June 13, 2006
The Problem With American Exceptionalism Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:00 AM EST In the wake of the three suicides at Guantanamo reported this past weekend, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., the commander of the detention camp, was quoted as saying of the prisoners, “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own.” He went on to add, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” I would argue that taking one’s own life, especially in protest rather than desperation, demonstrates an extremely high regard for human life. Look what I am willing to sacrifice to make my point, the suicide screams.
There is, however, a greater problem with Harris’s argument. His words took me back to Hearts and Minds, the film about the conflict that we call the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese term the American War. Point of view is exactly the point here. In the film Gen. William Westmoreland is heard saying that the Vietnamese do not share our regard for human life and family relationships. Meanwhile, on the screen, a Vietnamese mother is seen sobbing hysterically and trying to crawl into the grave with her son at his burial. I may be wrong about the exact words and scene. Perhaps General Westmoreland referred to only life or only family relationships. Perhaps it is a wife rather than a mother. But the fact that the scene has stayed with me all these years and sprang immediately to mind attests to its power. Even at the time there were complaints of the inflammatory juxtaposition of words and scene, as there always are with polemic documentaries, but the fact remains that Westmoreland did make the comment.
Certainly we cannot teach fighting men and women to love thy neighbor or turn the other cheek, though studies have shown that most men and women in combat fight not for principles or nation but for their comrades. But the need to demonize the enemy presents problems. In a soon-to-be-published biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Jean Smith writes that one reason many Americans were skeptical of the early reports of the horrors of the concentration camps was the debunking of some of the worst World War I stories about the atrocities of the “Hun.” (My colleague Fred Smoler says that many of the these debunked atrocities turned out to be true. I have no firsthand knowledge of the debunking of the debunking. I defer to Fred Smoler’s expertise in the matter.) But I think Harris’s statement, like Westmoreland’s before him, reveals a larger and more serious problem, that of American exceptionalism, the belief that we are more moral and righteous than other peoples of other nations.
In a recent New York Times Book Review essay on The Good Fight, by Peter Beinart, Joe Klein takes on this problem of America’s conviction of its own goodness. It was not always so, both the author and the reviewer argue, and they return to the glory years of Truman and a host of dedicated public servants who carried the liberal banner, when the L-word, as it is now called, was not a dirty one. “In the liberal vision,” Beinart maintains, “it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional.” That is why the Marshall plan required beneficiary nations to draw up their own programs rather than impose an American brand of democracy, as we are now determined to do. Other countries’ ways of doing things, liberal thinking went, may be different from, but is not necessarily inferior to, ours.
I am not suggesting that the world is a warm and fuzzy place; that terrorists do not want to destroy us; that there is not something warped about young men, and the occasional woman, who think they will achieve happiness in heaven, not to mention all those virgins we Westerners laugh at, by blowing up themselves and as many others as possible. But we will never solve the problem by dismissing those who create it as less good, less loving, less essentially human than we are. The only hope is to try to understand, and remedy, the conditions—some of them created by American policy, some by their own repressive societies and governments—that make them behave that way.
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