<nettime> Fwd: America attacked, Wasington razed -- in 1814

[Fatima Lasay <imaginero@yahoo.com>]

 --- Ferdi Bolislis <archipel@bigfoot.com> wrote: >
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 02:10:19 +0800
From: Ferdi Bolislis <archipel@bigfoot.com>
Subject: America attacked, Wasington razed -- in
1814

Americans Don't Understand That Their Heritage Is
Itself a Threat

September 23, 2001 

By CALEB CARR

We have heard a great deal of talk to the effect that the world will never
be the same after the attacks of Sept. 11, that we are living in a new
reality, and in one sense this is true. But this is not the first great and
violent historical turning point that the United States has faced.  In
other words, to put it as Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter might have, we have
been in this new world before. 

America experienced just such a prolonged moment during our own Civil War,
when not only armies but also civilians were slaughtered in horrifying
numbers because of a long-brewing clash between a dying, slavery-based
agrarian society and a vigorous, newly industrial modern state. We
weathered another during the days and years following Pearl Harbor, when
the majority of Americans had no idea if or where Japanese planes might
strike again and were later forced (as we have lately been) to reckon with
enemies who were willing to engage in suicidal attacks to achieve their
purpose. 

Yet perhaps the most immediately pertinent of such precedents is offered by
a much earlier conflict. In 1814, the United States was engaged in a bitter
war, on land and at sea, with the greatest power in the world, the empire
from which we had originally rebelled: Great Britain. 

Many analysts of the War of 1812 have tried to explain it as an economic or
political conflict of limited importance.  But it would have been hard to
convince the American civilians who suffered what amounted to terrorist
attacks by ruthless British raiding forces between 1812 and 1814 that the
conflict was either limited or explicable.  The British assaults were
astoundingly savage: women and children were mutilated and murdered along
with civilian men and soldiers in a deliberate attempt to break the
American people's will to fight. These efforts reached their culmination in
the last days of August 1814, when a squadron of British ships loaded with
soldiers and sailors sailed into Chesapeake Bay and up the Patuxent River
with a terrifying objective: to burn the city of Washington to the ground. 

The British force succeeded in this goal. By the night of Aug. 24, the
White House, the Capitol, the Library of Congress and many other buildings
emblematic of both the newborn capital city and the infant country itself
were engulfed in flames. The government had been evacuated at the last
minute, its officers (including President James Madison) scattering across
the countryside. British action against remaining American soldiers and
civilians continued to be, in many cases, merciless. 

The questions asked by Americans in the aftermath of this momentous event
were some of the same that I have heard all over our city and country in
recent days: Why here?  Why this? 

The War of 1812 had little to do with specific political grievances or
economic rivalries. It was prosecuted by the British because of a deep
anxiety over the spread of American democratic republicanism. Having seen
the bloody anarchy that had overtaken France during its revolution and
having watched the United States peacefully and dramatically multiply its
territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the British Empire -- a
stratified society still largely controlled by its aristocracy and
constitutional monarchy -- had grown deeply fearful that the spread of
American-style democratic rebellion would mean not only economic
competition abroad but also uprisings at home. In short, the British
gratuitously destroyed important structures in Washington (and killed many
innocent people) because those buildings were obnoxious symbols of American
values whose spread and propagation the London government feared would
spell the disempowerment of their own. 

The British were right to fear as much, for in time it was indeed the rise
of the United States that set the example for populations in colonies
around the world to seize their own destinies and put an end to the
imperial, socially regimented system on which British power depended.
True, in the 20th century the United States and Britain would become allies
in order to face the the common enemies of imperial Germany and, later,
Nazi and Japanese totalitarianism.  Nevertheless, it was the spread of
American values that put an end to the colonialism and imperialism that
were the practical and spiritual lifeblood of the British Empire. 

Similarly, it is the spread of American values -- individualistic,
democratic, materialistic and, yes, in many ways crass and exploitative
American values -- that terrorist groups and the traditionalist, socially
repressive societies that support them now fear.  This fear has driven them
to emulate the British forces of 1814 by damaging and destroying a group of
structures that are among the most familiar symbols of contemporary
American power. 

Thus the why. But why here? Washington is perhaps understandable, but why
New York? 

The engine that runs the juggernaut that is expansionist American
democratic capitalism (which is the force that opens the way for American
cultural predominance) is housed, chiefly, in a comparatively few
high-profile buildings at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.  Americans
look (or in the case of the World Trade Center, looked) on these buildings
as some of the most distinctive symbols of all that our city and nation can
achieve and have achieved.  

Our enemies in this war, by contrast, looked at them and saw -- still see
-- the death of their own values, their own ways of life, their effective
autonomy. Such perception breeds both malice and fear. Inside those
buildings, the people behind this attack believe, is where the end of the
societies they come from and the values that they live by was and is being
planned (whether consciously or not), and there is where the erosion must
be stopped. The terrorist obsession with the World Trade Center was, in
this light, not irrational. In fact it was, viewed in the context of a war
of cultures, entirely understandable. 

That context must now be fully realized by our side in this conflict. We
must all match the sudden comprehension and bravery of the hijacked
passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, who, realizing that their
plane was going to be used as a flying weapon of mass destruction,
immediately rose to challenge their captors, thus sacrificing their own
lives to prevent a fourth crash that could have killed thousands more
Americans. 

The people of this country, it has often been truly said, have a very bad
sense of their own heritage, and New Yorkers tend to be among the worst
offenders in this area.  We have been known to pull down historic
structures with remarkably little concern, to crumble and pave over our
past in order to make way for what we hope will be an even more profitable
future. But there are moments when we must overcome this blind tendency and
look to our history for both inspiration and solace. We know in our
collective memory the nature of this struggle; that understanding must now
move from our subconscious to the very forefront of our minds so that we
can accept the full dimensions of the conflict that will very soon engulf
the lives of not only New Yorkers and Washingtonians but all Americans. 

Yes, this is war, and in all likelihood it will be a vicious and sustained
one. What our enemies want is nothing short of an end to our predominance,
and they will not forsake terrorism until either they attain that result or
we make such behavior prohibitively, horrifyingly expensive. And this worst
assault on the United States in its history happened in New York City
because it symbolizes all that those same enemies loathe and fear most:
diversity, licentiousness, avarice and freedom. Now, as we go about the
process of adjusting ourselves to this new world of terrible conflict, we
can and must take heart from that one seemingly paradoxical historical
observation: both as New Yorkers and as Americans, we have been in this new
world before. 

Caleb Carr, a novelist and historian, is a contributing editor of ''MHQ:
The Quarterly Journal of Military History.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/magazine/23TERROR.2.html?ex=1002378721&ei=1&en=6816dbed16c5fc6d

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company 



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---
Fatima Lasay | fats@hoydigiteer.org | www.hoydigiteer.org
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