Pity the Nation
I first encountered Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk’s monumental book about Lebanon, years ago in the stacks of the Cambridge Public Library. I opened it and was immediately gripped by the power and urgency of his writing. Here is one of many examples, from p. 214.
The third aircraft came from above our heads. Perhaps the pilot feared a ground-to-air missile attack, for he brought his plane down in a sharp twisting dive that made us all catch our breath. From his aircraft there emerged a number of balloons that exploded behind the jet in a blaze of phosphorus. The balloons spilled out of the plane in its crazy dive, tracing the pattern of its descent in a spiral staircase of green light and fire that trailed down the summer sky. Through the field-glasses I caught a momentary image of the F-16—drab-brown camouflage on its wings and the sun-glint sparkle of the cockpit canopy—before the blast waves came banging round us. From that fearsome wadi there came a ripple of explosions that spread along the river bed and sent those dark fingers of smoke jabbing upwards again, like a dead hand rising from the ground.
More than a decade later, I have finally read the book (taking occasional breaks to read other books). It is an overwhelming and distressing experience—distressing not only because of the suffering he describes, but because you find yourself savoring the language that he uses to describe it. Take out the political analysis, change some names, and you would be left with a great modern war novel.
The political analysis is too important to take out, though. Political discourse has become crude and polarized, especially in recent years. To ask why the 9/11 attackers destroyed the World Trade Center can get you labeled as a terrorist sympathizer. Suggesting that a massive “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad is a form of terrorism can get you labeled as unpatriotic. And simply to describe the actions of the Israeli Defense Force, as Fisk does, can get you labeled as anti-Semitic. And so it has proved.
Language itself is central to the book, and in laying bare the ways in which the debasement of language has led to the debasement of political discourse, Fisk is a modern Orwell.
At one point during the period when the PLO was based in Lebanon, when Syria had all but occupied the country, when Israel was launching attacks, and when Phalangist and other militias were battling for territory, Fisk says there were six armies in the country. None of them, he makes clear, were good guys. Each labeled its opponents as “terrorists.”
One of Fisk’s most useful recommendations—unhappily never heeded—is to retire that word. Terrorist is a word that spreads darkness rather than light. It shuts down critical thinking and encourages us to treat our opponents as less than human. Lebanon made the absurdity of the term especially plain, because (as Fisk argued to his editors at the London Times), an honest observer would conclude that if any of the armed factions were terrorist then they were all terrorist.
