Terrorism, Inc, or the Family of Fundamentalisms - II
Vinay Lal
The left critique of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ embraces many different arguments. The very idea of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is seen as embedded in a long history of Western Christendom’s hostility to Islam and the continuing inability of the West to think of the Arab people as endowed with distinct histories, traditions, literatures and identities to which the same dignity should be extended as one might extend to other cultures and traditions. Many critics of Edward Said have found his own conception of Orientalism to be rather static, even riddled by the very textualism which he deplores, but few doubt that Said was essentially right in arguing that both the scholarly and common understanding of Islam in the West continues to be fatally compromised by the of the arrested development of the Semites."[8] Islam prevails, as well, much beyond the Middle East, though one would scarcely know from the print media in the West that South Asia is home to the largest Muslim population in the world. When Iran, following the revolution that toppled the Shah and the taking of American hostages, became marked as America’s most determined and dangerous foe, it was routinely supposed that the Shias represent the more intolerant and fundamentalist face of Islam, an impression that appeared to be authenticated by the emergence of the Party of God, better known as Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group that is thought to have driven the Americans out of Lebanon. It is precisely such assumptions which, among others, led to the studious indifference to the Taliban — an orthodox Sunni Islamist regime which derives its political theology from the puritanism of Wahhabism, an eighteenth century movement whose founder, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, sought to return the practices of Islam to the pristine state of the seventh century — in the global calculus of Western politics.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Less frequently noticed in this context is the political vacuum the US helped to create in one country after another. Suharto, a wartime collaborator of the Japanese, was given the green light to carry out the extermination of Indonesian communists. As heads rolled, the Americans exulted in the breathtaking devotion with which Suharto’s goons executed their task. The annihilation of the Iraqi communist party was no less thorough; and as for the assassination of Allende and the ascension of Pinochet in Chile, there is the pronouncement of Henry Kissinger on September 11, 1973: "I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ignorance of the complex history of Islam aside, the left points to a cluster of related arguments to underscore its critique of the Western discourse of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and the dramatic shortcomings of the West’s engagement with Islamic countries. There is the familiar argument, all too true, that "double standards" have characterised the engagement of Western powers with the Middle East,[9] perhaps nowhere more so than in the matter of the unresolved dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. The United States has unequivocally stood by Israel when it committed the gravest political transgressions, and Israel’s brutalisation of the Palestinians has never been condemned; but the Palestinians were habitually dismissed as "terrorists". Scarcely anyone needs to be reminded of the scores of United Nations Resolutions critical of Israel that were vetoed by the US in the Security Council or opposed in the General Assembly. The other variant of the same argument is a shade subtler: it points to the failure of the United States to adhere to its own values and standards of ethical conduct. American support of the most despotic authoritarian regimes, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is only the most glaring example of American democracy’s incestuous relationship with authoritarianism. The brutal regime of the Shah of Iran, who indulged the American appetite for oil and anti-communism, was upheld until the Islamic revolution tore into it; Saddam Hussein, before he became the supreme exemplar of the madman whose singular ambition in life is to destroy the United States, was seen as the bulwark of anti-Islamic fundamentalism in an otherwise depraved region; and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the foreign labouring force subsists without any rights and women are entirely excluded from the public sphere, has been for several decades the frontline ally of the US in the Middle East. The ironies are many, and daily compounded: thus the present ire of the US might be better directed at Saudi Arabia, in whose bosom the majority of the hijackers as well as of the puritanism pursued by the Taliban seem to have originated. But this would call into question the "special relationship" that the United States has cultivated with Saudi Arabia, one of many such relationships which suggest that totalitarianism also has many faces. As the case of Osama bin Laden so vividly demonstrates, terrorists are themselves the conduit for negotiations between their friends and sponsors: he was dispatched by the Saudis to aid the Americans as they sought to enrol Muslims in the jihad against the Soviets. Once a tool in the hands of the Americans, bin Laden himself became adept at transforming others into mere instruments of his will. The bitterness of those who have been the tools of history can scarcely be comprehended — but it was there to be seen, as the twin towers of the World Trade Centre disintegrated. In the midst of this brutal instrumentality, who will remember Kant’s injunction that one’s own action must be capable of serving as the basis of universal law?
Howsoever charitably inclined one might feel towards the United States, its foreign policy everywhere, and most noticeably in the Middle East, cannot be viewed as anything but a colossal failure. The American genius for creating Frankenstein’s monsters — Saddam Hussein, Noriega, bin Laden, the Taliban — calls for an epic narrative, though the theoretically inclined can muse over the course of dialectical reversal in history. Less frequently noticed in this context is the political vacuum the US helped to create in one country after another. Suharto, a wartime collaborator of the Japanese, was given the green light to carry out the extermination of Indonesian communists. As heads rolled, the Americans exulted in the breathtaking devotion with which Suharto’s goons executed their task. The annihilation of the Iraqi communist party was no less thorough; and as for the assassination of Allende and the ascension of Pinochet in Chile, there is the pronouncement of Henry Kissinger on September 11, 1973: "I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."[10] If one should think of these cases as examples drawn from a time when the United States was less experienced in the ways of the world, or when it was engaged in a heroic struggle with the heirs of Stalin, it becomes incumbent to note that the same phenomenon can presently be seen at work in Saudi Arabia: here is a repressive regime that has locked out all dissenters, imposed on the entire country the most draconian laws and bankrolled Mujahideen across South Asia. But as long as Saudi Arabia pumps the oil, exercises some restraint on OPEC and fills — as the most generous client in the world of the manufacturers of military hardware — the bank accounts of the American armament industry, who can say that it is not America’s trusted friend?
Thus, to follow the voices which have been prominent in their critique of American foreign policy and militarism, it has been the United States which has been conducting jihad upon the rest of the world. America’s pact with terrorism fills many pages, takes many forms and knows no bounds: let us say that America is multicultural even in its sponsorship of regimes and oppression of people. It has no special animus against Muslims, Africans, South Americans or speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages: it is predisposed towards a frightening ecumenism in its objects and strategies of pacification of recalcitrants and in its sentiments of overlordship towards the world. Writing in the pages of the Guardian on September 29, Arundhati Roy recalled the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died as a consequence of the sanctions placed against Iraq, the transformation of Pakistan and Afghanistan under the aegis of the CIA into the world’s largest producers of heroin, the "millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel, backed by the US, invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm," and the countless others who have been killed and terrorised into submission by regimes in Haiti, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Yugoslavia, Somalia, South Africa and the Congo acting with the active encouragement, military support and benediction of the United States government. She is scarcely the only one to have called attention to this record of genocidal intent,[11] and a great many commentators have all recalled similar episodes, such as the infamous admission in 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, that the death of half a million Iraqi children was not too heavy a price for containing Saddam Hussein. But Roy called her piece the ‘algebra of infinite justice’: as she notes, the United States named its imminent military mission ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, but then changed the name to "Operation Enduring Freedom" after it was pointed out that Muslims, who believe that only Allah can dispense infinite justice, would be deeply offended. With its proverbial ignorance, the American leadership could have been expected to commit such a blunder; yet it is the ‘algebra’ in Roy’s article that calls for some comment, and not merely because God does better the sums that the Americans proposed to finish. The use of the letters of the alphabet (x and y, for example) to denote unknown quantities was the first step in the development of algebra; and it is here that the ‘algebra of infinite justice’ begins to resonate with terror, since almost no one can be certain that the hand of American chastisement will not fall upon him or her one day.
The left-liberal critique of American foreign policy, while ethically compelling, is reticent about entertaining more daring questions that might help us to understand the widespread animus against the US which, not unfairly, can now be described as a distinct characteristic of ‘world consciousness’. Those possessed of absolute power are perhaps almost always hated, but such an admission is only calculated to make further reflection superfluous; besides, it obscures the fact that an intense dislike for the idioms in which the United States seeks to exercise its power exists alongside the universal visibility of American icons and the worldwide emulation of American cultural trends. America’s "hypocrisy" and its nauseating embrace of "double standards" are also doubtless deplorable, but it would be hard to find a nation-state whose conduct is not similarly compromised. Politics is only rarely anything but the crudest form of realpolitik, and the actions of the various countries that have entered into the American-led coalition against terrorism furnish the clearest evidence that self-interest dominates national policy. From the Indian perspective, for example, it is surreal to ponder over General Musharraf’s magical designation as the frontline foe of terrorism, just as the declaration by Uzbekistan, which has allowed its territory to be used for American aerial operations against Afghanistan, that it stands alongside the US in the war against terrorism must appear unbelievable to those acquainted with the ruthless elimination of all dissenting voices in a nation-state recently born out of the dying embers of Soviet tyranny. States that terrorise their own subjects are not the most credible candidates for a principled opposition to terrorism. Against all this, one can reasonably argue that hypocrisy is all the more intolerable when it is encountered among the Americans, who more than anyone else claim to be the conscience of humankind and the supreme flagbearers of the ideas of freedom and democracy. Those upon whom heavy responsibility rests must be held to higher standards of accountability.
The supposition that terrorism has become a way of life among some Muslim men in most Islamic countries runs very deep in the Western press and academy. Recalling Bernard Lewis’s ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, the Indian-born editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, presses forth the view in his article ‘The Roots of Rage’ that Islamic fundamentalism is akin to fascism, Nazism, and even populism in the US, having widespread acceptance in Muslim-dominated societies. The anger and despair of unemployed young men, conjoined to the success of fundamentalist organisations in offering various social, cultural and political services that the state is unable to provide, accounts for the success which the "medievalists" have had in recruiting youth to their cause.[12] Madrassas in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan are said to churn out tens of thousands of pupils steeped in parochial versions of Islamic history and theology and ill-equipped to face up to the modern world. Terrorism can be an attractive way of life when all other options have disappeared.
It is in juxtaposition with "the American way of life" that the notion of terrorism as a way of life begins to acquire greater resonance and an unusual complexity. Bush set the tone for the discussion, though American commentators would have needed no prompting: most are firmly persuaded that the United States is the most eminent custodian of those eternal values of freedom, democracy and compassion without which a people cannot be viewed as civilised. The US, Bush told FBI agents, is "the most free nation in the world", and it has a special "calling", which can be inferred from the fact that it is a "nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, reject murderers and reject evil." To the question, "what is it that the terrorists so hate about America", Bush replied in Congress: "They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." We might ask why in an elected body with over 430 members, only one Congressperson had the daring to cast a dissenting vote when Congress decided to give the President untrammelled authority to prosecute the war, but American democracy is not habituated to the discussion of subtleties. Chastising postmodernists, relativists, pacifists and other critics of "modern-day American imperialism", William Bennett assured his readers that "America’s support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world", and that "America was not punished because we are bad, but because we are good."[13]
If maudlin sentimentality should appear to render these expressions about "the American way of life" somewhat embarrassing, other commentators have attempted slightly more complex readings. Thus the burden of an editorial by Joyce Appleby, who recently served as the President of the American Historical Association, is that the inheritance of the Enlightenment divides the "modern West" from those determined upon a course of obscurantism and violence. This specialist in the intellectual history of the American Revolution says with supreme confidence that "Muslim culture is not Western culture 300 years earlier. Its bias against individual autonomy and self-interested economic exchanges runs deep."[14] There is not much work for interpretation here, the message is writ large: the terrorists and their Muslim brethren share a profound dislike for the free market and that emblematic figure of the American West, the Lone Ranger. Could they be further removed from "the American way of life"? Orientalist discourse has always insisted that the non-West has no idea of the individual, and that collectivities — organised around religion, caste, tribal loyalties and the like — alone matter among the less civilised and the barbarians. If, moreover, anyone should be foolish enough to hazard the speculation that interculturality is a far more promising avenue to the understanding of diverse histories, Appleby has this rejoinder: "Sexual relations, so basic to all social organisations, are ordered along entirely different principles [among Muslims]." The day may not be far away when we will be informed by Western experts that Muslims and "we" moderns in the West have different anatomies. Judging from the attacks on Sikhs, Hindus, Afghans, Muslims, Pakistanis, Iranians, Arabs and many others, some Americans, whose premise for action is the formula that ‘they who look different, are different’, are already enacting the street versions of this particular superstition derived from the Enlightenment. This is "the American way of life".
Why, then, one might ask, does Arundhati Roy find it incredulous that the US government should have represented the attacks as an assault upon "the American way of life"? It’s "an easy notion to peddle" amidst rage and grief, but she urges us to resist the thought, and "wonders why the symbols of America’s economic and military dominance — the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon — were chosen as the targets of the attack. Why not the Statue of Liberty?" But if the business of America is business, and the military is deeply interwoven into nearly all the political, social and civil institutions of American society, then Roy is evidently missing the pulse of America. She has the idea, particularly quaint in someone as astute as her, that the voice of the American people remains unheard in the web of military institutions, as though the entrails of the military did not extend into thousands of American communities. "American people ought to know that it is not them", Roy declaims, "but the government’s policies that are so hated", and she points to the acclaim with which the country’s many "extraordinary" musicians, writers, actors, and sportsmen are received worldwide. If the disjunction between the government and "the people" is so vast, then American democracy must be dismissed as an entirely farcical exercise — a view that neither the US government nor the American people will accept as credible. To imagine that "the American people" have a government wholly at odds with their sensibilities is to commit the folly of supposing that they are entirely gullible and ignorant, and yet wiser than their leaders; it also makes a mockery of the idea of representation, which is the formal mainstay of all democratic polities. Since leaders in the US are elected, one cannot but think that elections must mean something, however obviously inane the exercise may be of choosing between indistinguishable Democrats and Republicans.
Variations of Roy’s argument are frequently encountered among those critical of the US government but eager to exculpate "the American people". The American people, I might note incidentally, have many spokespersons: certainly in no other country does the government, and similarly its critics, purport to act and speak as frequently in the name of the people. The world is constantly reminded that "the American people" will not tolerate assaults on freedom, democracy, human decency and civilisation, and it is striking that Bush began his address to a special joint session of Congress on September 20 with the observation that "the American people" had already delivered a report on the State of the Union. The people were, in effect, the answer to bin Laden, rebutting his terror-laden acts with unforgettable scenes of courage and compassion: the Union remained strong. Thus, even as seasoned a political commentator as Noam Chomsky, a relentless chronicler over three decades of American state terrorism, gallantly persists in the belief that if "the American people" really knew of their government’s widespread complicity in the perpetration of gross abuses of human rights, their outrage would be sufficient to arrest the government in its tracks. If Chomsky can be in the know, what prevents the people amidst the information explosion of our times from shedding their ignorance? It is perhaps superfluous to add, then, that Roy, Chomsky and many others persuaded about the inherently democratic propensities of American civil society — while persuaded that American state terrorism represents the greatest threat to global society — ignore as well the consistent poll findings showing massive public support for military intervention, whether at the time of the Gulf War or in the aftermath of September 11.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The atrocities of September 11 can be known by no other name but terrorism. It would be cruel to speak of the chickens coming home to roost, or to think that America had it coming. If one had to think of proverbs at this juncture, one should be riveted only to Gandhi’s expression that an eye for an eye will result in the world of the blind. But much of the world has been living with terror for years, decades, and the greater part of terrorism is the fact that the United States, indeed nearly the entire ‘civilised’ West, has never had the courage to admit that it purchased its long night of peace with a
long night of terror abroad
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most conventional definition of terrorism adverts to violence that is indiscriminatory, targeting not only soldiers and functionaries of the state but also civilians, not only government installations but the pillars of civil society. The distinction between the government and "the American people" is precisely what the terrorist actions of September 11 sought to undermine, and the conservative elements in American society may be much closer to the truth in recognising that an attempt was made to put "the American way of life" under the bomb. It has been "the American way of life" to assume that one can live without fear, indeed that one is entitled to live with as much security as a multicultural democracy can promise, while being perfectly free to inflict, through one’s representatives in government, fear and terror upon others. Who in the US can presume to understand the trauma that Ernest Jones described in the 1940s as the "mutism and emotional paralysis", followed by "practical cessation of all mental activity and even death", of those who have had to endure night after night of intensive attack with missiles, cluster bombs and massive payloads of explosives?[15] Osama bin Laden has sought to carry the war to the American public and disrupt "the American way of life", and no other reading is suggested by his ardently expressed desire that America should be "full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east." It is another matter altogether that his actions will only reinforce "the American way of life", whether witnessed in the immense surge of militarism, the extraordinarily disproportionate use of air power against a people who have little but the clothes on their back, the pretense at internationalism, the pathetic air-drops of packages of peanut butter and strawberry jam, or the scarcely veiled threats of death and destruction for those states that are less than willing partners in the coalition against terrorism. Osama bin Laden does not appear to have understood that it is also "the American way of life" to lace terror with a tinge of kindness.
It is demonstrably true that the terrorist acts of September 11 were undertaken with utter deliberation and executed according to a plan perversely admirable in its devotion to detail. The terror ists conjoined this means-end rationality, at the altar of which all great powers have worshipped, to another form of life equally well understood by Americans, namely that captured by the domain of the symbolic. It is this circumstance which encourages me to move towards the conclusion of my ruminations with some observations on how the symbolic may assist in placing the notion of terrorism as a way of life alongside the other notion of "the American way of life".
One of the most visible symbols of "the American way of life" in late modernity is the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV), which now accounts for nearly fifty percent of sales of consumer vehicles. Commercials invari ably show the SUV traversing rugged terrain, taking the intrepid explorer to remote backlands, helping the expedition leader to bridge the awesome chasm of the Grand Canyon. The SUV, as everyone knows, is far more likely to be found on the free ways of Southern California, and generally the driver is its only occupant. Elbowing other vehicles off the road, terrorising other drivers into submission, the SUV is the battle-tank of high ways and city streets. Its track record on safety is widely acknowledged to be severely wanting. It has almost nothing to do with "sports", and its only utility is to feed the coffers of an auto mobile industry that has moved from one form of oppression to another, from Fordisation to more expansive forms of exploi tation of the earth’s resources. The SUV is illustrative, even in its mere designation, of the terrorism of hegemony: the hegemon retains the power of naming, and so embellishes what we might call the Road Bully Monster (RBM) with the trappings of both functionalism ("utility") and leisure ("sport"). Even in American parlance, the SUV is a "gas guzzler", not a slight admission in a country where the unhindered supply of cheap gasoline is virtually a constitutional right and anything more than a marginal increase in oil prices can trigger acute anxiety and dire warnings about the impact on tourism and the economy.
Installed in this monstrosity of a vehicle, the American takes it as an axiomatic truth that the world’s oil supply exists for the satisfaction of his wants. This is "the American way of life", and it is its own form of terror, and not only for the most obvious reason that with 4 per cent of the world’s population, the United States consumes nearly a third of the world’s oil and other resources. A profligate consumer, sworn to criminal levels of waste, the United States has succeeded admirably well in exporting the ideology of consumerism to the entire world. Its academics have also made an industry of exporting critiques of consumerism, but this should not surprise us, considering that the United States, by far the largest manufacturer and exporter of arms and military hardware, also describes itself as the greatest force for peace in the world. Hegemonic powers have always thought themselves entitled to call war peace. One is reminded as well of a conversation that transpired between Gandhi and a journalist, who probed the Mahatma on his opposition to industrialisation and big science. Gandhi is on record as having said that if a small island like England had to engage in such massive exploitation to attain comfortable standards of living for its people, he shuddered to think what levels of exploitation would be required to give a few hundred million — now a billion — people in India comparable standards of living. Perhaps such arguments might be dismissed as entailing a romantic critique of modernity, but the trail that leads from the gross, energy-abusing SUVs to America’s huge oil bill, the Middle East, the Gulf War, and now to the conflagration in Afghanistan and the untapped petroleum reserves of Central Asia is covered in blood. Oil flows through the veins of George Bush and Osama bin Laden: this is the happy marriage of "the American way of life" and terrorism as a way of life. One can only hope that there will be no progeny from this horribly deformed union.
The atrocities of September 11 can be known by no other name but terrorism. It would be cruel to speak of the chickens coming home to roost, or to think that America had it coming. If one had to think of proverbs at this juncture, one should be riveted only to Gandhi’s expression that an eye for an eye will result in the world of the blind. But much of the world has been living with terror for years, decades, and the greater part of terrorism is the fact that the United States, indeed nearly the entire ‘civilised’ West, has never had the courage to admit that it purchased its long night of peace with a long night of terror abroad. If there is to be any "enduring freedom" arising from the terrorist acts of September 11 and the events in the midst of which we are placed, it must reside both in the acknowledgement that terrorism has been incubating and flourishing in "the American way of life" and in the commitment to ensure that peace shall henceforth not be purchased with terror abroad.
Endnotes
1 George Bush, Address to a Joint Session of the US Congress, 20 September 2001. In his speech to the UN, Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, stated in like fashion that "you’re either with civilisation or with terrorists". See Maggie Farley, ‘Giuliani urges UN to act’, Los Angeles Times (2 October 2001), p. A3.
2 Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (15-21 January 1998), p. 76.
3 Eknath Easwaran, A Man to Match His Mountains: Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam (Petaluma, California: Nilgiri Press, 1984).
4 [V. J. Patel, Chairman], Report with Evidence of the Peshawar Inquiry Committee Appointed by the … Indian National Congress (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1930).
5 Osama bin Laden, ‘America will not live in peace …’, Los Angeles Times (8 October 2001), p. A16.
6 William J. Bennett, ‘Faced with evil on a grand scale, nothing is relative’, Los Angeles Times (1 Oct. 2001), p. B11.
7 Editorial, ‘The national defence’, New York Times (12 September 2001), sec. A.
8 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 307.
9 See, for example, Graham E. Fuller, ‘Muslims abhor the double standard’, Los Angeles Times (5 Oct. 2001), p. B13, and Mark Huband, ‘From dual containment to double standards’, in his Warriors of the Prophet: The Struggle for Islam (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 166-193.
10 Cited by Eduardo Galeano, ‘The theatre of good and evil’, La Jornada (21 September 2001), translated by Justin Podur.
11 In a similar vein are the commentaries, among others, of Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, John Pilger, Robert Jensen, Michael Albert, and Robert Fisk.
12 Fareed Zakaria, ‘The roots of rage’, The Sunday Times (Singapore), Review section (21 October 2001), pp. 34-35; see also Susan Sachs, ‘Behind the extremism: poverty and despair’, ibid., p. 35 [reproduced from the New York Times].
13 See note 2.
14 Joyce Appleby, ‘The bad news is, we’re history’, Los Angeles Times (16 October 2001), p. B19.
15 Ernest Jones, ‘Psychology and war conditions’, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 5th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), p. 187.
littlemag.com |
