http://www.mediamonitors.net/edward38.html
Collective passion
By Edward Said
Al-Ahram & Media Monitors,
September 22, 2001
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 such carnage has cruelly imposed on so many. New
Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally
rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, known
for his virulently Zionist views, has rapidly attained Churchillian
status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion he
has marshaled 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 to caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the
city's large Arab and Muslim communities, the first to express the
common sense 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
unrestrained retribution. There has been nothing to speak of on all
the major television channels but repeated reminders of what happened,
of who the terrorists were (as yet nothing proven, which hasn't
prevented the accusations being reiterated hour after hour), of how
America has been attacked, and so on. 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 history he and his shadowy followers may have
had (e.g. as useful conscripts in the jihad raised 20 years ago by the
US against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) before they became stock
symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective
imagination. Inevitably then, collective passions are being funnelled
into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit
of Moby Dick, rather than what is in fact 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. Manichean 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 mainly 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 as accredited pundits like
Thomas Friedman keep repeating; 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, cruel and
inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness.
Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by
intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the
Palestinians. Since 11 September, Israeli military forces have invaded
Jenin and Jericho and have repeatedly bombed Gaza, Ramallah, Beit
Sahour and Beit Jala, exacting great civilian casualties and enormous
material damage. All of this, of course, is done brazenly with US
weaponry and the usual lying cant about fighting terrorism. Israel's
supporters in the US have resorted to hysterical cries like "we are
all Israelis now," making the connection between the World Trade
Center and Pentagon bombings and Palestinian attacks on Israel an
absolute conjunction of "world terrorism," in which Ben Laden and
Arafat are interchangeable entities. What might have been a moment
for Americans to reflect on the probable causes of what took place,
which many Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs have condemned, has been
turned into a huge propaganda triumph for Sharon; Palestinians are
simply not equipped to defend themselves against both Israeli
occupation in its ugliest and most violent forms and the vicious
defamation of their national struggle for liberation.
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
efficacy of the oil, defence 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. The commonest thing is to get TV commentary, run stories, hold
forums, or announce studies on Islam and violence or on Arab
terrorism, or any such thing, using the predictable experts (the likes
of Judith Miller, Fouad Ajami, and Steven Emerson) to pontificate and
throw around generalities without context or real history. Why no one
thinks of holding seminars on Christianity (or Judaism for that
matter) and violence is probably too obvious to ask.
It is important to remember (although this is not at all mentioned)
that China will soon catch up with the US in oil consumption, and it
has become even more urgent for the US to control both Persian Gulf
and Caspian Sea oil supplies more tightly: an attack on Afghanistan,
including the use of former Soviet Central Asian republics as staging
grounds, therefore, consolidates a strategic arc for the US from the
Gulf to the northern oil fields that will be very difficult for anyone
in the future to pry loose. As pressure on Pakistan mounts daily, we
can be certain that a great deal of local instability and unrest will
follow in the wake of the events of 11 September.
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 defenceless civilians with F-16s and
helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more
conventional nationalist terror. What is especially 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 step forward and 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
been elected or having a real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been quarrelled 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 symbolic savagery. (With astonishing prescience in 1907,
Joseph Conrad drew the portrait of the archetypal terrorist, whom he
calls laconically "the Professor" in his novel The Secret Agent; this
is a man whose sole concern is to perfect a detonator that will work
under any circumstances and whose handiwork results in a bomb exploded
by a poor boy sent, unknowingly, to destroy the Greenwich Observatory
as a strike against "pure science.") 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 mobilisation and patient organisation 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
provide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap. This remains true in the
Middle East generally, Palestine in particular, but also in the United
States, surely the most religious of all countries. It is also a major
failure of the class of secular intellectuals not to have redoubled
their efforts to provide analysis and models to offset the undoubted
sufferings of the large mass of their people, immiserated and
impoverished by globalism and an unyielding militarism with scarcely
anything to turn to except blind violence and vague promises of future
salvation.
On the other hand, immense military and economic power such as the US
possesses is no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision, particularly when
obduracy is thought of as a virtue and exceptionalism believed to be
the national destiny. Sceptical 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 supposedly
separate people from each other into supposedly clashing civilisations
and re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available,
decide somehow to share our fates with each other as in fact 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, of course, 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 and misery can be addressed and the terrorists themselves
easily isolated, deterred or otherwise 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. The immediate
prospects are for destruction and suffering on a very large scale,
with US policymakers milking the apprehensions and anxieties of their
constituencies with cynical assurance that few will attempt a counter-
campaign against the inflamed patriotism and belligerent war-mongering
that has for a time postponed reflection, understanding, even common
sense. Nevertheless, those of us with a possibility for reaching
people who are willing to listen -- and there are many such people, in
the US, Europe, and the Middle East, at least -- must try to do so as
rationally and as patiently as possible.
By courtesy & © 2001 Al-Ahram Weekly & Edward Said
