Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2002 17:51:05 -0500
From: satish kolluri <skolluri-AT-DEPAUW.EDU>
Subject: One rule for the West, another for the  rest


Source: The Hindu (http://www.hinduonnet.com)

One rule for the West, another for the rest


Kabir (Sakhi: 240, The Bijak of Kabir, translated by Linda Hess and Shukdev
Singh)

IT'S Religion, Stupid! On TV screens across the globe, for more than three
months now, the sheep have been jumping into the ditch without a bleat of
protest. What's worse, they've convinced themselves that this is the way to
go, the way of justice and salvation.

Kabir's acerbic stanza accurately describes the debate in the mainstream media
following the September 11 events. Legions of experts and viewers have
committed themselves to an absurdly simplistic and Manichean account of the
world, in which President Bush and his international supporting cast 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 and instant axioms. An important aspect of
the debate is the critique-by-media of Islamic faith and Islamic cultures.
This takes, as its basis, certain "core Western values" that are assumed to
lie at the base of all civilised discourse (and which are, by implication,
counter posed to Islam). Interpreted correctly, of course, these core Western
values enshrine the method of radical doubt that is central to Enlightenment
discourse 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 reflects the interests
of dominant classes. Unfortunately, the dogmas of Western Government and media
rhetoric completely contravene this heritage of radical doubt.

The academic gurus behave no better. Francis Fukuyama has gone on record to
say that "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 (T. E. Lawrence's classic of romantic-Orientalist autobiography,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, tells the tale of how British irregulars brought
guerrilla warfare to the Arab resistance against the Ottoman Empire). Even
today the West blesses the world with lock, stock and barrel worth billions of
dollars.

Consider, also, the various unexamined axioms built into Fukuyama's
ill-considered sentence. "The only cultural system?" Three decades ago,
irrational violence was believed to be the monopoly of the Vietcong, who then
yielded place to the Khmer Rouge in the American demonology. Were the Vietcong
and the Khmer Rouge closet believers in the Word of Allah? Has North Korea,
regarded by United States leaders through the 1990s as the major scourge of
humankind, fallen under the influence of the ? "Regularly produces people like
bin Laden?" How many bin Ladens have the 1.2 billion Muslims produced? Fifty?
Or 500? And to blame Islam for the disaster in Afghanistan, a country
repeatedly abused by Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S., is to indulge in
despicable cynicism.

Western Values, and the U.S. as their Guardian Paul Pillar's formulation, in
his Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, briskly sums up the that dominate
Western media discourse about terrorism: "The longevity of the principles [of
U.S. 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 bears no relation to reality would be to insult the intelligence
of the reader.

Malevolence should be punished? The U.S. has consistently supported states
that sponsor terrorism, and has itself committed acts of terrorism. Indeed, as
a result of its involvement in the Contra war against Nicaragua, the U.S.
Government was tried, found guilty and mandated to pay substantial reparations
by the International Court, The Hague. But the law is respected only if it
reaches a verdict in the bully's favour; the U.S. hasn't parted with a dime.

The rule of law? Once in a while, the truth shines through, as when Robert D.
Kaplan writes in the : "If we are hamstrung by absolutist definitions of
friend and foe, and democracy and dictatorship, our chances of victory will
the diminished". This is refreshingly honest, by comparison with the
(oxy)moronic euphemisms of the U.S. propaganda machine. As for free speech, a
central tenet of the Western value system, Washington's approach to the fair
reporting of the Afghan war was to ask the Emir of Qatar to curb Al Jazeera,
the only free TV channel in the Arab world. The Emir simply reminded
Washington of the Fifth Amendment!

In other words: One rule for the West, another for the rest. This colonialist
ideology still motivates the Western elites, 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 , we would have
achieved a great change if every human life could be held to have the same and
equal value.


The 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. United Nations 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 U.S. magazine covers and
narrates, in parallel, the events taking place in Rwanda in the same weeks.
While the numbers of those butchered rises, and the nature of the slaughter
becomes more and more feral, and continue to put other, more sedate and
West-centred subjects on their covers.

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 produces 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.



A joint session of congress after the attack on the World Trade center... in
the cartoon-strip style of argument, isolated figures become the proponents of
terror.



As against the complete global (and certainly Western) apathy towards the one
million victims of the Rwandan genocide, September 11 is seen as an epochal
and apocalyptic event 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 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, writing a few days after the New
York attacks, noted that such horrors would hardly make an impression on a
Bihari, who has to endure 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. The only novel
feature about the September 11 kamikaze attacks is that, for the first time,
people from the world's powerless hinterlands have struck at the very heart of
the imperium.


War on terror — war or terror?


The definition of terrorism is conspicuously absent in the current global
debate. 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.

By differentiating between "our friends and our foes", the "terrorists" are
narrowed down to a ridiculous fraction (basically, just bin Laden, the Taliban
and Saddam Hussein). In the cartoon-strip style of argument pursued by the
Western powers, these isolated figures become 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
U.S. 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 two million children in the
last decade of the 20th Century, according to UNICEF estimates. And these
killing-machines are produced mainly by 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 turbaned
fanatic to be a murderer: The military-industrial complex is governed by
suave, pleasant family men who keep their eyes focussed on spreadsheets rather
than manifestos. The definition of terrorism is kept unclear, so that the game
of shifting self-interest can proceed unimpeded; there is no moral focus to
the debate over war and terrorism. The fashionable argument of the "just war"
is a feeble attempt to mask the truth so succinctly phrased by Thucydides:
"The powerful exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions
as they can obtain."

A just war would assume a consistent definition of justice. But can we take
the justice of the powerful seriously, when some murderers are punished while
others are rewarded with a retirement on the beaches of Florida? And what of
the slaughter of civilians that has taken place in the "just wars" against
Iraq and Afghanistan, a slaughter dismissed under the bland Pentagon doctrine
of "collateral damage?"

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".

The Afghan war is neither just, nor a war (wars are fought between well-
matched combatants). It is a campaign reminiscent of the punitive actions
carried out during World War II and the Vietnam War. When you can't catch the
perpetrators, you destroy something of their world as retribution. "It is
important to stress," continues Walzer, "that the moral reality of war is not
fixed by the actual activities, but by the opinions of mankind." To be
precise, by the opinions of the more influential among mankind: the bombing of
Aghanistan is just, only because it has been described as such by the powers
who ordered the bombing.


Frankenstein Inc. (Made in the U.S.)


The lab has been around for a long time 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 obeys his liaison officers at
the CIA. He cuts the wires that link him to the State Department. He is out of
control. He is identified as the enemy, magnified in the imagination, labelled
an 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 illegitimate children of the
"Empire of Good", serially stigmatised as their creators run out of enemies.
It is well known that Saddam Hussein, Noriega and bin Laden all began on the
right side of the U.S., and that the CIA funded the Taliban. Curiously, only a
few months ago, the Bush administration gave the Taliban a $43 million subsidy
as a reward for suppressing the drug trade (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; 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: 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 U.S. has not produced Frankenstein monsters by itself, it has
provoked them into being: Iran is the perfect example. The democratic
Government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1951-1953) represented a modern,
liberal, inclusive Iranian vision: of all "Islamic" Governments, its practical
values were closest to those theoretically cherished by the West. And yet, the
CIA overthrew Mossadegh's Government and restored the repressive Pahlavi
regime to power. Mossadegh's vision embodied precisely those values that
Western analysts today claim to find wanting in Islam; he was punished because
he dared to challenge Western control over Iran's resources by nationalising
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.


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, which is
currently the supreme rhetorical weapon, implies a homogenised vision of
American society, culture and Government (into which differences of race,
gender, class and persuasion are quietly collapsed). It also negates the
possibility of maintaining critical difference. After all, 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 American triumphs in academia and the arts.
However, the real beauty of U.S. culture is that these accomplishments were
born out of an attitude of dissent, questioning and confrontation. Thus, and
perhaps paradoxically, to criticise U.S. foreign policy is to uphold the best
and highest impulses in U.S. culture.









Copyrights: 1995 - 2001 The Hindu

Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly
prohibited without the consent of The Hindu

**********************************************
Satish Kolluri,
Department of Communication Arts and Sciences,
103E Performing Arts Center,
DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135

Ph: 765 658 6559 (O)
    765 655 1802 (H)

skolluri-AT-depauw.edu



     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---