Gene Lyons: "The Missing Antidote to Tribalism:

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Editorial.php?storyid=64506

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, May 12, 2004

To anybody with more than a child’s understanding of history, the most remarkable thing about wartime atrocities is that anybody pretends surprise. As George Orwell pointed out in an essay written around the end of World War II, there had been scarcely a year during his adult life when terrible crimes against humanity weren’t being reported somewhere in the world. Yet people, particularly intellectuals, tended to believe or disbelieve the ugly truth depending upon their own nationality and political ideology. "The nationalist," he wrote, "not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia." For the record, Orwell had nothing against patriotism, defined as love of country. By nationalism, he meant blind chauvinism, specifically "identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good or evil," and thinking "solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige." In short, primitive tribalism writ large.

Here in the United States, anyway, things were different. Since few Americans ever put faith in right- or left-wing creeds of militarized utopianism to begin with, the crimes of the Nazis and Soviets were more easily perceived.

Committed to the proposition that "all men are created equal," to a written constitution and a government of laws, our own denial consists largely of forgetfulness. Whether it’s the 19 th century extermination of Native Americans, the use of nuclear weapons against Japan or the massacres at My Lai, what historians call American "exceptionalism"the sentimental belief that the United States exists above temptation and outside history—helps us to reassert the national innocence again and again.

Even mentioning Hiroshima all but guarantees furious rebuttals invoking Pearl Harbor, which, no, I haven’t forgotten. It’s symptomatic that within a year of the Toledo Blade’s Pulitzer Prize for a series documenting previously unreported massacres of Vietnamese civilians by the U.S. Army during the late 1960s, Sen. John Kerry’s 1971 testimony to a Senate committee regarding Vietnam War atrocities can be used against him as an issue in a presidential campaign. Unlike other presidential candidates I could name, he was right and he was courageous.

<>The extent to which other nations have forgiven the United States its excesses and continue to see it as a beacon of freedom has nothing to do with our being" God’s country. "Rather, it’s the ideals of free speech, due process and equality before the law embedded in our constitution, signifying universal human hopes: the antidote to tribalism.