Depreciating democracy: a luxury for those who have it (June 2003)
For the last several months I've been recounting to my readers what it was like to be an American teacher in Italy, in a public school frequented by a very left-wing student body. Allow me, if you will, to back track to the first chapter.
The day after the military intervention began, an assembly was called for the entire morning in the school where I teach. Since I teach in the afternoon on Fridays, I wasn't there. I was in a hospital having some exams done in a department that was on the basement level, which blocked the signal to my cell phone. Therefore, it wasn't until I left the hospital at midday that I noticed all the SMSs I had been receiving from my students all morning, begging me to come to speak at the assembly so that a different voice could be heard. They had tried to express their support for the decision of the United States and Great Britain to go to war against Saddam Hussein, but the mobbing majority silenced them.
From what my students told me, the entire morning was spent in speeches full of the usual peace slogans: against the war, against Bush, accusing the United States of imperialism, unilateralim, oil thirsty, the usual fast phrases for easy digestion. The students who tried to articulate a different point of view were hissed into silence, with the exception of one Albanian girl who expressed both her gratitude toward the Americans for having led the Nato intervention in Kosovo and her confidence in the good faith of Americans as bearers of rights and liberties and not of oppression.
Several teachers intervened as well, though not with the kind of informative content that you might expect from them, given their rank and role, but steeped in anger and emotion and with an unequivocal " no to the war with no ifs and no buts" undertone. Only one Italian teacher tried to raise the level of the discussion by citing Manzoni. However, a French teacher lowered it once again, offering some some personal propaganda for a peace movement she belongs to and informing the students that she had a list of American products to boycott! Perhaps what she had to say wasn't against the law, but I imagine it must infringe on some deontological rule of etiquette. In short, here we had pacifists instigating trade wars in the name of peace. If they had been successful, they could have been the ruin of the companies involved. Evidently, they don't realize that companies consist of the people that work for them who also happen to have families to feed! And then they pretend to tell the taunting tale of terror and hunger from the embargo!
When I got to school, my students surrounded me. Both those who supported the efforts of the allies and the necessity of military intervention and those who go like clockwork to every peace demonstration wanted me to hold a conference on the war in the afternoon. I had been receiving many requests to speak at conferences, but up until then I had always declined out of timidity. I had never spoken in public before. This time, however, it was clear that I couldn't refuse, nor did I want to.
I began my discussion by telling them that I didn't intend to talk about my own personal opinion on the war because it would have been too easy for them to think that my opinions were based on the simple fact that I am an American. I confessed that it was true that after September 11th I discovered a strong sentiment of patriotism that I didn't know was dormant in me, having always considered myself a citizen of the world. I assured them, however, that my opinions were not based on my nationality, but on an even stronger sense of rationality. Nevertheless, I told them that I preferred to allow other voices to be heard, the voices of those directly called into cause and I took out three articles that had been published in the European press during the two months that preceded the war.
The first one was a letter sent to the British newspaper "The Guardian," the day before the worldwide peace demonstrations took place on February 15th, from an Iraqi doctor living in exile in London. In his letter the doctor reproached those who intended to go to the peace demonstration by informing them that not only would they NOT be helping the Iraqi people, but on the contrary, they would be dealing a winning hand to Saddam Hussein. He predicted that his people would cry when they saw the images of Western citizens demonstrating in their streets convinced that the demonstrations would curtail military intervention, their only hope for salvations. He asked the demonstrators: "Where were you when Saddam Hussein repeatedly massacred his own people? Why didn't you take to the streets against Saddam Hussein, then, and even now, since he's never stopped torturing our people?"
Every once and a while I stopped to offer an historic or geopolitical explanation when the brevity of the text required one. For example, when the doctor mentioned that he was neither a Kurd or a Shiite, but a Sunnite, I explained why he made that distinction, how the Kurds and the Shiites had been gassed by Saddam Hussein in the late eighties and massacred by him when the allies left Iraqi territory after the First Gulf War and before the British and the Americans created the two no-fly zones that have protected these two ethnic groups from the rage of the dictator for the last twelve years. Although the doctor belonged to the same ethnic group as Saddam Hussein, he affirmed Saddam's iniquities and his own conviction of the need to overthrow the Iraqi regime by force.
The second article was an interview with the Kurd leader in north Iraq,
Barham Salih, published by the "La Stampa" in mid-January.
According to Salih, more than anyone else, the Italians should have
understood that the Iraqis needed the Americans just like the Italians
did in 1943. He was dismayed by the rigid irrationality of their
pacifism. He called the attitude of the Europeans unspeakable, paradoxical
when you think that they themselves had been liberated by the Americans!
He denounced the double standard that allowed the Europeans to intervene
in Bosnia and Kosovo, but not in Iraq, where the suffering was perhaps
even worse. He implored Europeans to remember that the politics of
appeasement doesn't work. At this point, I had to make another explanatory
interruption. The interview was in Italian, but the word "appeasement"
was in English, so I explained to the students the historical connotation
of the intrusion of this English word into the Italian language.
Whenever it is used, it is meant to remind the reader of the error in assessment
made by the Europeans at Munich in 1938, when, for the sake of peace, they
allowed Hitler to occupy the Sudetentland in Czechoslovakia.
The third document was an article written by Veton Surroi, the editor of the Kosovarian newspaper, Koha Ditore, published by Le Monde and entitled: "Only under bombs will tyrants fall." In this article the journalist said that he felt that he was living a situation of déjà-vu. He recalled how Europeans had taken to the streets to demonstrate against the Nato intervention in his country, a conflict without which he and his people would still be the victims of the massacres of Milosevic.
Midway through the conference my cell phone rang. I've only had a cell phone since soon after September 11th and soon after I got it I was fiddling with the buttons and the menu with my usual intuitive trial and error approach to technology. I happened upon the menu that allows you to set your own musical ring. Convinced that I was about to embark on an operation that would only take a couple of minutes, I decided to set my phone to ring the Star-Spangled Banner. However, a cell phone isn't a musical instrument where all you have to do is press the right note. For every note I had to set not only the note, but the octave and the duration. In short, a divertissement that was supposed to last a couple of minutes became a major undertaking that took a couple of hours, thanks to my penchant for persistence! So when my phone went off plump in the middle of my talk, everyone heard our national anthem. Embarrassed, but laughingly, I said, " You see why I preferred to read these testimonies! After September 11th, I discovered a patriotism that even I didn't know was in me."
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi teaches Law and Economics at the Liceo Europeo
Umberto I in Turin, Italy. She also writes for the Roman daily, L'Opinione
della Libertà and was awarded the Mario Soldati Prize for Journalism
and Criticism for 2002.
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