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December 12, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December 12,
2001
The Nonsense Mantras
of Our Times
By Ilija Trojanow and
Ranjit Hoskote
What's the world like?
A flock of sheep.
One falls into the ditch,
the rest jump in.
Kabir
(Sakhi: 240, The Bijak of Kabir, trans. Linda Hess
and Shukdev Singh)
On TV screens across the globe, for more than
two months now, the sheep have been jumping into the ditch without
a bleat of protest. What's worse, they believe that's the way
to go, the way of justice and salvation. Kabir's acerbic stanza
accurately describes the debate in the mainstream media following
the events of September 11. Legions of experts and viewers have
committed themselves to an absurdly simplistic and Manichean
account of the world, in which President Bush and his cast of
international supporters are portrayed as God's good men, arrayed
in battle against maniacal fiends in turbans, baggy robes and
sandals, who threaten the world's sanity and security.
Within weeks, the debate on terrorism
and global conflict has been reduced to a mumbo-jumbo of self-justifying
mantras, which have instantly become axiomatic. Foremost among
these is the infamous "clash of civilisations" hypothesis
most often associated with a certain Samuel Huntington, but which
has a genealogy of its own, leading back to such justifications
of imperialism as Arnold Toynbee's schema of antagonistic civilisational
blocs.
The Toynbee-Huntington vision emphasises
the fault-lines among "eight or nine" cultural-political
blocs arbitrarily defined as 'civilisations', and seen to exist
in a state of conflict based on profoundly distinct cultural
values. In Huntington's view, the great clash of our times, which
takes the place of the Cold War face-off between the USA and
the USSR, is that between Islam and the West. After September
11, he has popularly and uncritically been hailed as the prophet
of the age.
The truth is somewhat less dramatic,
if no less violent, and has more to do with fundamental differentials
of economic and political power than with fundamental cultural
differences. Civilisations, as the proper scrutiny of historical
evidence would show, are marvellous hybrids: they have never
been pure, self-consistent entities. Historically, they have
evolved through exchange and synthesis, through the encounter
of different races, religions and philosophies. What is of interest,
in the study of civilisations, is not the differences that hold
people apart, but the heritage that people are able to share
across borders.
A more tenable view than the "clash
of civilisations" is that the battle-lines run through societies,
not between civilisations or nation-states. A US pacifist, who
believes in the necessity of social justice, is worlds apart
from an American investment banker, whose clients include Lockheed
and Unocal, and who believes that each man is master of his own
destiny. An urbane West European, who practises yoga, has a deeply
informed interest in African art, listens to reggae, and travels
the world in search of cultural inspiration, is equidistant from
both the West European skinhead and the Bajrang Dal storm-trooper.
Has there ever really been a clash of
civilisations? Did Venice and the Ottoman Empire clash because
of differences in their interpretation of Abraham's decisions,
or because they were locked in a struggle for control over the
Mediterranean maritime trade? And why, throughout the Mughal
and colonial periods in India, did both elite and subaltern-resistance
movements comprise coalitions of Hindus and Muslims, if Hinduism
and Islam are fundamentally irreconcilable? Huntington's theory
cannot explain why the Rajputs supported the Mughals, why Akbar
created a culture of multi-religious dialogue and understanding,
why some of Aurangzeb's highest-ranking military commanders were
Hindu, why the sanyasin-fakir resistance movement against the
East India Company embodied an alliance of Hindu and Muslim ascetic-warriors,
and why the Indian National Congress comprised the enlightened
leadership of the Hindu and the Muslim communities.
Civilisation can never be defined in
absolute and static terms. It is a fragile construct: a constant
process of self-evaluation rather than a stable cultural structure.
And once it tears apart under economic or political strain, it
can quickly uncover the most terrifying barbarism. No one has
depicted this syndrome more poignantly than Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness; the most enduring and unfortunate example
of this syndrome is the rise of Nazism from the rich soil of
German culture.
Unfortunately, the assumptions of the
West, which are based on binary models, continue to be projected
upon the former colonised world, often with the devastating effect
of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The worst example of this tendency
may be summed up as the 'principle of ethnicity as the basis
of political conflict'. Put to excellent use by the Western powers
in such situations of conflict as Lebanon and Rwanda, this principle
has most recently been introduced into the Afghanistan debate,
immediately following the flight of the Taliban regime from Kabul
and the entry of the Northern Alliance into the Afghan capital.
For the notion of the tribe is accompanied by the stereotypes
of primitive, tribal behaviour: barely had the Northern Alliance
marched into Kabul, when the Western media came abuzz with loose
talk of 'revenge killings' and 'warlordism' (the US Air Force's
killing of Afghan civilians is not, apparently, to be categorised
under the former rubric; and the strategists at the Pentagon,
calibrating the precise degree of offensive force, are not warlords,
since neither Powell and Rice favours turbans).
As has been well established, 'tribes'
were often invented by anthropologists ranging unfamiliar terrain
driven by a classificatory mania. Never mind that the identities
on the ground were often shifting in character, language defining
one affiliation, clan system a second, religious sect a third,
and political allegiance a fourth. Also, identities and allegiances
could change, leaving the already inaccurate taxonomy further
behind; but the so-called tribal differences, once established
by the Western knowledge system, were exploited by the Western
power system through the honourable imperialist formula: Divide
and rule!
Until the Soviet occupation, ethnicity
played a minor role in the modern Afghan consciousness. After
1978, however, the foreign powers which interfered in Afghanistan
(and kept the civil war going) raised and supported militias
that were organised on ethnic lines. Within this scheme, the
success of the Taliban was due only to the fact of a vacuum in
Pashtun representation. Nevertheless, Kabul's Pashtun population
has welcomed the predominantly Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance
troops. Should the foreign powers continue to insist on bizarre
ethno-federalist structures with quotas, veto rights and reservation
proportional to clout in the post-Taliban scenario, this would
spell disaster for Afghanistan's future.
There will always be forces that will
instrumentalise differences. What is needed is a vision of unity,
a vision of what the Afghan people really need to invent themselves
out of and beyond the quagmire in which they have been thrust
by superpower politics and the cynical power-games of regional
powers.
It's Religion,
Stupid!
The current debate proceeds from broad,
unquestioned certainties about the nature and history of Islam,
certainties that are as dogmatic as the supposed dogmas that
they oppose. This critique-by-media of Islam proceeds on the
basis of certain 'core Western values', founded on the principles
of the Enlightenment, that are assumed to lie at the base of
all civilised discourse. Interpreted correctly, these core Western
values enshrine the method of radical doubt, which is central
to Enlightenment discourse, all the way from Spinoza and Descartes
to Derrida and Foucault. This method helps us to unmask religion
as ideology, to examine the overt practices and concealed motives
of ideology, the manner in which it masks a power structure and
the interests of a dominant class. Unfortunately, the current
rhetoric of the West -- in government and media -- proceeds in
complete contravention of this heritage.
The academic gurus are no better. According
to Francis Fukuyama, "Islam is the only cultural system
that regularly seems to produce people like bin Laden or the
Taliban, who reject modernity lock, stock and barrel." As
a matter of fact, it is precisely the lock, stock and barrel
of modernity that Islamic extremism has taken up, since military
technology was the aspect of Western civilisation that the colonialists
exported most vigorously (read, for example, T. E. Lawrence's
classic of romantic-Orientalist autobiography, The Seven Pillars
of Wisdom). Even today the West blesses the world with lock,
stock and barrel worth billions of dollars. Consider, also, the
various unexamined axioms built into this ill-fated sentence.
"The only cultural system?"
Three decades ago, such irrational violence was believed to be
the monopoly of the Vietcong, who then yielded place to the Khmer
Rouge. Were the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge closet believers
in the Word of Allah? Has North Korea, regarded by US leaders
through the 1990s as the major scourge of humankind, fallen under
the influence of the mullahs? "Regularly produces people
like bin Laden"? How many bin Ladens have the 1.2 billion
Moslems produced? 50? Or 500? And to blame Islam for the disaster
in Afghanistan, a country repeatedly abused by Britain, the Soviet
Union and the USA, is to indulge in despicable cynicism.
Western Values,
and the US as Their Guardian
Instead of scrupulous attention to the
historical record and the application of the core Western values,
then, the Western media offer us nonsensical mantras that, by
repetition, have acquired the air of spiritual truths. Paul Pillar's
formulation, in his Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy,
sums these up briskly: "The longevity of the principles
(of US counter-terrorist policy) attest to their firm grounding
in an American political, moral, and legal tradition that places
high value on the rule of law and on the idea that malevolence
should be punished." To point out that this sentence has
no relation to reality would be an offence to the intelligence
of the reader.
Malevolence should be punished? The USA
has consistently supported states that sponsor terrorism, and
has itself committed acts of terrorism _- for instance, the Contra
war against Nicaragua, as a result of which the US government
was tried, found guilty and mandated to pay substantial reparations
by the International Court, The Hague. But since the law is only
respected if it reaches a verdict in the bully's favour, the
USA didn't part with a dime.
The rule of law? Once in a while, the
truth shines through in an article or a statement:: "If
we are hamstrung by absolutist definitions of friend and foe,
and democracy and dictatorship, our chances of victory will the
diminished" (Robert D. Kaplan, in the New York Times).
This is refreshingly honest, by comparison with the (oxy)moronic
euphemisms of the propaganda machine (Stanley Hoffmann, writing
in the New York Review of Books, praises the "benign
US hegemony").
As for free speech, a central tenet of
the Western value system, Washington's approach to the fair reporting
of the war has been to ask the Emir of Qatar to curb Al Jazeera,
the only free TV channel in the Arab world. The Emir, wily Oriental
that he no doubt is, took refuge in the Fifth Amendment!
In other words: One rule for the West,
another for the others. This illiberal attitude within the liberal
tradition goes back to J S Mill, that fountainhead of European
liberalism who opposed the idea of self-determination for the
world's colonised peoples. This colonialist ideology has not
yet been eradicated from the Western mind, and though we have
achieved a sort of globalism in terms of mass communications
and trade, we are still a long way from evolving a global ethics,
that would guide the relations among nations and peoples. Without
being as ambitious as the Advaita, we would have achieved a great
change if every human life could be held to have the same and
equal value.
Illusion of
a "Safe and Comfortable World"
The worst genocide in recent times took
place in Rwanda, and left close to a million people dead. UN
peacekeepers pulled out; the complicity of France in supporting
and arming the mass murderers became clear. But there was hardly
a ripple of public disquiet, as the radical artist Alfredo Jaar
chillingly demonstrates in his elegiac installations, 'Let There
Be Light' and 'The Eyes of Gutete Emerita'. These installations
are situated within a performance during which Jaar flashes a
sequence of US magazine covers and narrates, in parallel, the
events taking place Rwanda in the same weeks. While the numbers
of those butchered rises, and the nature of the slaughter becomes
more and more feral, Time and Business week continue
to put other, more US-centric matters on their covers. The genocide
might well have been unfolding on another planet.
No minutes of silence were maintained
for the victims of the Rwandan genocide; no candlelight vigils
were held in their memory, no celebrity-endorsed prayer meetings
were convened. On the contrary, the shameful involvement of functionaries
of the Roman Catholic Church in the genocide was glossed over:
no commentator was inspired to publish vicious diatribes against
Christianity as a cultural system that regularly breeds blood-thirsty
maniacs. But let's not forget that we are only talking of a million
dead blacks. There have been worse times, but hardly more hypocritical
ones.
As against the complete global and certainly
Western apathy towards the one million victims of the Rwandan
genocide, September 11 is seen as epochal and apocalyptic for
the whole world. The emphasis is on the supposedly sudden burst
of dramatic violence into the lives of an otherwise happy and
peaceable America.
The blissful ignorance or deliberate
self-delusion of the Western elites is eloquently, if also comically,
illustrated by the Tory MP Bernard Jenkins' view from the charmingly
pastoral locale of North Essex: The events of September 11, in
the worthy MP's opinion, "shattered the illusion of a safe
and comfortable world." On the other hand a journalist in
Bihar wrote, a few days after the attacks on New York, that such
horrors would hardly make an impression on a Bihari, who has
to endure murder and terror on a daily basis. The world is, in
reality, far more similar to Bihar than it is to New York or
North Essex, and the last few decades have witnessed an increasing
global Biharisation.
Not only are we speaking of increased
violence in the Third World, but we also refer to the routine
violence of American life. George Bush, in his address to the
nation on 7 October, bravely asserted that "we defend...
the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children
free from fear". This sentiment does not cover even the
inner cities of his own country, the Bihars within the USA.
In fact, the only novel feature about
the 11 September kamikaze attacks is that, for the first time,
people from the world's powerless hinterlands have struck at
the very heart of the imperium, shattering the myth of the invincibility
of the continental USA.
War on Terror:
War or Terror?
The definition of terrorism is conspicuous
by its absence. If terrorism is an attack on civilians or civilian
objects with the intent to terrorise the people or the government,
then the war on terror should be a war on the whole world order,
a system of permanent terror for three-quarters of mankind. By
distinguishing between State and non-State terror, the main culprits
are left out, and by differentiating between "our friends
and our foes", it is narrowed down to a ridiculous proportion:
bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In the cartoon-strip
style of argument pursued by the Western powers, these isolated
figures are the chief proponents of terror, promulgators of violent
manifestos and makers of catastrophic weapons.
On the other hand, as some clear-sighted
commentators have pointed out, the USA has supported (and continues
to support) states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who are probably
more to blame for the attacks on New York than the Taliban. And
what about the ongoing direct involvement of the "coalition
against terror" in terror? There are an estimated 500 million
small arms and light weapons in the world, and they have killed
2 million children in the last decade of the 20th century, according
to UNICEF estimates. And these killing-machines are produced
mainly by the states that are permanent members of the Security
Council and enjoy the absurd privilege of a veto. The same global
powers, individually or jointly, block all initiatives against
weapons and war -_ most recently, for instance, the international
agreement on land-mines. Surely the production and sale of weaponry
for the purpose of profit qualifies as complicity in terrorism?
You don't have to be a fanatic to be a murderer: the military-industrial
complex is governed by suave, pleasant men actuated by family
values, men who keep their eyes focused on spreadsheets rather
than manifestos.
The definition of terrorism is kept unclear,
not only because the phenomenon covers a multiplicity of changing
approaches and contexts, but because such a lack of clarity leaves
states a free hand to deal with opposing forces. We see here
a shifting game of legitimising self-interest; there is no moral
focus to the debate over war and terrorism. There has, in fact,
been little moral development since antiquity, despite the persistent
talk of Western values. The reality has been aptly described
by Thucydides: "They that have odds of power exact as much
as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can
get." The fashionable argument of the 'just war' is nothing
more than an effort at masking this truth.
A just war would assume a consistency
in dealing with the "evil". When some murderers get
punished and others get to enjoy the beaches of Florida, how
can we take justice seriously? Not to speak of the death of civilians,
which the last 'just war' against Iraq took into account so blithely.
Such deaths are covered under the bland Pentagon doctrine of
"collateral damage". Indeed, if the murder of civilians
is the criterion for defining terrorism, as what should we regard
the US action in Afghanistan?
Even a leading proponent of the just-war
theory like Michael Walzer admits that "when the world divides
radically into those who bomb and those who are bombed, it becomes
morally problematic, even if this bombing is justifiable."
Can we speak of war at all? Doesn't war presume a matching of
combatants? This campaign is more reminiscent of punitive actions,
which were carried out during the Second World War and the Vietnam
War. When you can not catch the perpetrators (in this case because
they have already brought themselves to justice) you destroy
something of their world as retribution. "That will teach
them a lesson," the colonial officer would say, after having
torched a village to signal his "benign hegemony" in
as dramatic a fashion as possible.
"It is important to stress,"
Walzer writes, "that the moral reality of war is not fixed
by the actual activities, but by the opinions of mankind."
The bombing of Aghanistan is just, only because it has been called
so by the powers involved in the bombing. No one forces us to
accept this notion. Every human being has the duty to try and
reach an opinion of his own, and to voice it.
Frankenstein
Inc. (Made in the USA)
The lab is well set up and we all know
how it works: Dr Frankenstein of the CIA arms his monster, then
leaves him to his own devices. The monster begins to misbehave.
He no longer listens to his liaison officers from the CIA. He
cuts the wires that link him to the State Department. He is out
of control. Therefore he is identified as the enemy, magnified
in the imagination, and labelled an avatar of Hitler. Then the
command is issued: Shoot at Sight.
In the good old days of the Cold War,
some of the demons and anti-Christs were made in the "Empire
of Evil". Today, they are all bastard children of the "Empire
of Good", serially stigmatised as their creators run out
of enemies. It is a well-known fact that Saddam Hussein, Noriega,
bin Laden all began on the right side of the US, and that the
CIA funded the Taliban. Curiously, only a few months ago, the
Bush administration gave the Taliban a subsidy of $43 million
as a reward for suppressing the drug trade. But sometimes the
monster takes Dr Frankenstein for a ride: the opium that was
burned was the surplus, destroyed to keep prices high in the
narcotics trade.
It is worthwhile comparing the Taliban
to the Khmer Rouge, that other bizarre and genocidal regime (and
let's not forget the US outcry against Vietnam for toppling Pol
Pot, or the common criticism of Tanzania when it toppled Idi
Amin_s regime of horror). Both came to power after devastating
wars. We speak of violent people as though they were trained
to be violent by their traditions. But what else would people
be in an atmosphere of total and pervasive war? Violence breeds
violence _ you don't have to be General Manon of the Northern
Alliance, fighting continuously for the last 22 years, to realise
that. This, rather than cultural determinism, is by far the most
convincing explanation for the rise of forces like the Taliban
and the Khmer Rouge.
And where the US has not produced Frankenstein
monsters by itself, it has infallibly set up laboratories for
their production: Iran is the perfect example. The democratic
government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1951-1953)
came closest to Western values, among all 'Islamic' governments
and represented a modern, educated, tolerant and inclusive Iranian
vision. This was systematically destroyed by the Western powers,
through a CIA-sponsored destabilisation programme and coup, which
culminated in the restoration of the corrupt and repressive Pahlavi
regime. Mossadegh's vision embodied precisely the values that
today's analysts claim to find wanting in Islam; his only crime
was that he had dared to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,
bringing down upon himself the wrath of the West for challenging
First World control over Iran's oil reserves.
America and/or
Critical Difference
Given the tenor of the current debate,
our arguments here would automatically qualify as being anti-American.
This cry of anti-Americanism is currently the weapon of all rhetorical
weapons -_ and the most absurd one at that. Not only does it
imply a homogenised unity of American society, culture and government,
or a singular American identity (into which factors of race,
gender, region and class are quietly collapsed), but it also
negates the possibility of maintaining critical difference. To
love jazz music does not mean to support the bombing of Afghanistan;
to admire the tradition of free speech is not to endorse the
idiocy of corporate media.
It is impossible to have grown up as
a cosmopolitan citizen in today's world without having been inspired
by the triumphs of the US in academia and the arts. However,
the beauty of US culture is that these accomplishments were born
out of an attitude of dissent, questioning, confrontation, self-direction
and self-affirmation. Thus, to criticise US foreign policy is
to uphold the best and highest impulses in US culture.
The mediation of dissent through art
and the sustenance of the human spirit through culture are not,
of course, confined to US culture. We conclude with a traditional
love poem from Herat (the American spell-check on our computers
automatically and repeatedly alters the unfamiliar Afghan place-name
from 'Herat' to 'Heart', but the error may be apposite). Since
all music, even traditional Afghan music, was banned by the Taliban,
this song has not, perhaps, been heard in the city of its origin
for years. Its poignancy underscores the tragedy of what two
decades of war has done to this society:
"When the waterfalls cry,
when the sheep cry,
my heart thinks of Syamui.
How long must I cry, O Syamui?
As the rubies come out of the mines,
As the sun shines over the mountains at dawn,
So too does Syamui show herself
on the roof of her house."
In Afghanistan today, the rubies are
mined to finance the internecine warfare, and Syamui has fled
into the cellar, afraid to show herself in public, her future
menaced as much by the Taliban whip-squads as by the rain of
American bombs. CP
Ranjit Hoskote
is an Indian cultural theorist. He is also Assistant Editor,
The Hindu, Bombay (India). Ilija Trojanow is a German
novelist, and Special Correspondent for the
Suddeutsche Zeitung, and currently lives in Bombay (India).
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