The Events and Aftermath

[clement Thomas - pavu.com]

http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm

The Events and Aftermath
By Edward Said
Sunday September 16, 2001
The Observer
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 funnelled 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 real 
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 mobilisation 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. Deionization 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.