Glenn Greenwald is, as I’ve said before, an incredible writer. Not a great site to bookmark if what you want is to be constantly kept abreast of recent activity, but for piercing insight there’s none that can top him. Today’s column is just as true as his others, tackling a question that I feel most aren’t willing to genuinely answer: “Why do they hate us?”
Note, too, the vast gap between how Americans perceive of their actions (mere “aberrations”) and how so much of the rest of the world perceives of it, especially those in the targeted regions. So much of this disparity is explained by a basic lack of empathy: imagine if every American spent just a day contemplating how they’d react if some foreign army from a Muslim nation invaded and bombed the U.S., occupied the country for the next several years with 60,000 soldiers, killed tens of thousands of citizens here, set up secret prisons where they disappeared Americans for years without charges or even contact with the outside world, imposed sanctions that blockaded food and medicine and killed countless children, invaded and ransacked our homes at will, abducted Americans and shipped them halfway around the world to island-prisons, instituted a worldwide torture regime, armed their allies for attacks on other Western nations, and threatened still other invasions.
The United States is a nation that is, for the most part, untainted by war. The last time American citizens had to worry themselves about seeing soldiers from an opposing military in their back yard, they were still Americans holding the guns. Our brothers fought in Iraq, our fathers fought in Vietnam, our grandfathers fought in Germany, and our great grandfathers fought in Germany.
Say the word “war” to an American and the word is subconsciously prefixed with “sending them off to.” War is an external event to Americans, we think of our men and women fighting and, from our perspective, it’s more about watching them get on a plane and counting down the days until they come back. War affects our lives in a tangential way; we know someone who’s fighting or we watch our economy ebb and flow.
Even the notion of war on our soil baffles us. We can’t imagine it, and this manifests in the inability to understand why in the world those ungrateful Arabs aren’t singing our praises. Americans have absolutely no concept of what it is to have a war happen on their own soil, and I don’t think outside of it actually happening that they ever will.
To get at least somewhat of an idea, I want you to engage in a little exercise. If you’re near a window, look outside. Just look out there. Chances are you see your street as at least somewhat safe. Maybe there are some criminals, but you’re largely safe. This is your home. Maybe there are some kids riding bikes, someone walking a dog.
Now visualize, to the best of your ability, the house across the street from yours (or whatever’s over there), exploding. Just blowing the fuck up in a cloud of dust, debris, and body parts. Your floor quakes, a few things fall off the shelves, and your neighbors are dead. A plane flies by, the one that dropped the bomb. On the street, men in uniform with patches of flags from another country swarm in, checking the wreckage. They cart off the survivors, and they leave. The next day, a news report says the people in that home were suspected of insurgency. Friends of yours. And you know they weren’t.
Take a moment to think about what that would feel like. The fear. Worse yet, the anger. The rage at seeing soldiers from some other country kill and capture your friends, with no warning. Knowing it may happen again, and there’s nothing you can do it about it.
This is us. The war isn’t limited to Arabian warzones. It’s in their streets, in their yards, killing their families. No matter how noble our intentions were, we stormed into their neighborhoods, told them what we wanted, and are now apparently unable to comprehend why so many of them are dropping land mines in front of our vehicles.
Actually, I have a better idea. Scrap all that stuff above. Just go watch Red Dawn, and realize that, to the Middle Eastern citizens, we’re the Soviets. We’re dropping in and devastating their towns all in our interests, with little to no concern for theirs. That’s the answer to “why do they hate us?” It has nothing to do with freedoms, with religion, with race, with our approaches to anything. It has to do with what we’ve done to them. America isn’t the only free nation, and yet somehow they aren’t furious at the Germans or the Norwegians.
Americans are not known for our empathy (just check out the health care debate), and this is a case where, beyond being actually confronted with the horrors we’re inflicting on the people they’re claiming should be “grateful”, I can’t see it being fixed.
