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October
8, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn
Flashes
and Plumes of Fire
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
How
Jimmy Carter and
I Started the Muj
Philip Agee
The
USA and Terrorism
Mahajan
and Jensen
A
War of Lies
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance
Builds an Airport
October
7, 2001
John Pilger
Hitchens'
Slurs
Tariq
Ali
Who
Said History
Stopped Being Ironical?
October
6, 2001
Vijay
Prashad
US
War Aims
Kevin
Gray
The
Trap:
Blacks and 9/11
October
5, 2001
Ronnie
Gilbert
Déjà
Vu: The FBI's War
on Civil Liberties
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban
Cluster Bombs
Dave
Marsh
John
Brown, Woody Guthrie
and the Secret Music of 9/11
Babak
Nahid
A
Suspect's Perspective
October
4, 2001
David
Vest
Send
in the Cons
Robin
Blackburn
Road
to Armageddon
Noam
Chomsky
Chatting
with Chomsky
Tony
Blair
The
Dossier on bin Laden
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Those CIA Killing
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Crop Duster
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October 11, 2001
West Is As West Does
By Hani Shukrallah
"[A] war has been declared
upon Western societies. It is mistaken to view the events of
11 September solely as a war on America. It was an act of war
in America, on the West," writes Anne McElvoy in the Independent.
The statement/theme, or variations upon it, is being shouted
from the rooftops, by politicians, media people, scholars and
commentators, liberals and conservatives, right-wingers and social
democrats; out-and-out racists, bible-thumping televangelists
and pro-lifers no less vehemently than strictly p.c. feminists,
gay rights activists and militant vegetarians. Thoroughly interchangeable
with the West have been two old but robustly born again self-
designations: "the civilised world" and "the free
world."
So not only did Bin Laden allegedly
bring down the "Soviet Empire," he has now also achieved
what that empire in all its nuclear might was unable to do in
many decades: he has recreated the "West" as a coherent,
cohesive monolith in which left-wing liberals such as Ms McElvoy
can bask in the identity, values and civilisation they share
not only with Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, but also with
George W Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and -- why not? they're "Western"
too -- the manifold White supremacists, Paki-bashers and Neo-Nazi
skinheads who, indeed, have been prophetic in their warnings
of the dire threat the non-Western world poses to the West.
Credited with so much power,
it is little wonder that the Saudi millionaire's interviews read
as the ravings of a megalomaniac.
So attached is Ms McElvoy to
her "war against the West" thesis that she makes a
clumsy and transparent attempt at bluffing her way to proving
it. The target, the World Trade Center, is apparently sufficient
proof to McElvoy that the terrorists' evil design was directed
not at the US alone, but at the West as a whole. Why? Because
it housed people from many different nationalities, she writes
in complete seriousness. She skims, however, over the obvious
corollary to her argument, which is that these "different
nationalities" were all "Western." I don't have
access to a civilisational breakdown of the thousands of men
and women who were heartlessly murdered in the twin towers of
the World Trade Center, but I would be very interested to find
out how Ms McElvoy would have gone about making such a distribution.
For instance, we know that some 100 British nationals were killed
in the attack; how many of them, one has to wonder, were of South
Asian origin (including turbaned/bearded Sikhs and clean-shaven
Muslims)? Are they to be categorised as Western or non-Western?
Is a third-generation Briton of Indian origin Western or non-Western?
And what of African Americans?
White Anglo-Saxons may (however improbably) trace their "Western
origins" back to the Ancient Greeks -- who actually belonged
to a Mediterranean civilisational bloc, which was even then in
close and constant contact with other civilisational blocs in
east Africa and south and east Asia. If she thinks about it,
McElvoy will discover that, despite their contribution to "Western"
American culture, the "Western" roots of African Americans
may plausibly be traced back merely to the '60s and '70s of the
last century -- a dubious privilege they won, paradoxically,
by reclaiming their African heritage. And take the Jews. Notwithstanding
Marx, Freud and Einstein (the very hallmarks of modern Western
civilisation), "Western societies" slaughtered six
million Jews before affording them the privilege of being constructed
as "Western" -- and then only in conjunction with the
creation of the state of Israel, through which Jewish colonists
in Palestine proved that a Jew could be as "Western"
as the next man. He too could plunder, dispossess and subjugate
a de- humanised "non-Western" population.
Define "Western."
It is not race, God forbid, though there are still a great many
people in "Western societies" -- not least in Mr Berlusconi's
government -- who would argue otherwise. Clearly, it can no longer
be defined in Cold War terms -- Western democracies versus the
"totalitarianism" of the Eastern Soviet system. Ah,
but what of Western culture, and even more significantly, Western
values? This, surely, is fine and dandy, especially if one refrains
from such faux pas as the Italian prime minister's confidence
in "the superiority of our civilisation" over the Muslim
one. But here is the rub: Western values, it is widely accepted
by almost everybody (including both Berlusconi and Bin Laden),
entail such things as democracy and human rights, the emancipation
and equality of women, secularism, reason and tolerance.
Do they now? Perhaps Messrs
Bush, Blair, Chirac and Schroeder (who resolutely and hysterically
refused to proffer an apology for slavery and colonialism) would
explain to the less fortunate non-Westerners among us where these
Western values were during the plunder of Africa and the enslavement
of millions of its people. And what of the overthrow of the elected
governments of Mosadegh in Iran, Sukarno in Indonesia and Allende
in Chile, to name but a few of the more grisly examples? What
of the vicious dictatorships the "West" put in place,
bolstered and supported there and throughout the "non-Western"
world?
Where were Western values when
millions of people in the non-Western world were killed and tortured
by Western-government-sponsored butchers and villains such as
the Shah of Iran, Indonesia's Suharto or Zaire's Mobutu? And
what of the napalming and murder of two million Vietnamese, or
the bitter irony of Western support for Pol Pot's bloodthirsty
brand of "communism"?
And what of Francism, Fascism
and Nazism -- why are they not products of "Western civilisation"
as well? Does McElvoy know that the Muslim Brothers (the fountainhead
from which today's militant Islamists can trace their beginnings)
started their political life in the late 1920s as "brown
shirts," that they drew inspiration and ideological sustenance
from that particular brand of Western civilisation?
"Berlusconi and civilisation
do not mix," was the title of a devastating Leader published
by the Guardian on 28 September. Mr Berlusconi, said the leader,
"is living proof that there is nothing inherently superior
about western civilisation." It went on to describe the
Italian prime minister as a megalomaniac "who has compared
himself with Justinian, Napoleon and Jesus," a politician
who was twice convicted of corruption and who has brought post-fascist
and racist parties into his coalitions. All in all, the Italian
premier has proven a grave embarrassment from whom various Western
leaders have hastened to disassociate themselves. But one has
to wonder whether he was merely saying what many others, including
such liberal-minded people as McElvoy, are too ashamed (consciously
or unconsciously) to express openly. Because if such things as
democracy, rationalism, human rights and women's equality are
to be hailed as exclusively and/or essentially Western values,
it is only natural for those who uphold them to consider Western
civilisation to be superior to other civilisations that do not.
It so happens, however, that
we -- in the non-Western world -- have a life-and- death stake
in the struggle for democracy and human rights. Bin Laden and
his cohorts are not a function of an inherent hatred of democracy
by "Islamic civilisation," but of its increasing obliteration
at the hands of "Western"-driven capitalist globalisation.
CP
Hani Shukrallah writes for the Cairo-based Al-Ahram
Weekly, where this column originally appeared.
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