Почему США остаются в центре внимания мировых интеллектуалов: исторический контекст и современная реальность

There’s an idiom that appears on social media platforms every so often. This or that person, the idiom goes, “lives rent-free” in someone’s head. There is some merit to that claim. We cannot ignore silliness as a driver of public discussions. There is, however, a better and much more logical explanation for why some issues (or persons) remain in focus in the daily work of public intellectuals. For example, I have been given cause recently to reflect on the questions, “Why the US?” And, “Why now?” A response to those questions is shaped by at least three things. The most significant of these is history. With the act of writing it rests on a kind of elision between academic or scholarly interest ― call it intellectual interests if you will ― and a journalistic impulse. This column sits in the space between traditional intellectual discussion and journalism. I make no claims to “high culture”, nor complete objectivity or empty neutrality; intellectual honesty and integrity are far stronger and a better basis for presenting ideas. I use journalism as a tool to present preferred positions on specific topics, positions that are justified and which, I should admit, are biased one way or another. That does not necessarily invalidate whatever is written here. Starting with history. We are within an epochal turn in world affairs, somewhere between 1913 and 1945. Late last year I suggested that we were at a point in world affairs not unlike where we were in late 1913, the eve of another European 30-year war. Across those decades, the focus of public intellectuals shifted from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. These men lived “rent-free” in the heads of public intellectuals — mainly in Europe. The US media did not take Hitler seriously in the late 1920s and ’30s. He was ridiculed and dismissed as a fringe player, a comic figure who would fizzle out once he got into office. I suspect it had to do with the appeal of eugenics in the US in the 1920s. For a sense of it all, look at the Immigration Act and Virginia Eugenical Sterilisation Act of 1924. In Mein Kampf Hitler explicitly praised the US for its progress toward a völkisch (racial) conception of citizenship. In short, Germany in general, and Hitler in particular, deserved to live “rent-free” in the heads of public intellectuals. Fast forward to the early 21st century. We should make no bones about the fact that the US has remained engaged in hot and cold wars in the world since at least 1950. Modern wars are fought across several fronts, all with the same objective. As the elected leader of the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power, Donald Trump continues to open new fronts to America’s war on the world, shifting relentlessly between kinetic violence and diplomatic coercion. In any given week he might initiate the targeted assassination of fishermen accused of drug running, threaten to violate the territorial sovereignty of an ally such as Greenland or Canada, or kidnap a foreign head of state. American warfare includes systematic financial strangulation of entire societies such as Cuba since 1960, or Iran since 1979, and now with bombs raining down on people in Iran. These are the things that “live rent-free” in our heads ― as well they should. In journalistic terms, it has to do with proximity, relevance, timing and impact; the prices of consumer products are affected by war. Among all this, one deep concern I have is forced deflection and the selective morality that is at work when deciding what should be written. The deflection mirrors the way former US attorney-general Pam Bondi urged legislators to ignore the Epstein files and focus instead on stock exchange gains. It gets infinitely worse when moral asymmetry steps in and when universal ethical rules are replaced with purely tribal ones. A double standard emerges. When “they” commit an atrocity, it is because they are inherently cruel, wicked, animals, or subhuman. When “we” do the same it is described as an unavoidable by-product of conflict. The directive remains clear: if you’re going to write about the war, keep the focus entirely on what “they” do. But we cannot run from the world, as Walter Benjamin tragically learned in 1940, and nor should we ignore uncomfortable truths about it and ourselves. • Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission. Business Day