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Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and
to a lesser degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen,
unknown assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless
destruction.
For the residents of this wounded city, the
consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage and shock will
certainly continue for a long time, as will the genuine sorrow and
affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many.
New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani,
a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde
figure, has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly,
unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled
the city's heroic police, fire and emergency services to admirable
effect and, alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice
of caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab
and Muslim communities, the first to express the commonsense of anguish,
the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering
blows.
Would that that were all. The national television
reporting has of course brought the horror of those dreadful winged
juggernauts into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always
edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the expected
and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger,
outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and
un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and
patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has
dutifully repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not
stop until terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism,
everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No
answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East
and Islam are what 'we' are up against, and that terrorism must be
destroyed.
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is
spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct
involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for
so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out
of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a
sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in
some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's
name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in
effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers might
have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and
hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective
passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily
resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is
going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing
its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured
geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors.
Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with
future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is
needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want
the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab
worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its
sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous
repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility
of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances.
Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity
or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete
interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi
people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the
34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now
cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its
military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.
Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things
by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of
course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material
interests, the influence of the oil, defense and Zionist lobbies now
consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old
religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms
every day.
Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still
more critical sense of the actuality. There has been terror of course,
and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on
terror.
This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the
others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenseless civilians with
F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more
conventional nationalist terror.
What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to
religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep
veering away from history and sense. This is where the secular
consciousness has to try to make itself felt, whether in the US or in
the Middle East. No cause, no
God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of
innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in
charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause
without having a 2real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been quarreled over by Muslims,
there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are
Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations
even though some of their adherents have futilely tried to draw
boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet
history is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by
demagogues who are much less representative than either their followers
or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists
is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance,
including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily
attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be
gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington
suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor
refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education,
mass mobilization and patient organization in the service of a cause,
the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking
and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models pro vide, wrapped
in lying religious claptrap.
On the other hand, immense military and economic power
are no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Skeptical and humane voices
have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as 'America' girds
itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with
allies who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and
for imprecise ends.
We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that
separate people from each other and re-examine the labels, reconsider
the limited resources available, decide to share our fates with each
other as cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and
creeds.
'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners
to follow blindly.
Some will run behind them, but for future generations to
condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a
critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice
and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual
enlightenment seems far more willful than necessary. Demonisation of the
Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics,
certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be
addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business.
It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than
still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.
Edward Said
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