Worth noting:
Ian Buruma
This is my last column - I hope, at the very least, that I have annoyed rather than bored you
Tuesday January 28, 2003
The Guardian
This is my last weekly column, at least for a while. I never thought I would be a Guardian columnist. I was never even an habitual Guardian reader. But then I was employed some years ago as a regular writer for the Spectator, too, even though I didn't exactly fit the typical Speccie man's profile either. The thing is, I like writing against the grain. It is fun to provoke, to stir things up, even to annoy. Writing to nodding heads is an exercise in complacency, and complacency leads to boredom. It has been my privilege to annoy you for a year and a bit; if I have bored you, I have failed.
Predictability is another recipe for boredom. But an opinion-monger has to come from somewhere. I am an old-fashioned liberal. That is, I prize freedom more highly than equality, and individualism more than order. Freedom to think and say what one wants, as long as it does not deliberately provoke bodily harm to others, should be the minimum requirement in any civilised society. And so is freedom from arbitrary use of power. These freedoms can only be guaranteed by governments which abide by the same laws as the governed, and can be voted out of power.
Two things, in my experience as a Guardian columnist, are guaranteed to cause maximum annoyance; or perhaps just one thing: any argument in defence of Israel or the United States. Harold Pinter's poem, published last week, is typical of the kind of rage provoked by the US, though the imagery - the galloping horses and whip-wielding riders - is more likely to bring fearsome visions of Cossacks to mind. Tom Paulin's effusion comparing Israeli soldiers to the SS is an example of the same sort of thing.
I received some less poetic views in anonymous letters, one of them signed, oddly, "a non-Muslim liberal". This "liberal" opined that everything the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians "totally exonerated" what the Nazis did to the Jews. These rages suggest not only that the US and Israel are bad, but worse than anywhere else.
There is much wrong with American society and foreign policy, and there are pressing reasons for attacking Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. That I chose to defend both countries none the less is because they still come closer to my definition of freedom than most countries, even if they fall far short of their own claims. Perhaps this is one reason why the Pinters, Paulins and non-Muslim liberals get so worked up: the hypocrisy; the fact that Americans preach freedom but manipulate elections, support foreign dictators, and mangle the English language. Or the fact that Jews, having suffered such persecution themselves, should now behave badly to others.
So it is perhaps a compliment to both nations that they should be held to higher standards than any other. Never mind that the French, with their vaunted tradition of liberty and fraternity, gave tacit support to African genocides, or that far more Muslims are being persecuted and murdered in India than in the territories occupied by Israel. The French are the French, and the Indians are poor. But Americans and Israelis should know better.
Worse than stupid anti-Americanism, in my view, is the parochial assumption that the freedom of peoples, less familiar to us, and not ruled by white men, is a more relative matter. They have their own traditions, we tell ourselves, and, after all, isn't our colonial legacy really to blame for their ills, and before criticising Africans or Asians, shouldn't we look at ourselves first?
These were the arguments I used to hear as a student of Chinese, when anyone was tactless enough to mention Mao's bloodlust. Some of this has to do with a deep European unease with the use of power in foreign affairs. We have abused our powers so many times in the past that we should now exercise humility, and not presume to tell others what to do. The Americans have not yet learned this lesson, another reason for Pinteresque fury. But this noble impulse becomes ignoble if we refuse to act for the good. We left it to the Americans to stop Europeans from slaughtering one another in the Balkans. And now the Americans, with a little help from us, are about to go to war again. This might strike you as an odd moment to quit a weekly column, and so it is. But once the bang-bang is over, and the politics resumes, it will be my pleasure to come back and criticise the Americans, if they should fail to help the Iraqis gain the freedoms they were promised. Meanwhile, thank you for having me. It was a joy to be here.
· Ian Buruma is moving to work in the US and will write periodically for G2.
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