And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease
.
With these words Chris Hedges summarizes his view on the United States after the death of Osama Bin Laden. He was speaking in Southern California on sunday night, when the first confirmation was made public.
Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on al Qaida for the New York Times.
There is not much optimism in his talk, more just an clear and lucid view of the current hubris and folly of our military actions in the Middle East.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.
Hedges experienced 9/11 firsthand and in the weeks and months afterwords saw the unfortunate side of the American psyche.
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.
He ends his talk with the stark realization that Empire eventually corrupts and threatens the soul of the country.
So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know it’s intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to fight.
I think it is important to look beyond the excitement of the past few days and use this event as an opportunity for cold sober look at our dependency on violence as an expression of national character.