May 4, 2003

THE time was a sultry summer evening of the year 2000. The place: the courtyard of a house in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in Shiraz, Iran. Our host was treating us to refreshing watermelons and small glasses of hot Iranian tea, and his vision of history. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was still intact, and even felt itself powerful enough to threaten Iran with an invasion.

Masood Toofan, a prominent literary critic and translator, our host for the evening, whom we had sought out for a discussion on literature and life in Iran, seemed fiercely nationalistic to us. He was among those ‘purists’ who sought to purge the Farsi language of most of its Arabic words and literary influences. He even spelled his nom de plum, Toofan, with a “te” rather than the Arabic “to-e”.

Humanity, Toofan says, is divided into two categories: those who create civilization and those who destroy it. The former, according to him, are the ones who make cities, while the latter come from the obscure non-urban backgrounds and invade the cities with their weapons of destruction.

To him Afghans (a term which, to our unease, somehow seemed to include Pakistanis too, which wasn’t surprising given our all-out support for the Taliban at that time) were such barbaric people who would have no qualms destroying any civilization, any way of life, that differed from theirs. And civilized societies, cities, he said, were essentially vulnerable to barbarians’ onslaught. It was strange, now it seems to me, that he should mention the sacking of Baghdad at the hands of the Mongols as an example.

Books, he said, were delicate things. They exist thanks to an understanding among the humans using them that they are something to be valued, preserved, protected. A book is just like a human life, he says; it does not take much to destroy it. The thing which keeps you from unleashing your power to annihilate either a human life or a book can serve as a working definition of civilization. This is what differentiates you from a barbarian.

This conversation came back to me today when I read, thanks to a friend, a professor of Physics at the Punjab University, Dr Anis Alam, an exchange of emails between two physicists: one, representing the editorial staff of an academic journal brought out by an American association of physicists, and the other, Dr Daniel Amit, a professor at the University of Rome. When requested to review, as he has been doing on a voluntary basis for quite some time, a manuscript for publication in the journal, he declined, saying that he did not want to “correspond at this point with any American institution”, and added: “Some of us have lived through 1939.” When the editors took refuge behind the supposed neutrality of science and the scientists, Dr Amit was more elaborate.

“What,” he wrote back on April 9, 2003, “we are watching today, I believe, is a culmination of 10-15 years of mounting barbarism of the American culture the world over, crowned by the achievements of science and technology as a major weapon of mass destruction. We are witnessing manhunt and wanton killing of the type and scale not seen since the raids on American Indian populations, by a superior technological power of inferior culture and values.”

Dr Amit goes on to say: “Science cannot stay neutral, especially after it has been so cynically used in the hands of the inspectors to disarm a country and prepare it for decimation by laser guided cluster bombs. No, science of the American variety has no recourse. I, personally, cannot see myself anymore sharing a common human community with American science. Unfortunately, I also belong to a culture of a similar spiritual deviation (Israel), and which seems to be equally incorrigible.”

While most of us feel dazed as a result the overwhelming campaign of shock and awe launched by the most recent, most developed, nation (should we say “nations”?) in the world against one of the most ancient, most un-developed one, some individuals are recording this unbelievably barbaric history unfolding in the Middle East. Thanks to the Internet, we are able to learn very quickly what the invaders and the media faithfully serving them have been trying to conceal and distort. Not only that, we find that individuals belonging to the invading countries are registering their outrage at the crimes that are being committed in their names.

One such instance is the article “Parable of the bad Samaritan: some reflections on collateral damage-control” written on April 16, 2003 by Tim Wise, available at the Z-Net website www.znet.org. Talking about the media management of the story of “Little Ali” — the boy who lost his arms and all the members of his close family in the war against Iraq — Wise says, “Ali, we are to believe, is simply the victim of the ‘horrors of war,’ a nice, tidy and quite passive formulation that makes no mention and takes no notice of which side unleashed the said horrors...

“But Ali’s family was not ripped to shreds by something called the ‘horrors of war’. Rather, they were undone by cluster bombs, the use of which against civilians is plainly in violation of international law and common decency: two concepts that never have too much meaning for the victors who can avoid war crimes trials even while they parade others as monsters for the cameras and willing public...

“And yes, I know, because Donald Rumsfeld says so — and because it sounds so reassuring — that ‘in wartime, it is inevitable that some innocent civilians will die.’ Perhaps that is what we will say to Ali, instead of paying him (and others like him) reparations. His parents were unlucky; his cousins, unlucky; his brothers and sisters, unlucky; his arms, unlucky. Their deaths and his injuries were inevitable and simply couldn’t be avoided.

“But only a people who have never had a stronger foe hand us our assets on a silver platter could hear such bile and not vomit all over our shoes. Only a people who truly believe that the objects of this destruction are an inferior and less important species of humanity than ourselves could repeat such utter crap and not gag on the mendacity. For indeed, no wartime deaths are inevitable because war itself is a choice we make. Weather is inevitable, but beyond that everything else is pretty much the result of human agency. We chose this war. We lobbied for it, we paid for it, and we launched it.”

Mark Steel, writing for the Independent of London under the title “Iraqis only count if they’re dancing in the street”, has this to say on the exploitation of the victims of war: “...papers that supported the bombing can launch appeals on behalf of the victims of that bombing. As if there’s no connection between the two. It’s as if Reggie Kray had shot Jack the Hat McVitie and immediately knelt down beside him yelling ‘Look at this poor sod, someone’s shot him through the head. Right, everyone sling a tenner in this bucket.’”

Saul Landau, a maker of the film Iraq: Voices from the Streets, a teacher at Cal Poly Pomona University and a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (find him on the web at www.rprogreso.com) has reacted to the appalling sight of journalists serving the invaders in his article “Shop, go to church, support Bush’s war and wait for Armageddon” thus:

“Well-dressed people pour out of churches, get in their SUVs and drive to their $400,000 plus homes. Some will watch sports on TV, others will tune in to the presstitutes, as Uri Avnery calls them, who report on the war in Iraq. ‘Their original sin,’ he says, ‘was their agreement to be “embedded” in army units. This American term sounds like being put to bed, and that is what it amounts to in practice.

“A journalist who lies down in the bed of an army unit becomes a voluntary slave. He is attached to the commander’s staff, led to the places the commander is interested in, sees what the commander wants him or her to see, is turned away from the places the commanders does not want him to see, hears what the army wants him to hear and does not hear what the army does not want him to hear. He is worse than an official army spokesman, because he pretends to be an independent reporter. The problem is not that he only sees a small piece of the grand mosaic of the war, but that he transmits a mendacious view of that piece.’”

Among the journalists belonging to — not embedded in any way with — the invading countries who won respect for honestly reporting and fearlessly commenting on the aggression against Iraq, John Pilger and Robert Fisk are prominent. Fisk has brought out some very disturbing facts about the deliberate pillage and arson of carefully selected places in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities while the citizens have been put under a “curfew in all but name” from nighttime till dawn.

He mentions the fires that consumed every one of Baghdad’s ministries except those of interior and oil. Fisk has also documented how priceless objects in the archeological museum and contents of the largest library in Baghdad were allowed — encouraged — to be looted and destroyed. Now, in his April 17 article “Anti-colonial war” (also available at the Z-Net website), he reports:

“There is also something dangerous — and deeply disturbing — about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town... The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be paid... In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn’t the Americans stop this?”

Talking about the sixty empty “secret police headquarters in Baghdad” he points out the other side of the picture: “There is no evidence even that a single British or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth of documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former places of torment. Is this idleness. Or is this wilful?”

The monsters who handled the dirty work for Saddam Hussein’s dreaded regime may quite possibly be working for the occupation army now. Fisk says, “At the end of the second world war, German-speaking British and US intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence.”

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