Letters to the Editor
s. sen
Published Letters: 74 Editor's Choice: 12
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Who's smug?
[Read the article: How Opal Mehta saved our lives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sandip Roy's strange narrative of the superhuman abilities of Indians is probably meant to be ironic, but it doesn't quite work. Instead, he comes across as smugly self-congratulatory. He claims, essentially, that while there are a few ordinary Indians who should be accepted in their ordinariness, the rest of us in the diaspora - Roy included, of course - are superhuman doctors, programmers and spelling-bee robots.
While there are all sorts of things that are wrong with this vision, I will restrict myself to pointing out two. One is that Roy, like much of the upper-class diaspora, seems to live in a world of willed blindness. He does not see the rest of the South Asian diaspora: the cab drivers, convenience store clerks, motel owners, and waiters in Indian restaurants. Are they also supermen with photographic memories and IIT degrees, to be fondly admonished for pushing their children a little too hard?
The other problem is that the smugness of the doctors, computer geeks and spelling-bee parents is essentially fascist: a nasty mixture of self-satisfaction, cultural anxiety, disdain for others, and contempt for a liberal education. It is not coincidental that this elite segment of the Indian diaspora in North America and Britain is viscerally anti-Muslim, and a major contributor of money and political support to the Hindu right in India. Sandip Roy may not subscribe to that ideology, but he does seem to share their vision of what it means to be South Asian in the contemporary world.
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Hello? Editors? Anybody home?
[Read the article: How Opal Mehta saved our lives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some of the letters on this thread are overtly racist, not to mention ignorant. References to "wogs"? An "Indian mafia" in the schools that specializes in plagiarism? Either there needs to be some editorial vigilance that might keep this trash out of the magazine, or the letters section should be restricted to registered members of Salon - and to people who have names. Most of the racist bilge seems to come from non-members who sign themselves "anonymous" or don't give any name at all. That would not be acceptable in a print journal, and there is no reason why it should fly online.
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Garbage
[Read the article: "The Lemon Tree"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The character returning to his old home is visiting a place "abandoned freely by his family on the recommendation of the Arab governments," huh, No Name Given? Tell that to the people massacred at Deir Yassin. And do give us your name, instead of hiding behind anonymity.
It is not necessary to be anti-Jewish or even anti-Israel to recognize that the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 was one of the tragedies of the 20th century. The history of the world we inhabit is made of such tragedies, and obviously they cannot be fully undone: Native Americans cannot entirely recover their lost lands, Indians and Pakistanis cannot 'go back' to their old homes on the other side of the border, and Palestinians cannot reclaim what they abandoned in 1948 without a radical and politically impossible restructuring of the Israeli state. What's done is done; the right of return, if it is ever acknowledged by the Israeli government, must necessarily be largely symbolic. But it takes an extraordinary moral stupidity and ignorance of history, comparable with Holocaust-denial, to deny the human cost of mass eviction, or to state that Palestinians "freely" abandoned their homes. It is further proof, as if any was needed, that Salon's 'open' letters policy has succeeded only in turning the magazine into a garbage dump.
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Neither unique nor surprising
[Read the article: Murtha: Marines killed civilians "in cold blood"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Haditha incident is probably not the only atrocity from the Iraq war, just as My Lai and the Tiger Force atrocities were not extraordinary in the context of the Vietnam War. Moreover, such incidents are not uniquely American; they are a part of nearly all counterinsurgency operations and many large wars.
Having said that, it's important to note that they are especially predictable in wars in which the enemy is perceived to be racially inferior: German operations in eastern Europe, Japanese operations in China, Pakistani operations in Bangladesh, Israeli operations in the occupied territories, and so on. Not surprisingly, the atrocious treatment of civilian populations is particularly commonplace in many of America's wars: the Indian wars on the frontier, the war to colonize the Philippines, the Pacific war, Vietnam, and now Iraq. Even today, the US military does little to discourage soldiers from seeing the enemy in racial terms: injuns and redskins have been replaced by gooks, skinnies and ragheads, but the implications are the same. Richard Drinnon has an excellent book, FACING WEST, which makes the cultural connections between Indian-fighting and subsequent wars. Much of the behavior that became commonplace in the Pacific and Vietnam - like collecting body parts as souvenirs - originated in the cavalry wars against Native Americans.
Perhas it is naive to expect that the enemy can be invested with humanity in wartime. Certainly it goes against the grain of present-day military training, which emphasizes that the enemy is nothing more than a target. Yet the idea of treating the enemy with respect also has a long pedigree in the history of warfare - it's called chivalry. To fight with chivalry requires not only that we not see the enemy as subhuman, but also that we see ourselves as human, i.e., imperfect and fallible. When we assume the identity of God's Chosen Nation, Leader of the Free World, and other such absurdities, that becomes impossible.