Ted Honderich was my classmate at the U of Toronto. He was perhaps the best
student in the class. Nice to see that he has come to no good according to
the hacks hired to smear any criticism of capitalism and US foreign policy.
It is amazing that these reviews actually present almost no evidence for
their conclusions or rather slurs.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 6:24 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:30297] Why do they hate us?
The Telegraph, Sept. 17, 2002
When in doubt, blame the US
Noel Malcolm reviews The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and
Infuriates the World by Mark Hertsgaard and After the Terror by Ted
Honderich
Why do they hate us? is, we are told, the question that most Americans
were asking themselves in the immediate aftermath of September 11 last
year. The they that mattered here turned out to be an unrepresentative
ultra-extremist organisation, and so the question may have lost some of its
force. But, put another way, it is still a question worth asking: what are
the origins of anti-Americanism, and why is it capable of attaining such
virulence, such extremes of hatred?
A well-researched cultural and ideological history of anti-Americanism,
exploring its history, its different strands - Leftist, Rightist,
Euro-nationalist, Cold War, Islamic, Third Worldist and so on - and, above
all, the strange interactions and cross-fertilisations between them, is a
book that I would dearly like to read. But, if one is being written as a
response to September 11, do not expect it to appear just yet. Serious
research requires more than the six months' writing time that went into
most of the current crop of anniversary publications.
Instead, what we have is writers on the hobby-horses that they had already
mounted, long before the Twin Towers were hit. These two books, by the
American journalist Mark Hertsgaard and the Canadian-British philosopher
Ted Honderich, are dressed up as meditations on the significance of that
terrible event: their titles hint at it portentously, and their
dust-jackets have sombre photographs of US flags and vapour trails, the
Statue of Liberty and a pall of smoke. But a truer subtitle, in each case,
would be: As I Was Going To Say, Before I Was Interrupted.
Mark Hertsgaard did at least have one major advantage: by September last
year he was already more than half-way through a lengthy round-the-world
tour, collecting interviews and impressions for a book about popular
attitudes to America. Some of that material (though not much - his
publishers should look again at his expense claims and try calculating the
unit cost per anecdote) has found its way into this slim volume. He has
discovered, for example, that young people round the world like watching
pop videos on MTV, that American tourists abroad can sometimes seem loud
and pushy, and that many people still want to emigrate to the United States.
But the main purpose of this book is not to unveil these and other such
remarkable findings. Rather, it is to tell readers (American ones,
primarily) what is wrong with America in Mr Hertsgaard's opinion - an
opinion that was formed, evidently, quite a long time before he reached the
departure lounge. His previous publications include a book about the
dangers facing the global environment, and one entitled On Bended Knee: The
Press and the Reagan Presidency. Sure enough, this book contains tirades
about the global effects of American consumerism, the pro-corporate bias of
the American press, and the general evils of Reagan, Bush and Bush.
What has all this got to do with September 11? Since the al-Qaeda
terrorists were not, so far as we know, protesting about greenhouse gas
emissions, or about the stage-management of White House press conferences,
or even about Reagan's tax policies or the vote-counting procedures in
Florida, the answer has to be: not much.
Professor Honderich has tried to stick closer to the really big issues.
Instead of anecdotes and vox pops, his book (Edinburgh UP, £15.99, 160 pp)
is filled with abstract argumentation about moral philosophy, the nature of
democracy, the definition of political violence, and so on. As a result,
this book is able to be bad in a much more serious way. Indeed, I think it
is one of the worst books I have ever read.
The key points of the argument are as follows. There is no real difference
between an act of omission and an act of commission. This means that each
time I fail to give money to Oxfam to save the lives of starving Africans -
for example, each time I spend money on a holiday - I am responsible for
killing people. Therefore we are all, in a real sense, murderers, and the
West is collectively responsible for the elimination of human life on a
colossal scale. (Western interventions to help starving Africans, such as
the ill-fated American operation in Somalia, naturally pass unmentioned
here.)
If
