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 By
Thomas S. Harrington ’82
A few days ago, I led a class of second-year college students
through an analysis of the Argentine film, The Official Story. It
is the tale of a respectable Argentine history teacher who discovers, to
her own horror, that she has become a participant in one of the most heinous
crimes that one can commit, and one through which the dictatorship of her
country made its perverse mark in the world: the stealing and marketing
of orphaned children.
As you probably remember, Argentina, like its neighbors Chile
and Uruguay, was ruled by a United States-supported military dictatorship
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The junta justified its existence largely
in terms of a war against terror. It sustained that it, and it alone, could
save the country from the moral and physical disintegration brought on
by a group of anti-patriotic “subversives.” Its preferred solutions
to the problem of terrorism were a combination of illegal detention, torture
and the practice of “disappearing” people. One of the regime’s
favorite methods for accomplishing this last goal was tethering weights
to still-live bodies of supposed “threats to the society” and
dropping them from a helicopter into the roiling waters of the Atlantic
Ocean. The children left behind by these, and other similarly unfortunate
souls were then often given or sold to families considered to be loyal
friends of the government.
I know that, for most Americans, Argentina and its experience
with dictatorship seems very, very far away. I dare say that within the
Anglo-Saxon world, most people consider government malfeasance to be a
quite normal state of affairs in the Spanish-speaking world. “Those
people,” the reasoning goes, “have never been able to govern
themselves. Nothing that goes on there surprises me.”
What makes The Official Story so powerful to American
viewers, including my students, is the way it eliminates that comfortable
psychic distance. The protagonist, Alicia, is (like a strong plurality
of her fellow citizens at the time) a lot like you and me: middle-class,
well-educated and fundamentally convinced that her qualities of judgment,
honed through long years of reading and social observation, will lead her
to “do the right thing.”
What she did not realize, of course, was that in the ongoing
labor of “making sense” of the world, sifting through available
information is only part of the task. Equally important is coming to understand
the set of suppositions that delimit the pool of “facts” at our
disposal and thus regulate our patterns of thought concerning the “other” peoples
of our world. One pillar of Alicia’s mental world was a belief in
the essential righteousness and trustworthiness of the men who were purporting
to save the country from those who were said to be nihilistically bent
on its destruction.
As I write, Baghdad is falling into the control of American
troops. Iconic figures of evil are toppled and, we are told, liberation
for all is at hand. The talk, once muted, of bringing “democracy” to
still more countries of the region is on the lips of Pentagon planners
and the many interpreters of their theories in the press.
Maybe it is all true. Maybe America really is a “city
on a hill” that has, and always will, manage to somehow transcend
the venality and moral patchiness of other more “normal” peoples.
Then again, maybe this is a perception determined by our own collective,
and essentially narcissistic, need to view ourselves as different from
the other, more pedestrian tribes of the planet.
One of the key demands of the Ignatian interpretation of
Christianity is that we commit ourselves to discernment, that is, that
we actively seek to recognize—and learn to work with—the contradictory
impulses that make up our own spiritual universe. It is a practice that,
at its core, is designed to bring us into intimate contact with our own
fragility, and by so doing, open us up to God as well as other flawed and
contradictory human beings. Maybe I am missing something (maybe I, too,
am just another victim of my own very narrow set of framing mechanisms),
but I see very little of such a humble and introspective search for answers
in today’s America.
Thomas Harrington ’82 is an associate
professor of Spanish at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
By Ibrahim Kalin
It is almost cliché to say that it is easier to win
the war than to win the peace. Considering the state of modern warfare
and military technology for which the world spends close to half of its
resources, military victories can no longer be seen as something to take
pride in. The essential question that remains before and after any war
is peace and how to maintain it. Military prowess can bring about temporary
and relative calm for a particular conflict but cannot achieve the goal
of sustainable peace. If peace is to be an enduring quality of human life
extending from our relationship with the natural environment to other nations,
steps other than believing in one’s military power must be taken.
This leads us to make an important distinction between two concepts of
peace.
In contrast to negative peace that denotes the absence of
conflict and discord, peace as a substantive and positive concept entails
the presence of certain conditions that make it an enduring state of harmony,
integrity, contentment, equilibrium, repose and moderation. Even though
negative peace is indispensable for preventing communal violence, border
disputes or international conflicts in the short term, positive peace provides
a comprehensive outlook to address the deeper causes of conflict, hate,
strife, destruction, brutality and violence. It also provides a genuine
measure and set of values by which peace and justice can be established
beyond the short-term interests of particular individuals, communities
or states.
Defining peace as mere privation of violence and conflict
runs the risk of turning it into a concept that is instrumental and accidental
at best, and relative and irrelevant at worst. Furthermore, the positive
concept of peace shifts the focus from preventing conflict, violence and
strife through short-term means to a deliberate willingness to generate
balance, justice, cooperation, dialogue and coexistence as the primary
terms of a proper discourse of peace. Instead of defining peace with what
it is not and forcing common sense logic to its limits, we may well choose
creating a philosophical ground based on the presence and endurance, rather
than absence, of certain qualities and conditions that make peace a substantive
reality of human life.
As a substantive goal, peace does not denote a mere state
of passivity. On the contrary, it means to be fully active against the
menace of evil, destruction and turmoil that may come from within or from
without. As historian R.G. Collingwood points out, peace is a “dynamic
thing” and requires consciousness and vigilance, a constant state
of awareness that one must engage in moral and intellectual struggle to
ensure that differences do not become grounds for violence and oppression.
Since absence of conflict does not mean absence of dissent and disagreement
in an absolute sense, peace has to be worked out within the context of
what philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “politics of recognition,” which
suggests that lack of recognition, or mis-recognition, is a form of violence
and inflicts harm on others. Inevitably, this invokes the idea of fairness
and justice in extending peace to the collective and inter-subjective domain.
Peace, therefore, is inextricably linked to justice because
it thrives on the availability of equal rights and opportunities for all
to realize their goals and potentials. We cannot hope to bring about peace,
in whatever sense of the term, without preventing injustices that function
as a breeding ground for conflict and violence. This suggests that every
peace effort must be accompanied by a robust consciousness of justice even
when it goes against our short-term interests. One of the meanings of the
word justice (‘adl) in Semitic languages is to be “straight” and “equitable,” i.e.,
to be straightforward, trustworthy and fair in one’s dealings with
others. Such an attitude brings about a state of balance, accord, and trust,
and goes beyond the limits of distributive justice. Defined in this broad
sense, justice encompasses a vast domain of relations and interactions,
from taking care of one’s body to international law. In short, peace
can be construed as an enduring state of harmony, trust and coexistence
only when supported and sustained by justice.
When we look at questions of peace and conflict from this
point of view, we have to admit that the way we approach most of the current
political conflicts in various parts of the world stands little chance
of achieving peace as a sustainable project. The idea of removing “greater
evil” with “lesser evil” may or may not work for a particular
conflict. The fact, however, remains that using military force does not
resolve but postpones and evades deeper problems that breed and give rise
to violence and confrontation. In the long term, the doctrine of “might
is right” works against the very idea of peace and justice because
it reduces the terms of peace and conflict to the presence or absence of
military power. This, in turn, leads to the illusion that more military
power and spending is the key to global peace.
In a sense, this characterizes most of the conflicts in various
parts of the world today, from Chechnya and Kashmir to Palestine and Ireland.
The common perception that peace can be achieved by use of force, especially
in those conflicts that involve the Islamic world, is not only erroneous
and deceptive but also counterproductive—it disregards the fundamental
questions of justice and equality as irrelevant and redundant. The persistence
of political conflicts and violence cannot be explained, as it is often
done, by creating such monolithic categories as Islam versus the West,
a-historical notions of fundamentalism and terrorism or some cosmic struggle
between good and evil. Reality defies such “one-size-fits-all” terms
and forces us to address the root causes of violence in the Middle East
and elsewhere with courage, fairness and honesty.
If peace is to become a reality of human life and not an
empty word, we have to change our ways of thinking about those with whom
we believe—or are made to believe—we are in some ineluctable
conflict. We will achieve substantive peace only when we embrace the “other” not
as an enemy to be destroyed but as part of the richness of human experience
to live with and to learn from.
World religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
with their long history and shared heritage, will have to play a central
role in this endeavor as there is no possibility of world peace without
first making peace among religions. It is only by refusing to succumb to
extremisms of an Islamic and/or American brand that we will be able to
create a vision of peace based on equality and justice.
Ibrahim Kalin is an assistant professor in the religious studies department.
By John M. Gilligan ’81
At noon on the Friday after Sept. 11, 2001, I was riding
the Paris metro. The train came to a stop between stations, and an announcement
played, inviting us to stand in a moment of quiet prayer and remembrance
for the victims of the terrorist attacks. As we stood in the strangely
silent car, above us traffic came to a halt and church bells rang. France
and the rest of Europe had stopped for an official moment of mourning.
Not that any governmental decree was necessary. The French
had been glued to their TVs for days; they had seen the horrific images
and were already mourning in their own way. After years of official and
unofficial condemnation of economic, linguistic and cultural imperialism,
the French suddenly realized how closely they were bound to their oldest
ally. For the first time since the Liberation, it was acceptable to be
pro-American. It was a strange moment to be an American in Paris. My horrendous
French no longer seemed to bother anyone. Upon noticing my accent, Parisians
were eager to speak with me, to express their solidarity and their sadness.
The Sept. 12 headline of Le Monde seemed to sum up what most people
here felt: “We Are All Americans.”
Less than two years later, it is once again a strange moment
for an expat, but for very different reasons. The French love affair of
all things American did not last too long. The reason: Iraq. Chirac and
de Villepin may be the object of Rumsfeld’s attacks on “Old Europe,” but
it’s not just the government and intellectuals who condemn the American
policies. The opposition to the war runs deep and strong through all parts
of society.
The first Sunday into the war, worshippers received a letter
from the cardinal condemning the war. Popular culture is once again full
of 60s-style anti-war songs and symbols. Reality show contestants fall
over each other trying to gain public support (and votes) with energetic
condemnations of the war. There are enormous demonstrations against the
United States and an overwhelming public sentiment against the war. It’s
always surprising to find someone who supports military action in Iraq
(and has the nerve to say it).
Now, when my still-horrible accent is noted, comments are
a bit more pointed (I’ve abandoned pointing out my own opposition
to the war; now I just claim to be from Dublin). France has become a parallel
universe, with a very different view of what is happening in Iraq. The
sense of living in a different world is reinforced whenever I switch cable
stations. It is fascinating to compare the completely different slant that
the different media give the war. French TV features no heroic titles or
snappy computer graphics; but there is plenty of video of horrific casualties,
destroyed buildings and American prisoners—lots of the images that
the American press has decided not to show. With an unusually warm spring,
open windows allow me to hear my neighbors’ strong reactions to the
horrible images.
The majority of the population here hopes for a quick end
to the war, and few see long-term damage resulting from the current divisions.
And most French go out of their way to distinguish their anti-war sentiments
from their positive feelings about Americans. But while anti-Americanism
may not be a problem, there is a fascination with the growing francophobia
reflected in the American press. The French are used to the rabid attacks
that the London tabloids routinely make on “Frogs” but surprised
with the new U.S. xenophobia. The exaggerated language of the Murdoch press
gets a lot of play here. Watching local reaction to U.S. anti-French actions
is enjoyable. Having my morning coffee, I enjoyed eavesdropping on a discussion
about the recently televised images of Americans pouring Bordeaux out in
the street (“as long as they paid for it, they can do whatever they
want” is a cleaned-up translation of the general sentiment). My favorite
reaction, though, has to be what a television forum participant said about
the phenomena of “Freedom Fries”: “Don’t they realize
frites are from Belgium?”
Since 1996, John M. Gilligan ’81 has lived and worked in Paris
designing Web sites.
By Gretchen Ekerdt ’04
A few days after the armed conflict began in Iraq, the professor
in my “History of Islam” class told us that she was not going
to worry about what happened 1,500 years ago at that moment. She wanted
to know what everyone was thinking and feeling about the war. She looked
at one girl and said, “díme.” (“tell me.”) I
thought to myself, “Oh, this girl must have raised her hand.” The
girl spoke, and the professor responded. But then my professor looked at
another student sitting right next to the girl and said, “Díme.” That
was when I realized we would all be speaking.
Class participation is rare in Spanish universities, and
mandatory participation is unheard of. So we (there is another Holy Cross
student in the class) were a bit nervous to be the only two broken-Spanish-speaking-Americans
sharing our feelings about the war in Iraq. We both spoke—Paul, and
then me. I think it was good for everyone to hear what we were thinking.
I know how all of them feel, but all I ever hear is “¡No
a la guerra!” shouted from the streets and the halls. And it
is nice to know that there is some thought, and not just undirected anger,
behind their opposition. All I see is signs featuring hearts drawn around
the word “Iraq”; and graffiti that labels Bush, Blair and Aznar
as assassins, and that demand an end to “la guerra por petroleo,” (“war
for oil.”) In class, I said that I wanted to believe that world
leaders act in ways that they truly believe will benefit all people.
I do not want to dismiss these men as assassins. But then I added that
I did not want to be convinced that this war is necessary.
Many of the students are participating in a general “huelga,” (“strike”)
by not going to class. I feel conflicted about suspending classes in a
university as a form of protest. I grew up believing that the protests
of my parents and their generation during the Vietnam War made a difference.
The pictures and footage of that era indicate the same thing. I feel disillusioned
because the huelga here sometimes seems like a mere excuse to avoid
attending class.
A few days ago, in my “History Of Modern Spain” class,
my professor tore up the announcement he had received about another strike
and threw the pieces on the floor. Another professor had accused him of
ignoring the situation in Iraq, saying that “there is more to history
than agrarian practices and demographic comparisons.” Our professor
told us, “¡Soy historiador! If I did not come here and
teach I would be failing you.” And with that, he continued our discussion
of the 17th-century secular clergy. Many of the students laughed at his
dramatic display, but no one seemed angered by his position, which I felt
supported my skepticism of these strikes.
When I claim that the commitment of the Spanish youth is
weak, I have to wonder if my defensive feelings as an American abroad could
be diminishing my own idealism. Because I am so far away from home, I want
to be proud of my home. However, this is not the year to say to a Spanish
person, “I am proud to be an American.”
I watch the news each day while eating lunch with another
Spanish student, Fernando. Whenever President Bush comes on, I feel a pit
in my stomach that is something like shame. But there is also a defensiveness
looming. Whenever Aznar’s face comes on the screen, Fernando grunts.
But we also see images that they will not show on the news in the United
States—images of civilian Iraqi injuries and deaths. There are moments
when neither of us can look at the screen. In these moments, I don’t
think it matters where either of us are from. We do not feel ashamed or
defensive, we only feel ill.
Gretchen Ekerdt is participating in the
College’s Study Abroad
program this year, attending Universidad de Leon in Leon,
Spain.
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