Under the aspect of eternity, the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago was eclipsed Tuesday by a darkness more fateful, more frightening, and–if we can keep clear about it–more instructive. What can we learn? And how fast?
For one thing, we now know that the fact that the world’s only superpower and global nerve center has been brought low by terrorists seizing four American civilian passenger planes signals a transfor-mation of international politics.
It makes a mockery of claims by the powerful that missile-defense systems can shield a society like ours.
But it also makes a mockery of claims by the powerless that their violence is morally redemptive. The question now is whether our supposedly so-powerful society has enough will and moral resources to defend itself not as a global directorate but as a wellspring of politics that brings hope, not fear.
We have been such a wellspring, at times. We are that, every day, to countless newly naturalized citizens. Yet the bloody paradox that grips us rests in the fact that the newest global technologies we so boisterously generate have made our own and others’ borders defenseless against one of the oldest errant human impulses, embodied in the religious and tribal fanaticism of suicide bombers and airplane hijackers. This is not John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; it’s not Lori Berenson’s commitment to guerrilla warfare in Peru; and it’s no intifada. It’s an implosion of anything that anyone who still believes in politics can excuse or indulge on behalf of the victims of colonization or imperialism.
But the paradox of new technology and ancient impulse also strips the powerful of any hope of annihilating an enemy’s violence through more violence–as we certainly did do in Japan and Germany after the shock of Pearl Harbor had set in. Where now are the battle lines? Suppose the United States obliterates whoever is responsible in the next 48 hours, or that Israel rolls over Palestine. Any short-term reduction in the number of suicide bombers would be offset by the stoking of the fires of rage.
It used to be relatively powerless people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who warned the powerful that violence is an endgame without ending. Now that the powerless have been stripped by their own would-be spokesmen of the moral right and credibility to make that claim, we, the powerful, are left to find Gandhi’s and King’s truths within ourselves even as we fight a new kind of war.
