Part 2: Stereotypes and conversations you don't get at home, continued

In my last post I mentioned my shoarma guy, the Iraqi guy who hates Americans, and who teased me so openly about it. Shoarma guy intrigues me. I have gone back several times over the weeks to see him. When Sandy was in town I took her to meet him but I said to him, "You're not going to like her. She's American. Not German like me." The next time I went in he asked me, "Why you keep coming back here?" "I like your food," I told him. 

A couple of weeks ago after he brought out my shoarma, and no one else was there, I asked him, when are we going to talk about it? America, Iraq, his attitude? He was the one who first brought it up, after all. I asked him a question I thought he would find even-handed: What was better after Saddam and what was worse after Saddam? He said he didn't like to talk about it. He walked away. He got agitated. But after a while he came back and answered my question. 

"Before the war I had everything," he said. "After the war, I lost everything." Before the war, he didn't know what his neighbors were. After the war everybody has to know what you are. I didn't know what he meant by what you are, then he explained: He was a Christian. Before the war that didn't matter. After the war it was a tremendous problem.

There used to be an iron hand in Saddam, which was bad, he said, but after, there was anarchy, which was worse. He said, “Before the Americans came I had one Saddam. After, I had three thousand Saddams.” Everyone tries to take control, everyone tries to impose their will. It is chaos, he said, and especially unsafe for religious minorities. He moved to Amsterdam with his wife and children. Other relatives moved to America. To Michigan. They are happy in Michigan, he said. It appears to bother him a good deal. They pay taxes there, no doubt, that support America' wars. They help pay my salary, I thought, and I buy his shoarma. 

On his mobile phone, he showed me pictures he'd taken of his church in Baghdad. It was beautiful. But in the next photo it was desecrated and destroyed when local forces took control after the Americans removed Saddam's regime. He showed me pictures from inside the church of dead people. Awful pictures of half-persons who had been blown up. He asked me, quite earnestly, “What it was all for?” We both knew that the first pretext for the American invasion, the weapons of mass distraction, was untrue (if it was ever really believed in the first place). But since it wasn’t ever true, he wanted to know, what was the reason? What was the real reason America came? For what was everything taken away? For what? It is probably my own naïveté, but I didn't have an answer for him. Should I? Didn’t I help pay for it?

The pictures of his church, before and after, reminded me immediately of the desecrated synagogues of western Europe, including the one my father's family attended in Hechingen and the synagogue in Essen I visited earlier on this trip where my grandparents married, before everything went to hell. But those pictures I have only seen in museums and books, and now on the web. His pictures he took himself. In some ways they are similar. Far too similar, actually. But I am a fortunate descendant, not a witness, not a victim.

Do I understand? Could he possibly believe I do? I don't know if I do myself.

Can I say I opposed the war? 

Can I say I am sorry? Who knows. How can that matter now? I said it anyway.

This was one man, with one point of view; certainly there are others. Maybe even in Michigan. He is upset. He knows he should not hate innocent people who did not themselves perpetrate the war or decide to wage it. Hating innocent people is what the problem is, and we knew it.  Yet, he confessed with considerable discomfort now, that when he sees replays of the airplanes attacking America, he says, good.

One is not really allowed to have a frank discussion like this back home. It reminded me that in 2001, for a few moments, we tried. Americans asked, what in the world could we have done that would make people hate us so much? There was good reason to try at least to think about it. But before we tried too hard to understand anti-Americanism hypothetically, we waved the flag to defend ourselves against invaders. And that doesn't very well answer the shoarma guy's question, "for what?" 

I shared these impressions, and the story of three thousand Saddams, with my brother, Eric Walther, an astute history professor in Houston. Eric wrote back to me “I mean this sincerely, Joe, through my study of the past and growing older: The worst holocaust in history is the one that affected one's own people. The numbers really don't matter…”. 

There are lots and lots of sides to issues like this. I don't claim to know many. But I try to meet people who violate my stereotypes. Hear another point of view. Be a professor -- keep my mind open, learn something, teach something. And if I don’t wear the wrong shoes or carry too big a coffee cup, and try not to be too stupid, I try and violate a few stereotypes myself. Others' stereotypes. I hope this is what I am here to do, in part.

My disguise

"What’s the difference between a big shoarma and a small one," some new tourist asked while I was in the shoarma guy's shop one night. I answered for him: "Big is big and small is small." Shoarma guy laughed. I listened to him and showed him respect. We're getting along. 

See you in Cincinnati.

I have fallen a bit behind in blogging, and am trying to catch up. I've actually been home this week--in America--to see my wife, visit my students, and have lunch with my friends and colleagues. Drive my big car. Live in my big house... More next week from Amsterdam.