Antitribalism and the Face of American Justice. (03/01/2002)
Using a term like "tribalism," which has gained a considerable currency in political discourse over the last decade, especially in circumstances where one warring faction of individuals within national borders are attempting to annihilate a rival group or "tribe," is so conflicted with ambiguity, with an absence of clearly defined meaning, on the one hand, and so laden with various kinds of negative bias, on the other, that its utility as a characterization of real social status for people who fall, or are simply forced to exist, under its defining umbrella has become severely compromised, if not completely meaningless. One reason that ambiguity and negative bias have become attached to the term arises from the fact that 19th Century anthropologists systematically employed the word to describe relatively disparate social structures whose only real common ground was limited to the perception on the part of the observer that the social group under scrutiny and analysis was inferior to the one the scientist using it embraced. The term was used to communicate to the audience of anthropological study that the social organization under which the scrutinized people lived and died was less sophisticated and more primitive than the one in which the audience existed. In spite of the fact that most anthropologists cautioned readers against assuming that "primitive" meant "inferior," the word "tribal" came to signify the existence of a wide disparity between the sophistication of the cultural achievement of the people who studied other societies and the achievement of those who were, or became, the object of that study. The very act of doing such research implies that the people doing it are superior to the ones who are its object, since Western civilization always makes a value-laden binary distinction between subject (superior) and object (inferior). Hence, and inevitably, despite warnings to the contrary from anthropologists, "tribal" people are always considered to be objects of study under the subjective gaze of a superior culture.
Making this essential bias even more problematic is the fact that European colonial expansion into areas of the world largely thought to be inhabited by "primitive" people belonging, as it were, to this or that "tribe," also gave rise to, and encouraged, if not demanded, the expression of value-laden judgments, whether real or imaginary, that supported and proved European superiority over the "tribal" people who fell victim to those same expansionist impulses. Every European colonial governor had to assert his superior status over the people he ruled and to achieve and maintain that status both he, and his own homeland superiors, had to believe that their position of power radiated upward along a natural, even God-ordained, chain of hierarchical structure placing them at the top and their subjects, who were actually only objects, at the bottom. "Tribal," therefore, came to signify a very real political disparity between rulers and their inferior subjects in every context where any colonial power was exercised.
In light of this context, then, Roland Merullo, in his essay "America's Secret Culture" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 03/01/2002, B7-B9), argues that Americans
"are a sort of antitribal juggernaut in a world that has been evolving, for millennia, from tribalism toward something larger, more inclusive, less closed. That evolution has been marked by the worst kinds of violence and arrogance-from the Crusades to the conquistadors to the Chinese invasion of Tibet-and we certainly bear on our collective soul some of the sins of colonialism and imperialism" (B9).
The problem with a statement like this one, apart from the fact that it is expressed solely from the point-of-view of a member of the dominant culture it intends to defend, from the point-of-view of an official white America, is that it transforms the worst aspects of colonial and imperial excess, those perpetrated by crusaders and conquistadors, for instance, from individual acts of annihilation and genocide motivated mostly by greed into a grand pattern of evolutionary progress that is both inevitable and essentially desirable since it results teleologically in the creation of something "larger, more inclusive, less closed." The "we" in this statement does certainly carry "some of the sins" of that excess on its "collective soul" but, and at the same time, no specific individual who falls into that category ("we") can ever be called to justice because that "we" is perceived as being as much a victim of "evolution" as were the people who suffered and died as a result of the pursuit and fulfillment of that greed. One way to tell the difference between victims of the evolutionary process of annihilating "tribal" culture, so that something larger and better can take its place, is to examine the ethnic heritage of Wall Street investment bankers, or anyone else for that matter who "earns" hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, in comparison to the annual, and/or life-time, earning potential of anyone who lives on an American Indian "tribal" reservation. Balanced, one against the other, my guess is that people in the concentration camps are probably not getting on as well as are the people who manipulate the American capitalistic marketplace to the advantage of white European Americans.
The argument here, then, seems to be that it was first necessary to destroy "tribal" culture in the Americas before it would, or could, become possible for a tiny minority of mostly white people to amass fabulous fortunes at the expense of the environment and, worse, at the expense of the rest of us who have not managed to join that exclusive club at the top of the American capitalistic hierarchy. An example of what I mean surfaced recently in the revelation that six investment bankers working for Barclays Bank in London spent $62,700 for dinner last summer. They did have three bottles of wine (ranging in price from $17,500 to $13,100 each), so maybe I shouldn't be so judgmental. While it might be inappropriate to suggest that 100,000,000 native Americans had to die so that these six people could spend nearly $63,000 on a single meal, the fact is that the evolutionary process Merullo describes is exactly what got us to this stage of evolutionary development in the first place. Excesses like this one, though perhaps less spectacular, occur every day.
Looking at this same issue in another way, in 1972 the US war effort in southeast Asia turned its attention into Cambodia, putting forth the argument that the north Vietnamese were using that nation as a sanctuary from which to launch attacks against our military forces. This was probably true. President Nixon began a process of limited, mostly special forces, invasions of Cambodia along its borders with south Vietnam and instituted a long series of B52 bombing raids against suspected north Vietnamese positions in that country. As a result of US military activity in Cambodia, that friendly country's government was destabilized to the extent that it could no longer defend itself and its people against the Khemer Rouge, a communist insurgency, if not terrorist, group that soon took control of the country under the leadership of Pol Pot. In only a few years, 3 million Cambodian citizens were murdered in one of the worst sustained programs of genocide in the 20th Century. US government complicity in that incomprehensible tragedy, through the exercise of its war-policies, is one example of how our "collective soul" is tainted by the "sins of colonialism and imperialism." Another way of saying the same thing is that the 3 million "tribal" Cambodians who died as a result of Pol Pot's genocidal practices were a necessary sacrifice to clear the way for a "larger, more inclusive, less closed" society in Cambodia, one that is now easier for market economies like our own to manipulate and exploit. Hence, a greater good was achieved in the long run through the unfortunate demise of the 3 million people who were ground into dust by the inevitable turning of the wheels of an evolutionary process that functioned beyond the control of mere political hacks.
A similar, and no less destructive, process has more recently been launched against the "tribal" people of Afghanistan. US interests there are about the same as they were in the Vietnam theater. A group of anti-US terrorists (al-Qaeda-Taliban) were being harbored in the chaos generated by decades of civil war between rival factions of "tribal" people led by this or that "warlord." After the terrorists attacked the US (World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001) it became both necessary and permissible for our military to begin a bombing campaign, again using B52's but now equipped with "smart" bombs, whose intent was to destabilize the government of Afghanistan (Taliban, which was filled to overflowing with "evildoer's") so that we would be able to eradicate the terrorists hiding inside the "tribal" structure of that Islamic country. An added bonus arises from the fact that we can now wage a legitimate "crusade" against the Muslims' "jihad," something we have not been able to do, except vicariously through our support of Israel, for a number of centuries. This strategy will work about as well as it did in Cambodia, which is to say not at all. In a few years, and after the wheels fall off our imperialistic train, Afghanistan will revert to its pre-Soviet civil war status fought out between this or that "tribal" warlord. This time, however, the ultimate goal of establishing a "larger, more inclusive, less closed" society will be achieved, on the strength of the mutual and reciprocal annihilation of the warring "tribal" factions, for the simple reason that the US will have bolstered each side's relative military strength by selling or giving them the kinds of sophisticated weapons that are necessary to insure a mutual destruction. This program of evolutionary progress is already underway in the repeated calls coming from the Bush administration's shadow government in its deeply secretive underground bunkers for the creation of a national army and police force in Afghanistan. The creation of that national army, whose mission will be to insure peace and freedom for the Afghani people, will ultimately generate the kind of antitribal government best suited to capitalistic exploitation.
What is most disturbing about this political ideology is that any number of academic people, like Merullo, can be counted on to articulate and apply the terms and definitions of antitribalism to virtually any circumstance that appears to obstruct the interests of US economic and militaristic aspiration without ever recognizing the potential of its terribly destructive, even genocidal, effects. The very term "tribal" can now be applied to almost any cultural context that seems, or actually is, significantly different than our own in ways that communicate an unexamined, if not unconscious, acceptance of the "fact" that such cultures harbor and export violent and deadly anti-American intentions toward every innocent member of our society. Calling the enemy "tribal" in Bush's global war against terrorism makes it unnecessary to establish beforehand the fact that such targets actually pose a threat to anyone's life. The simple act of identifying anyone, collectively or individually, as "tribal" makes him/her/them both a visible and viable target for US retaliation.
The origin of this ideology is relatively transparent, known clearly by those against whom it has been employed, but essentially invisible to the ones who have used it to advance the aims of Eurocentric desire in the Americas in the past and elsewhere in more recent times. One can even refer to it as an ancient ideology since its roots can be traced back to Tertullian's Treatise on the Soul in 260 AD. More recently (1582 AD), Sir George Peckham wrote an exhortation to Queen Elizabeth I advocating the colonization of America in which the modern ground for the idea that tribalism is necessarily connected to anti-European terrorist activities was first defined and articulated. While it might seem to some unlikely, if not completely bizarre, to attribute a contemporary political and militaristic ideology to the 16th Century musings of a relatively unknown British advocate of colonization, Peckham's exhortation to the Queen does establish primary principles on which the ideology depends. For instance, Peckham argues that English colonists needed to be sent to America heavily armed because there were two kinds of natives in the New World, two "tribes" as it were; that is, one group was made up of relatively peaceful and defenseless farmers, people continually threatened by the other "tribe" characterized as being vicious and cruel cannibals ("with teeth like dogs") who always had it in mind to eat their more docile and compliant neighbors. The colonists needed arms to defend the docile farmers from the ravages of their cannibalistic near neighbors. Hence, and in this way, Peckham establishes a distinction between "good" natives and "bad" ones, where the superiority of European civility, backed by a necessary "force of arms," can be counted on to defend the compliant "tribe" from their vicious and brutal neighbors. Peckham admits, however, that forts must also be built to protect the colonists from natives in general, especially from those who were unlikely to accept the friendly appropriation of their "tribal" lands for Christian use as opposed to heathen or pagan misuse that was so obvious to Europeans at the time.
In Afghanistan, of course, this same argument has been put to justify US military intervention. On the one hand, there is an abused group of people under the dictatorial control of a "bad" regime of extreme fundamentalists (Taliban) who not only deny basic human rights to the "good" group but also enforce their rule by executing anyone who objects to their control. On the other hand, and at the same time, much has been made of the fact that both groups can be roughly divided into several various, if somewhat indistinct, "tribal" alliances that constantly shift back and forth between extremes of "good" and "bad" natives according to whether they support or resist, from day to day, if not hour to hour, the stated interests that have motivated American military intervention in the first place. America's stated objective is first to rid Afghanistan of the "bad" tribe (Taliban) who controls the country and has allowed an even worse foreign "tribe" (al-Qaeda) to find safe-harbor in the chaos occasioned by decades of intertribal warfare that characterizes the recent history of the nation. Once the dominant, evil "tribe" is driven from power, as the Taliban has been, more or less, the US military will be able to concentrate its focus on the annihilation of the foreign "tribe" of mostly Arabic people who have launched attacks against targets on the US homeland itself.
The advantage in defining Afghanistan's various factions as essentially "tribal" is that few, if any, restrictions can be placed on how the American military conducts its war against terrorism. This is true because the evil perceived is in the fact that Afghanistan is a "tribal" nation and, while one "tribe" or another might attract attention at any given moment, any "tribe" at all can be characterized as evil eventually and thereby become the object of that retaliation. In the view of the "antitribal juggernaut" that America has become, according to Merullo, when in fact it has been one since the earliest contact between English settlers and native Americans, true evil resides in the "tribe" as a social or political structure and hence both "good" and "bad" tribes eventually become targets for annihilation. That 80% of the American people support the terms of Bush's war against "tribalism" in Afghanistan, and anywhere else he wants to take his crusading banner in the future, only testifies to the fact that he has seized the proper terms of engagement for any foreign war the juggernaut wants to prosecute. King Philip's War in 1675 was waged for exactly the same reasons that Bush's war against terrorism is being waged today: a "bad" tribe of cowardly natives launched an unprovoked attack against innocent English settlers and the settlers annihilated them in retaliation. How can the one be differentiated from the other? I can find no significant or substantial difference.
What is most amazing in this context is that the first American President and Commander-in-Chief of the 21st Century has not been able to improve on a military strategy, and an ideological justification for it, that was first employed 327 years ago when the Puritans were prosecuting an act of genocide against the "tribal" people of New England. While the bombs might be "smart" today, the people dropping them have not evolved much beyond their distant ancestors. Sadly, there may not be any need for evolution, since the justification plays just as credibly now as it did back then.