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CounterPunch
January
18 / 19, 2003
An Unacceptable Helplessness
Will the Last
Person to Leave Turn Out the Lights?
By EDWARD SAID
One opens The New York Times on a daily basis
to read the most recent article about the preparations for war
that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion,
one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing
number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved
to the Persian Gulf area. 62,000 more soldiers were transferred
to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately intimidating
force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the
country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint relentlessness.
The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it
grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George
Bush proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the
population that is comparatively rich. The public education system
is in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans
simply does not exist. Israel asks for 15 billion dollars in
additional loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment
rates in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every
day.
Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably
costly war continue and continue without either public approval
or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised indifference
(which may conceal great over-all fear, ignorance and apprehension)
has greeted the administration's war- mongering and its strangely
ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by
North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction
to speak of, the US plans a war; in the case of North Korea,
it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating
difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for North
Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation
appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians,
regional experts, administration officials, journalists have
repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as
Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus pre- dates
11 September, as I have shown in my books Orientalism and Covering
Islam. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added
the authority of the United Nation's Human Development Report
on the Arab world which certified that Arabs dramatically lag
behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women's
rights. Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that
Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system is a
disaster, in effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide
bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers
(like Osama Bin Laden) but also by governments who are supposed
allies of the United States. The only "good" Arabs
are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture
and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences
of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves
or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired
American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of
print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam
enough, we need to do more about driving away the specter of
Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited,
ideological rubbish. Only what we, and our American instructors,
say about the Arabs and Islam -- vague re- cycled Orientalist
cliches of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard
Lewis -- is true. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough.
"We" need to join modernity, modernity in effect being
Western, globalised, free- marketed, democratic -- whatever those
words might be taken to mean. (If I had the time, there would
be an essay to be written about the prose style of people like
Ajami, Gerges, Makiya, Talhami, Fandy et. al., academics whose
very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity and a hopelessly
stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them).
The clash of civilisations that George
Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a
preemptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result
in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change and
forcible modernisation a l'americaine. Never mind the bombs and
the ravages of the sanctions which are unmentioned. This will
be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his
men and replace them with a re-drawn map of the whole region.
New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world
altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will
welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about their
past sufferings. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying
situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force
capable of stopping Sharon and Mofaz, who bellow their defiance
to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we
destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people
continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement
that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the
West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60- ton American-made Israeli
bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums
of agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for
132 children. The United Nations stands by, looking on as its
resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas,
George Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the 16-year-old
Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority
offers a return to peacemaking, and presumably, to Oslo. Having
been burned for 10 years the first time, Arafat seems inexplicably
to want to have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make
declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting
their willingness to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably
though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing to
go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry,
dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in
the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as
their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for
the average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than
to see his or her leaders kneel as supplicants before the Americans?
In this entire panorama of desolation,
what catches the eye is the utter passivity and helplessness
of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its
servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move
troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but
the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland
refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military bases
in our territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding
helplessness?
The largest power in history is about
to launch and is unremittingly reiterating its intention to launch
a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful
regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy
the Baathi regime but to re-design the entire region. The Pentagon
has made no secret that its plans are to re-draw the map of the
whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and many borders
in the process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm when
it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty).
And yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats
of polite demurral in response. After all, millions of people
will be affected. America contemptuously plans for their future
without consulting them. Do we reserve such racist derision?
This is not only unacceptable: it is
impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million
Arabs wait passively for the blows to fall without attempting
a collective roar of resistance and a loud proclamation of an
alternative view? Has the Arab will completely dissolved? Even
a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to
pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of
history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed
utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses
nevertheless goes on functioning. Arab babies are born every
hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and
have children, they play, and laugh and eat, they are sad, they
suffer illness and death. There is love and companionship, friendship
and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly
misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living
despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab leaders
and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty gestures
at the so-called "Arab street" invented by mediocre
Orientalists.
But who is now asking the existential
questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left
to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic
sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments --
no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom -- sit back
in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens
and ships out more soldiers and F-16's to deliver the punch.
The silence is deafening.
Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones
broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic
to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering.
Huge, expensive armies. For what?
This is not a matter of party or ideology
or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich
used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernisation
and certainly globalisation are not the answer for what threatens
us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of
secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and
endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and
history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great
vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that, and
bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that
our political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce
a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors,
they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think of
survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the
present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air and the lives
dependent on each other for existence? No one seems to be in
charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English
that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness,
our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when our strength
is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave
please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval
that will leave very little standing and perilously little left
even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for
extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively
to demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to
the wreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial
matter of regime change, although God knows that we can do with
quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another
offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live
in peace, another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy.
Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision
for our future that isn't based on a script written by Donald
Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power
and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
Yesterday's
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January 11
/ 12, 2003
Omar al-Qattan
How
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"The Coup Lacked Professionalism"
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Read
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