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March 30, 2003
Promoting cult of stupidity
Tariq Ali explains the hatred the oppressed of the third world feel for the west which has fostered their inequities and powerlessness. But, he feels, the Islamists with their route to the past offer no solution either
TRAGEDIES are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of September 11, 2001 are no exception... A torrent of images and descriptions has made these the most visible, the most global and the best-reported acts of violence of the last fifty years.
I want to write of the setting, of the history that preceded these events, of a world that is treated virtually as a forbidden subject in an increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity and extols the present as a process without an alternative, implying that we all live in a consumerist paradise. A world in which disappointment breeds apathy and, for that reason, escapist fantasies of every sort are encouraged from above.
The growing crisis in Argentina, a symbol of the dead-end that market-fundamentalizm had reached, came to a head on September 5, 2001. It was ignored. A multi-class uprising followed. Two presidents fell within the space of a fortnight.
The complacency of this world was severely shaken by the events of September 11. What took place — a carefully planned terrorist assault on the symbols of US military and economic power — was a breach in the security of the North American mainland, an event neither feared nor imagined by those who devise war-games for the Pentagon. The psychological blow was unprecedented. The subjects of the Empire had struck back.
I want to ask why so many people in non-Islamic parts of the world, were unmoved by what took place and why so many celebrated, in the chilling phrase of Osama bin Laden, an ‘America struck by almighty Allah in its vital organs’. In the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, people hugged each other in silence. In Porto Alegre, in the deep south of Brazil, a large concert hall packed with young people erupted in anger when a visiting black jazz musician from New York insisted on beginning his performance with a rendering of ‘God Bless America’. The kids replied with chants of ‘Osama, Osama!’ The concert was cancelled. There were celebrations on the streets in Bolivia. From Argentina the Mothers who had been demonstrating for years to discover how and when the local military had ‘disappeared’ their children refused to join the officially orchestrated mourning. In Greece the government suppressed the publication of opinion polls that showed a large majority actually in favour of the hits, and football crowds refused to observe the two-minute silence...
The necessity to explain these reactions does not mean justifying the atrocity of September 11. It is an attempt to move beyond the simplistic argument that ‘they hate us, because they’re jealous of our freedoms and our wealth’. This is simply not the case.
We have to understand the despair, but also the lethal exaltation, that drives people to sacrifice their own lives. If western politicians remain ignorant of the causes and carry on as before, there will be repetitions. Moral outrage has some therapeutic value, but as a political strategy it is useless. Lightly disguised wars of revenge waged in the heat of the moment are not much better. To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Capitalism has created a single market, but without erasing the distinctions between the two worlds that face each other across a divide that first appeared in the eighteenth, and became institutionalized, in the nineteenth century. Most of the twentieth century witnessed several attempts to transcend this division through a process of revolutions, wars of national liberation and a combination of both, but in the end capitalism proved to be more cunning and more resilient. Its triumph has left the first of these worlds as the main repository of wealth and the principal wielder of uncontrolled military power.
The second world, with Cuba the only exception, is governed by elites that either serve or seek to mimic the first. This closure of politics and economics produces fatal consequences. A disempowered people is constantly reminded of its own weakness... people become flustered, feel more and more helpless and nervous. Anger, frustration and despair multiply. They can no longer rely on the state for help. The laws favour the rich. So the more desperate amongst them, in search of a more meaningful existence or simply to break the monotony, begin to live by their own laws.
Willing recruits will never be in short supply. The propaganda of the deed — the homage paid by the weak to the strong — will endure. It is the response of atomized individuals to a world that no longer listens to politicians who have become interchangeable, to corporations one-eyed in the search for profits and global media networks owned by the self-same corporations and locked into a relationship of mutual dependence with the politicians. This is the existential misery that breeds insecurity and fosters deadly hatreds. If the damage is not repaired, sporadic outbursts of violence will continue and intensify.
Acts of violence depend neither on the will of an individual leader, however charismatic, nor on the structure of a single organization, the existence of one country or the fanaticism of a sinister religion, its believers quelled by the visions of a glorious afterlife. The violence, unfortunately, is systemic. It assumes varied forms in different parts of the globe. Nor is it the case that the bulk of this violence is directed against the United States. Religious fanatics of all hues often brutalize co-religionists whose purity is suspect or who are not as vigorous in their search for God and, as a result, are more critical of superstitions or empty and meaningless rituals...
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...What do the Islamists offer? A route to a past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. If the ‘Emirate of Afghanistan’ is the model for what they want to impose on the world then the bulk of Muslims would rise up in arms against them. Don’t imagine that either Osama or Mullah Omar represent the future of Islam. It would be a major disaster for the culture we both share if that turned out to be the case.
Would you want to live under those conditions? Would you tolerate your sister, your mother or the woman you love being hidden from public view and only allowed out shrouded like a corpse? I want to be honest with you. I opposed this latest Afghan war. I do not accept the right of big powers to change governments as and when it affects their interests. But I did not shed any tears for the Taliban as they shaved their beards and ran back home. This does not mean that those who have been captured should be treated like animals or denied their elementary rights according to the Geneva Convention, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, the fundamentalism of the Empire has no equal today. They can disregard all conventions and laws at will.
The reason they are openly mistreating prisoners they captured after waging an illegal war in Afghanistan is to assert their power before the world — hence they humiliate Cuba by doing their dirty work on its soil — and warn others who attempt to twist the lion’s tail that the punishment will be severe...
I’ve met many of our people in different parts of the world since September 11. One question is always repeated: ‘Do you think we Muslims are clever enough to have done this?’ I always answer ‘Yes’. Then I ask who they think is responsible, and the answer is invariably ‘Israel’. Why? ‘To discredit us and make the Americans attack our countries.’
I gently expose their wishful illusions, but the conversation saddens me. Why are so many Muslims sunk in this torpor? Why do they wallow in so much self-pity? Why is their sky always overcast? Why is it always someone else who is to blame? Sometimes when we talk I get the impression that there is not a single Muslim country of which they can feel really proud. Those who have migrated from South Asia are much better treated in Britain than in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States. It is here that something has to happen.
The Arab world is desperate for a change. Over the years, in every discussion with Iraqis, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians, the same questions are raised, the same problems recur. We are suffocating. Why can’t we breathe? Everything seems static. Our economy, our politics, our intellectuals and, most of all, our religion. Palestine suffers everyday. The west does nothing. Our governments are dead. Our politicians are corrupt. Our people are ignored. Is it surprising that some are responsive to the Islamists?
Who else offers anything these days? The United States? It doesn’t even want democracy, not even in little Qatar, and for a very simple reason. If we elected our own government they might demand that the United States close down its bases. Would it? They already resent al-Jazira television because it has different priorities from them.
It was fine when al-Jazira attacked corruption within the Arab elite. Tommy Friedman even devoted a whole column in praise of al-Jazira in the New York Times. He saw it as a sign of democracy coming to the Arab world. No longer. Because democracy means the right to think differently, and al-Jazira showed pictures of the Afghan war that were not shown on the US networks, Bush and Blair put pressure on Qatar to stop unfriendly broadcasts. For the west democracy means believing in exactly the same things that they believe. Is that really democracy?
If we elected our own government in one or two countries people might elect Islamists. Would the west leave us alone? Did the French government leave the Algerian military alone? No. They insisted that the elections of 1990 and 1991 be declared null and void. French intellectuals described the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) as ‘Islamo-fascists’, ignoring the fact that they had won an election. Had they been allowed to become the government, divisions already present within them would have come to the surface.
The army could have warned that any attempt to tamper with the rights guaranteed to citizens under the constitution would not be tolerated. It was only when the original leaders of the FIS had been eliminated that the more lumpen elements came to the fore and created mayhem. Should we blame them for the civil war, or those in Algiers and Paris who robbed them of their victory?
The massacres in Algeria are horrendous. Is it only the Islamists who are responsible? What happened in Bentalha, ten miles south of Algiers, on the night of September 22, 1997? Who slaughtered the five hundred men, women and children of that township? Who? The Frenchman who knows everything, Bernard-Henri Levy, is sure it was the Islamists who perpetrated this dreadful deed. Then why did the army deny the local population arms to defend itself. Why did it tell the local militia to go away that night? Why did the security forces not intervene when they could see what was going on?
Why does M. Levy believe that the Maghreb has to be subordinated to the needs of the French republic, and why does nobody attack this sort of fundamentalism? We know what we have to do, say the Arabs, but every time the west intervenes it sets our cause back many years. So if they want to help, they should stay out.
Excerpted with permission from
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
By Tariq Ali
Verso, London. Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 1-85984-679-3
342pp. Rs1500
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