Matching Tracksuits

My day started out badly — I missed, somehow, the 6:00 bus to Kraków so I ended up going first to Nowy Targ and then catching a mini-bus to Kraków from there. I got a few supplies for business English and a textbook for Gosia, the new English teacher, as well as three books for me: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Man of the Century: the Life and Times of John Paul II; and Denying the Holocaust.

I’ve started Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and I have to say I’m already intrigued. Goldhagen makes the point that none of the studies of the Holocaust deal with the people who carried them out, except for the upper ranking officials like Himmer. None of the things I’ve ever heard or read about the Holocaust deals with who actually carried it out. We know who ordered it, and we know a great deal about them; we don’t know who really did the actual deeds, and we know nothing about them. At least we did — I think HWE is/was an effort to begin to remedy that.

I took a private bus from Kraków to Jabłonka and spent about two hours at Kinga’s house. Her brother is getting married this weekend, so everyone was busy making cakes and such. Since I couldn’t just sit around and watch them work without doing something myself, I helped make a few things. Kinga promised to save me some of the fruits of my labor. I guess I’ll get to try them Sunday, because I’ve been invited over for Sunday obiad, which of course I wouldn’t miss for the world.

As I was walking from Kinga’s house to the “rynek” to catch the bus, I saw Agnieszka (who used to work at the store across the street) as she was taking in flowers from the florist shop where she now works. I just walked up to her and said, “Cześć” and she returned the greeting, at first without looking at me. Then she looked at me and recognized me and was more than a little shocked. She had no idea I was back. We chatted for a bit, then rode the bus back to Lipnica together. She’s really a sweet woman. I like her a lot — something of a “country girl” I guess.

Today was an easy day as well. The fourth year students had the próbna matura in English or German (yesterday it was in math, I believe) and so I only had three classes, starting at 12:40. The lessons were somewhat useless, but I’m going to get a grade out of them nonetheless — at least I’m planning on it now. We’ll see. Anyway, it was the listen-to-the-music-and-write-the-scene-you-see lesson. A lesson with little or no preparation, and that’s why I chose it. I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow and Friday, though. With class four maybe a little matura debriefing, but I don’t know. Anyway, I’m hoping that the matura will scare some of the kids into better behavior, but I doubt it. Dominika dropped by this evening to leave some stuff for Kinga and she told me that there might not actually be a new matura. “It depends,” she explained, “on who wins the election. Some of them want to change it, some don’t.” Who knows?

Saturday I went to Nowy Targ to buy a few things. At the targ I wanted, at the very least, a jacket (a nice one — the one I got in Jabłonka the other day will eventually be a Quattro jacket), some new jeans, and a couple of sweaters. I got everything but the jacket, though I think I’ll head back next week and try to get it (250 złotych for a nice wool p-coat seems too good a bargain to pass up). I was also going to try to buy a pair of nice boots at the shop in the rynek but I had a RWYA moment: the only boots they had were the very ones on display. That mean you had to choose not by price or style but by which boot they had in your size.

Instead of settling I went to Zakopane where I bought a nice pair of Italian hiking boots for 430 złotych along with another two pairs of nice socks and some waterproofing stuff. After that, I walked up to the little kiosk that sells pipes and such and bought some Night Cap and a tamper — and forgot all about getting pipe cleaners. Still having over an hour and fifteen minutes before my bus back to Nowy Targ, I walked down to the little góralski restaurant Charles and I took his mom and had oscypek smażony and a bowl of żurek followed by pierogi ruskie along with a small Okociem. A delicious lunch — and the whole time I kept thinking about what it would be like to have the folks there, or Marlon or Adam. Maybe sometime.

A letter to my father:

This week has been an emotional one for people all over the world. It really is no longer as it used to be — something changed forever Tuesday. There are of course two situations of concern: first is the feelings, concerns, and perspectives in America and the world in general; the second is the feelings, concerns, and perspectives among those who perpetrated this act.

To begin with, I can’t help but see similarities between these two situations.

1. Both people feel that a great injustice has been done to them. This drove certain individuals to commit one of the most horrific acts in history. Who knows what that itself will cause America to do in retaliation. But it will retaliate, and that leads to the second point:
2. Both groups feel that their retaliatory action will rectify the situation. The men who killed all those people in the States didn’t do it because they thought they were being evil; they did it because they thought they were acting justly. We can of course question their sense of justice, but the fact remains: they most likely felt that this act would tilt the scales of justice in their favor. America feels that its retaliation will accomplish the same thing.
3. The injustice they feel has inspired many of them to volunteer their services in operations that might result in their own death in order to get justice. They’ve been showing here and on BBC footage of bin Laden’s minions training, and no reasonable person would deny that these men are willing to give their life for their beliefs. At the same time, I’ve heard reports that the American public is okay with the idea of casualties in its search for justice. Additionally, I’ve heard of common soldiers expressing an eager willingness to take part in missions that might result in casualties.
4. Both groups see themselves as virtuous and the other as the epitome of evil. Of course the U.S. has been branded the Great Satan by the Islamic world for ages. Now Bush is continually referring to those people who planned and committed this act, as well as those who harbor them (read: the Taliban) as “evil.”
5. There is a certain fanaticism among both people. I saw footage of Bush visiting the disaster area in New York and he was talking to all the rescue workers through a megaphone. At one point they spontaneously began chanting, “U.S.A.!!! U.S.A.!!! U.S.A.!!!” pumping their fists, with a look of just indignation on their faces. Change the language to Arabic and put a beard on Bush and it looks eerily similar to what we see in the Middle East from time to time.
6. Both groups see the loss of a certain number of innocent lives as an acceptable price to pay to reach their objectives. Senator Zell Miller said the U.S. should “bomb the hell out of Afghanistan.” This would probably result in significant civilian losses, but this is apparently not a concern for Miller. Loss of civilian life is not an issue, obviously, for those who did this. And of course both groups would define “innocent” differently, and I highly doubt that Miller would call the Afghani citizens who died as “innocent,” because, after all, they support bin Laden. Those who killed the people in the States would probably not call their victims innocent, because, after all, they support Israel’s anti-Arab war and so on.
7. Neither group will ever say, “We deserve that act of retaliation because our own last attack was so awful. The scales of justice are now even and we, as an evil state, have been justly punished.” In other words, a military attack will just bring about another terrorist attack.

We have to ask why someone would do such a thing. Think about it: these people spent months, or maybe even years, preparing for this. They learned English; they got into the country; they sat through hours of flight training; they planned how to hijack the plane; at least some drove from Florida to Boston; they spent thousands of dollars; they spent all this time and money preparing for a moment in their lives that they knew would result in their death. All these months, all this planning, all this discussion — and they know it’s going to result in their death. I hardly think it whatever it was that drove them to this was trivial. They felt they were acting nobly, even justly. Do you really think they’re doing this simply because they’re jealous about America’s comparative wealth? Do you think such a petty emotion as envy could sustain these men through all this effort as they propelled themselves to certain death? Do you think they would really kill thousands of people from jealousy? How many rich men in America get killed because some poor homeless bloke starts envying him?

These men acted in response to a perceived injustice. Whether or not America meant to, it has done something that has angered at least 100 people in the world enough that they are willing to sacrifice everything to enact some kind of “justice.”

This same kind of rage that Americans feel must certainly be similar to what drove these men to do this. No one in the American media (from the limited bit I get) seems to be admitting this. Some senator said, “We’ve got to be somewhat irrational in our response. Blow their capital from under them.” Don’t you think however “just” that might seem to Americans, that Afghanis would feel the same pain and resentment toward America that Americans now feel toward them? As Salon magazine put it, “You might as well hand out box-cutters and directions to Kennedy Airport to every kid in Afghanistan unto the third generation.”

But it seems that so many people feel that admitting that America might have done something that, however unjustly, caused this is to say that the men who did this are not responsible for their actions. People seem to feel like it’s the equivalent to saying, “Oh, well, we brought it on ourselves, so we shouldn’t retaliate.” That’s not at all what I’m saying.

The point is simple: if America truly wants to stop these types of things from happening, it has to take into account what causes the conditions that make people feel this way. And stop saying things like, “It’s just because they’re jealous of America’s wealth and power.” Jealousy cannot drive people to commit the kinds of terrible acts that happened Tuesday. Jealousy might lead Germany or France to badmouthing America, but to sacrifice one’s own life? To kill thousands? There has to be more. But if America simply bombs the hell out of some part of the world and in turn kills hundreds or thousands of people it labels “terrorists,” it will do nothing but make the situation worse. You don’t calm an angry dog by kicking the shit out of it every time it bears its teeth.

I also think it’s ridiculous write these individuals off as sociopaths. Perhaps bin Laben is a sociopath, or a psychopath. But they’re not all sociopaths. They’re not all mentally ill. A mentally ill person could not hide his intentions from flight instructors for so many hours of instructions, nor could they have failed to raise suspicions as apparently they did. And certainly neighbors would notice something weird about them.

All these answers — jealousy, mental illness, simple overwhelming evil, even demon possession, as I’m sure some Christians have suggested among themselves — are the easy answers. But it’s finger pointing. It’s “us and them” thinking, and that kind of thinking seldom never brings good fruits in such instances.

Neither does it do any good to call them cowards. They knew the response their actions would inspire. They know that many of their compatriots are going to die because of what they did. They also knew they were going to die. Besides, “cowardice” is a relative term. To millions they are now heroes. Another relative term.

As for whether or not America is blameless, I think it fairly certainly is not. If America is so just, why did it allow the atrocities in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia to continue unabated? Why did it support oppressive regimes such as Pinochet in Chile and Marcos in the Philippines? Why does it enact embargoes against countries that result in millions of people being pushed to the brink of starvation while leaving the people the U.S. is trying to punish completely untouched? Why did it not drop an atomic bomb somewhere near Japan as a warning as to what they were capable of instead of killing thousands and thousands of civilians? Why did it carpet-bomb Dresden and Cambodia, knowing full well it would result in thousands of civilian casualties? Why hasn’t it done anything about the human rights atrocities going on in Afghanistan now at the hands of the Taliban? Why didn’t it do something about the German death camps it knew about as early as 1941? Why did it round up Americans of Japanese descent during WWII and put them in camps? Why didn’t it do anything about Pol Pot? Idi Amin?

The question is whether or not these actions are enough to cancel out all the good things America has done. And it has done plenty of good things: restoring Europe after WWII, helping nations in their times of catastrophes, and so on. Probably for every good thing America has done, someone else can point out a bad thing; I don’t know that either tips the scales.

My point is this: America is ruled by humans, and I’ve never met a human who is more good than he is bad. I’d love to be the optimist and say, “We’re all inherently good,” but I don’t think the reality of history bears that out. At the same time, we’re not inherently bad. We’re some curious mix of the two (called human nature), and so the countries we inhabit and rule must be the same. America has done some amazing and wonderful things; it has also done some disgusting and dreadfully evil things. And it has also done many things that it sees as good and others see as bad. But all these things it as done out of its own interests, just like people. No one does a single thing from purely selfless motives. Even the greatest martyr gets some sort of personal satisfaction out of her death.

You said, “As long as America is wealthy it will be hated. As long a America would stand in the way of ego-maniacs trying to rule the world it will be hated.” Again, I have to say that I doubt that envy of wealth is enough to produce this kind of hatred. And as for the ego-maniacs, America has, as I pointed out, supported its own share of them. In addition, America has helped oppressive regimes overwhelm democratically elected governments simply because the former espoused capitalism and the latter communism (I’m thinking here of Central and South America). You wrote, “I find myself wondering about why ‘the world’ doesn’t see any good from America.” I also wonder why America never saw any good in any of the “communist” regimes it helped to overthrow in Central and South America. It was a matter of ideology, not practical ends. Domino theory and such. Gotta stop that Communist virus from spreading . . . even if in a few countries we label “communist” the people are happy with their leadership. Of course they don’t really know the insidious nature of communism, and how it will eventually destroy them in the end. That sounds a lot to me like Marxist thought — bourgeoisie mentality enslaving people and deceiving people about the fact that they’re actually enslaved and such. So we destroy the government to save it. Sort of like destroying the village to save it.

It’s really amazing how easily and quickly people can switch perspectives on something, how people can go from saying “A and not B” to saying “B and not A” in such a relatively short period of time. Especially when there’s something to be gained in such a change.

An excellent example is the situation with Iraq and Iran. For a while it suited America’s interests to support Saddam in his war with Iran, and all the while he massacred Kurds in his own country. His regime did to the Kurds what they later did to the Kuwaitis. Why didn’t America do something about Saddam then? Because he was useful. He severed as a distraction for Iran. When Iran was busy fighting Iraq, it couldn’t devote as many resources to sponsoring terrorism against the West. Problem solved. And in the meantime, thousands and thousands of innocent people were killed in a senseless war America helped sponsor. Now we’ve switched — Iran seems to be a little more moderate, so we can now play them against Iraq. You might say, “Well that’s because Iran is now a more humanitarian, less repressive regime, and we’re rewarding their changes with a new openness toward them.” That might be so, but that’s not my point — my point is that throughout all this, Iraq has been an oppressive, murderous regime, and we only did something about it when the threat spread beyond its borders.

It’s really a matter of perspective. You see all of America’s actions as just; others see all their nation’s actions as just. There are few people in the world who say, “We as a people and a nation are bad — inherently evil, in fact — and we just want to wreck havoc on the world.” Everyone sees themselves as the good-guy. But everyone can’t be the good-guy all the time. There have to be bad-guys, and I think most Americans are unwilling to admit that their country has ever been a bad-guy. Much like Islamic extremists are unwilling to admit that their country has ever been a bad-guy. “We’re backed by God’s justice.” “We’re backed by Allah’s justice.” Both statements can’t be right.

What I’m getting at is this dualistic view that so many people seem to have — on both sides of any given political coin — will do nothing but encourage and fuel such actions as we saw Tuesday. We have to be willing to look at ourselves and say, “What could we have done that could have possibly resulted in someone feeling such fury towards us?” In other words, we have to walk a mile in others’ cliché moccasins. Are those on the other side going to do the same? I don’t know. Maybe they would continue to be close-minded, but does their close-mindedness justify our own? Does their dualistic proclamation, “We’re always right and you’re always wrong” call for an equal response from us?

If we provide an equal response, that’s exactly what we’ll get — more of the same. They’ll see our action as something that needs to be avenged, and will strike again. We will wage hit them again and say, “Justice has been done.” They’ll feel injustice has been done, and hit us back. Sort of like how practical jokes seem to spiral out of control. In this case, though, the consequences (for both sides) are a little more dire than short-sheeted beds.

As a side note, only somewhat connected to all this, I would like to respond to one thing you wrote in your letter: “Who also denied that the CIA ever trained bin Laden or that he was a great warrior” As for whether the CIA ever trained bin Laden or not, I’m in a similar situation as you: I can’t really comment conclusively. But I do admit that I don’t accept it carte blanche when a CIA official says that the CIA didn’t train him. I don’t know that he’s lying — I’m simply saying it wouldn’t surprise me at all, and that it’s done in the name of “national security.” We have some people saying that the CIA did train bin Laden; we have others saying they didn’t. Who to believe? I don’t know. But just because the CIA says it doesn’t make it so. And given the documented assistance the CIA and other groups gave to Afghanistan during the late seventies when it was fighting the Soviet Union, I would say it’s more likely that he’s lying than not. Why lie? Look at the alternative: “Yes, we did train him. We trained him to sic him on the Reds, and now he’s turned on us.” Sort of like Frankenstein — not something a government readily admits. So on one hand we have a simple denial; on the other, we have a positive statement plus documented facts that the CIA did help at least some of the Afghanis — seems to me the evidence leans towards those who say he was trained at the hands of the CIA. Of course conclusive evidence is conveniently impossible to get, as it would all be classified.

In the end, I know this is all out of my hands. But I do firmly believe that if America reacts only to this event without addressing in any way the injustices (perceived or real) that inspired these terrible acts, this will only be the beginning. And the next retaliation against America could be even more devastating — perhaps a biological agent released simultaneously several major U.S. cities, or maybe even the detonation of nuclear device. (They wouldn’t even have to create a nuclear device: just detonate a lot of explosives wrapped around some plutonium, then sit back and wait for the cancer to set in.) It’s already a bad situation — I just hope America acts wisely and doesn’t make it even worse.