Toeing the line between criticism, hypocrisy

Only Charcoal to Defend: From Guy Fawkes to Black Friday: Reconciling November’s holidays

November is the month when we descend into winter. Each holiday takes us a little deeper. The sun shone when the month was young, and Halloween parties peppered the campus. I got giddy when I saw a couple Guy Fawkes masks—a symbol of the internet hacktivist group Anonymous, of Occupy Wall Street, and of other anti-government and anti-establishment movements around the world. “We are legion!” yelled one masked Halloweener at one point, echoing the mantra of Anonymous.
I managed to remember the Fifth of November when it came. It received very little news coverage, but Twitter was full of pictures of protestors with Guy Fawkes masks in front of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and other symbols of power around the world. In 1605, Londoners lit bonfires all over the city to celebrate the foiling of Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot to blow up the House of Lords. To more and more people now, November 5 is a revolutionary day waiting for Fawkes’ reckoning.
But before I can romanticize a gunpowder plot, with November comes a day that is beautiful for many reasons, and would not tolerate more destruction. Kurt Vonnegut described how on November 11, 1918, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another” and the First World War ended. The day was named Armistice Day, and never again were we supposed to have another war like the one that cease fire ended. The day is now known as Veterans Day—and we have had many wars since. Had Vonnegut and I been friends, we would have celebrated our birthdays together on this day, and maybe we would have talked about how we were never supposed to have such wars again.

Only Charcoal to Defend: The U.S. government is responsible for the crises in the Middle East

President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night outlined his plan for “degrading and ultimately destroying” the Islamic State. The plan involved a vastly expanded military operation and a campaign of precision bombing that will continue for years. A host of American politicians and pundits have joined the president in voicing their desires to see the Islamic State destroyed.
“We will follow them to the gates of hell,” warned Vice President Joe Biden in a speech Wednesday night. Or, as Judge Jeanine of Fox News put it, “Keep bombing them. Bomb them again and again.”
The Islamic State shocked the world over the last two months by conquering wide swaths of Iraq and Syria and establishing an Islamic caliphate. More sensational yet are the numerous videos of mass executions conducted by the group, and its predilection for public crucifixion or decapitation as punishment for crimes ranging from drug possession to being part of the “wrong” religious denomination. The Islamic State is surely vicious and brutal.In this way, it mirrors its makers.
If the Islamic State is the cancer of the Middle East, the United States is the world’s unscrupulous dumper of carcinogens. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban, it gave the Taliban a raison d’etre. When the U.S. went into Iraq to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s regime, it gave al-Qaeda room to grow.
When the United States and a “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq in 2003 under blatantly false pretenses, it killed over 100,000 Iraqis, destroyed the country’s infrastructure, exacerbated sectarian divisions and left the nation destitute, with a U.S.-armed puppet government in Baghdad.
The memory of sexual and psychological torture at the hands of American soldiers is fresh in the minds of many Iraqis, including members of the Islamic State who staged a prison break from Abu Ghraib last year.
Several months ago, the Islamic State stormed northern Iraqi cities and, in the process of overrunning the Iraqi soldiers stationed there, gained control over an enormous cache of American weapons and supplies. Of course, the group already had many arms, some of which it received from the C.I.A to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Moammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
Preventing the Islamic State from gaining further traction is a reasonable goal, but any serious venture to combat the sort of militancy and extremism displayed by the Islamic State would require the West to stop trying to colonize and subjugate the Middle East (through war, neo-liberal capitalism and the Israeli colony), and to stop supporting and providing weapons to autocratic leaders in the region.
Saudi Arabia likes to behead people just as much as the Islamic State, so why is one our close ally and the other a mortal enemy?
Bombing people has simply proved ineffective in the U.S.’s tragicomic Global War on Terror. If anything, it has bred anti-American anger and sympathy for groups like al-Qaeda. Any attacks on the White House would simply be a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
“If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven,” Obama warned on Wednesday. But if American leaders really wanted to protect Americans, they would put controls on energy companies in order to stop a crisis of massive climate change, would they not? Why do they not spend less money on war and more on education and health? Or at least jail one of the bankers responsible for the current recession?
U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria is not really about protecting Americans. We hear the same fearful language that was thrown around in the lead up to the Iraq War and the disastrous Global War on Terror, but the threat of the Islamic State is only conceptual here.
The threat of corporate gangsters and a militarized police state, on the other hand, is very real, especially when governments, such as those of the U.S. and the U.K. use the threat of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to justify surveillance, censoring and a host of other authoritarian measures against their own citizens.
We should have learned, but the same military-industrial businessmen who raped Iraq and wasted nearly a trillion dollars to line their pockets are trying to do it all over again.
Rather than hiding behind the screens from which they direct drones and spread lies, the people who really want this war—the president, his cabinet, those in Congress, and all their cronies in the weapons and oil industries—should stay true to their word, journey to Iraq and Syria, and personally accompany the Islamic State to the gates of hell. Stay there for all I care.

Only Charcoal to Defend

Toeing the line between criticism, hypocrisy

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

December 5, 2013

Why is it that we Opinion columnists find it necessary to share our thoughts with you every so often? I don’t remember anyone asking me to do it, except for my editor of course, who has to remind me every two weeks.

In the process of writing columns, I’ve given advice, suggested changes at Bowdoin and, in my first article, accused the members of the Judicial Board of breaching the honor and social codes.
Was this presumptuous? To think that my opinions were worth the paper that they were printed on, or to think that writing about them would even do anything? I don’t know.

We columnists have a tendency to criticize things. To my knowledge, almost every one of my past articles has included a critique of something or other.

Constructive feedback is healthy and even vital for self and community. Being critiqued after writing shitty articles quickly teaches you that if you are going to offer your opinion to a wide audience, you need to make sure that your argument is watertight.

More worrying than the possibility of poor writing, however, is the risk of sounding sanctimonious. It can be frighteningly easy to pass judgment on others without being made to face all of the contradictions, crimes and cares that contribute to one’s self.

I can condemn George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, for example, then proceed to check my messages on my iPhone (created in a factory in China by a worker I have never met) and eat a bowl of Kelloggs cereal (with genetically modified sugar) without ever having to acknowledge my complicity in preserving the racist and violent system he is only a pawn in. Can there be an opinionated person who is not hypocritical in some way?

It has been written that white privilege makes its appearances in the pages of the Orient. This is undoubtedly true: the Orient will typically be drenched with one kind of privilege or another. We are liberal arts college students. We are privileged as shit.

So when we write critical editorials, how can we know where the line is between critical analysis and hypocrisy, judgment and abuse of privilege?

If we want to avoid hypocrisy by understanding our privilege and using it responsibly, there are questions that we have to ask here, at Bowdoin, amongst ourselves. We should discuss internal contradictions, challenge the status quo, and deconstruct the sexist, racist, environmentally destructive institutions of power we are inheriting with this world.

But we should not make our attacks personal. Even when discussing and critiquing individual people’s actions we should try not to attack people. One wise professor once told me that when we critique, we want to do is hold up the shit for everyone to see. We want to show that it looks like shit, and it smells like shit. But what we don’t want to do is find the person who made it and wipe their face in all that shit.

The Lebanese mystic and writer Khalil Gibran asked, “Was the love of Judas’ mother for her son less than the love of Mary for Jesus?” He asked it rhetorically. You wouldn’t want any mother to find out if you smeared shit in her child’s face, whether that child was Judas or Jesus. It isn’t worth it because if you know anyone well enough, you might simply no longer feel any anger towards them—just sadness and love.

I don’t want to make any moral judgment on the Universe. I don’t really want to make moral judgments of anyone else either.

I do want to be able to critically look at manifestations of power structures, know who benefits from them, and interrogate what those people do to maintain those power structures. Because when we work together we can create wonderful systems of support for each other, but we can also commit genocide and be incredibly racist, sexist, and all that shit.

Why have I taken the time to share my thoughts with you every so often? Who knows, maybe I just like to hold shit up so you can see it. Maybe that is what the advertisement for potential Orient columnists should be: “looking for amateur shit-holders. No shit-throwers, please.”
Any takers? I’m abroad next semester so here is one free spot.

Thank you for reading.

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