Gil Anidjar has an excellent article up at the ABC Religion and Ethics page, which speaks well to the culture of fear that continues to be inculcated in America after 9/11. Well worth a read. Here’s a segment:

One thing the prophets, poets, and philosophers of old did not endlessly rehearse is, “Be afraid, be very afraid! There is danger everywhere. Remember what was done to you and how it has hurt and, above all, frightened you. Build onto yourself higher walls, therefore, make bigger bombs and better security gates, for your own exclusive care and protection. And make sure those immigration laws are tighter than what is inflicted on them bankers!”

It should be obvious that, though we can all-too easily be persuaded otherwise, we are not all vulnerable in the same manner. We are not exposed to the same risks and we do not all have the same life expectancy.

Those among us who are more privileged, more protected, as it were, may or may not have a choice in the emotional response we experience with regard to the state of the world. But it does seem like we might have some choice in what we embrace and condone by way of our collective behaviour, our politics.

On the anniversary of 9/11, therefore, I remember the schoolchildren who, over the course of the Cold War, were taught fear on their flesh by crouching under their desks. And I remember the role played by shoes today in the pedagogy of fear.

That is why I want to believe that the American president might address the nation and the “international community” with the following words:

“My fellow Americans, and fellow Westerners, do not be afraid. Verily, I say unto you: Do not fear the shoes of our neighbours. Do not fear them at airports first. Perhaps, you will learn not to fear them at the entrances of mosques. For the love of God, or that of the poor (the downtrodden), the widow (the refugee), and the orphan (the immigrant).”

Andrew Bacevich is now blogging at World Affairs. His blog, Anti-Imperialist looks to be a consistent source of helpful and insightful commentary on contemporary issues. His latest post is on the Iraq war and its legacy:

The violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 persists, but Americans, from Barack Obama on down, are eager to declare the Iraq War at an end. Apart from a few diehard neoconservatives still keen to use Mesopotamia as a springboard for the pursuit of imperial fantasies, Americans can’t wait to shake the dust of Iraq from their feet and be done with the place.

Yet even as we leave, we should not forget. Common decency demands that we honor the service and sacrifice of those who bore the burden of waging that war. No doubt some committee will soon start lobbying for the construction of an Iraq War Memorial to be erected on the Mall in Washington. That effort deserves to succeed.

My own view is that every American war, large or small, ought to be commemorated smack dab in the middle of the nation’s capital. Crowding every inch of the Mall with granite and marble war memorials—the bigger the better—just might help deflate the continuing American illusion that we are a peaceful people desirous of nothing except to be left alone. It might help us see ourselves as we really are.

Yet the commemoration of the Iraq War ought to have a second component: American soldiers and American citizens are owed an accounting of exactly what this war was about. Who devised it? What was its actual purpose? What did it achieve and at what cost? Why did so much go so wrong for so long? Who should be held accountable?

An old, but still utterly apt article cuts through the sentimentality we go through every year around MLK day.

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

If King were alive today the Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s would be calling him a demonic communist trying to take America away from us. We have no problem fetishizing King as the enlightened proclaimer of racial equality. But can America remember the historical King who condemned the systemic violence of the United States at home and abroad? The King who crusaded on behalf of the poor?

Well, no. Clearly not.

The Ekklesia Project has launched a new blog in response to President Obama’s recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I think this is a good thing. EP came into existence to call into question Christians’ complicity with violence as such and war in particular. That was something of an easy target during the Bush years and many Christians of the EP persuasion voted enthusiastically for Obama (including Stanley Hauerwas, who has a response to the speech up on the blog). At any rate, I appreciate that Obama is not being given a pass on his escalation of the war on terror by EP. He should not be given one.

Also does anyone else find it interesting that so many people like Hauerwas who built careers around taking down Niebuhrianism voted for Obama who is by far the most articulate exponent of Niebuhrianism to occupy the White House in decades? This came up in the comments on Hauerwas’s post and I think its quite an ironic point. But, that being said I’m glad EP is not letting go of their convictions on the basis of “Yeay, not Bush!”

Well, contrary to all the hubbub about an alleged uprising of the conservative masses (proletariat?) against the totalitarian rule of Barack Obama, it seems that things have gone differently in the over-discussed special election for one of New York’s congress members. It turns out that a district that has been held by Republicans since 1872 has now been won by a Democrat.

Yeah. The days of Barack Obama are clearly numbered. Thats obviously what this indicates.

Now, obviously all of this fascination with this obscure special election is massively insignificant. However, the one thing it has wound up showing is how utterly nonsensical, ideologically driven, and stupid the whole Beck-Palin cloud of noise is. And maybe it also seems to show that at least some of the electorate isn’t completely captive to these sorts of inane voices.

Larison is very perceptive in cutting through the fog of triumphal pronouncements about the alleged resurgence of conservatism that the current NY special election for congress is supposed to indicate:

The GOP seems to be making what ought to be an easy win into a national Phyrrhic victory in which the relative strength of conservative activists inside the party becomes vastly exaggerated and identifies the flailing, failing party even more closely with its conservative members. This will make it very difficult for conservative activists to disassociate themselves from the outcome of the midterms next year. What I find strange in the fixation on NY-23 is that the off-year gubernatorial elections probably serve as a much better indicator of large-scale movements in public opinion. Larger, more diverse electorates in large states are involved in Virginia and New Jersey. If things go as I expect them to with a Republican pick-up in Virginia and a Democratic hold in New Jersey, the message will be rather muddled. It will mean that Virginia will have chosen a Northern Virginia moderate who successfully ran away from his earlier social conservatism while New Jersey re-elected an incumbent who was thought to be highly vulnerable and discredited by corruption. Those results could be explained by pointing to the nature of the electorates in both states, but this does not lend itself to a triumphant narrative of Republican resurgence fueled by true believers. The point here is not to write off conservative insurgents or reject protest candidacies provoked by the failures and mistakes of state and local party leaders. These are appropriate and sometimes necessary responses to elected and party officials’ blunders. What also matters is being willing to acknowledge that the political landscape is not necessary what we wish it is or think it ought to be. Hoffmania and its attendant privileging of ideology over actual local interests suggest that a great many conservatives cannot and will not acknowledge this.

This nice dose of sanity speaks volumes against some of the ridiculous claims that have been made — often by evangelicals — about how “real America” is somehow revolting against Obama. One pundit even claimed that this obscure special election somehow proved that “the Obama brand” will be dead in 2010 (2 months to go, folks!).

Doses of sanity such as Larison provides here are quite welcome these days.

I swear this is the last quote I’ll post on the topic for a while:

I got a note from a good friend yesterday expressing shock, and anger, about Drudge and Malkin’s usage of that alleged racial beat-down on a school-bus [to attack Obama]. On some level, I wonder if something’s wrong with me. I’m neither shocked, nor angry. This is exactly how I expected these fools to respond to a black president.

If anything, I’m a little giddy. For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades.  Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

It’s intensely grating to live say, in Atlanta, and have some dude in Harlem crowned as your unelected leader. It’s even more grating if said dude’s agenda seems, in large measure, come down to standing in front of cameras and tweaking his opponents. It’s no mistake that O’Reilly and Sharpton would break bread together at Sylvia’s–they feed each other.

But Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study–and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness–and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date–and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West–the way he says, “He’s a jackass.” He sounds like one of my brothers. And that’s the point, because that’s what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it’s driving them crazy.

Indeed:

You don’t have to wear a white hood to have views that are significantly animated by racist beliefs and fears–and saying that a lot of the hysterical protest on the right (stylized as a desire for ‘small government’) is significantly animated by racist beliefs and fears is most decidedly not to say that “limited government sentiment is automatically a form of subliminated racism.” Much of it is so animated, but that doesn’t mean that each person with such ‘limited government’ views is a racist, let alone has a penchant for white-hood wearing.

Here’s a question: what proportion of the people clamoring about ‘limited government’ at these rallies seem to have no problem with–indeed seem to much support–federal programs that they think benefit them and people like them (Medicare, Social Security, federal spending that provides jobs in their community, such as on defense, etc.), but are rabidly opposed to things that they think will go to people unlike them? I think an answer to that question would go a long way to answering how much of the protest is animated by racism.

Dan has what I’d consider to be a reflection on 9/11 that really has some substance:

As today, is September 11th, I thought I would engage in a bit of remembering — it is, after all, important to recall moments of our history, for this is the story in which we live.

On this day in 1973, Augusto Pinochet’s American-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This resulted in seventeen years of torture, terror, and disappearances in Chile, and (according to people like Milton Friedman, who saw Chile as a textbook example of the type of world he wished to create) set a precedent for the way in which the United States acted in Latin America (particularly in the ’70s and ’80s… although they are at it again, as Obama’s government backed the Honduran coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in June of this year).

Sponsoring terror, imposing military rule, depriving local populations of their rights, their food, their land, their livelihood, their health, their children and their lives… this is the way that the US continues to engage with the world at large. It is enough to make some people want to fly planes into buildings. Which, not altogether surprisingly, is what happened on another September 11th.

Because if you have no college degree, there’s a good chance you’ll end up on Fox News.

Andrew Bacevich has an interesting reflection in World Affairs Journal on Graham Greene and American foreign policy. It really unpacks the way in which innocence (i.e. having only the best and truest intentions) is horribly dangerous in the world of violence and power. As Greene puts it, “Innocence is a kind of insanity.” The conscience that is clear, on the basis of good intentions needs not pay attention to the havoc that has been wrought by the actual actions taken.

Bacevich points out the kind of moral malaise this creates among Americans, who have enshrined this notion of innocence into our national moral sensibility:

America means well: on this point the vast majority of Americans will permit no dissent. We differ from all other great powers in history. Our leaders differ as well. To those who formulate U.S. policy, ideals really do matter. As President Obama insisted in his Cairo speech, anyone depicting the United States as a “self-interested empire” is way off base.

When U.S. policy goes awry, therefore, the culprit might be bad luck, bad planning, or bad tactics, but American motives lie beyond reproach. Thus, the reassuring take on the Iraq War, now emerging as the conventional wisdom, is that—however mismanaged the war may have been early on—the “surge” engineered by General David Petraeus has redeemed the enterprise: a conclusion doubly welcome in that it obviates any need to revisit questions about the war’s purpose and justification, while meshing nicely with the Obama administration’s inclination simply to have done with Iraq and move on.

The implications of trivializing Iraq are already evident in the debate regarding “Af–Pak”: the overriding concern becomes one of finding the general best able to apply to Obama’s war the “lessons” taken from Bush’s war. That such an approach should find favor in Washington would not have surprised Graham Greene. Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made. Yet America’s benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way—or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington’s bidding became sources of embarrassment.

Vietnam once laid waste to Washington’s claim of innocence, until Ronald Reagan helped restore that claim. Every indication suggests that American innocence will survive Iraq as well, this time with Barack Obama as chief enabler helping to sanitize or erase all that we do not wish to remember. A people famous for their self-professed religiosity won’t even bother to look for someone to whom they can express contrition.

Nice surprise from the Scriptorium Daily, a blog based out of the supremely conservative Biola University. The only other time I had ever heard of the author was in a book he edited that was a debate over young versus old earth creationism. Well, regardless of where he comes down on that particular issue, the author is right on the money here:

Torture of any human being is incompatible with the Christian faith.

This should have been obvious, but like many hard and inconvenient moral lessons it was not. Christianity grew in cultures that used torture frequently and so had cultural assumptions inconsistent with their faith. Like most evil things, torture is justified by the good that can come of it. Most bad things are tempting because of alleged goods, but Christian experience shows that any gains from torture are not worth the cost to the souls of men and cultures.

Because there are times when torture seems like a good idea, Christians followed the practice of most ancient cultures and sometimes used it when they gained power. However, it was always a difficult decision for Christian civilizations to make and always had critics amongst Christian theologians and philosophers. The practice was modified and prisoners were given greater rights. The longer Christians thought about the practice and experienced the results, the broader the disdain and condemnation for it.

Eventually, a consensus developed in the traditional Churches that torture was a temptation to do evil, a snare of devils to corrupt souls, and a delusion that promised good, but only certainly did evil.

The condemnation of torture is part of the culture of life so central to the Faith. It is sad to see some Christians use arguments and lines of reasoning to justify torture that are similar to those used to justify abortion.

Traditional Christians disdain those who mutilate the corpses of enemies, because it dishonors the Image of God. How much worse is it to mutilate the living body or the immortal soul of a man?

Adam has written a lengthy skewering of Craig Carter. Here’s a few paragraphs:

A more worthy title for the blog [than The Politics of the Cross Resurrected], however, would have been “Craig Goes All First Things on Everybody’s Ass.” The blog is now basically a rant on the Liberal takeover of the Americas, from the homosexuals’ conspiracy to poison the minds of our children and force evangelical ministers to marry them, to Obama’s determination to kill as many unborn babies as he can, to socialism being the enemy of the church, and so forth, with some smattering of Augustine, Aquinas, David Bentley Hart, and the quasi-catholic extolations of the recent popes mixed in.

. . .

Resentment here is the political posture which believes that some entity out there controls the destiny of your self, community, or nation, and is controlling it in an undesirable fashion. Yet how can you be resentful when you have voluntarily chosen other than affiliation with that power (whether this is still the case with Carter seems hard to tell)? Here then is what Zizek describes as envy, which is the bane of most attempts at true fundamentalism. Envy names the attempt to withdraw from the world, yet all the while constantly measuring up to the world to ensure that we are really living a better life than them.

. . .

Ultimately, though, obsessing over every turn our fallen world takes is just exhausting. And boring: like Thoreau says, once you’ve read the news for a year, you’ve got the idea of how things go–each day is just a variation on the theme. My basic point here, then, is that we will know the true fundamentalist by her fretting. If she genuinely believes that Christ is the lord of history, then she will live simply, enjoy life with her friends, and trust providence.

Let’s see how this plays out. . .

Andrew Bacevich has a great new article in Salon about the end of the “American Century.”

The net effect [of the myth of the American Century] is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people — and especially the American political class — still remain in its thrall.

Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.

For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65 percent  of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2 percent of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.