by Sachi Sri Kantha; published May 16, 2004
Miffed with the LTTE’s Military Muscle; a provocative point of view
Has anyone wondered why the Washington Poo Bahs who dictate American diplomacy are miffed with the LTTE’s military muscle? Time and again, Eelam Tamils are served with statements from the American political decision-makers that the LTTE should give up its “arms forever.” This is then bloated into headlines by Sinhalese diplomats (both real and fake varieties like Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar) and scribes. For instance, I quote excerpts from a Colombo hack’s recent jottings.
“United States Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage said here on Wednesday that the United States will not remove the LTTE from their list of terror groups until the LTTE gives up arms forever and unless they do so they will not have any chance of having a relationship with the United States. Speaking to reporters after his meeting with Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadiragamar at the State Department, Armitage said the US had never supported the LTTE in any way and not given aid to the LTTE at any time and the aid given to the people in the north/east of Sri Lanka have been channeled through the NGO and other organizations.” [by Bandula Jayasekara in Washington DC, 14th May 2004 – in the Lanka Academic website, http://www.theacademic.org]
I suspect that the answer to the question posed at the beginning is ‘infection with a virus of crypto-racism.’ Of course, there are millions of politically enlightened, liberal whites in America who have no offense against the LTTE or Pirabhakaran. But sadly, they do not belong to the decision-making tribe in Washington DC. One of the politically enlightened liberal whites in America whose thoughts I respect is Norman Mailer.
Norman Mailer’s provocative thoughts
My politically incorrect suspicion that the LTTE is a victim of an infectious strain of crypto-racism in Washington ,DC was enhanced after I read Norman Mailer’s opinion piece entitled “We went to war just to boost the white male ego” [vide, London Times of April 29, 2003]. Norman Mailer is, for sure, opinionated. But, two factors made me pay attention to his point of view. First, as an American original in the literary kingdom, Mailer is no lightweight. Thus, his observations elicit thoughts, reflection (and also vehement criticism from his opponents). Secondly, he is also a white American male. I reiterate that this particular point of view of Mailer’s appeared in 2003 – merely five weeks, after President George Bush’s decision to enter Iraq militarily. It received quite a bit of flak from fellow American whites, who hated Mailer’s guts to vent an unflattering opinion on the predominantly white American decision makers (exceptions being Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice). Here are excerpts from Mailer’s provocative commentary.
“…The key question remains – why did we go to war? It is not yet answered. In the end, it is likely that a host of responses will produce a cognitive stew, which does, at least, open the way to offering one’s own notion. We went to war, I could say, because we very much needed a war. The U.S. economy was sinking, the market was gloomy and down, and some classic bastions of the erstwhile American faith (corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church, to cite but three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Since our administration was probably not ready to solve any one of the serious problems before it, it was natural to feel the impulse to move into larger ventures, thrusts into the empyrean-war!
Be it said that the administration knew something a good many of us did not – it knew that we had a very good, perhaps even an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of Armed Forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military, career-focused and run by a field-rank and general staff who were intelligent, articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any other power group in America. In such a pass, how could the White House not use them? They could prove quintessential as morale-builders to one group in U.S. life, perhaps the key group: the white American male. If once this aggregate came near to 50 percent of the population, it was down to…was it now 30 percent? Still, it remained key to the president’s political footing. And it had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, unless he happened to be in the Armed Forces.”
Then, Mailer narrowed in on, what he termed as ‘the ongoing malaise of the white American male.’ If a non-white had written the following lines, it could be conveniently tagged as ‘nothing but a racist diatribe,’ but Mailer is an American white male. Excerpts:
“…He [that is, the white American male] had been taking a daily drubbing over the past 30 years. For better or worse, the women’s movement had had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego had withered in the glare. Even the mighty consolations of rooting for your team on TV had been skewed. There was now less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice-hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger) as well as lacrosse, swimming, and the World-Wide Wrestling Federation – remnants and orts of a once-great and glorious centrality.
On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces. If blacks and Hispanics were numerous there, still they were not a majority, and the officer corps (if the TV was a reliable witness) suggested that the percentage of white men increased as one rose in rank to the higher officers. Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super Marines, and – one magical ace in the hole – the best Air Force that ever existed. If we cannot find our machismo anywhere else, we can certainly settle in on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the cardinal reasons we went looking for war…”
Uncomfortable with non-white military muscle
There you have it. Norman Mailer had eviscerated point blank (as is his wont) the troubled psyche of the American white male in the first decade of the 21st century. Due to the shrinking spheres of ‘white dominance’ in an ever larger number of sports [which are nothing but attenuated mutations of warfare, under strictly regulated rules of time and space], the predominantly white American male policy-makers would like to maintain dominance and the limelight, at least in military warfare. They hate competition from non-white territories. Sounds simple. But, isn’t it the politically incorrect truth as well?
In the past century, from the 1940s to the mid 1970s, the predominantly white American male policy-makers were repeatedly challenged by the non-white Asian military heroes. Americans won one, drew one and lost one. They won against Gen.Isoroku Yamamoto in the 2nd World War, by first assassinating him sneakily. They drew against Mao Ze Dong in the Korean War. But they lost to Gen. Von Nguen Giap in the Vietnam War. Thus understandably, they have developed a psychological allergy to non-white Asian military heroes. Next to Giap, none other than Pirabhakaran has appeared as an authentic military hero in Asia.
One should also be reminded that in Asia, blind-sighted US policy mavens even went to the extent of irrationally providing political and diplomatic support to Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, to spite Vietnam. And Pol Pot, in the eyes of the then dimwits of the U.S. State Department and the executive branch was a ‘great democrat’ in the second half of the 1970s! I wonder how the current Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage would counter now a question on the American support for Pol Pot’s regime in the not-so-distant past. On October 15, 2002, in an interview to CNN’s Larry King Live TV program, Harry Belafonte – the aged black singer and outspoken civil rights activist – ripped the hyperbole of American policy Poo Bahs on terrorism with the following reflective wisdom:
“Our hands are not clean, Larry. There are nations all over this globe that suffer from policies that we have implemented. People go away bitter with a great sense of loss and families are destroyed. Terror isn’t only our experience. Terror is experienced by people all over the place and we have helped instigate some of it.”
Sadly, this type of wisdom from liberal Americans does not play well in the policy corridors of Washington, DC.
In sum, I infer that since Pirabhakaran and the LTTE have demonstrated military muscle for the past two decades (though not directly against the American military), this performance is rather uncomfortable to the American white male decision-makers, who are infected with the virus of crypto-racism. Folks like Richard Armitage would welcome only army-less freedom fighters of the caliber of the Dalai Lama, who are adorable Mickey Mouse-type caricatures for photo opportunities. But Pirabhakaran is in good company. The myopic American bureaucracy failed to grant formal diplomatic recognition to Mao and Communist China from 1949 to 1972. Though diplomatic recognition came in 1972, mainly for American business to compete in the billion-strong market, even 32 years later, China hasn’t turned into a bastion of democracy.