|
|
text: ------ Bush: "My dear Dalai Lama..." --------- Pope: "My God, what an idiot!"
Bush very grateful to his close friend Osama after his help for his re-election!
(copyright: the photographer, late Secretary of State Colin Powell)
Some funny animations about the lost war about petrol by the USA in the Middle East!
With kindest regards to AL JAZEERA...! Take your time to laugh!
Abdallah
Hammoudi – anthropologue marocain - professeur à Princeton aux Etats-Unis décrit sa position devant la
guerre contre l’islam
Abdallah Hammoudi : Il est dangereux de figer les
musulmans dans des stéréotypes de constantes culturelles
€ LE MONDE | 07.01.02 | 13h05
Une thèse majoritaire aux Etats-Unis diabolise les Arabes et leur
propension naturelle à la violence. En retour, ces derniers
démonisent l'Amérique. Seul le dialogue est une solution.
[Question:]Après dix ans d'enseignement aux Etats-Unis, comment
appréciez-vous la perception qu'ont les Américains de leur image à
l'étranger ?
- Il y a, chez beaucoup d'Américains, la conscience vague que quelque chose
ne va pas. Cela se résume au concept du ugly American, cette image
pas toujours aimable que les Américains projettent hors de chez eux. Ça les
fait sourire ou ça les énerve. Mais cette conscience élude généralement
l'image que leur pays projette à travers sa politique extérieure. Une part
non négligeable de l'intelligentsia le reconnaît et critique la grande
puissance agissant unilatéralement, peu soucieuse des droits des autres
peuples. Mais le discours dominant, surtout dans les médias, est à
l'autosatisfaction et à l'autojustification. Dans une émission très
populaire comme Larry King Liv e, on entend très souvent,
depuis le 11 septembre, à propos des musulmans ou des Arabes, Ces
gens-là nous détestent parce qu'ils envient notre démocratie, notre
richesse, notre bonne vie (good life). . Ou Ce sont des
perdants qui nous haïssent parce que nous sommes des gagnants. On dit
ces gens-là, des êtres pas vraiment identifiés, appartenant au
monde des miséreux.
- Et au niveau universitaire ?
- La grande vertu des Etats-Unis est que la discussion est toujours
légitime. Un discours critique s'y développe depuis quelques années, mais
il reste peu lié aux problèmes pressants que posent les autres sociétés. La
collaboration des Etats-Unis avec des régimes antidémocratiques est souvent
occultée. Peu de gens s'intéressent par exemple au rôle historique de la
CIA.
- Mais dans le monde arabe, l'antiaméricanisme charrie aussi de nombreux
et puissants fantasmes : on attribue tous les maux aux Américains, à la
CIA, ou aux Israéliens, pour s'exonérer de toute responsabilité.
- A qui le dites-vous ! Je passe mon temps à dire que nous, Arabes, ou
musulmans, devons d'abord balayer devant notre propre porte.
Malheureusement, chaque fois qu'un intellectuel comme moi analyse les
responsabilités premières que portent les siens quant à leur malheur
historique, son discours est immédiatement utilisé par les milieux et les
médias anti-arabes. Il leur sert à nier toute responsabilité des Etats-Unis
dans les problèmes des sociétés arabes. Bien sûr que ces fantasmes existent
parmi les Arabes et les musulmans, et depuis le 11 septembre on assiste à
une déferlante. Car ils émergent avec d'autant plus de vigueur que le moi
est très malmené. Se voir nié produit des attitudes irrédentistes. Et plus
l'irrédentisme se développe, plus le fantasme croît. La seule thérapie,
c'est la confrontation et le dialogue de façon à ce qu'on puisse
progressivement démontrer que le démon n'est pas toujours de l'autre côté.
Car les fantasmes existent de part et d'autre. Par exemple Les
musulmans ou les Arabes sont culturellement incapables d'accéder à la
modernité. Ils ont une propension naturelle à la violence. Plus
ceux-là subissent ces fantasmes, plus ils développent des fantasmes à
rebours : L'Occident est corrompu, l'Amérique et Israël responsables
de tous leurs maux. Le gros problème des sociétés arabo-musulmanes
est qu'elles font face à des grandes puissances, à commencer par
l'Amérique, qui les emprisonnent dans des stéréotypes. D'où la frustration,
due au sentiment d'être prisonnier de la représentation de l'autre. Plus
ils se sentiront diabolisés, plus ils tendront à démoniser l'autre.
- Pouvez-vous donner un exemple ?
- Celui qui détient le pouvoir de représentation détermine qui est
terroriste et qui ne l'est pas. Aujourd'hui, les Arabes ont beau dire que
les Palestiniens sont engagés dans une lutte de libération nationale, les
termes utilisés aux Etats-Unis sont systématiquement les violences en
Palestine. Des violences dont les Palestiniens sont les
fauteurs, pas les victimes. En Afghanistan, pendant l'occupation russe,
officiels et médias américains disaient moudjahidins et
les résistants afghans. D'une manière générale, on accrédite
l'idée est que les Arabes sont violents,
irrationnels. Leur violence devient une composante constitutive
de leur barbarité. Quand un jeune Chinois fait seul face à un tank, il est
un héros. Quand un jeune Palestinien le fait, il est victime de sa propre
violence irrationnelle.
Il en est de même du djihad, ou de Ben Laden. Parce que certains musulmans
s'arrogent aujourd'hui le droit d'exercer la violence pour dominer les
autres, on tire des généralités sur le monde arabe, sur les
musulmans. Si, sous prétexte que certains colons israéliens spolient
les Palestiniens, ou que d'aucuns prônent leur transfert hors
de Palestine, on en concluait que le judaïsme est intrinsèquement
spoliateur, qu'il porte en lui l'épuration ethnique, ce serait perçu, à juste
titre, comme une abomination.
- C'est ce que vous expliquez à vos étudiants ?
- Je leur enseigne que l'ignorance et le fantasme sont les choses les mieux
partagées, et qu'il faut toujours se méfier du sentiment de sa propre
innocence. Et j'essaie de faire comprendre que les Arabes et les musulmans,
comme tous les êtres humains, sont des produits de l'histoire. Qu'il est
faux et dangereux de les figer dans des stéréotypes ou de pseudo
constantes culturelles qui les prédisposeraient à la violence et
à l'irrationalité, une théorie malheureusement répandue aux Etats-Unis.
- Vous-même êtes perçu aux Etats-Unis comme un musulman
modéré...
- Généralement, on me considère comme un Arabe modéré. Ce
disant, je ne sais jamais exactement à quoi on fait référence. Cela peut
vouloir dire que je soutiens le changement par le dialogue et non par la
violence. Mais souvent, cela signifie uniquement : toi, tu es gentil parce
que tu n'es pas contre Israël. Mais si je dis que l'Intifada est
parfaitement compréhensible, je cesse sur-le-champ d'être un
modéré. Ainsi fait-on systématiquement ici une différence entre
musulmans modérés et extrémistes. Bien sûr, on évoque aussi les intégristes
chrétiens, ou juifs. Mais on n'entendra personne parler de chrétien
modéré, ou de juif modéré. Cela ne ferait aucun sens.
Pourquoi cela en fait-il pour le musulman ? Parce que
naturellement, l'islam, lui, n'est pas modéré.
L'ambiguïté du rapport aux musulmans est profonde.
- Comment l'expliquer ?
- Ceux qui poursuivent des objectifs de puissance fonctionnent en
catégories binaires. Pour ou contre. Avec nous, contre nous. Etre
pro-américain, c'est être pour la paix avec Israël, donc contre le
terrorisme palestinien. Etre antiaméricain, c'est être pour les
terroristes, Ben Laden et les Palestiniens. Bref, modéré ne signifie pas
croire à la raison et au dialogue, mais induit une forme d'acceptation de
la politique américaine à l'étranger.
Je suppose que, pour Poutine, être musulman modéré
implique de penser, comme lui, que les Tchétchènes sont tous des bandits.
Or moi, quand j'entends les Américains parler de régimes arabes
modérés, ça me révulse. Car pour l'essentiel, il s'agit de monarchies
rétrogrades, ou de pouvoirs corrompus et autoritaires.
- Vous imputez le déficit démocratique dans le monde
arabo-musulman aux grandes puissances. Pourtant, dans votre pays d'origine,
vous insistez au contraire sur les responsabilités propres des dirigeants
locaux.
- Non. J'impute en premier lieu ce déficit à la dynamique interne des
forces de nos propres pays. Mais quand des universitaires américains me
disent que mes analyses sont très importantes, c'est qu'à leurs yeux elles
viennent renforcer leur conviction : Les Arabes n'ont personne
d'autre à blâmer qu'eux-mêmes. C'est inacceptable. Beaucoup
d'intellectuels américains font comme si l'Amérique était innocente de tout
reproche, puisque elle est une démocratie. C'est ce que j'appelle le
syndrome d'Athènes.
- Qu'entendez-vous par là ?
- Athènes ne se préoccupait pas de savoir si Sparte était ou non acquise à
la démocratie, tant qu'elle ne menaçait pas ses intérêts vitaux.
L'essentiel pour Athènes la démocratique était de se protéger en dominant
Sparte la non-démocratique. C'est ainsi que la démocratie se mute en son
inverse dès qu'elle sort de ses frontières. La démocratie israélienne,
la seule du Moyen-Orient, devient un argument pour justifier
l'occupation des Palestiniens.. La démocratie américaine devient un
certificat de bonne conscience pour la défense des intérêts américains à
l'étranger. C'est une traduction, à l'époque contemporaine, des arguments
ressassés du colonialisme, mettant en avant sa modernité politique,
économique et sociale pour justifier son emprise coloniale. Les valeurs de
la démocratie deviennent alors identitaires, quasi raciales. C'est
Berlusconi. La démocratie cesse d'être l'une des plus hautes valeurs de
l'humanité, valable pour tous. Non, c'est une valeur
américaine.
- Craignez-vous dans le contexte actuel un risque de phobie envers les
musulmans aux Etats-Unis ?
- Les Arabes américains ressentent une certaine suspicion générale, même si
les gouvernants ne cessent de répéter que ce n'est pas une guerre contre
l'islam. Ils se sentent aussi en position de faiblesse. Ils sont très peu
nombreux dans les circuits décisionnaires et au Congrès. J'ai été frappé
par un reportage télévisé, après le 11 septembre, à Dearborn, une ville du
Michigan où existe une très ancienne immigration syro-libano-palestinienne.
Certains sont de la troisième ou de la quatrième génération ; or beaucoup
déclaraient : Je ne sais pas si je suis américain ou non. Je ne sais
pas si je suis accepté. Quelle influence peut avoir une communauté
où, après trois générations, on en est encore au stade de l'acceptation ?
Cette inquiétude est renforcée par les récentes arrestations, les mesures
annoncées instaurant une justice d'exception pour les
terroristes non américains, les projets d'interrogation de 5
000 à 6 000 musulmans en dehors des garanties juridiques assurées aux
citoyens américains.
- Vos enfants sont américains. Vous définiriez-vous comme pro ou
antiaméricain ?
- Je ne me définis pas de façon binaire. Je me sens comme un bâton brûlé
par les deux bouts. Je souffre du déficit démocratique des sociétés arabes
et musulmanes, et simultanément de l'incompréhension dont ces sociétés font
l'objet en Occident, principalement aux Etats-Unis. Si j'étais
antiaméricain, je ne serai pas resté vivre en Amérique. J'admire les
réalisations occidentales en matière de libertés, dans la science et la
culture. C'est pour nous, Arabes, une source d'inspiration, pourvu qu'on
nous laisse y travailler à notre propre rythme et selon nos moyens, et que
nos failles cessent de justifier des croisades contre nos sociétés.
Propos recueillis par Sylvain Cypel
Here an article of Edward Said about America (Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6
March 2002 Issue No.575)
Thoughts about America
Edward Said warns against the return to a shameful episode in the US's
intellectual history
I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he
or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at
this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of
alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For
despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims
and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the
current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and
Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases,
detained by the police or the FBI.
Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for
special attention during airport security checks. There have been many
reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that
speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to
draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many
experts and commentators on terrorism, Islam, and
the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and
so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has
become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and
elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to
end Iraq.
There are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim
populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against Iraq
continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the
Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in the
United States.
While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than
what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply
resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being
involved in a just war against something unilaterally labeled
as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role
of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be grateful
to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different:
America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of
laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly
exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives
here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant
from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld.
The Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor
for approved or disapproved forms of American behaviour,
including things that have come to be called un- or anti-
American statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American
Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one
eerily of the unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush
insists on the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce
such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes
proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself. The
Constitution expressly separates church and state.
There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and his
compliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections
of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal
procedures that give individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or
a fair trial, that allow secret searches, eavesdropping, detention without
limit, and, given the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that
allow the US executive branch to abduct prisoners, detain them
indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether or not they are prisoners of war
and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which is not a
decision to be taken by individual countries.
Moreover, as Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a
magnificent speech given on 17 February, the president and his men were not
authorised to declare war (Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world
without limit or reason, were not authorised to increase military spending
to over $400 billion per year, were not authorised to repeal the Bill of
Rights.
Furthermore, he added -- the first such statement by a prominent, publicly
elected official -- we did not ask that the blood of innocent people,
who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent
villagers in Afghanistan. I strongly recommend that Rep. Kucinich's
speech, which was made with the best of American principles and values in
mind, be published in full in Arabic so that people in our part of the
world can understand that America is not a monolith for the use of George
Bush and Dick Cheney, but in fact contains many voices and currents of
opinion which this government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.
The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and
unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no
secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of
others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush
believe are its interests. So far as the Middle East is concerned, it does
seem that since 11 September there has been almost an Israelisation of US
policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates have cynically
exploited the single-minded attention to terrorism by George
Bush and have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy
against the Palestinians.
The point here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, the US is not
Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for the moment,
Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state
in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not
infinite dependence on the US, but rather on accommodation with its
environment, not the other way round. That is why I think Sharon's policy
has finally been revealed to a significant number of Israelis as suicidal,
and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve officers' position
against serving the military occupation as a model for their approach and
resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from the Intifada. It proves
that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation have finally
brought fruit.
What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been
escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and
his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the military
campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good,
and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil.
Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that
people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of
US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies
on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for
accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst
of all, the legality of such actions.
What does it mean to defeat evil terrorism in a world like
ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite
and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to
suit the US, substituting people we think are good guys for
evil creatures like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all this is
attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is either purely theoretical
or who, because they sit behind desks in the Pentagon, tend to see the
world as a distant target for the US's very real and virtually unopposed
power.
For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known evil state and you have at
your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and dozens of
submarines, plus a million and a half people under arms, all of them
willing to serve their country idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush
and Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the chances are that you
will be willing to use all that power sometime, somewhere, especially if
the administration keeps asking for (and getting) billions of dollars to be
added to the already swollen defence budget.
From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few
exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country
have tolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases,
tried to go beyond it, toward more self- righteous sophistry, more
uncritical self-flattery, more specious argument. What they will not accept
is that the world we live in, the historical world of nations and peoples,
is moved and can be understood by politics, not by huge general absolutes
like good and evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on
the side of evil.
When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be
more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the slightest tone of
self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11 September entitle
him to preach at others, as if only the US had suffered such terrible
losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in the world were not worth
lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral conclusions from.
One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals
concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much
greater suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or
an air force, or a proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering
at the hands of Israel continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort
of moral blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative
evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic language that I
normally avoid and detest) is very much the order of the day, and it must
be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into -- indeed, actively to
campaign against falling into -- the trap.
It is not enough to say blandly that all human suffering is equal, then to
go on basically bewailing one's own miseries: it is far more important to
see what the strongest party does, and to question rather than justify
that. The intellectual's is a voice in opposition to and critical of great
power, which is consistently in need of a restraining and clarifying
conscience and a comparative perspective, so that the victim will not, as
is often the case, be blamed and real power encouraged to do its will.
A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of
a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the
major French, German, Italian and other continental papers but which did
not appear in the US at all, except on the Internet where few people took
notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the
American war against evil and terrorism being just and in
keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed
interpreters of our country.
Paid for and sponsored by something called the Institute for American
Values, whose main (and financially well- endowed) aim is to propagate
ideas in favour of families, fathering and
mothering, and God, the declaration was signed by Samuel
Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others,
but basically written by a conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke
Elshtain. Its main arguments about a just war were inspired by
Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the
pro-Israel lobby in this country, and whose role is to justify everything
Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist principles.
In signing this declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism
and, like Sharon, allies himself with an interpretation (and a questionable
one at that) of America as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, the
more to make it appear that Israel and the US are similar countries with
similar aims.
Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of
its citizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly
only the state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to
state boldly that in supporting Israel he is supporting a state structured
by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical hypocrisy) he would
oppose in the United States if this country were declared to be white and
Christian.
Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really
addressed to our Muslim brethren who are supposed to understand
that America's war is not against Islam but against those who oppose all
sorts of principles, which it would be hard to disagree with. Who could
oppose the principle that all human beings are equal, that killing in the
name of God is a bad thing, that freedom of conscience is excellent, and
that the basic subject of society is the human person, and the
legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the
conditions for human flourishing?
In what follows, however, America turns out to be the aggrieved party and,
even though some of its mistakes in policy are acknowledged very briefly
(and without mentioning anything specific in detail), it is depicted as
hewing to principles unique to the United States, such as that all people
possess inherent moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths
exist and are available to everyone, or that civility is important where
there is disagreement, and that freedom of conscience and religion are a
reflection of basic human dignity and are universally recognised.
Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say it is often the case that
such great principles are contravened, no sustained attempt is made to say
where and when those contraventions actually occur (as they do all the
time), or whether they have been more contravened than followed, or anything
as concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and his colleagues set
forth a list of how many American murders have occurred at
Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in 1983, as
well as other military combatants.
Somehow making a list of that kind is worth making for these militant
defenders of America, whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including
the hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel with US
support, or the hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained sanctions
against the innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither
mentioned nor tabulated.
What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by Israel, with
American complicity and even cooperation, and where is the nobility and
moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children are killed,
millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Or for
that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and
Indonesia with American support and acquiescence?
All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by
American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a
statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the
arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war
declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those
Islamists who have argued that our war is with the West and
with America.
Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort
of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the
elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact
exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with
a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real
politics, real history, and real moral issues.
Despite its vulgar trafficking in great principles and values,
it does none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed
to cow foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that this document
wasn't published here for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely
criticised by American readers that it would be laughed out of court and
two, that it was designed as part of a recently announced, extremely
well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war
effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption.
Whatever the case, the publication of What are American Values?
augurs a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse.
For when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of
the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that
power's case instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication
and understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war
against communism, which we now know brought far too many compromises,
collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists
who should have played an altogether different role.
Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which
went as far as providing for the subvention of magazines like Encounter,
underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic
exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals
and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole notion of
intellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For
along with that effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate,
intimidate critics, and restrict thought.
For many Americans, like myself, this is a shameful episode in our history,
and we must be on our guard against and resist its return.
|
