A week ago I highlighted a statement by John Pilger which I reproduce here a second time:
The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth.In itself the thought Pilger expresses is - unhappily - an unremarkable one today. I have read and heard dozens of statements like this since September 11 2001. It has become a standard piece of wisdom across a wide sector of left and liberal opinion. Just for that reason, I want to take what Pilger says as the text for a brief further reflection - a reflection on the ways in which such statements excuse the acts they purport to contextualize.
Of course, this is typically denied by those who make the statements. It's not a matter, they insist, of excusing; it's merely a matter of explaining, of providing relevant background. In some cases, maybe. These things are very much a matter of balance and emphasis, and you therefore need to take each assertion of the given kind in its overall discursive setting, look at what else is being said by the person whose assertion it is, the things she stresses, the things he passes over in silence, and so forth. I know, in any case, that in too many of the instances which I've seen, the denial is not convincing; the assertions are yes-but condoning or mitigating ones.
These are some obvious pointers. First, as I argued here (see my response to the question on Michael Walzer) and have argued on this blog repeatedly, there is the patent inadequacy of the type of explanation proffered: that is, reaction to injustice. Injustice doesn't always and everywhere elicit mass murder of the innocent in response. Second, there is the shifting of the balance of blame, so common with these statements, from those directly responsible for acts of murder to others whose responsibility is either remote, doubtful or non-existent. Third, there is the selectivity with which this kind of (root causes) argument is employed.
One example. Those critics of the US and its current foreign policy who are also severely critical of Israeli policy and (let's just say) not especially sensitive to Jewish fears today about the spread of anti-Semitism - how often do you see them invoking a root cause, or background, which might generate a degree of understanding here? Speaking for myself, I haven't seen it much at all. But one would have thought there was a rather large historical 'root cause' which could be seen as pertinent in this area, contextualizing the fears of ordinary Israelis and the growing worries of Jewish people everywhere. Mention the Holocaust in this connection, though - leave alone 2000 years of persecution and Jewish suffering - and you'd be shamelessly exploiting the victims for unseemly political ends.
Those are some pointers. Here's the money. There are a few things that can be said about these perpetrators of the random murder of the innocent in the last few years - in Manahattan, in Bali, in Istanbul, in Madrid - and these are three of them. They aren't democrats even in the loosest sense, wedded as they are to a belief system that is profoundly anti-democratic. Morally, by their deeds, they show a contempt for fundamental human values, as embodied in universal codes of rights and prohibitions. Culturally, their commitments are backward-looking and anti-egalitarian, to put it mildly - reserving, for example, a less than ideal place in the world for women. All of this is integral to the deliberative moment in the crimes they commit, to what moves them to choose and act as they do. Sufficient, one might have hoped, to convince any liberal or socialist democrat which side of the political line people thus motivated should be seen to stand on. What has become common today with far too many liberals and socialists, however, is the type of Pilgerite characterization I've highlighted:
... the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination.The terrorist murderer thereby becomes an expression - albeit, perhaps, a misguided or distorted expression - of a global struggle against oppression and injustice. It puts him on 'our' side of the line if this is what his motivation really derives from - despite those three aforesaid deliberative features, which in fact make him a deadly enemy. To adopt the modern cliché: this is the bottom line in pinpointing the monumental excuse today being made by the more deluded sections of liberalism and the left.