In a later missive, I'd like to help bring this discussion group's focus
back to cinema, which is where we'll need to eventually return to, as I
already have personally had to do reviewing several films this past week.
But for now, I think it may be time to step back and consider where The Left
stands in the post-Sept. 11 situation, and what its choices are.
    ``The Left'' is, of course, not some nameless, faceless entity, either
manufactured, pre-fabricated or destined to march in lock-step in any
direction. Indeed, as anyone who has been an activist or involved in Left
political activity knows, the American Left is in a permanent state of
disarray and barely controlled chaos. It has lacked, for many years,
anything like genuine leadership, let alone anything like a common
ideological agreement. The Ecos have battled the Laborites, the Feminists
have battled the older male groups, the elderly CP have looked askance at
either what was called ``The New Left'' or more recently, The Greens. The
Greens themselves, which I was involved with for many years, embody almost
perfectly this disunity, never better symbolized than by its endless debate
over whether to adopt majority vote process or the consensus process
borrowed from vestiges of the old peace movement.
    For those who know or have been part of the Left, this is not news. But
what has always haunted the groups and individuals who make up the American
Left is the spectre of the potential invasion and/or attack of the U.S. by
non-Americans. Giving peace a chance, whether it be Vietnam or
Israel/Palestine was one thing; what of domestic invasion? What then? What
would be the response? Would it depend on the nature of the invader? Would
it depend on the manner of the invasion? Would it depend on the invader's
politics? Would peace be given a chance if the invasion was one of pure
hostility? Would it be given a chance if the attack was upon the U.N.
building in New York? The list of possible scenarios and responses is
endless.
    That spectre, from the American perspective, has become tangible, with a
degree of personal and civic grief that is unprecedented in American
history. More will die in the WTC than died--combined--in the War of
Independence and Korea. More, incredibly, died in one day on American soil
than died on the Civil War's bloodiest day, at Antietam Bridge. Everyone I
know is at least two degrees of separation from actual victims, and many are
one degree. The nation is enduring a long, hard funeral.
    And the attack may as well have been on the U.N. building. 63 countries'
citizens died in the bombing. England, alone (as Tony Blair has noted), lost
more civilians in this one attack than any since WW2--this, including the
years of IRA bombings. People of every religious faith were killed. People
of every continent were murdered. This, by any definition, is a crime
against humanity.
    It may also prove to be the Left's worst nightmare. It's already proven
to be the Right's. Consider this. The worst initial comments from any
Americans were uttered by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (which naturally
comforted many on The Left, who surely thought, ``You see? The crazies are
on their side, not ours.''), possibly eclipsing them forever as voices even
within their own community. Two of the most cherished longterm agenda items
for the Right--missile-shield defense and a greatly reduced central
government--have been obliterated. The Bush Administration's own agenda has
been profoundly altered: Farewell to Unilateralism, Farewell to
Isolationism, Farewell to The Education President, Farewell to Supply-Side
Economics. Hello to Keynsian Economics. The Left would greatly misunderstand
the new events simply as feeding a right-wing fantasy of massive military
spending and rearmament. The upcoming ``war'' hardly fits even the Right's
vision of how war is fought, let alone the Left's. It is fascinating, and
revealing, to read the naive predictions of some imagined carpet bombing of
Afghanistan. Perhaps this is a cherished vision by some on the Right; it's
certainly expected (as so many emails on this site alone have indicated) by
some on the Left. But this too is an item that must be said Farewell to.
    The first dominant reaction from the Left has been of two tones. The
first is to decry any talk of possible war. The second, which has been heard
loudly and endlessly on this site, has been to immediately shift the issue
to the familiar ground of U.S. complicity in foreign atrocities,
misadventures and worse. The first reaction is human. The second is
nefarious, and hardly original.
    For those here and elsewhere who have, almost without a breath's pause,
argued this second reaction, there's genuine and relevant precedent. Many on
the Left argued against U.S. involvement in Europe and the Pacific during
WW2 after the Japanese invasion, on various grounds. Pacifists maintained
their longheld belief that war begets war and solves nothing. Libertarian
Leftists argued that meddling abroad would only get us into more trouble.
Other Leftists opposed to Communist-oriented domination of the Left remained
skeptical of the anti-Fascist cause, if only because it bolstered the CP's
militancy. The permutations were as endless as the Left's various
subdivisions.
    All of these, as history proved, were quite beside the point. The only
sound Left argument for U.S. involvement in WW2 was one based on
anti-totalitarianism. The Left now would be wise to revisit this.
    The intellectual retreat to citing past American crimes abroad has been
sad to witness. The saddest of all have been those tinged with the
unreadable stylistics of Structuralist language, in which whole non-existant
words are devised to reduce a tragedy to the level of a geometrical formula.
I have argued that this form of rhetoric may stem from a certain wing of
Academia, long distanced from real events, so remote, removed and wedded to
one specific type of discourse that all it can do, in the face of Sept. 11,
is fall back on what it knows.
    But just as what the Right knows is wrong, so too for the Left. There
are many who have long wished for American power and global reach to be cut
down to size, many deeply uncomfortable living in a country whose government
practices policies they deeply disagree with and which seems impervious and
deaf to protests. I know, and have known, them. What they have never been
prepared for is a direct attack on their country by a force which stands for
everything they oppose.
    The American Left is now faced with an enemy far worse than any they
ever imagined stemming from their own citizenry, be it the Christian
Coalition, the Christian Identity movement, the militias, the Neo-Nazis or
the military-industrial complex. It is faced with a force which executes
women for wearing nail polish. A force which imitates, EXACTLY, the methods
and tactics of the Mafia. A force which envisions an empire, based both on
the most medieval reading of the Q'uran and a romance of past glory. A force
which dwarfs European-based dictators, of the Right or the Left, in terms of
their taste for the totalitarian. It's a force, in short, which represents
everything the Left does not stand for. The American Left, in particular.
    It seems to me that the matter that the Left must disabuse themselves
of, first, is a retreat into pure Pacifism and, second, an analysis which
essentially fights the last war. The hard-core followers of the first
position may beyond discussion: Many are religiously devout in their cause,
which I respect while viewing as tragically and morally wrong. Those in the
second camp, a larger group, are in danger of extinction amidst current
events. The logic behind the anti-U.S. critique was perfectly fine as an
abstract, even real, argument before Sept. 11. That logic has now expired, a
charming relic of the past, along with Communism and Fascism and any other
dead-end byway where intellectual politics has meandered down. It has been
rendered useless by the terrorists themselves, who hate the entire spectra
of liberalism even more than they hate U.S. military and commercial power. I
t's in this that feminists could especially cast light where there is now
murkiness. No thinking feminist, woman or man, can possibly apply
intellectual relativism to the ``New Moorism'' of not only bin Laden, but a
whole host of his allies and fellow Medievalists. For make no mistake what
their cause is. They operate on the term of Medievalism, employing the most
sophiticated techniques of Capitalism.
    My worry is that a long-held critique, framed strictly within the
standards measuring everything in terms of American behavior, will blind the
Left to the most critical crisis of its time. The Left is faced with the
most virulently anti-Leftist force ever organized, possibly even including
Hitler's SS.
    It may be that, within some cultural themes and practices, the tradition
of Lacan and Deleuze will continue. (Certainly, Deleuze as a film critic is
endlessly valuable.) But much of the language of that tradition, applied to
these events, comes off as comical at best and coldly cruel at worst. The
thinking needs to be clearer, and so does the language. It's my hope that,
along with a shift away from this language trough some have fallen into,
there will also be a shift away from old stances, old positions. If not,
then a key stream--the Left--in the wonderful tradition of American thought
and action will become irrelevant. And if that happens, we'll be all the
poorer.
Robert Koehler