We All Want Peace

Yesterday’s “Rally for Peace and Justice” in Tercentenary Theatre upheld the noblest of ideals. We were happy to see that its tone was appropriately muted: the gathering concluded with the singing of “Dona nobis pacem,” a heartfelt hymn for peace at home and abroad. The most moving speeches were those condemning the acts of intolerance toward Muslims or those of Arab or South Asian descent. It would be a great shame if the horrific tragedy of Sept. 11 makes America an uglier place for citizens of any ethnicity or religion to live. Fortunately, all of our political leaders have echoed these sentiments, and anyone who has taken the time to discuss these acts has agreed that they are unacceptable and un-American.

However, while it might be good to repeat these basic truths, in many respects the rally was preaching to the choir. Aside from a few emotional outbursts soon after the bombing, all of our leaders condemn acts that smack of “indiscriminate violence,” and unlike the terrorists, none of them support the needless killing of innocents. Who would be opposed to “a reasoned, just and forward-looking response” to our national tragedy? The important question is what responses are reasonable, what actions are just—and on this question, the speakers were silent. In order to affect the decisions of America’s leaders, our public debate needs to move beyond the clichés of yesterday’s rally, that innocent lives are sacred the world over or—as one speaker noted with some force—that “terrorism is not okay.”

This timidity may have been a response to the trouble Harvard rallies often have in keeping their causes straight. But the variety of rallygoers’ agendas does not excuse the blurring of vital distinctions that marred the rally’s message. In discussing the Bush administration’s warning to countries suspected of harboring terrorists, one speaker raised the example of domestic militia groups and the Ku Klux Klan. “We harbor those people,” he announced, and we harbored Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—who, coincidentally, was executed last June.

We are astounded by the inability of a Faculty member to distinguish between the Taliban’s active protection of, if not assistance to, terrorist groups and the efforts of American law enforcement to apprehend those responsible for hate crimes in the U.S. Treating these distinctions as too subtle for listening students to understand is irresponsible and trivializes the enormity of the Sept. 11 attack.

It also dangerously undercuts the moral case that must be made as we seek justice. If the U.S. once “harbored terrorists who kept slaves,” does that mean we must forgive states that have not yet reached our exacting standards of morality? The speaker went on to quote an antebellum speech of Frederick Douglass, which attributed to America “crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Though our history is flawed, our past mistakes must not prevent us from taking the proper actions today. Equivocating on a subject of such great importance runs the risk of blaming the victims for their suffering and sheltering the true culprits from rebuke.

From this foundation, the rally progressed to the truly bizarre, as a union representative pointedly mourned the deaths of workers (as opposed to management) as well as the loss of 2,000 jobs at hotels near the World Trade Center. He went on to note that “whenever Big Business, the White House and the military get together,” workers will be victimized—and called on workers to join with others to defend themselves. The class-war rhetoric was manifestly inappropriate for this kind of memorial, and the rally’s confused blend of Marxism and spirituals only further detracted from its effect.

Such rants were secondary to the rally’s true purpose. Many of the messages conveyed were needed contributions to the public debate—especially the importance of peace-building, diplomacy and working as allies with the people of the Middle East who abhor terrorism. But on some of the most vital issues, the rally so restricted its message that it no longer spoke to the actual questions that policymakers—and the American public—are facing. Platitudes about the “cycle of violence” will not tell us how to respond if diplomacy fails, or if it is believed that new attacks are imminent.

And because the rally’s platform ultimately rested on these platitudes, it allowed for and promoted assumptions that would have been made explicit, and likely rejected, in a more substantive agenda. No one could criticize a “respectful dialogue” with Middle Eastern nations. But the unstated assumption of many speakers, that the U.S. will never need to use limited force to prevent future terrorist attacks, was not and could not have been justified. For all our attempts to address the “roots” of terrorism—socioeconomic, political, religious—we cannot guarantee that we can avert it through kindness.

These calls to “stop our own violence and violence-supporting actions in Middle East”—including, presumably, support for Israel and sanctions on Iraq—shift the responsibility for the attack from the terrorists to the U.S. government. These policies can be questioned, but they must be maintained or dropped on their own merits, not merely because they are thought to encourage terrorists.

To treat American foreign policies as the ultimate causes of the Sept. 11 attack perverts the message of peace. It assumes that what terrorists dislike about America is also what Americans dislike about America, that they do not oppose our pluralism, our influence abroad, our resistance to their ideological fantasies; that, at some level, the attacks were justified; that if the United States were a more moral nation, they would not despise us so much; that the terrorists responsible for mass murder are fundamentally good people who would not hate without cause.

These assumptions are entirely belied by the monstrosity we have witnessed. They cannot be made true by the sincerest wish for peace.