Reply to Bryan Appleyard

As I read the story, according to Bryan Appleyard and his German colleague Henryk Broder (Warum wir Amerikaner hassen [Why we hate Americans]), anybody who is less than unequivocally pro-Bush is called anti-American and suspected to hate this nation and approve terror. This is dangerous black-and-white thinking. And what's even worse - again along the lines of Broder - is that Appleyard links this so-called anti-Americanism with anti-Semitism. If this is true, anybody who demands something more sophisticated than "The civilized world has been hit and must strike back forcefully" is held to hate jews. Which is, if you allow, some of the greatest bullshit I have heard so far.

Why do I call black-and-white thinking dangerous? Because it effectivly imposes censorship on any more differentiated view of the situation. And the freedom from censorship is one of the most vital values of the so called free world. Some of the most fruitful ideas how to come to grips with the terribly difficult situation we are faceing could be suppressed even before they are formulated - just because they don't feel 'determined' enough. Instead of encouraging discussion, thinking people all over the world are forced into a moral dilemma: "Either you are for us, or you are for the terrorists." And what if I dislike or even fear the American reaction? Pacifists are terrrorists, this time? What if a 'crusade' seems to be the most awkward and fruitless metaphor for what has to be done now?

To be sure, I don't think that there can be any 'differentiated' opinion on the nature of the events of September 11 among civilized human beings. It was a mass-murder, an atrocity, a crime against humanity. And if any responsibles are still alive, they have to be found an punished.

But that doesn't mean it can't be interpreted in a number of ways. Perhaps it can even be 'read', as Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung proposes. To his opinion, it was directed against the economic and military Americas, and not against its democratic institutions. I don't know if it really makes sense, but I do think that it's important to try to understand.

The problem is: Appleyard, Broder, and all the other black-and-white thinkers are in a very profound sense anti-modern. They all stick to a unifying idea of the nation that is deeply misleading and profoundly wrong. It's sometimes the metaphor of the nation as a person with a "will" and a "character" (described by George Lakoff, a US author, in his text about the moral justification of the Gulf war), sometimes the metaphor of a container that "contains" everything that is being said and done therein and has only one "surface" (the border) where exchange with the outer world can take place.

While such metaphors used to work (that is, gave a useful account for political action) in the 19th century in Europe (probably less so in the inner-American conflicts between 'civilisation' and indigenious people, cf. Jerry Mander, a US author), in that they allowed for the actors on the international scene to have names and positions, today the situation is different. International companies, NGOs, even individuals (and terrorist organisations) have their own foreign politics, the economic and cultural borders between societies melt down and give room to what (US) sociologist Manuel Castells calls the "space of flows". (America, by the way, has been a "space of flows" for a long time already; look at the biographies of the brightest people there and don't be surprised to frequently find Asian, African, or European backgrounds only zero, one or two generations back.)

Instead of accounting for these facts, Appleyard rather sticks to the outdated (and dangerous) metaphor of the nation as a person up to a point where it gets really disgusting - the US as a 'father' to the European 'children' who bite the (father's) hand that feeds them. Well, I recommend Mr. Appleyard to get his hands on any one of the following books (by US authors) to get a little insight how much the United States as a political and economic entitiy behave like a caring father: Noam Chomsky's The New Military Humanism, Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith's The Case Against the Global Economy. Christopher Hitchens' text on the war crimes of Henry Kissinger will also do.

What Appleyard doesn't get is that for the modern mind, the nation as an object of possible hatred ceases to exist. We are all real-world enough to know that America is not to be identified with the politics of its respective government (while anti-modernist Appleyard is so enarmoured with symbols that he is not ashamed to even personify the United States and call it a "she"). Some Europeans love jazz music and dislike the moral fundamentalism of anti-abortionists as well as laws against oral sex; it's not necessarily a contradiction to respect American intellectuals like Sontag, Hayles, or Dreyfus, and at the same time hold the opinion that Hollywood is continuously lowering the standards of what is considered 'good cinema' worldwide.

Now, according to Appleyard, the European "chatterers" have the problem that they can't leave the logic of the cold war behind. Quite the contrary. What we are experiencing right now is exactly a step back into the logic of the cold war: The free world finally has an enemy again, after a break of roughly a decade, we are 'back to normal' - we are in The Closed World (a very recommendable book by US author Paul N. Edwards) again where America leads the rest of the world in its glorious strife against absolute evil. If a writer like Appleyard proves anything, it's just this. (The Closed World describes that/how military computer technology and cold war ideology form a discursive continuum in which computerized control of real space is seen as the foremost means to save the free world from the absolute evil of communism. Of course, it never worked on the technical level; SAGE didn't work, sensor-technolgy in Vietnam didn't work, SDI didn't work. And NMD will not work either.)

Don't get me wrong: There's absolutely no doubt that terrorism has to be stopped and that murderers and people who back them up have to be punished. The question is: how do we succeed in this endeavour. Any action, military or otherwise, has not only to be justified by international law, it also has to be done with caution and in a way which finally leads to success instead of more terrorism. The *feeling* of one's own actions to be just is not necessarily a sufficient measure if these conditions are being met.

Note from December 1, 2001: The link to the Appleyard story is gone. Newspapers still suffer heavily from linkrot. They have not yet understood what the demands of the net as a discourse space are.

Note from August 2002: SPIEGEL suffers from another kind of linkrot. It goes like "Now you have to pay for what used to be free..." Under the name of 'Micropayment', the hyperlink turns into a commodity - well done, guys.