Freedom: A Grim Lesson of History

We will, I suppose, always remember where we were.

I was on the Santa Monica Freeway heading west, as the first reports of war tumbled from the radio in breathless chaos. In those first numbing moments, I waged my own fight for clarity. And, because it is the habit of the bookish mind to name its feelings with other people’s words, I thought of Yeats’ elegy for the dead Irish airman who was his great friend’s only son:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love.

Minutes later, I was watching the light fade through the window of a friend’s small study and listening to him muse. “Thinking about all this,” he said, “I can’t help but feel how deeply we all are the prisoners of our own history--George Bush of his in World War II, Saddam Hussein of his.”

Even when we are not history’s prisoners, we inevitably are its children. For Americans, the people who reinvented themselves on the shores of a New World, this is a hard fact to accept. But the necessity of such recollection--of our real history, and not the one we have imagined through the movies--never has been more urgent.

In these first heady hours, war seems like a giant video game, a kind of global Nintendo. There are, however, casualties--our own, as well as the Iraqis’. There may be terrorism here at home. The search for scapegoats and fifth columnists will begin, and its direction already is clear.

Over the past two weeks, our government has subjected the organized Arab-American community to a campaign of systematic scrutiny and intimidation. Its implications are, unfortunately, anything but unprecedented.

Here, again, we catch the whisper of a dark old tension: Who really is an American? In times of stress, how far can we really trust those among us who look or speak or believe too differently?

We are prone to such suspicions because American nationality is unique. We are not a nation, like others, of blood and soil, but of an idea. We are united by a common ideal of human liberty, not by a common ancestor nor even by common customs.

The ambiguities and anxieties inherent in these facts have consequences. In the 19th Century, the Nativists’ anti-immigrant frenzy fomented not only war with Mexico, but also anti-Catholic pogroms at home. During World War I, paranoid suspicion destroyed the German-language cultural associations, and justified harsh repression of the German-speaking peace churches. The Red Scare after the war all but eliminated the foreign-language presses, because most were “tinged” with socialism. In the 1930s, hostility toward immigrants helped build the pulpit from which Father Coughlin ranted against Jews.

During World War II, that suspicion of immigrants linked with racism, and the result--to our everlasting disgrace--was the mass internment of 120,000 utterly blameless Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.

It is that shameful chapter in our history that comes most readily to mind, when I read that our government’s agents even now are prying into the lives and minds of Americans of Arab descent.

Last week, for example, Nazir Bayda, regional director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, received an unannounced visit from an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s anti-terrorist squad.

Initially, they asked him whether he had been subjected to harassment of any sort since the onset of the Gulf crisis. Then, they began to question him concerning his political views, his attitude toward Israel and toward Saddam Hussein. They asked him whether he knew any terrorists.

One wonders whether, in the wake of the next IRA bombing, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley--or any of the 40 million other Americans of Irish descent--will be subjected to similar interrogation. Perhaps the presumption of disloyalty in time of crisis applies only to those Americans whose families came from non-Western nations--to Arab Americans and Japanese Americans, for example.

Bayda was one of more than 200 Arab-American business and community leaders questioned in this fashion by the FBI last week. And despite protests to FBI Director William S. Sessions and denunciations in the House Wednesday by Reps. Norman Mineta and Don Edwards of California and Romano L. Rizzoli of Kentucky, this squalid inquisition continues.

In fact, as The Times reported earlier this week, three Arab-American leaders who met with Lawrence G. Lawler, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, were told that their complaints--and not the bureau’s snooping--had created “paranoia” among Arab Americans.

I am tempted to call that response Orwellian logic. But it isn’t logical at all; it simply is Orwellian.

In his television address Wednesday night, President Bush told us that this war is a fight to “free” Kuwait and to secure the mysterious New World Order about which we have heard so much. It’s difficult, right now, to tease the deeper meaning from those words. Kuwait will be independent once again. But when its hereditary aristocracy is restored to their absolute power, will its people be free in any sense in which we understand the word?

And, when Saddam Hussein is killed or admits defeat, it will not be because he suffered the judgment of international law or the sanction of the United Nations. It will be because the overwhelming superiority of Western--and particularly American--military technology gives us the ability to impose whatever legality we acknowledge. The moment in which that fact is realized will be pregnant with old temptations.

As always, the dead hand of the old era clutches at the hopeful heart of the new. But because we are history’s students, as well as its prisoners, we know one thing for certain: No order worth having ever will be established by a nation whose people live in fear of one another, where the will of the majority is visited on the few in the form of the policeman’s chilling knock at the door.