I Respond To John

Perhaps John has a point. It’s hard to see the administration’s racism from just those few comments that I’ve cited. However, John’s missing the context that the whole Iraq war and war on terror are taking place in. It’s impossible to ignore the racist underpinnings of Huntington’s book, Clash of Civilizations (by the way, his new book, Who Are We?, is a great exercise in using pseudo-social science to prove Anglo-Saxon superiority). As a Cornell American History Ph.D. candidate put it, “[Clash of Civilizations] is essentially a subtle reconstitution of ideas about race that drove nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism”. So if these are the kind of intellectual theories and ideas that the administration is bringing to life through policy, it seems to me that the policies are racist. If the policies have an element of racism, then it should be no surprise that the language used to justify them is racist too. Look at all the rhetoric surrounding the two wars and you’ll see the same themes of light versus dark and good versus evil as well as the noble impulse to democratize the Middle East. You may recall that the president used the word crusade to describe the war on terror. This is another telling aspect of the Bush rhetoric which leads me to believe that racism permeates quite a bit of the language used in support of the war. If you look back at the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of racism, you’ll see some of the notions that drove the original crusades. Clearly, this is hardly an appropriate word for Bush to use. If this isn’t enough to convince John that racism is indeed present in the administration’s language, I can’t imagine what is.