| A Letter from America: October 24, 2001 by Peter Longley I remember in my British childhood the interesting mid-Atlantic voice of Alistair Cooke reading his weekly Letter from America on the BBC sandwiched somewhere in between In Town Tonight and the ever popular Billy Cotton Band Show. It was a cultivated British accent that had acquired just enough of an American drawl to make this weekly news from America seem authentic. For most of us in Britain in those days, which pre-dated universal television, Alistair Cooke was our knowledge of America, even if his vision was through British eyes. It was an interesting period -- one of bombastic boom in the United States and one of soul searching in the United Kingdom. I now find myself somewhat like Alistair Cooke in the 1950s, straddled between these two great countries wanting to interpret the one to the other in a very different period of time. 1956 saw Britain engulfed in the Suez Crisis. The crisis symbolically marked the end of the era of British Imperialism. The Suez Canal had been the lifeline of the British Empire for nearly 100 years, but as easily as Britain had acquired the canal through the financial wizardry of Disraeli from legitimate French and Egyptian interests, so the canal was lost through the realization of General Gamal Abdel Nasser that the British Empire was no longer a force to be reckoned with and that the Middle East was no longer an area to be subject to mandates and foreign interference, but an area of proud sovereign Arab states. The Suez Crisis was the underlying cause of Harold MacMillan's famous remarks about "the winds of change." The post-Suez world would never be for Britain the same as what had gone before. Suez was Britain's wake-up call. It was the moment when as a nation we were forced to acknowledge the superior power and muscle of the United States of America in ongoing global affairs. The pill has been hard to swallow, even 50 years on. But, other than Margaret Thatcher's bid to save the Falkland Islands, and a dogged, emotional and unrealistic opposition to the European Economic Community, there has been little indication of Britain wishing to go it alone anymore. The Atlantic alliance has remained strong, Britain supporting almost all major policy decisions of the American super-power. On September 11, 2001, "the winds of change" came to the United States. In this letter, like my esteemed predecessor in the 1950s, I will endeavor to interpret the United States through British eyes, but unlike Alistair Cooke, who did so in America's period of greatest growth and boom, I will do so in what I perceive to be America's wake-up call, when this superpower that I love as my home, must assuredly face some serious challenges to the status quo. The American role will never be quite the same again. The sun rises It is hard to relate to these "winds of change" in the peaceful Missouri Ozark countryside where I have made my home. The sun rises on golden trees in the fullness of fall, and the lush green of Indian Summer grass gives contrast in the meadows. Outcrops of ancient shelf rock overlook valleys of rivers and streams almost untouched by time where Native American artifacts and Civil War memorabilia are still daily discoveries. Amish communities, dressed in 17th century clothes, plow with horses and drive their buggies into town to tie them up at designated hitching posts in front of modern banks and post offices. Long freight trains snake their way down the single track that is one of the main links between the busy East and West coasts of America. We are a whistle stop along the way. But I would not choose to live elsewhere. For like so many, I have discovered the benefits of Middle Class America. Gas, or petrol as I would have said in my childhood, is little more than a dollar a gallon, even in this period of Middle Eastern uncertainty. My grocery bills in town are a third less than those in England and my income tax only half of that the other side of the Atlantic. Land in the Ozarks is cheap and property everywhere in the United States, despite large regional variations, is a lot more reasonable than its European counterpart. I am retired, but when I was working my salary was nearly double the British equivalent. All of this is very positive, especially when it is set against the incredible beauty of America's natural spaces, a landscape that is still more wild than cultivated, and despite the urban sprawl of certain cities a lot less built up than Europe. There are some sacrifices. I miss the lack of historic continuity as an Englishman, and along with that there is a certain cultural dearth, although a marked revival in interest in Native America is bearing its own fruit. But for many of us living in Middle Class America, it is precisely this enviable way of life that lies behind the crisis we now face. The nations of the Third World want what America has, and America requires what little they have in order to maintain what she has. American foreign policy, therefore, like our British foreign policy before Suez, is all about sustaining our Middle Class prosperity. It is easily justified as "protecting our way of life," but in reality it means that we in the Western world as the "haves" are using up 80 percent of our planet's resources, which we largely gain by a foreign policy that exploits the "have nots." Victors of war The politics of the Middle East are mostly about oil, but not entirely. It was we in Britain who created the modern Middle East. It was we as the victors of World War I who carved up the former territories of the Ottoman Empire to create today's Arab states. The Arab world went from a largely nomadic tribal area, loosely associated with the ancient power of Persia to the East and the Ottoman Turks to the West peacefully practicing various versions of Islam, into a series of sheikdoms that by chance found themselves sitting on the world's new goldmine, 20th century oil. The one exception was our British creation of the state of Israel. By the time we gave up our mandate over Palestine, Israel's new neighbors had all become rich on the West's greedy need for their black gold. They had in less than half a century become important enough to believe that they could politically eliminate the state of Israel. They might have succeeded but for the American fascination with Israel. Israel's main commodity for American needs, as she is one of the few non-oil producing nations of the Middle East, seems to be the "Jewish" vote, an important part of internal American politics. As Britain withdrew as an active player in the post-Suez Middle East, so America poured more and more into Israel, but she was forced to do so at the same time as she tried to maintain powerful influence with Israel's oil rich neighbors, some of whom were courted by the Soviets during the difficult period of the Cold War. A weird combination of Soviet and American weapons, both supplied by the need for Arab oil, were pitched against American weapons in Israel. The better-trained Israeli forces proved the superior, and more and more the Arabs had to fall back on an ancient weapon not used much during the peaceful period of Ottoman and Persian suzerainty -- "Jihad" or Holy War. Islamic fundamentalism was revived and it spread at an alarming rate. Poor and oppressed Any fundamentalist movement will spread easiest among the poor and oppressed. In almost every Arab nation, the fruits of trade alliance with the United States were only lining the pockets of the rulers; little was reaching the people. At the grassroots level, there was and is little love for the United States, which is seen as the perpetuators of the intrusive state of Israel. In a world of instant communication, however, the anti-American sentiments felt by the majority of Arab people are easily inflamed by the realization that they are not alone. I have had the privilege of traveling widely around the world over a 30-year period. Americans are not liked despite the world's love affair with the U.S. dollar. The Old World clinging to its historic roots resents American superiority, and the Third World is waking up to the reality that they are exploited by the world's super powers. It may be an illusion on their part to believe that without this exploitation they might achieve the same level of prosperity that we enjoy and that they also long for, but it is their dream. Rise of terrorism The rise of terrorism as a means to an end has had an alarming success rate over the past 200 years. There is a very thin line between freedom fighting and terrorism. Most "freedom" movements in the dissolving of imperial power started as guerilla activity. Freedom fighters and terrorists believe in their causes, often more vehemently than those of us who are defending our comfortable status quo. Freedom fighters, terrorists and the idealistic dictators they spawned successfully changed the map of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. They created the Cold War. They were behind the changing patterns of the Far East after the fall of British and Japanese Imperialism. In many ways, they have created the world that we now live in. If a terrorist movement can associate itself with a fundamentalist religious belief, it becomes doubly powerful and significantly more aggressive. Individual life is sacrificed willingly to the cause. That is what we face in much of the Middle East and Indonesia today. It was not surprising, therefore, that in an unprecedented period of U.S. boom, terrorists struck at America in such a devastating way as we all witnessed on September 11, 2001. The dreadful question, which the world had to face on that day, was: How would the world's greatest super power react? An English philosopher and rebel, David Icke, potentially describes this scenario well. He sees most of us as sheep easily manipulated by our governments, whether we have elected them freely or not. There comes a crisis, which David Icke insinuates is often the deliberate result of government policy, and the sheep all cry out, "Something must be done." This gives the government freedom to do whatever it likes, knowing that the sheep will follow with patriotic fervor. In that patriotic fervor, civil liberties are easily revoked and government control is tightened until the next crisis when the sheep cry out again, "Something must be done." David Icke sees this as a deliberate worldwide policy of the few to dominate the many in a New World Order. I do not believe in that extremity, but many of the conditions that Icke describes are present in America today. Rise of patriotism I do not want to decry the rise of patriotism that we are experiencing, but to caution that patriotism can be a difficult thing to understand. Pride in our country is a wonderful sentiment, but it is a pride in the people and the stewardship of our nation and its natural resources that is true patriotism. Selling our souls to government is not true patriotism in a world that has now set its sight on becoming one global family. So, the patriotism that we are experiencing in America at this time needs to be respected with caution. There is a wonderful coming together of the American people as they face the current crisis, but there is also a blind patriotism that stands behind our leaders without question, making it hard for the true patriot to raise his or her voice. In the manner of David Icke's "Something must be done," there is a feeling for revenge. Our "way of life" has come under attack. Symbols of our financial freedom and our military might have come tumbling down. Five thousand innocent people have died. And now, we face the reality of bio-chemical warfare. Something must be done. That can not be denied. But is the right thing being done? We want Bin Laden because we believe he is in part responsible for this tragedy and past tragedies of a lesser scale. We are probably right to attempt to bring him to justice just as the Western world has brought Milosevic to justice. But we should remember that those who did this dastardly deed believed in their cause. They had enough hatred to kill themselves in an act of "Jihad" against 5,000 people whom they loosely and not totally correctly considered to be Americans. Many who were not American died in the Twin Towers. But then, the root cause of this "Jihad" is not just against Americans, but against a whole Western world that lives off the backs of three-quarters of the rest of the world. On that single day when 5,000 died in America, nearly 30,000 global citizens died from starvation. Starvation may be considered a natural cause of death as opposed to a deliberate act of sabotage, but much of our world's starvation is the result of our imbalanced economy. An imbalanced economy is sabotage of our planet. Greed in the face of ecological necessity is also sabotage of our planet. We can no longer hide behind ignorance as our well-meaning Empire-building forebears did. We are now citizens of our planet first, and members of a nation second. If we refuse to be citizens of our planet first, our nations will cease to exist with the eventual extinction of the human race -- and we will hand our planet back to other species who were here long before we evolved in the first place. It is not until the Western World addresses its systematic rape of planet Earth that we can begin to create the sustainable worldwide economy that can assist in truly eliminating the hardships encountered in most of our world. A positive step So, how do we fight the terrorist? I can only consider it a positive step forward that so many nations of the world have genuinely grieved with the United States over the tragedies of September 11th and vowed to play their part in an international coalition against terrorism. It is my belief that the era of global warfare is over, a phenomenon associated with Imperial expansion and the result of nations seeking to discover more and more of our planet and its useful resources. The discovery era is now over. To that end, knowledge of our world and its resources is now common to all. We all now know we are citizens of Planet Earth, but we don't yet know how to share our home. It is this basic fault that leads to jealousy, frustration and terrorist needs. At the time of the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the 1980s, I was working as a cruise director for another company. As a result of that event, all officers of the company for whom I worked were put on a crash course to learn how to deal with terrorist attack. I remember very well the opening remarks of our instructor, who I believe was British. "Nothing is going to stop the hijacker. None of your security efforts will stop the hijacker from achieving his goal. They may frustrate him, but he will always find a new technology and a new way to achieve his goal. Your training is not about how to prevent a hijacking from happening. We are here to train you in what to do from the moment the hijacking has happened." In short, it is almost impossible to fight the terrorist, but it is possible to fight terrorism. I believe that this is a time for our Western world to listen to its wake-up call. Instead of concentrating all our efforts on fighting the terrorist, let's concentrate on fighting terrorism. There is no terrorism without a cause. A cause that can engender enough hatred for America and Americans to lead to the events of September 11th has deep feelings. Our best weapon Perhaps our best weapon would be to look at ourselves and ask why our "way of life" is both envied and despised by so many on the planet. Maybe this will reveal some of the imbalances that are the root causes of international tensions. America controls the greatest flow of trade in the world. The American dollar is the benchmark of our global economy. Are we good stewards of these powerful responsibilities? We in Britain and America can fight this war without firing a shot or dropping a bomb. We can do so with the help of the powerful coalition of nations that have rallied around us. If the watch cry is "Something must be done," then why don't we do something that can be of permanent benefit to the planet and thus ultimately to America as a nation? Fighting this war with bombs and bullets in Afghanistan and potentially elsewhere, is hardly likely to achieve these permanent goals. It might eliminate Bin Laden. It will almost certainly destroy the Taliban. It will also destroy Afghanistan. Victoriously we might be able to establish a new government in Afghanistan, friendly for a while to the United States. It will probably be formed from the more trustworthy elements of the Northern Alliance, who will be faced with an impossible task in trying to govern a destroyed nation. They will not succeed without huge support from the United States, which in turn will alienate them from other nations of Islam, creating a scenario similar to that which followed on the creation of Israel. Should we realize that and drop our support once the war is over, as we did in the Afghan Russian War, we will probably leave this poor nation to the horror of further civil war no doubt ending in the re-establishment of Islamic fundamentalist rule. Why do we not see that to the Arab world, whether rightly or wrongly, the United States is an interfering meddling nation only out to achieve its own ends? On hearing this, the sheep will bleat again. "But we are not. We are providing humanitarian aid and food for the Afghans." Yes, Americans are providing aid to the Afghans and I have no doubt will continue to do so as long as they need to. But, where was that aid two months ago? Yes, the United States is by far the most generous nation of the world in terms of humanitarian aid and food supplies for the depressed nations of the world, but why wouldn't she be when she holds 80 percent of the world's wealth. Why, however, if this is true, can this great nation not find the funds to pay her dues to the United Nations? Is this a statement of superiority -- or what? The United Nations should be the real place to debate the future economy of our world without the vested interest of one nation over another. Sharing compassion We have justifiably shared compassion with the relatives, friends and acquaintances of the victims of the September 11th terror. When we consider the ordinary Afghan citizen caught up in this present horror, maybe we should look on him or her with the same compassion. Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness in his or her life. Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his or her life. Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair. Just like me, this person is seeking to fulfill his or her needs. And, just like me this person is learning about life. But sadly, we might have to add, just like me, this person is angry and seeking revenge. It is a vicious circle; we are back where we started. I feel we will gain more by examining the folly of our present action where seeking revenge is only creating revenge. Heaping hate on hate is only adding fuel to the fire. Better to respond to our wake-up call and examine ourselves. We can fight terrorism, but we can't fight the terrorist. The world is at an apex. The world will never return to September 10, 2001. Our lives have been changed forever, even in the golden light of this valley in the Missouri Ozarks. But, on September 10th in the Western world, we still had a pretty solid-looking economy based on our selfish rape of our world's resources. Now, we have an uncertain economy, but we could have a new vision that will bring our world closer to oneness, co-operation and peace. I rally around President Bush in creating a global alliance against terrorism, but let's do it the right way to secure the future our planet deserves. It is worth it, because it is a jewel in the universe. On September 10th, we in the West along with the Asian powers of China and Japan were the world's leaders. We still are after September 11th, but it is a different world. Let's lead it differently. The United States is blowing in "the winds of change." It can be a painful process as we British remember in 1956, but it can lead to a better world. What we see in the world is only a reflection of what we see in ourselves. Peter Longley -- born in Scotland and brought up and educated in England -- is the author of the novel Two Thousand Years Later (Hovenden Press 1998) and a graduate of Cambridge University in Theology. He has lived in the United States on and off since 1962 and permanently since 1977. He is a former cruise director of the Queen Elizabeth 2 and is married to international solo flautist Bettine Clemen. He retired to become a lecturer and novelist in 1996, and since moving to Missouri in 1999 farms a small holding of 30 acres in the Ozarks. Copyright © 2001 Peter Longley |
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