Different Categories of Hostility
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Latest Update: October 25, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Olivier Urbain, Soka University

Source:.

This essay is based on article in the November 1, 2001 issue of the New York Review of Books: On the War by Stanley Hoffman, Harvard University. P. 8. "He is working on a book on the politics and ethics of global society." Index of articles by Professor Hoffman. backup

Professor Hoffman gives a very helpful reading of the hostility expressed against the United States. I think it might help you sort out some of the issues we've been discussing. About three-fourths of the way down the file, you will find this discussion of Anti-American hostilities:

1. "Reading newspapers and listening to public officials and commentators since September 11 has been a disconcerting experience. While the press and television in friendly countries have, mostly without animosity, discussed why the US is the target of so much hostility (and not only in the Islamic world), in the US the question has largely been dismissed. Or the answer has been self-serving, simplistic, and summary—it's the virtues of democracy, or of capitalism, or of an open society, that make others envious and angry.

2. "It would be far better to realize that this hostility toward the US has many layers. Some of the terrorists and their supporters are religious fanatics who see in the US, the West, and Israel a formidable machine for cultural subversion, political domination, and economic subjection. The kind of Islamic revanche bin Laden projects in his statements is both so cosmic and based on so peculiar an interpretation of the Koran that there is very little one can do to rebut it. But there is a great deal one can do to limit its appeal. This kind of an ethics of conviction feeds— like so many other forms of totalitarianism—on experiences of despair and humiliation, and these can be understood and to some degree addressed.

3. "But there are more limited bills of indictment against the US, focused on specific American policies. Sometimes, the targets are the corrupt or brutal regimes that have been propped up by American economic and military assistance. Sometimes there is solidarity with the Palestinians' demand for an end of occupation and, at last, genuine self-determination. Sometimes there is concern for Iraq's children, who are claimed to be victims of US sanctions. Sometimes it is a sense of having been used and discarded— acute among many Pakistanis after the end of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Throughout the developing world, resentment of American wealth is accompanied by protest against the misery of refugees, or continuing mass poverty.

4. "It is dangerous to confuse those different categories and lump them as anti-American. We have tended, in the last ten years, toward a form of self-congratulation that can be grating for others: we are the "indispensable nation," the carriers of a globalization that will bring peace, democracy, prosperity, etc., the champions of an economic system that will eventually lift all boats, the catalysts of world order. We have not been sufficiently sensitive to other peoples' fears for their cultures, and to others' sense of shock at the inequities that come with capitalism and globalization.

5. "No policy the US adopted would affect the implacable hatred of bin Laden. But we need to know why others sometimes feel threatened by us. We have been celebrating the solidity of our status as the dominant nation after the collapse of Soviet power and of the Soviet threat. There are, when it comes to overall power, no rivals in sight, and benign American hegemony, we often say, provides a modicum of order without threatening anyone. And yet a powerful country can both attract and repel.[3] By conventional measures of power we may be unbeatable, but those who feel threatened by us or annoyed by our self-righteous, ostentatious, and opulent predominance can do us great harm. We need not only to protect ourselves better at home (instead of waiting for a decisive victory abroad), but also to understand why even nonterrorists sometimes feel smothered by America's cultural, economic, political, and military omnipresence.

Analysis of Argument

In the interest of developing our skills at reasoned argument, follow the steps of the argument:

• in the US the question
  • largely dismissed - example nation-state patriotism and revenge
  • or self-serving, simplistic, and summary - envy of our good qualities

  Now you take over from here and fill in the argument. Then link it conceptually to what we are studying:

  • In social theory, consider colonialism and postcolonialism, empire. Relate this to the comment on hegemony.

  More soon . . . . October 25, 2001. jeanne