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Helperin doesn't state his ethnicity (or, if he did, I missed the statement) but I assume from his account that if you were in New York and if you saw him on the street then you would think "one of us" rather than "one of them." I'm assuming, then, that he's either white or black, someone who has a Standard American look. And what's the relevance of this statement? Well, I rather suspect that the American voices which are (bravely and honorably) blogging about the decay of civil liberties in the United States are (for the most part) the voices of Standard Americans. Because I rather imagine that, right now, anyone who's not a Standard American is doing the sensible thing and is shutting up and keeping a low profile, which I imagine is what I'd be doing if I was in such a position. (This is just a guess, an impression that I get from the Internet surfing I've done to date. I haven't tried to check, and I haven't made a conscious effort to seek out American voices which are, say, Iranian or Hispanic.) Sitting on the train today, conscious of my status as a member of a very small minority in a very populous nation, I couldn't help but think, "You know, this would be a pretty hideous place if people were picking on me on account of my ethnicity." If a few members of my own ethnic group (which, for the purposes of life in Japan, is the group consisting of "non-Asian foreigners") were misbehaving, and if, on that account, I was subject to police raids and to intrusive interrogations, and if I was living with the risk of being disappeared by the government and of being held incommunicado, then I would be feeling pretty miserable, and would be feeling (inevitably) a certain degree of hostility to the system and to those in charge of it. And that, really, seems to be the situation which is developing in the United States: a government which is run by Standard Americans for Standard Americans is starting to persecute various ethnic minorities, all the time muttering the magic mantra, the magic mantra being "It's a war, it's a war." The talk of war reminds me of an incident I heard about on radio - I think on an American Public Service Broadcasting program rebroadcast in Japan on 810 AM, the wavelength used in the Tokyo-Yokohama area by the American military radio station Eagle Eight Ten, which does produce some of its own original content, but which spends much of the day rebroadcasting radio programs as they are heard in America. Anyway, the program that I listened to was about an American police chief who made himself unpopular by sending the cops onto the local university campus to bust a certain number of soft drug users. Some of the objections to this seemed to amount to, "Hey, you're not supposed to be busting us middle-class types, you're supposed to be down in the ghetto arresting poor blacks." To which the police chief replied, in effect (I forget his exact words) that he was supposed to be making war on drugs, not war on blacks - that it was his duty to enforce the law, and, if the community didn't want the law to be enforced, it should work to change the law. This isn't the only occasion on which I've heard something suggesting that America's "war on drugs" amounted to "war on blacks." Justice is equal enforcement of the law. If the law is the same for everyone - for example, if everyone is made to take their shoes off at the airport security checkpoint - then, although people may grumble about it, they are unlikely to feel individually persecuted by it. Some years back, in the 1980s, I was living and working in London, England, at a time when it was necessary to have your bag searched if you wanted to enter a museum. That didn't worry me. It was one rule for everyone. As long as the same rules are equally imposed on everyone, a situation is unlikely to get out of hand because individuals are unlikely to feel personally victimized. Furthermore, there are practical limits to what the authorities can do if they are doing the same thing to absolutely everyone. However, when the law is unequally enforced, it is very easy for terrible injustices to arise, and for helpless individuals to be victimized, terrorized and brutalized. The situation which exists in America, at the moment, is that the government can, in effect, quite simply disappear people. Out of the nothingness of thin air, the American government invented the category "enemy combatant," and used it to overturn the rule of law in America, without much more than the occasional whimper from people in high places. Now, a more systematic erosion of the rule of law is in train, the idea apparently being to bring about a situation in which a person's rights can be reduced to zero if the magic label "suspected terrorist" is affixed to them. It seems that (with a fair few honorable exceptions) Standard Americans are by and large prepared to go along with this because (so far) Standard Americans are generally not the targets of the kind of "throw them in jail just in case" policing which seems to be becoming a new American norm. Now, this kind of "throw them in jail just in case" policing has two fairly obvious consequences, one domestic and the other international. Domestically, it is reasonable to assume that that people who, ethnically, do not fit into the Standard American group are steadily becoming more and more unhappy with their lot. (As indicated above, I certainly would be becoming unhappy, and very unhappy, and becoming that way very fast, if I was suffering something analogous here in Japan.) From an American perspective, the domestic tensions may not be politically significant, in the sense that the ethnic groups in question are in no position to defy the domestic majority. However, internationally, there is a problem. If people of one's own ethnic group are being persecuted, it's only natural to start thinking of the persecutors as targets. An example of this comes from American history. In my lifetime, there have been years during which the Irish Republican Army was waging war on Britain, and a certain amount of the funding for this terrorist activity came from sentimental Americans of Irish extraction. (Down through the years, various British political leaders, such as Margaret Thatcher, were less than pleased with the American government's sentimental reluctance to restrain Americans who were engaged in the time-honored practice of funding the murders of British citizens.) As far as the rights and wrongs of the IRA's struggle are concerned, that is irrelevant here. The important fact is that a certain number of sentimental Americans, perceiving that struggle as having right, were prepared to fund it, even though that struggle had no impact on their own lives. I was quite amazed when Ronald Reagan visited Ireland and made such a big fuss about his Irishness. From my perspective, Reagan is an American. What's he doing showing up in Ireland pretending to be Irish? Even so, from an American perspective, there was, apparently, nothing strange about this. The ethnic connection persists (at least as far as sentiment is concerned) despite the intevening generations. (My own ancestry, incidentally, is a mix of English, Scottish and Irish, and my own connection to Ireland is rather stronger than Ronald Reagan's. From an ethnic perspective, of course, this three-way mix gives me a rather confusing choice of potential hereditary enemies.) Rightly or wrongly, a certain number of Standard Americans were (in my lifetime) moved by ethnic sentiment to fund IRA terror directed against Britain. With this example in mind, it seems reasonable to argue that America's domestic mistreatment of people who are not Standard Americans is going to arouse similar passions in various ethnic communities around the world. In summary, then, from an external perspective, America's "war on terror" can very easily look like "war on people who are not Standard Americans." What is actually being done (people being disappeared, held without trial, denied access to legal counsel, threatened, menaced and subjected to arbitrary detention and interrogation) has the appearance of being fascism in action. And, the longer this goes on, the more America stands in danger of being seen as the Great Satan, a legitimate target for people from many ethnicities. And America risks being seen so not just for the lifetime of the Bush regime but for longer - perhaps for centuries. It is worth remembering, in this context, that the worst things that the British did to the Irish (invasion, conquest, oppression, nonchalantly presiding over famine and so forth) were done in previous generations. In my own lifetime, British policy toward Ireland has been much more enlightened, and, whatever the rights or wrongs of Britain's policy in Northern Ireland (I'm not going to take a stance either way) I believe it fair to say that successive British administrations have acted with good faith in their formulation of policy on Northern Ireland. Today's Britain, then, is far different from the imperial monster of old (in consequence, perhaps, of the comparative weakness of modern Britain, which constrains the nation to pursue more civilized policies.) However, Britain's barbarous behavior in Ireland in the past caused transgenerational scars, and these scars meant that, when IRA terrorists sought support from Americans who were far removed from the struggle in Ireland, in a certain number of cases they found it. |
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