The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
History and solipsism

Did history exist before I existed?

Or did it only begin to exist when I started paying attention?

Here is when and how Terrorism* began existing, as implied in the Account of some (.pdf):

In 1915, with the sinking of the Lusitania. "Germany" was apparently responsible.

When Terrorism existed next, according to the same Account: after the Versailles treaty and during the 1930s. "Germany" was again responsible.

When it appeared next: at Pearl Harbor. "Imperial Japan" was responsible.

The Account seems to pick up again in 1983, with the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon.

[*Note: Does Terrorism only exist when Americans are the targets? And non-Americans are the targeters? That seems to be the implication.]


However, I am bugged by that 1915 date. Why does it seem so odd to me to have Terrorism simply appear out of nowhere in 1915?

Maybe because, one could argue, individuals that some might (and did) call "terrorists" existed before 1915 in America. One such potentially named "terrorist" even assassinated the President in 1901.

Why then did the Account's history of Terrorism not begin in 1901? Why with one event in 1915? What about the other events during years before or surrounding 1915? Was anything else going on in the background in the USA at that time that might have been labelled "Terrorism"?

Not mentioned in the Account. I wonder why.

I am especially surprised that the Account skips over 1919. The omission is, for me, the most mysterious "dog that didn't bark" in the narrative.

Then again, perhaps it is all too obvious why 1901, and 1917, and 1919 etc. get glossed over in the Account. Perhaps these details of history get glossed over because acknowledging them would reveal the extent to which standing on a "war footing" against Terror is not something that had to be learned entirely from scratch after 9/11/01. Rather, it was something attempted by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, who provided us with a storehouse of ideas on how to prevent Terror. Most such ideas were abhorrent, but a few of them were common sensical (such as "don't trust your sources uncritically and don't 'stovepipe' their tales directly to the top without verifying them). But the entire storehouse, good and bad, went unused from 1/20/01 to 9/11/01, it seems.

At first thought, one might think that the current administration would race to openly proclaim and integrate this unmentioned history of the fight against Terror into the Account. One might think this because today some define Terror as many of our great-grandparents apparently did, as something done only by swarthy, verminous foreigners who infiltrate the safe space and purity within the USA's borders, to target civillians.

However, to openly acknowledge this recurring -- and now recurred -- theme as part of the Account of Terror would be a public relations and tactical misstep now. Doing so would automatically reveal the inevitable destination which the Account dare not mention (at least not on daytime television, before the eyes of the nation, seven months (hopefully) before Election Day), the destination to which the current War on Terror has always intended to take us: the suppression of domestic dissent.

[Update 5/12/08:

data point, from the LA Times:

"Domestic Spying Far Outpaces Terrorism Prosecutions"]

In 1919, as today and in between, the "To Do list" of the War on Terror seems to toggle compulsively between from the prevention of/punishment for politically dangerous ideas/acts and the eradication of "non-Americans" from our midst.

For example, one historian decribed some details of the (in today's terms) Terror of bygone days thus:

[In 1919], many citizens took the Bolshevik threat to America seriously.

More frightening to most Americans than bolshevism was labor unrest, which was sometimes equated with revolution in the public, as well as the business, mind. In America the year opened with a general strike that paralyzed Seattle for five days in January and ended with the September Boston police strike and the massive nation-wide steel strike that lasted into the winter of 1919-1920. In between, over 300,000 coal miners, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, walked out of the mines.

More ominous still, that spring and summer bombs were sent to prominent business and public figures, including John D. Rockefeller, Ole Hanson, the anti-Red mayor of Seattle, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

from Melvyn Dubovsky's We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (1969)


The same historian described the cozy relationship between that era's War on Terror, ethnocentric paranoia, law enforcement and domestic political crackdown thus:

Fearing Wobbly-induced violence in his state . . . the governor of California wired Palmer: 'Will you please at once take all steps to the end that America may be kept wholly American.'

Palmer agreed to do so, and indeed he tried. So did his eager young associate in the Red Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover, in fact, sought to make deportation of alien Wobblies an automatic and mandatory procedure, and proposed the selective arrest of Wobblies in groups of five hundred in order to cripple the organization permanently.

One reads the above and wonders anew: Why did our current administration need to learn the tactics of the War on Terror from scratch after 9/11/01? Didn't Hoover leave any files around that they could have read? Wouldn't review of such things generally be a natural part of the orientation program before taking office? Wouldn't someone, especially a scholar of the Gilded and Progressive eras, like Rove, have asked for the "How to Fight Terra" guide from 1919 to be brought front and center and put on the Attorney General's desk? Guess not.

Or maybe it was, but our adminstration spokespersons are simply being coy about it.

In contrast, had Dr. Rice chosen to tell the Account a little more openly, she could have easily expanded the timeline back to 1901, as another historian's details suggest:

Secret Service men were with the president at the International Exposition in Buffalo a year later when a man drilled McKinley with two shots that shortly proved fatal. The assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was neither an Italian nor a member of any known anarchist cabal. But the first-generation Polish American believed that all rulers were enemies of the people and was strongly drawn to anarchists like Emma Goldman, though she resisted his clumsy efforts to enlist in her entourage.

After his arrest, Czolgosz said he'd shot the president because 'he didn't believe one man should have so much service and another man should have none.'

from J. Anthony Lukas's Big Trouble (1997)


It fits my theory that Dr. Rice's prepared remarks did throw in a mention of the Patriot Act. While the commission hearings are properly causing much attention to be paid to the administration's pre- and post-9/11 overfocus on Iraq, I find it spooky that the counterpart, domestic centerpiece of the War on Terror is getting nary a mention, at least in the coverage.

Thus, reflections on Dr. Rice's appearance before the commission lead logically to reflections on this man's.

On another level, Dr. Rice's Account seemed to me dangerously blinkered insofar as it suggested that, in 1915, 1939, 1942, 2001 and 2004, Terror was and is ultimately perpetrated against the USA only by other nation-states ("Germany," "Germany," "Imperial Japan," "Iraq/Afghanistan," "Iraq/Libya").

I feel unnerved to hear the problem analyzed in those terms when the facts on the ground scream how obsolete the nation-state concept has been rendered by contemporary "terrorism" (for example, by the nationless al-Qaida) and the War on Terror itself, even, in the case of the latter, in spite of itself

(wherein domestic, political and economic constraints on the national level forced Bush & Rumsfeld to try fighting the war through increasing resort to supra- or non-national forces such as mercenaries and corporate contractors, falling into disastrous results of other kinds).

Obviously, I waver between a few theories as I try to make sense of the 43rd Presidentiad's attitude towards history, especially as they invoke it in their War on Terror.

Do they know history but distort it, for immediate, domestic political purposes? I think that at some moments. Are they genuinely ignorant of it? And if the latter, why? Do they secretly believe that history didn't start until they came along? That they could remake the world at will? That the lessons of the past are overrated? Even the evil lessons (read "methods") handed down by A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, that they hastily dusted off on 9/12/01?

I waver in my theorizing about their attitudes all the more as I hear each individual sit down in front of the 9-11 commission and present their own interpretation (usually a self-serving, blame-casting one) to explain what went wrong (or right) before, what's going right (or wrong) now, and why.

How long until the "Rashomon" analogies get brought out to describe the experience of listening to the 9-11 commission hearings?
posted by TiR at 10:38 PM