While commenting on the discovery of the Nazi atrocities Marguerite Duras observes that “If Nazi crime is not seen in world terms, if it isn’t understood collectively, then that man in the concentration camp at Belsen who died alone but with the same collective soul and class awareness that made him undo a bolt on the railroad one night somewhere in Europe, without a leader, without a uniform, without a witness, has been betrayed. If you give a German and not a collective interpretation to the Nazi horror, you reduce the man in Belsen to regional dimensions. The only possible answer to this crime is to turn it into a crime committed by everyone. To share it. Just like the idea of equality and fraternity. In order to bear it, to tolerate the idea of it, we must share the crime.[1]”
The emphasis is mine, and it is this idea of recognizing our shared responsibility which makes the study of this period—or any other period of history—relevant to our experience today. Above all we must guard against the tendency to separate ourselves—some group of us—from the rest of humanity, and especially to dehumanize and demonize those who don’t think or act like we do, since this is the first step towards violence, atrocity and war.
I think about the way Franco separated Spaniards—all Spaniards, all of those with an innate and equal claim to Spaniard-ness—into two groups: the ‘good’ Spaniards (those who supported Franco), or nosotros, and the bad Spaniards (those who opposed him during the civil war and his forty-year dictatorship), or ellos.
Likewise, I observe in the States the way some people speak. I’m thinking specifically of people close to the Tea Party movement, and particularly Sarah Palin. These people often say “We need to take America back,” suggesting that with Barack Obama’s overwhelming victory in the 2008 elections ‘America’ was somehow ‘taken from’—who?
Yesterday I heard a Tea Party victor claim that his triumph was that of the American people. Again, how is it possible—how does it become possible—for these people to speak as if they speak for the whole ‘American people,’ when they quite obviously represent only a fraction (perhaps a majority, greater than 50%, but not often) of the nation’s population?
Inherent in their rhetoric is the accusation that the opposition—those who voted for other candidates—is somehow less ‘American’ than they are. Why? How so? How can this be possible?
I’ve lived outside the States for half of my life, about twenty-five years now. But I was born and raised there—in the heartland, in the Midwest, where the ‘real’ Americans live—and only left to live definitively abroad once I had become an adult. I can understand how my long self-imposed exile might make me less American, as I have no doubt absorbed cultural acquisitions that are not, at least now (though perhaps originally, since most Americans came from Europe), one hundred percent American.
I realize that the way I speak, the way I think, even my accent are no longer one hundred percent American, though for twenty-five years they certainly were. So I can accept someone suggesting that I—who still retain my U.S. citizenship and passport, and still faithfully and punctually pay my U.S. taxes—am not quite as American as those Americans who have never lived abroad.
But what I can’t understand is how one lifelong resident and citizen of the United States can claim to be more American than any other. To appropriate for themselves—as some people do—the right to determine who is ‘good’ enough, ‘patriotic’ enough, red-white-and-blue enough to claim to be American, is an abuse of rhetorical power that is intellectually misleading and perhaps even criminal.
Perhaps the essence of politics is division, though nothing can be accomplished, in terms of politics, without collaboration. Fortunately the only men and women who are willing to kill and be killed for their political ideas today are that minority we refer to as the ‘terrorists.’ These people and their methods are rejected and disdained by the vast majority of the world’s democratic population (and most countries today are more or less—and I mean more or less—democratic). So some progress has definitely been made; though it could also be argued that there were causes during the early part of the 20th century that were worth fighting for.
But most of us everywhere, throughout the world, are interested primarily in getting on with our lives, and leading those lives in a relatively peaceful manner. All the more reason to avoid the inflammatory (and accusatory) rhetoric which is not only intellectually deceitful, but potentially explosive.
As far as I can understand it—having been educated as an economist—all Americans are in the same big ocean liner (where one can travel in various classes of comfort) when it comes to the current economic crisis (that factor which more than any other has determined the results in Tuesday’s elections). And as far as I can understand it, we all contributed to creating the mess of the historical deficit—by consuming more than we could afford on a personal level, and by either supporting the costly invasion of Iraq and/or the stimulus spending that was designed to prevent the economic freefall when the housing market burst, and was essentially agreed upon during the last days of the Bush administration.
If now there are those who are appalled (or merely understandably concerned) by the size of the deficit, but don’t want to consider how it came about, then that’s their choice. But to stigmatize someone else because they’ve got a different idea of how to do something about the widely unacceptable rate of unemployment, is both dishonest and morally wrong.
At any rate—and this is how I view the election outcome—Americans will once again get what they deserve. Whether you voted or not for this ‘change,’ a sufficient majority of those who went to the polls did. And now that America is in the ‘right’ hands again, there will be no excuses—or will there be?—when it comes time for the presidential campaign to begin, in less than a year.