entered the University of Redlands and the vast majority of those in my inner circle of friends and family still reside there. My mother works less than one mile from the location of what was the World Trade Center. I have worked in Southern Manhattan, on Chambers Street, for the New York Public Interest Research Group. Chambers street now represents a war zone reminiscent of the horrors we Americans have been strenuously conditioned to ignore throughout the world. Tuesday September 11th will be remembered in our generation as the initiation of America into the fraternity of nations, into the reality of a world continuously at war, despite all the best efforts of peaceniks such as myself to be rational about the bloody practice. The primordial nature of my connection to the concrete jungles in Manhattan generated in me a response most hateful, and rage-consumed. On Tuesday morning, I wanted war, I would allow myself to be drafted, and I wanted to destroy a civilization whose very existence is antithetical to the Western way of life. In the ensuing days, I have backed off the brink somewhat, and I have stopped watching the network newscasts without skepticism. Retreating into thought and escapism to quell the panic in my brain, I have had the opportunity to reevaluate my frighteningly racist reactions. First and foremost, I would like to loudly applaud all those Americans who have taken efforts to publicize the need to treat all Americans with fairness, be they brown-skinned or white-skinned. I am aware of lynchings in Texas, Oklahoma, and other places, and while I cannot say I am surprised, I am appalled all the same. Echoing the words so eloquently written in our own University of Redlands’ Bulldog earlier last week, I feel that only we can destroy ourselves and our America, with hate and racism, sown by the fear generated by the evil acts of people who may call themselves this religion or that, but who are in reality Satanists. Similarly, Christian fundamentalists in America, such as Robertson and Reed, are worshippers not of any benevolent God, but of the Devil, making foolish hate-filled comments about the tragic events of Tuesday morning. Those urging us into a war right now are of this strain and creed. They drive, with stealth in the night, and shoot a girl in Oklahoma wearing a chador. Take the examples of heroism and humanism alive in cosmopolitan cities of the highest forms of civilization (like New York), and love your fellow man and woman, work beside them in faith and hardship. My own emotional response confirms to me that this fear of brown-skinned peoples from the Middle East is thriving in this country presently. I am an Indian in ethnicity, and an American in soul and mind. I have never called myself an Indian-American, as I feel that such phrases of political correctness serve dubious ends of divisiveness. Perhaps for the first time in my life, the conflict of identity in my soul has come to the absolute forefront of my day-to-day existence.
One thing I am certain of, though, is that India and America, as the two greatest democracies in the free world, ought to stand hand in hand in combating the evils which have plagued both now for some time. Indeed, the government in India of Atal Behari Vajpayee has offered unlimited support of American military actions in response to the attack, but our conservative administration of cold warriors is still focused on utilizing Pakistan as an ally, reinforcing the divide between India and the US that should have died with the cold war, and appeared to be laid to rest by the skillful diplomacy of the often maligned President preceding this one. Indeed, Bill Clinton’s historic tour of India and snub to Pakistan appeared to confirm this new arrangement of security in South Asia. Anyone aware of the political climate in Pakistan ought to know that there would be no way to guarantee the security of our troops in that nation. To place our troops there would be counter-productive in many ways, with threats on their lives from Pakistani fanatics being a foregone conclusion. For those of you not familiar with the internal politics of Pakistan, and the relationship between that nation and Afghanistan, there are many resources available in the media. In a very oversimplified nutshell, the government of Pakistan is its military, led by General Pervez Musharraf, who is more or less pro-western relative to his opponents, despite his dubious past and reported complicity in the creation of the Taliban by the Pakistani Intelligence Service. The public in that nation, however, is sharply anti-western, and indeed many of the suicide schools, which train the fundamentalists, are in Pakistan. American troops in Pakistan would be a recipe for disaster.
The question of beliefs and standards in the context of the potential response to the terror of the new war take on a few possible manifestations. Firstly, I would like to invoke the sentiments of the western world’s public following the end of the First World War. Widespread then, was the view that war was the game of upper-class persons played to the death by lower-class persons. This reality is reinforced by the horrific attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. The perpetrators of this attack are cowards, taking innocent human life, rather than focusing on leadership groups who they may have a case are truly responsible for the plight of their people. Indeed, responding in kind would make America no better than Osama’s mindless minions. The Israeli government has an enlightened view concerning the future of warfare, and has held to a policy of assassination. The style of modern warfare ought to be altered, and America should immediately withdraw from the article of the United Nations charter, which makes assassination illegal. Let us kill Saddam, kill Osama, and other lousy excuses for human beings. But why kill innumerable Afghans, or Palestinians, or Iraqis? Likely, they hate their governments as much as we do, at least the older people, who weren’t raised in the climate of fanaticism, who remember life before the Mujahadeen twisted their faith into Demonic practice. Let us destroy the madrasas where these inhuman robots are trained, let us avoid population centers where perhaps we may annihilate a great many sympathetic persons. Give the individuals worshipping Satan in the name of God no fertile grounds to recruit a radicalized population into their diabolical midst. I know, easier said than done. But abrogating the commitment to an anti-assassination policy can perhaps lead us in this direction. Perhaps our incumbent President is too much of a coward to follow such a noble direction, as he and his successors would be risking their own lives to live out their ambition to the American Presidency. Bombings can only destroy the ground of a nation, not its spirit, as the Soviets learned so brutally from 1979-1989 when they fought the Mujahadeen (more or less, now the Taliban), and how we learned so brutally from the Vietnam War.
America, by the way, armed and trained the Mujahadeen, perhaps including Osama bin Laden himself, in the name of ideological war on the Soviet Union. But alas, the Soviet Union was an “enemy” we could sit back, have a drink or two with, smoke a cigar or two, and calmly discuss our missiles. God bless the memory of the Soviet Union. In perfect historical hindsight, the lesson to be learned here is that threats and ideologies are two distinct things, and with a strong Soviet Union today, the ethnic separatism and religious fundamentalism sweeping the near east might not be so prevalent. The situation festering in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s further reinforces this point, as that country’s bloody civil wars were borne out of a nationalism no longer crushed from above by the Titoist state. It is very easy to say now, but had we been in the practice of a realist foreign policy in the 1980’s, we should have aided the Soviets in their efforts to suppress the radicals and westernize Afghanistan under the guise of Communism. In America, the diffusion of wealth and education, relatively, has been superior to the spread of these valued commodities in other nations, and thus our people don’t revolt. In fact, American spirit is on beautiful display in the wreckage of the WTC, as volunteers flock to the aid of the government trying to pick up the pieces. The enemy is not Arab, or Muslim, it is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism flies in the face of the easy-going, liberal and laid-back lifestyle we enjoy in the west. Christian fundamentalists, radical Jewish settlers in Palestine and Islamic fundamentalists are one in the same, not to be distinguished from each other. Terrorists and the states that harbor them, however, are to be distinguished, lest we permit ourselves to be taken by the Devil’s minions, they having already succeeded in some regions of the Arab and Islamic world. In fact, the Devil’s machinations in the minds of our American government are creating the possibility for miscalculation of the greatest order, with talk of bombing Kabul, the traditional capital of Afghanistan, rather than Kandahar, the Taliban’s capital, where the officials of that hellish regime are located.
The calls for bloodshed are ignorant, knee-jerk reactions, no different from Palestinians rejoicing in the streets on Tuesday morning. Those images enraged me, as well, and I was quick to blame Islam. But having the opportunity to live on, and think about the situation more, I realize the Devil is in all us Humans, and the only victors in the coming war will be those of us who conquer our darkest sides, in the name of peace, love and friendship. There is nothing incorrect or wrong in believing in God, just make certain not to follow the Devil when rage is building in the nation’s soul. True Americans are those who live in peace, and who cherish freedom, the evil individuals now perpetrating attacks on Arabs and other peoples of color in America are not Americans (although they are technically citizens of the United States). Just as Osama bin Laden is no Muslim, and Pat Robertson is no Christian. These dark times in our great nation demand that we rise up to the task of preserving our values in the face of massive provocations, perhaps more deadly manifestations of which are only around the corner. I remember that I used to walk through the concrete jungle of New York City, listening to the homegrown sounds of the inner-city on my headphones, thinking that life in America was always about rich versus poor, black versus white. In the past week, the possibility of those long walks up and down the avenues of Manhattan has been threatened, and I realize the need to unite. I want to be part of that unification process, and those ignorant few that destroyed my America in the past week will not deter me from rebuilding the rubble, to find the stars and stripes underneath, not at all tattered, and proud. I call on all my fellow Americans to show restraint, and to utilize their thinking capacities in the coming months, to remember the days when the Twin Towers stood proud as a symbol of our way of life, and to urge our legislators to limit the scope of the coming war to only those who are responsible for the atrocities in my home town and the nation’s capital.
In conclusion, the terrorists who perpetrated this attack on America last week are fighting a two-front war, using both international agents of terror and domestic ignorance as their weapons. The evil in people is being summoned forth by a Demonic cleric, calling on ignorance to do its will in destroying America. Reports of a Sikh immigrant being killed in Arizona and of Arabs and South Asians nationwide being under siege confirm that the enemy is within. In addition to the remaining members of the bin Laden network, his agents take the form of racist individuals calling themselves Americans in vain, taking retribution on those uninvolved in the attacks that shook our nation, are people you and I might confuse to be American and they are here in America, allowing their dark sides to rule. People of the great Western persuasion are brown, turban-clad, bearded, and in many cases Muslim. After hearing these horrific reports suggesting the manifestation of the dark side in people who might call themselves Americans, I prayed for the safety of my aunt in Albuquerque, who is a Sikh woman, is very religious, and loves America. She is an Architect and an Urban Planner, not a terrorist. Perhaps I would feel less paranoid if the Attorney General was making an equal case for fighting the dark side in the souls of the confused and ignorant here in America. But as the case is, mum is the word, and finding news on such attacks has been difficult, as the networks move us ever closer into the inferno awaiting us all in America, created by the evil-doers, exposing, perhaps, our weaknesses within this great land, storied in the annals of history to rise above all such distinctions in the name of freedom.
---- As a final note, anyone who wishes to gain a truly realistic view of the post cold war world ought to go the library or the computer center and obtain a copy of Samuel Huntington’s writing on the “Clash of Civilizations”. The proclamation of the new world order by Bush Sr. in 1991 now seems trite, as there is less order in this one than in the last. Stay strong, and vigilant in these times of great trouble.