Joker One

Kinda off topic for this blog, but if you didn't catch Terry Gross's interview with Donovan Campbell, it's a must.

Former marine Donovan Campbell led a platoon against insurgents in Iraq. His memoir of his experiences is Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood.

On careful listening

Michael J. Totten has an interesting post, picking up a thread from John Burns:

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

Totten offers his experience in agreement with this observation. Now, I don't know that measuring Iraqi opinion is fatally skewed. There are problems with all sorts of opinion measuring in all sorts of societies, and I expect Iraqi society can recover just fine. But this is otherwise a significant observation for me. I have to confess, I'm probably the only person I've met who doesn't have a set-in-stone view of what to do in Iraq. I was against the war from the start. And although I've rethought some of my views on the war, acknowledging that I had underestimated some of the reasons offered by liberal interventionists, I still think it was a mistake. Not only because I expected that the Bush administration would invariably bungle every decision. Also because war, even when the moral underpinning is strongest, is impossible to "do right." But since the war started, I've been emphasizing that we should do what is best for the Iraqi people. Though it needn't be always, in this case I think that's identical to doing what Iraqis think we should do. So if we don't know what they want of us that presents a problem.

But let me contrast that with this article at Socialist Unity. When I read it, I was immediately struck by how the name echoes what I recall as a stream of "Riddle" headlines dealing with Asian societies expressing the Orientalist view that Asians are so different from us that they present a "riddle" for us Westerners to understand. The article itself is better in several respects, but I think the effort to ignore/dismiss/erase/subjugate Tibetan voices is even more significant. It's one thing to disagree with the Dalai Lama, but Newman's attitude toward the Tibetan people (the proletariat he should be supporting?) denies and distorts the views they very clearly express. Newman writes:

the fact that the figurehead for the Free Tibet campaign is the Dalai Lama, the feudal figurehead of the old slavery and barbarism is illustrative of the fact that no progressive national-popular and democratic campaign exists among the mass of the Tibetan Chinese

From whatever I know about Tibet, I expect the Tibetan people (not "Tibetan Chinese," which reproduces the Chinese attempts to tell Tibetans how they think of themselves) would be outraged by such a characterization. In fact, the Dalai Lama has threatened to resign as the political leader of Tibet as a way of discouraging violence. That threat does not work because he is a slavemaster, but because he is a respected authority recognized as such by the Tibetan people. Even if one feels they are wrong to invest authority in such a religious figure, it doesn't change the fact of their views. It cannot simply be reduced to "false consciousness." To proclaim that they "really" think something else through such a process of refusing to listen (especially by claiming that they present a "riddle" to be solved) is the core of colonialist/Orientalist thought as I usually conceptualize it (abstracted from the the particular circumstance of historical Orientalism). Ironic, as Newman would probably think of his position as anti-colonialist, but I'd agree with those commenters who have noted that he's falsely positioned Chinese imperialism as the opposite of Western imperialism.

Totten recognizes the difficulties of understanding another's perspective. (And even acknowledges that he has much less of a clue about some segments of Iraqi society.) To some people, that might be "weasel words," but it's better to think of it as making space for someone else's thoughts. Refusing to substitute our thoughts for what they actually say.

So:
Yes to listening to others!
Yes to a Free Tibet!
And I'm still embarrassingly open to arguments on how best to leave Iraq.

Why don't Jewish leaders do a better job speaking for Jews in America?

People who like to blame Jews for the Iraq war sometimes note that most American Jews were, from the start, and still are more often opposed to the war. It's supposed to shield them from accusations of antisemitism, by presenting their criticism as targeted only at Jewish leaders. Well, so long as that criticism is centered around those leaders' Jewishness, it's still likely to be antisemitic. And it's not really true that Jewish leaders were major supporters of the war. This article contains a far better description of the situation. Major Jewish organizations have, contrary to what some people think, mostly been silent on the war. And even when a particular Jewish leader or organization was supportive of the war, their general stance tends to get seriously distorted.

But there is a disconnect between the views of the Jewish community and the views of Jewish leaders. The silence of community leaders is in sharp contrast to widespread opposition to the war in the community. Why is that? Well, noting how few Americans like Bush these days, maybe it's just because leaders are always imperfect reflections of their constituents. But I think there is something deeper there. There's a line in the Forward article:

In an attempt to explain the lack of interest in revisiting Iraq, Gutow suggested that "it is very complicated for any organization to go against its government when we're in war." He also said that "there is a reluctance to oppose this specific administration" because it is seen as being supportive of Israel.

Even when an individual Jew is in a position of power, such power is constrained by power structures in the wider society. If such a person desires to act as a Jew, it is even further constrained. Like the Hollywood mogul who makes the films he makes because he's a Hollywood mogul rather than because he's Jewish - if he made "Jewish films," whatever that would mean, he wouldn't be very successful. Most Jews in the culture industry are there because they wish to contribute to American culture as Americans, to prove their American-ness. In fact, Hollywood completely avoided Jewish themes until 1947. (One of two films that year to deal with antisemitism, Crossfire, was adapted from a book about homophobia.) So a film like Schindler's List isn't predetermined by Steven Spielberg's Jewishness, but rather gets made to capitalize on a wider not-specifically-Jewish fascination with the Holocaust. And the success of the film reflects how broad that fascination truly is.

Like the Jewish Hollywood mogul, Jews in politics wish to contribute positively to the nation, and their views on any issue (even Israel) are not overdetermined by their Jewishness. But not every Jew gains entry into the halls of power. Those who do manage it because they are in agreement with power. When they disagree with a majority of Jews on an issue, we see clearly that their views are not overdetermined by their Jewishnesh -even as antisemites argue that this is precisely the case- but rather their position is dependent upon their views. Critical analysis should focus on more general power structures -class- rather than ethnicity. So, to even bother talking about why Jews like Douglas Feith or Richard Perle (who aren't leaders in the community, but who do get singled out by critics) might have supported the war in Iraq or whether they were pushing for war for a long time (or anything else about them, really) in an effort to understand why we went to war is already to single them out unfairly on the basis of their Jewishness. They were able to be influential because people with more power chose them as advisors. In the end analysis, it's still Bush's war.

Going a bit further, I think major Jewish leaders and organizations should often be seen more as ambassadors for the powerful to the Jewish community rather than representing Jews to the powerful. Their role as interlocutors between American Jews and those in power pulls from both sides. Because Jews are not a powerful group in America, we have to make concessions to those who are powerful in order to be heard sometimes. Discussing issues of importance in the Jewish community (like antisemitism) marks us as outsiders and strains our relationships with those who are more powerful.