The abstract enemy
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
III I I I I I I II I II I II AN ARAB WAS GOING DOWN TO JERICHO . . . JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN I N HIS SMALL masterwork, The Warriors, J. Glenn Gray argues that one basic aim of a modern state at...
...The cultural minister of Nicaragua, Ernesto Cardenal, had just visited and spoken to a large and largely sympathetic audience when I conducted this class exercise...
...The abstractness of the locution, the enemy, promotes the growth of abstract hatred, hence its helpfulness in time of total war...
...On the other hand, with modern communication and travel, perhaps a more realistic and reflective image of potential enemy nations will prevail...
...The University of Massachusetts is a highly politicized campus...
...One student said the first image that popped into her mind when Russia or the Soviet Union got mentioned was of a mass of soldiers high-booting it in a stern and disciplined manner under the humorless faces of the Kremlin elite during May Day celebrations in Red Square...
...B UT, it turns out, there is a candidate, a group we now construe in monolithic terms as not only foreign but hostile: the Arabs...
...Americans love Chinese food," one student chirped...
...Gray hoped so...
...But," she went on, "then I think of television specials about travel down the Volga...
...We are invited to hate without limit and are told we are good citizens for doing so...
...Gray insists that there is a drive towards this sort of moral absolutism even in democratic societies, perhaps especially in democratic societies, for popularly elected political leaders must convince the populace of the rightness of a cause in order to gain legitimacy to pursue it--or to pursue it to a "successful" conclusion at any rate...
...The difficulty of discussing seriously Israeli foreign policy, including our apparently unlimited willingness to supply Israel with all the sophisticated weaponry it wants, without falling under suspicion concerning the depth of one's commitment to Israel's survival, is also implicated in the current state of affairs...
...We know very little about the particularities of Arab history and the details of Middle East politics...
...There are many Asian students at the University, including a number from the People's Republic...
...Confronted with the tangled density of international relations, those who make foreign policy and those who try to think about it realistically are tempted to dismiss all discussions which probe abstract images of the enemy as well-meaning reiterations of old news...
...Let me be clear: the question isn't whether individuals-- for example, the hijack killers of Robert Stethem or Leon Klinghoffer -- should be brought to justice, but is whether we make no distinction between those designated terrorists and most Arabs in general...
...If we are to go to war we should be clear about whom we are fighting and why...
...But this state of affairs is a dangerous one in a democratic society...
...victims of state repression in China have no such lobbying effort keeping the issue alive and before the public eye...
...It is always the enemy...
...James...
...That human beings are "pretty much the same the world over," however true at some genetic level, seems not terribly helpful when it comes to parsing the geopolitical issues that divide nation-states...
...Our media, almost without exception, inculcate stereotypes of Arabs...
...Other students disagreed, acknowledging that they, too, saw the Chinese as less deadly, less abstract, more human than they did the Russians...
...in the legions of private detectives on TV...
...As soon as a student suggested this possibility, I knew she was right, and the rest of the class concurred...
...we do not talk about an enemy, for example...
...It is not that we are any more savage than our pre-rnodern forebears, Gray continues...
...The definite article is deployed...
...There are an insufficient number of ArabAmericans to make much headway in protesting popular and media representations of Arabs or in lobbying for nuanced specificity in our responses to all those different peoples and cultures we call "the Arabs...
...Which, among possible future enemies in a war this country might fight, are best candidates for the enemy, for firing under the rubric of a total and hostile Other...
...We figure we owe them for the oil crisis, the Marine barracks, the Iranian hostage situation, the TWA hijack, ihe Achille Lauro...
...In recent popular films, Protocol (with ever-bubbly Goldie Hawn), Into the Night, and The Jewel of the Nile, "the Arabs" are pictured either as crazed fanatics, ill-mannered buffoons and goons, or venal and corruptible clowns...
...Politicians, keenly aware of this fact, choose silence--or they themselves reinforce the popular image of "the Arabs...
...The "valley" (the loose designation for the Connecticut Valley which includes five institutions of higher learning--the University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, and Hampshire College) is bustling with teach-ins, speeches, courses, and pkotests about Central America...
...The abstract enemy I I I II III I we are to end wars once and for all...
...As well, the excesses of the Chinese regime are perhaps less known to us than are those of the Soviet Union...
...Gray, writing in 1959, was worried...
...The Chinese, according to my students, have become more "human" to us than have the Russians...
...And, for whatever reasons, Mao never struck us as being as demonic as Stalin...
...Since the early 1970s we have seen the flourishing of the mystery genre in such writers as Amanda Cross, Gregory MacDonald, and the more profound P.D...
...Organized, highly publicized efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews and dissidents are mounted daily in the United States...
...W ~ 1TH GRAY'S notion of the enemy in mind, 1 posed a question to a class of some 140 students in a political theory course, "Issues of War and Peace in a Nuclear Age," this past semester at the University of Massachusetts...
...Perhaps," one student remarked soberly, "we hold a racially tinge.d notion that there are so many Chinese, the loss of a couple of million wouldn't be that big a deal...
...We shouldn't require the false comfort of abstract hatreds...
...Central Americans seemed most familiar--and particular--to the class...
...The bombing attack on an office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in California, and threats of violence against ArabAmerican groups nationwide, provide sobering evidence of attempts to intimidate those working to counter demeaning, culturally-sanctioned images of Arab peoples...
...The involvement of nuns and priests in Commonweal: 14struggles for "peace and justice in Central America," whatever one's position on liberation theology, also touches many students on a cfimpus with a large Catholic population...
...The previous autumn, Robert White, former ambassador to E1 Salvador, attracted over one thousand students in an appearance at the University...
...Gray's thesis, philosophically complex, has been recast so often in popular form that it now seems shopworn, perhaps even banal...
...Subsumed under the injunction to know others as we know ourselves, is the notion that wars begin in the "hearts and minds" of human beings and must there be extirpated if I I I I II I JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton...
...By designating the enemy with the definite article, "it" is made to appear a singular, monolithic entity dominated by hostility towards us...
...I realize Russians have women and babies and old people, too...
...A rough consensus emerged in class, then, that the Russians are less individuated, less concretely and diversely alive to Americans than either Nicaraguans or Chinese...
...The students played with the question for awhile, bringing forth abstract pictures 'and then correcting them with more concrete images of the Russians, th~ Chinese, the Central Americans...
...The warning against abstracted thinking wears thin and invites well-meaning, but simplistic proposals for intermarriage, cultural exchange, even the use of children as hostages for peace...
...The sanctuary movement is widely publicized...
...What it would take to chip away at this abstraction is difficult to say...
...So even with the Russians, my students believe it would take a concerted, all-out effort to promote an image of the enemy that would justify the barbarities of total, especially nuclear, War...
...O~i the one hand, total war makes it possible for us to destroy the enemy without ever seeing him or her face-to-face...
...It may be increasingly difficult for governments to create believable abstract images of the beast or the devil in respect to whole peoples...
...Images on television show the Chinese hustling and bustling in a way that seems familiar to our speeded-up society...
...rather, we have more highly developed means to create and to act on abstract hatreds and the simplifications they produce...
...This moral absolutism is constructed through language...
...The image we have in our heads of Arabs is of a uniformly ignorant, dirty, and fanatical people...
...I I I II I Screen II I I II IIII I I MYSTERY & TRAVESTY BUT ROCKY TO THE RESCUE ANE THEOgY has it that the foreshortening of horizons in America today is leading many to seek solace in "'trivial Upursuits" or the easy pleasures of generic literature, especially mysteries...
...Political cartoons portray a hook-nosed sheik out to grab Western goodies or blow up Western--or Israeli--planes, leaders, and innocent civilians...
...and now even in Edwin Drood on Broadway, complete with its alternate endings to Dickens's unfinished whodunit...
...Or interviews in which Russians say they most fear war, most want peace...
...The question went something like this...
...Whom can we -- we Americans -- most likely see as the enemy in Gray's sense...
...But he was not terribly confident...
...We have already been desensitized to abstracted thinking in the case of "the Arabs" because we have been bombarded for several years with indiscriminate use of the term terrorist as a way to characterize particular persons and whole peoples, for example, the Palestinians...
...hence abstract hatreds are less likely to be challenged by human contact...
...But I discovered recently that probing images of possible or future "enemies" remains a valuable notion, one that need not descend into the willfully innocent fantasy that we can have "relations" with whole nations analogous to those we have with our family and friends...
...We tend to merge all "Arabs" together...
...It would take a lot of concerted, one-dimensional propagandizing to turn "Central Americans," or any particular group among them, into the enemy...
...Based on the Parker Brothers' board game of the same 17 January 1986:15...
...III I I I I I I II I II I II AN ARAB WAS GOING DOWN TO JERICHO . . . JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN I N HIS SMALL masterwork, The Warriors, J. Glenn Gray argues that one basic aim of a modern state at war is to establish an image of the enemy as abstract and totalistic as possible in order to distinguish sharply the act of war-time killing from the act of peace-time murder...
Vol. 113 • January 1986 • No. 1
