On Politics

May 29, 2007

The Philosophy of Terror

“We say outright: these are madmen, yet these madmen have their own logic, their teaching, their code, their God even, and it’s as deep-set as could be.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

In 1949 an Egyptian teacher and academic travelled to Greeley, Colorado, to study curriculum at the Colorado State Teachers College. His experience, he tells us, was unremittingly awful.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Greeley was a small, conservative town. Liquor was illegal (it was to remain dry until 1969), but the usually dry plains north of Denver were watered with an irrigation system established by its Godly founders in 1872. The apparent austerity of the place, however, was lost on its Arab visitor, who wrote later on the experience of attending a sock-hop in a Church basement:

They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed against lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.

But perhaps our visitor’s most memorable observation was of the state of local hair-dressing:

In summary, anything that requires a touch of elegance is not for the Americans, even haircuts! For there was not one instance in which I had a haircut when I did not return home to even with my own hands what the barber had wrought, and fix what the barber had ruined with his awful taste.

For our travelling scholar, jazz became “the music that the savage bushmen use to satisfy primitive desires”; the practice of drinking unsweetened tea was unthinkable.

The reflections, published as “The America I Have Seen”, could be dismissed as sour and misguided riffs had the author not been so important, but he was. The writer was Sayyid Qutb, the philosophical godfather of al-Qaeda.

* * *

Earlier on, Qutb’s concerns seemed reasonable. Angered by the British occupancy of his country, Qutb believed the West’s presence was eroding the indigenous community of Egypt, and it moved Qutb to consider communitarian ideals, established through a commitment to Allah; specifically, the denouncement of perceived Western hedonism, and the acceptance of sharia law—the legal code of the Qur’an. Qutb came to resemble something like a Platonic idealist, a philosopher who, in the words of Charles Tripp, stressed “the unity, the perfection, and the comprehensiveness of God’s creation”.

In Qutb’s mind, to follow any other laws than those explicitly passed down in the Qur’an was to move towards imperfection. This was the inflexible spine of Qutb’s “Islamism” described by writer Paul Berman as “a desire to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society, to be based on ancient Qur’anic principles”. Everything was to be determined by the Qu’ran, to have it any other way would be to enshrine rules that did not originate in God. For Qutb, it would mean that our moral codes, sense of progress, and the ways in which we organise society would have their roots in ourselves. This, said Qutb, was akin to turning our back on God. It was also preposterously arrogant.

Against his proposed sharia model, Qutb held the Western one—a shabby, stinking testament to the folly of secularism. Aware that the West’s sphere was in constant overlap with the East’s, Qutb noted that all over the world man was miserable, idiotic and divorced from nature. Worse, man was rootless, soulless and empty, and the cause was the West’s “hideous schizophrenia”—its separation of the sacred from the secular. Berman writes of Qutb’s belief:

Europe’s scientific achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their “hideous schizophrenia” on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery—the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness.

In other words, for Qutb the Enlightenment was not progress, and the Industrial Age and modernity were signifiers of moral regression. Qutb says: “The true value of every civilisation lies not in the tools man has invented or in how much power he wields. The value of civilisations lay in what universal truths and worldviews they have attained”.

It is arguable whether Qutb felt this strongly about the West before visiting America, but his writings on that experience suggest a man who had already made his mind up on the matter before he arrived. Writing in The Believer, Rolf Potts notes that Qutb’s American essay “reflects the stereotyped sentiment—commonly encouraged by the Egyptian prejudices of his day—that America’s material culture was morally inferior to the spiritual civilisation of the Arab world”.

Potts also writes of the odd methodology Qutb used for collecting his information on the US: “Of the 54 brief sections in ‘The America I Have Seen’ only seven allude to specific real-life observations; the other sections consist of broad generalisations and second-hand anecdotes”.

National Public Radio’s Robert Siegal noticed Qutb’s strange relationship with truth also, when he filed a story on Qutb’s American essay for flagship program “All Things Considered” in 2005. Noting Qutb’s skewed re-telling of American history, Siegal says:

He informed his Arab readers that it [American history] began with bloody wars against the Indians, which he claimed were still underway in 1949. He wrote that before independence, American colonists pushed Latinos south toward Central America—even though the American colonists themselves had not yet pushed West of the Mississippi… Then came the Revolution, which he called ‘a destructive war led by George Washington’.

How seriously then, are we to take Qutb’s claim—a man who “saw only what he already believed, and wrote no facts, but his own truth”—that “humanity makes the gravest of errors and risks losing its account of morals, if it makes America its example”.

Qutb’s flexible relationship with observable truth is crucial in understanding the final look of his fundamentalism, and the later influence Qutb was to have on al-Qaeda—this point will be revived later.

As Qutb’s fundamentalism hardened, a process hastened by his ten-year imprisonment (and torture) at the hands of the Nasser regime, Qutb arrived at a strange place. Tripp writes:

Qutb appeared to have abandoned the idea of rational exchange or argument as the chief means of spreading the truth of Islam. Faced with the ineffable beauty and startling truth of the vision of the good life vouchsafed by God to Muhammad, Qutb seems to advocate an end to reasoned—philosophical—argument. Instead, faith seems to be all that is required.

Faith is all that is required, because faith is the fountain-point of morality, culture and social responsibility. To claim it to be from anywhere else is to relegate God, and to forget our own, divinely nominated positions on Earth. Tripp points us to the logical, and dangerous, end-point of this: “Fundamentally, he seemed to be demanding that agreement should precede discussion”.

This is a chilling statement, suggesting, as it does, Qutb’s (and al-Qaeda’s) intractable space—a philosophical black-hole, immune to reason. There are also chilling politics to this space—politics shared by al-Qaeda.

* * *

Scholars argue as to whether or not Qutb would have sanctioned al-Qaeda, but it is doubtless that he has had a major influence upon Osama bin Laden (who was taught by Qutb’s exiled brother) and former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (and current al-Qaeda second-in-command) Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The first influence to note is Qutb’s and al-Qaeda’s shared definition of jihad. Translated to mean “struggle” and traditionally referring to the private difficulties of reconciling oneself with God (it should go without saying, but this understanding of jihad remains the dominant one amongst Muslims), Qutb took jihad to mean the offensive struggle for Islam; a concept of struggle that reserved the use of force. Berman writes of Qutb: “Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a life of struggle, or jihad for Islam, and the struggle means martyrdom”.
And martyrdom means death. Qutb himself achieved this when he was hanged in 1966 for political conspiracy. Before his death, Qutb had written extensively on the theme of martyrdom:

Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.

There are obvious comparisons between these statements and statements made in suicide martyrdom videos today. Take the 15-year-old Palestinian Hussam Abdo (who is the subject of the photo that heads this piece) who, in March 2004, walked towards a crowded Israeli check-point strapped with explosives. Hussam’s intentions were detected by Israeli soldiers, who trained their guns on the teenager while a robot was dispatched to disarm the explosives. Hussam became famous when footage of the moment circulated the globe. This exchange with Hussam took place a few months after his imprisonment. The interviewer is James Reynolds from the BBC:

JR: Some teenagers want to be footballers, others want to be singers. You wanted to be a suicide bomber. Why?

Hussam: It’s not suicide - it’s martyrdom. I would become a martyr and go to my God. It’s better than being a singer or a footballer. It’s better than everything.

To be sure, Hussam mentions avenging his friend’s death (and, bizarrely, his dislike of school) as reasons for the attempted bombing, but, like many others, the death is couched in a romantic, Qutb-ian logic—the romance, and gifted afterlife, that attends martyrdom.

Another chilling example comes to us from the eldest suicide bomber involved in the July 7, 2005 bombings in London. Mohammad Siddique Khan, 30, left behind a suicide tape on which he recorded justifications for his part in the bombings that took 54 lives:

Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood… Our driving motivation doesn’t come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer.
Our religion is Islam—obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Muhammad… This is how our ethical stances are dictated.

Khan also references various and vague injustices committed by the West on “his people”; Khan’s final polemic is undoubtedly politicised, but it is also undoubtedly fundamentally religious. This is about more than the West, this is about a violently enforced “obedience to the one true God”. To view the July 7 bombers, or the s/11 terrorists, as violent political reactionaries is only a partial truth—they are fundamentalists. This is non-negotiable, and its roots go back to Qutb’s privileging of the martyr.

Interestingly, Khan refers to himself as a “solider at war” in the video. It is a recurring theme—suicide terrorists locating their act in an internationally defined holy war. This question—just who will be subject to offensive jihad—has been influenced by Qutb.

Qutb used the word jahiliyya to describe the un-Islamic and for Qutb, the un-Islamic did not just refer to non-Muslims, but rather to all who did not believe in a strict, sharia state, a critical semantic development. Historian John Calvert argues that Qutb’s greatest influence on this current jihad was “the notion that the West and its regional proxies constitute a metaphysical entity. Jahiliyya is not confined to the West but is a constituent component of many Muslim countries”. In other words, al-Qaeda’s jihad is both internationalised against the West and localised against Muslim governments deemed to be un-Islamic.

Qutb’s influence on al-Qaeda stretches to include the question of who may become part of the jihad. In his writings, Qutb privileges the activist, and, as Tripp writes, encourages “the virtues of direct, non-philosophical apprehension of the truth, of dynamic fiqh… It is here that many have read into his work elements for a revolutionary manifesto”. An activist, in Qutb’s terms, is anyone who has faith—in fact it is preferable if they have nothing but faith—and acts upon it.

But perhaps most distressing of all, is the shared ground between Qutb and al-Qaeda’s leaders regarding the scope of jihadi ambition. al-Qaeda, like Qutb, believe that the only law is God’s law, and as such, man-made laws should be abandoned in favour of sharia—a move towards a perfect community. This I have looked at before. But the sheer scope of this vision is unnerving.

al-Qaeda leaders and suicide bombers have spoken of their desire to establish an international caliphate. This, surely, could not explain away the motivations of all, or perhaps even the majority, of Islamic terrorism, but the desire remains. It sits alongside Qutb’s belief that “Islam seemed to have an answer to all current social and political problems as he defined them” and “the contemporary Muslim had a duty to struggle against the forces of jahiliyya in the twentieth century in order to re-establish the perfect community and, more ambitiously, to elevate Islam to its rightful position as the dominant universal creed”.
Dominant universal creed.

With al-Qaeda, Qutb’s ideas have converged to create the perfect storm, whereby the intractable space—that is, the condition that faith is all that is required—is populated with terrorists (Qutb’s privileged activist) and set to wage an offensive jihad with a newly determined international concept of jahiliyya.

This can not end well, but the West can attempt to limit the numbers of “privileged activists” volunteering their services to al-Qaeda. By these activists I refer to the poor, stupid, hungry, criminal, angry or abused peoples that live both in the East and the West (though this isn’t always the case. Siddique Khan, mentioned earlier, was college educated and had worked as a teacher before the July 7 attack). It is the people seduced by the apparent Godliness and purpose and structure of terrorism. With these people we need superior PR, and that means an honest recounting of history.

Qutb’s claims that Western man placed an arrogant faith in reason has a legitimate claim—Nazism demonstrated the technological progress birthed by the Enlightenment in its industrial-scale destruction of the Jews. Profound developments in technology has meant the military ubiquity of the United States. But to note the crimes of the Nazis, or the bloody incursions of Israel and America is not compatible with viewing the men and women who leaped from the twin towers as soulless jahilliya. The men and women who leaped that day were fathers and mothers, Knicks and Yankees fans, drinkers, readers and mortgage holders. They were innocents.

The conflation of American civilians with American government is one made by the propaganda and metaphysical assumptions of al-Qaeda—that the West has been fundamentally corrupted by secularism and capitalism, and poses a profound threat to Islam. If the West is wholly corrupted, then all peoples and places are legitimate targets of violent jihad.

Within this justification exists yet another link between bin Laden and Qutb—each man’s distortion of history, and political use of Qur’anic interpretation. Writer Max Rodenbeck writes well of this in his review of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden:

He is a soapbox orator, scoring unsubtle points in an imaginary debate by drawing on a mix of Islamic scripture, faddish political constructs, and gross exaggeration, as well as real historical grievances… For all his aura of religious punctiliousness, bin Laden twists Islamic texts to his purposes. He seems happy to engage in factual distortion and, occasionally, the politician’s bald-faced lie.

There are multiple examples of this, but consider the fact that bin Laden has not publicly considered the split in America caused by the decision to invade Iraq; he ignores the millions who marched in Europe before the Iraqi invasion, and of the consequent, considerable dent in Tony Blair’s popularity. Such observations are politically unhelpful; Qutb and bin Laden may well say they are also redundant—each man has defined the West as jahilliya.

bin Laden’s espoused world view is considered legitimate by al-Qaeda’s drifting, impoverished foot-soldiers who, rightly or wrongly, consider their plight America’s fault. al-Qaeda’s leadership (and yes, this group is best defined ideologically, so hierarchical considerations are difficult) exploits existing conditions of enmity towards the West in order to better recruit. Rodenbeck, reviewing Olivier Roy’s Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, put his finger on just these conditions of recruitment, saying:

Roy… notes striking parallels between today’s jihadists and Europe’s radical left of the 1960s and 1970s. The two movements have drawn from similar social pools of alienated, dislocated youth. They have chosen similar symbols (beards and guns and sanctified texts: the Koran substituting for Marx, Sayyid Qutb for Gramsci) and targets (“imperialism,” “globalisation,” “Americanisation”).

al-Qaeda’s seniors may exist in the intractable space, but there are things to be done about preventing the alienated, confused or plain criminal from drifting into it. We must be confident in what the West can offer, and that means being confident enough to admit to its flaws. bin Laden, for all of his hyperbole and distortion, gives voice to genuine historical grievances. An honest discussion with the peoples who may join al-Qaeda, and a considerable effort to understand the conditions—both real and imagined—that encourage terrorism, is surely the only way to prevent them from occupying that intractable space. This may come, but it is unlikely for as long as Bush remains in the White House—at time of writing another 18 months, give or take. Bush’s ideas, and, perhaps just as importantly, his articulation of them, has set us all back. Bush and Cheney have operated from their own intractable space—certainly a much less frightening one, but a space characterised by blind faith and harsh ideology nonetheless. Alongside a great many other things, the damned real estate of political imagery and language in the US needs to be razed and replaced with much different ideas of selling ourselves. We’ll just have to wait and see: the next president of the United States of America will be sworn-in in January 2009.

Posted by Marty at 6:24 PM

December 6, 2006

The Worst Crime of All

A rather shameful example of re-heating up old work & selling it as new, but it’s been so long between posts. This piece was originally published here.

A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
by Samantha Power

An Introduction

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Perth reached a maximum of 32 degrees on February 15, 2003. There was high humidity, no rain, and some cloud cover. I checked this because on this date Western Australia’s capital accommodated its largest public protest since Vietnam. 10,000 citizens marched and moped through the CBD’s streets, waving anti-war banners and speaking to each other in hurried, heated tones. I checked the above statistics because I was one of those 10,000 people, and time and trauma will make it that memory is rarely accountable.
I checked some other things: an estimated 300,000 people joined anti-war rallies across the country that weekend, but Howard said that public opinion could not be fairly measured by the numbers. Then Opposition leader Simon Crean, citing these numbers, said Howard was “out of touch” on the impending war, but no-one listened and in November that same year Crean announced he would abandon the leadership.
There are other details from that day that I can not check—they have not been recorded in any online news archive. But they are the details that stuck.
In Perth’s CBD on February 15, 2003 there was no mention of Saddam Hussein. Nor was there mention of his Anfal campaign, an Iraqi design to kill Kurds with bureaucratic precision. In these streets, on this day, there was no mention of genocide. The American myth of Lincolnian intervention had been replaced with the myth of malevolent empire: “No Blood for Oil!”, and history had been skewed and condensed so we could protest.
Joan Didion once wrote that we tell ourselves stories to live, but the stories we tell ourselves to protest are slim indeed. On that day protestations rhymed in red paint on cardboard—US history had been condensed to pithy lessons in evil.
Certainly there were genuine concerns about our increasing subservience to Bush; certainly there were concerns about US and British intelligence. But if there was nuance, and I suspect there must have been—deep down, in the pockets of the protesters—there was no sign of it, and rationale played second to the rules of public protest. The rules are much the same as the rules which govern the 6 o’clock news bulletin, or the world’s fish-wraps: condense and colour. The protest body did just this, and moved and marched itself colourfully against the Howard government. It did this with slogans and papier-mâché dolls of the PM, his features cruelly distorted, his hands covered in mock-blood. A protest must move in unison, on the grounds of consensus, and it finds this by divining the lowest common denominator. By its very definition this march had to defy calm questioning of the post-invasion plan (the seeming absence of which was the reason behind my attendance). It had to defy questions on the general justifications for intervention, and on the grim history of Hussein’s rule. In short, it had to defy sense, and the 10,000 yelled and ached with the passion found in contemplating what Christopher Hitchens once described as the US’ “unlovely interests” in the region.
Durability is a precious thing, rarely found in our ‘papers or news bulletins, and it certainly is not found in the slogans we use for protest. Perhaps the rallies over that weekend can boast a durability, but it is within their numbers, not with their actions. Certainly, Samantha Power’s important work—A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide—is a durable blessing, and perhaps, just perhaps, it may have assisted with our public discourse on these matters. But more on this later….

A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

A dim knowledge of the 20th century will still afford you this one fact: never before had so many been victim to mass killings. The 20th century is marked by two world wars, but also by at last six major examples of genocide: The Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915; Hitler’s extermination of Jews, and other minorities during the Second World War; the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against the Cambodian people; the gassing of Kurds by Saddam Hussein in Northern Iraq; the destruction of the Tutsi of Rwanda by the Hutu, and, finally, the genocidal treatment of Croats, Muslims and Albanians by the Serbs. As astonishing as these acts are (and Power’s gift for research and methodology amply provide the ghastly scope of these crimes), what rivals the acts themselves is Power’s central thesis: that the West, and the US in particular, had sufficient intelligence about these crimes, not only while they occurred, but often before. The horror of Power’s book is her persuasive argument that nothing was done to prevent these acts of genocide, and that “no US president has ever suffered politically for its indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on”.
Needless to say there are few heroes in this book, but if there is one, it is Raphael Lemkin, a figure who represents the impassioned goodness capable in individuals, but not often permitted by political machinery. This month will mark the 47th anniversary of Raphael Lemkin’s death, and you may be forgiven for believing that the man who saw that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was presented to, and adopted by, the UN General Assembly, and who had been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace prize (he never won it), died in salubrious conditions. Not so. On August 28, 1959, the man who had spent a quarter-century trying to ban genocide collapsed in his law office in Manhattan with a fatal heart attack. Power writes: “Lemkin had coined the word ‘genocide’. He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral”.
In the year of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the League of Nations sat to discuss international criminal law. Lemkin, at the time a public prosecutor in Warsaw, and piqued by the Turkish atrocities against the Armenians, addressed the League of Nations Legal Council arguing that the crime of barbarity (a crime that would later linguistically evolve into “genocide”) be considered as a crime against international law. Lemkin was not only sensitive to the Ottoman slaughter, but presciently wary of Hitler, and he argued that if mass slaughter had happened before, it could happen again. For his comments, the Polish foreign minister forced Lemkin to resign, and Lemkin became a private prosecutor.
Lemkin’s remaining 26 years were remarkable. When his fears about Hitler materialised in 1939, Lemkin joined the Polish army and fought to defend Warsaw. Six years later, when Europe lay in ruins and Hitler’s body was smouldering in a ditch, Lemkin had lost nearly 50 family members in the Holocaust, caught a bullet in the hip, and had become a special foreign affairs advisor in the US War Department. He had also, before war’s end, coined “genocide” and its first printed appearance came in the widely read Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. An impressive litany then, and on December 9, 1948, Lemkin’s moment arrived—the vote in the UN General Assembly to ban genocide: 55 votes for, none against. Just four years before had Lemkin introduced the term to the world. But sadness and disappointment were never far from Lemkin, and Power registers a note of grief when she writes: “Unfortunately, though Lemkin could not know it, the most difficult struggles lay ahead. Nearly four decades would pass before the United States would ratify the treaty, and fifty years would elapse before the international community would convict anyone for genocide”.
Lemkin’s presence in this book is a sombre one. His heroic story, and his sad, final days preface Power’s painstaking accounts of genocide in the last century, and as she deputises vast and persuasive evidence that the US government consciously chose not to intervene in each act, Lemkin’s legacy hovers somewhere strong, sermonising on the power of a driven individual, but also upon powerful political antipathy.
Whilst Lemkin’s legacy can be debated, Power’s painstakingly researched thesis is difficult to argue against: it has never been in any US president’s political interest to intervene in genocidal activity. What’s more, the startlingly banal reasons for inactivity are astonishing. During the Ottoman slaughter, the US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau Sr. dispatched this cable back to Washington:

I earnestly beg the Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration with a view to reaching a conclusion which may possibly have the effect of checking [Turkey’s] government and certainly provide opportunity for efficient relief which now is not permitted. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race, but I realize that I am here as Ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country.

Power writes: “Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they please within their own borders”. It is here that we reach the nut of Lemkin’s concern: that infrastructure, welfare, culture—they were a nation’s responsibility, but sovereignty should not be extended to conceal, or even encourage, genocide.
What of the Allies’ knowledge of the Holocaust? Power writes: “The Allies’ suppression of Hitler’s Final Solution has been the the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship. Intelligence on Hitler’s extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942”. Power continues: “In November 1942, Rabbi Wise, who knew President Roosevelt personally, told a Washington press conference that he and the State Department had reliable information that some 2 million Jews had already been murdered”.
If it appeared that the Nazis had left little room for expanding the scope of barbarity, the Khmer Rouge found a way during the 1970s. Here Power explains the proximity of the rise of the Khmer Rouge to the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam—the US, quite simply, would not countenance re-deploying troops to the same region, not after the nightmare years of Vietnam. But when a few senior officials voiced concerns about the Khmer Rouge, they were shot down for crying wolf—the sad result of the dubious circumstances that Johnson conceived to place America in Vietnam, and the rotten methods deployed by Nixon and Kissinger to keep them there. In short, the re-deployment of troops to the region would have been political suicide, and Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 all but nailed inactivity in the face of genocide. The Khmer Rouge, finally forcibly removed from power by the Vietnamese, enjoyed the patronage of the Chinese—arms and money—on the outskirts of Cambodia, and so the US, in favouring its freshly minted relationship with the Chinese, became de facto supporters of the Khmer Rouge, and the Russian-backed Vietnamese were left to pick up the pieces.
Power forcefully demonstrates the various geopolitical concerns which conspire to political lethargy. But what of the US public? Power is just as convincing in arguing that newspapers have known, and published, plenty of horror stories, but it does little in fermenting public outcry. Power argues that the magnitude of the atrocities is difficult to report (a regime’s reclusiveness; hostility to foreign journalists; a reliance upon questionable sources etc.), but that further still, the ghastly scale of genocide is impossible to fathom appreciably. Power tells the story of Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat and Roman Catholic who disguised himself as a Jew and smuggled himself into the Warsaw ghetto, before smuggling himself back out and to London. When Karski travelled to the United States he met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who heard Karski’s stories before telling him: “I don’t believe you”. Karski protested, before Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said that I cannot believe you”. Here was a difficulty of conception, and I’ll leave the last thought on that not with Power but rather with British comedian Eddie Izzard:

Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can’t even deal with that! You know, we think if somebody kills someone, that’s murder, you go to prison. You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that’s what they do. 20 people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever. And over that, we can’t deal with it, you know? Someone’s killed 100,000 people. We’re almost going, “Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning…”

Iraq

It is disingenuous to isolate the Iraqi chapter here, because it suggests that it holds a unique significance. It doesn’t. Power’s strength is deep research, an avoidance of polemic, and a consistent and persuasively held argument. I isolate this chapter, not because it is any different from the others, but because it should have had, and perhaps still should have, an influence upon public discussions of military intervention.
When we marched, back then, back before 2, 790 coalition deaths, and an estimated (and highly disputed) 40, 000 civilian deaths, well, back then, it was the drive of distrust that put bodies on streets. And why not? The intelligence seemed dubious even then, and when our own leader played deputy to the child president, well… But the anti-war drive never really got out of first gear, publicly melted as it was to crude understandings of geopolitics. Oil. Empire.
While the endemic failings of public protest can not be measured against the gross failings of this war, it may be useful to hear what Power says on Iraq, when operation Anfal enjoyed its perverse zenith:

Hussein did not set out to exterminate every last Kurd in Iraq, as Hitler had tried against the Jews. Nor did he order all the educated to be murdered, as Pol Pot had done. In fact, Kurds in Iraq’s cities were terrorized no more than the rest of Iraq’s petrified citizenry. Genocide was probably not even Hussein’s primary objective. His main aim was to eliminate the Kurdish insurgency. But it was clear at the time and has become even clearer since that the destruction of Iraq’s rural Kurdish population was the means that he chose to end that rebellion. Kurdish civilians were rounded up and executed or gassed not because of anything they as individuals did but because they were Kurds.

With the Congo bloody, and Kim Jung Il posturing madly over a hopelessly sick country, the question “why Iraq?” is fair. But Power’s firm explication of the devils of Iraq should leave us not postulating whether war is wrong, but rather when it is justified. Arrogant, dangerous adventurism is this US administration’s disease—but it does not alter the fact that Saddam Hussein committed genocide. If the bloody quagmire of Iraq only serves to support theories of rabid empiricism gone wrong, then I believe we move from an appreciation of the US as benevolent intervener. History certainly proves me wrong, but Power has left me convinced that genocide needs the world’s strongest nation to assist in its prevention. Decades of “unlovely interests” have certainly deeply undermined the US’ reputation, but what happens if it folds?
If we establish genocide as the worst case scenario, and Power would argue that there is nothing worse (we’ll exclude a nuclear apocalypse and natural disasters), then perhaps we can still breathe life into Lincoln’s Last Great Hope: pleading and begging and believing that the US can assume a position of practical moral leadership. Power’s despair, however, seems to be that of Lemkin’s: that the banal sum of Realpolitik and conceptual frailties denies a public and political appreciation of the worst crime of all. Perhaps then we need another individual like Lemkin; a man preternaturally in-tune with what is right, and who would sacrifice his nervous system for it. It is a great deal to ask of anyone.

Posted by Marty at 4:52 PM

March 23, 2006

Iraq

I was two months shy of my tenth birthday when Bush senior lit Baghdad up for the first time. As with the adults watching with me, the war existed only as a series of images, colourfully, if vacuously, commented on by Brokaw, Rather and Jennings, all hamstrung by a particularly censorious military.
The Pentagon had learnt some harsh realities from Vietnam, and launched Annex Foxtrot to ensure any My Lai horrors weren’t broadcast live on the evening bulletin. No, the press were to be “followed at all times. Repeat, at all times,” and so for me the war took on the agreeable glow of a computer game—all luminescent tracer fire, and precision bombing, the electronic bomb-sights happily televised live: 3-2-1… KABOOM!
It was all terribly exciting.
I remember keeping a diary while the action unfolded, the only time I have kept such a thing in my life. The diary’s gone now, as has all sense of what was in it, and why it was kept, but there’s a sense when I think back on it (hand-made pages, written on with blue and red biro) that I felt this was… important—important beyond the television coverage’s aesthetic triumphs.
And then, 100 hours after the first bombs were dropped, it was all over. Iraq surrendered, Saddam stayed, and I was left believing my parents were wrong—real life was just like a computer game.

12 years later and now three years ago, Bush junior anticipated lighting Baghdad up again. I now sided with my parents—the world, whatever it was, was nothing like a computer game, although it could often be as bloody and compelling. I had decided that the war was ridiculous—there was little to no post-invasion plan and I had also decided that the world was nothing like the one our leaders believed in: a world on the brink of a Saddam-inspired annihilation, tempered by the Great and Universal struggle of Good and Evil. Yeah, fuck them, I thought.
But I had also decided that the majority of people I walked next to in the anti-war marches were fools, kinked with slogans and hippie-platitudes, who had reduced history and politics to crowd-pleasing protest couplets. Yeah, fuck them, I thought as I bit into a cheeseburger and wondered whether it would be one or two weeks before the first bombs were dropped. It turned out to be five days.
Three years later and the US’s impatience, myopia and hubris have led to—surprise!—a bloody quagmire (that damned word again) with no end-date in sight. The US is still not evil, just critically inept, and undercurrents of masochism that fester in the US military’s belly encourage fresh young men to subscribe to jihad. Saddam still remains a fuck-ass in desperate need of legal punishment and Bush has (nearly) three years left on his second term. He will no doubt leave a deep, deep scar on the Republican party, and their only hope in 2008 is a candidate proven to have been miles apart from this damned administration. This means McCain, who may or may not have a hope of beating the eventual Democratic candidate, widely believed to be Senator Clinton. I doubt, however, if any of Bush’s gang will find meaningful employment in any future Republican administration, but I thank them for the various lessons they’ve taught me about greed and gain and failure.

Posted by Marty at 3:17 PM

September 30, 2005

Latham as Samson

And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. (Judges 16:30).

Samson fell in love with a Philistine once, and deeply. Their sex life isn’t detailed, but Samson was divinely bequeathed super-strength and a hot-head, so I assume it was rough… but in the end she betrayed him, and Samson carved out a life of psychotic vengeance against the Philistines.
The Bible records one incident where Samson uses the jaw-bone of an ass to slay 1000 of his enemy, and in another incident Samson sets fire to Philistine farmer’s foxes, leaving the flaming creatures to howl and die under the moon. Our Samson was pissed.
The secret of his super-strength was, in the end, discovered. His head shaved, the Philistines captured him, tore his eyes out, and set him in prison to crush grain. But the Philistines weren’t careful enough, and Samson’s vengeance was allowed to take its famous course, resulting in what may be the first recorded kamikaze attack…

***
I don’t suppose there are any great myths of decency left supporting Australian politics, but, if there are, Latham has surely pissed on their shadows.
In his second appearance on Lateline since the publication of his diaries, a kinked Mark Latham spat his way through the interview, attempting to claw the eyes out of any number of politicians and journos. So much so, that the interviewer, Tony Jones, had to block three allegations of Latham’s that surely would have resulted in slander suits. It was a wild exchange.
As notable was the savage way Latham went about destroying whatever hint of credibility he had left. Latham set about attacking the sexual lives and (alleged) soft-drug habits of ex-colleagues in a smarmy, juvenile fashion—this was the same damned man that screamed bloody murder against his old party for an alleged smear campaign. It was pure hypocrisy, and Jones called it, and so Samson finished pushing on those pillars.
Latham’s approach was certainly Samson’s, but whether it will be as catastrophic is another matter. Latham exhibits the same vengeful bent, but not the strength, and Labor should recover before the next election.
What’s left, though, is this question: was the Labor party so bankrupt of leadership qualities that a paranoid misanthrope was deemed a suitable candidate for future prime minister? It boggles the mind, and we are owed a satisfactory explanation.
I’m sure it’ll never come.

Posted by Marty at 8:11 PM

September 20, 2005

Latham's diaries

It’s difficult to know what to make of Mark Latham. The release of his diaries—400+ pages of a sort that may very well eviscerate the Labor party—has captured unfaltering levels of interest, and is now the biggest political story of the year. The release of the book was moved to yesterday, Monday the 19th, two days earlier as to utilize the super-inflated interest, and when News Ltd. took the ABC to the Supreme Court (for possibly breaching confidentiality between The Australian and Latham’s publishers), a very dirty bomb had been set-off by the former Labor leader.

So what to make of these diaries? They’re profane, ceaselessly vitriolic and paint a man who seems to have been very much on the outside of the Labor party. In fact, almost every senior Labor figure (Julia Gillard is the notable exception) is knifed by Latham’s diaries, either suggesting a deeply paranoid misanthrope, unfit for Prime Minister-ship, or of a Labor party defined by greasy subterfuge and Machiavellian ambition.
It is nice to side with Latham. His, well, grotesque picture of the Labor party conforms well to my cynicism of the party, of politics, but surely it can not be as simple as a man who just wanted to tell the truth. Latham’s diaries are problematic for many reasons:—For one, Latham compromises Paul Kelly, prominent political writer for The Australian, by publishing certain quotes which could seriously damage him professionally—no attempt is made by Latham to hide the source. Asked about this by Andrew Denton, Latham, an admirable intellect, teetered on the churlish in defending his position. “If the media can say whatever they like, then I will too…” was the essence of his reply. Denton seemed unimpressed. So was I.
Latham’s diaries sit unwell for me for this other reason, too: Latham has taken great pride in painting the diaries as the work of an honest whistle-blower, sickened by a party fueled by machine-men and blind-ambition. Surely this is only a partial truth—Latham champions candor when it suits him, but when questioned about his own history of shifting allegiances, he seems to button up. When asked, for example, about his relationship with once-mentor Gough Whitlam, Latham responds that they “were political friends, and nothing more. We’ll never see each other again.”
They were more than that. And everyone knows it. For one, Latham’s oldest child bears Gough as a middle name.
Latham’s diaries contain some heavy allegations, each made with a peculiarly ribald-Aussie tongue, and reading them I thought of a time when Latham really dropped the load when campaigning for the national election. It was the night before the Big Day (when Latham would lead the Labor party to one of their worst-ever defeats) and Latham and Howard had scheduled some radio time. Latham was exiting the studio as his opponent entered it, and Latham, a much larger man, shook his hand violently while standing over him in a classic position of intimidation. I swear there was even something… odd, in Mark’s eye. Happily, Denton picked up on this too, asking Mark just what the hell it was all about. Latham subsequently told a story of playground revenge—Latham believed Howard to have a pumped-up handshake to make up for his small stature and, apparently, had hurt Latham’s wife with one of its implementations. Latham never forgot.
Here is a man profoundly damaged—he has lost faith in a party which once defined him, and eventually placed him as leader. He has lost what were once father-son relationships, dismissing them as now-irrelevant symptoms of a political career. We have a man who at every chance defends his book as the work of noble candor, and yet struggles to defend, or even talk about, a swarm of issues, including his violent mood swings, his reticence at the time of the Boxing Day tsunami, and what, in fact, Labor had given him.
Here is a very angry man—a very interesting man, no doubt, but one smart enough to realize the deep, deep effect this will have on his old party. Short of answering every question, the publication of Latham’s diaries seems to have encouraged a swathe more. And, what’s more, may well have further augmented the Lib’s indomitable position.

Posted by Marty at 12:13 PM

July 15, 2005

Afterword on The War on Terror

There are bombs everywhere now. By the time you finish your cigarette, or finish your beer, or finish reading this… someone’s brother would have been destroyed by a bomb, somewhere. We are told to be vigilant, hopeful. We are told to utilize virtues that, apparently, the West have a monopoly on—stoicism, comradeship, endurance, faith… it’s all very tiring, especially when the blue-blues are always there, knocking, knocking, trying to find a way in…
I’m listening to “Blackbird” now, from The Beatles White Album. If you do not like this song, or are sick of it, then you do not deserve ears. “Blackbird” doesn’t make anything make more sense, nor does it replace the blue-blues with croissants and light. Rather, it stands as rich, poetic companionship—a feat of breathtaking simplicity, composed by a man blessed. It’s here now, and will never leave us—our greatest achievements can be found and placed on our bedroom shelves. In my room I estimate I have over one thousand years of work—all of the novels, all of the records, all of the time it took to compose each and every one of them… a thousand years, give or take, and holding efforts spanning from Ancient Greece to last week.
The bombs are still there, always will be, and the smoke and the torn limbs and the moribund peace agreements and the high, high, high mountains of political spiel… Well, damn. But in my bedroom I have one thousand years of talking and whispering; one thousand years of graceful tears and laughter; there’s a thousand-years worth of fights and questions and work, work, work—ethical rationalism, psychedelic adventurism, cathartic meanderings, arguments, editing, recording, re-recording, bleeding, touring, leaving, coming, writing, screaming, finishing…
It helps.

Posted by Marty at 7:43 PM | Comments (1)

Running on the Spot: The London Bombs & the War on Terror

Thursday, 7 July 2005—Terror strikes London
5.50 pm WST—It’s night here, on the other side of the globe, and cold and dark but for the news flashes of my cable news services—CNN, BBC, Sky London and Fox report with a frenzied vagueness—the services are reliant upon dazed eye-witness accounts, starved of information from authorities who clearly know better than to inflame panic. What is consistent though are words like “war” and “fatalities” and it’s clear that the second largest underground system in the world (it accommodates three million Londoners per day) is suspended. The symbolism of this attack, if not the fatalities, is staggering.
8.30 pm WST—Blair is approaching the lectern now, and he is clearly shaken. He speaks volubly, considering—determined, consoling, but eschewing the typical over-blown rhetoric which over-shadows real human drama and common sense. He is a man knifed in the stomach, but his presence is impressive, largely because it is so real. I wonder if I have to like him a little bit now…
9.00—Bush makes his eulogy, deputizing the cowboy-color we’ve come to expect. There is very little human about it. We have heard this all before…
11.00—Many hours have passed since the explosions, and various heads of various authorities now summon a press conference. The picture is roughly painted for us: Four, not seven explosions. Three on trains, the other on a double-decker bus. All the bombs were detonated in the heart of London. 33 people have died, the figure expected to rise by 20 or more. The head of the Underground says he hopes the tube will be reopened some time tomorrow…
In Iraq, during the same passage of time, there would likely have been 12 bombing fatalities (largely locals) and roughly 8 kidnappings.

One Week Later
There’s a rub here, and it’s this—no-one can be protected from this kind of attack, not now, not ever. Bush, Blair, Howard, Scotland Yard, they all emphasize the importance of national security, but it’s futile. There is no such thing as an impregnable homeland security, not for this asymmetrical business. No Star Wars system would have prevented American jets being flown into American buildings, and no police presence could have prevented four Islamo-fascists carrying death onto the London tube. Our leaders have an increasingly tough sell on this point, for they themselves must realise the futility, and so we have a war on terror, a bogus idea that may assuage the dim-witted, but it won’t save lives.
We were sold the invasion of Iraq, in part, as a strike against a cultivator of terror. Well, two and half years later it hasn’t seemed to have worked, and stories like Abu Ghraib can only work as recruitment posters for prospective terrorists. In Afghanistan, well… the Taliban were smashed, but only in the sense that they were deposed from a central command. They fled to the mountains, taking their fighting expertise with them (this is the country, remember, that staved off a relentless Soviet attack during the ‘80s), and are now, apparently, exerting influence from there—a fact supported by Howard’s re-deployment of troops in that region.
So where are we? Homeland security is futile, and our military excursions (a vast, messy extension of protecting Western borders) hasn’t proved profitable. Rather it seems to have been an expensive, bloody, intractable mess.
So why do we continue to support the premise of the war on terror (i.e. that ideas may be combated by military extension)? Largely because our leaders continue to tell us that this is a war against our “ideals”, against “our way of life” i.e. as distinct from a war against our politics. This is a crucial difference—it creates a discourse in which we resort to embedded notions of cultural ideals, cultural identification, stymieing discussion concerning our politics—i.e. the real versus the abstract.
Breeding nationalism is very important for keeping up our faith in this war on terror. Bush has used the tactic relentlessly since S-11, and now the political expediency of jingoism is apparent to Blair, who’s summoning the Churchillian stoicism, the Blitz-surviving strength, so integral to the British ideal. This may be something close to Freud’s “narcissistic ideal”—what Britain strives for as its ideal has already occurred (during the Blitz), thus creating a narcissistic satisfaction. All Britons, poor or rich, can identify with this, and so it becomes a substitutive satisfaction for the sacrifices of this war (e.g. dead troops, pissed Jihadists, restrictions on personal freedoms). Being told that this is a war against the British-bulldog, or against the Aussie-digger, is easily translatable, and encourages us to participate with the cultural ideal. Of course this leads to hyper-patriotism, and is clearly hostile to any deeper discourse concerning our relationship with the East.
So what happens now? The West is encouraged to retreat into cultural ideals, breeding a pig-headedness that will surely rub against the Islamo-fascists who continue to operate underground. We are at a stale-mate which has very, very little hope of being unlocked any time soon.

One Day Later
Ahh, queer ramblings for a queer time. The above requires some Heavy Editing, but who will do that? The above themes don’t bear looking at for extended periods—it’s much too thick and the stench of failure is everywhere.
We’re locked in now, for the long haul, and so you had better start practicing your responses to your future child’s question: “Did everybody used to have to wear these masks, Daddy?”

Posted by Marty at 10:51 AM | Comments (2)

April 21, 2005

WA State Election: Barnett's Wet Dream

A surprise canal proposal from WA premier aspirant Colin Barnett has proven a spectacular piece of poor strategy, challenging what previously looked like an indomitable position for the state’s Coalition.

Barnett’s response to Western Australia’s water supply problem centres on the construction of a 3700 km canal, similar to one currently used in California, designed to channel water from the state’s Kimberly region to Perth. Logistically breathtaking, Barnett’s proposal is significantly more dramatic, more expensive and less researched than current Labor premier Geoff Gallop’s industrial suggestion. Gallop proposed the construction of a desalination plant in the area of Kwinana, an industrial suburb straddling Perth.

Whilst Labor’s proposal has been criticised for its pollutant potential — the Greens refuse to support the idea because of concerns over Greenhouse gas emissions — the desalination plant remains a much less contested policy than Barnett’s canal. Under Gallop’s plan, water rates would increase, but only marginally compared to the forecasted increases required to pay for Barnett’s project. Secondly, Gallop’s idea has undergone substantial independent analysis, a virtue lacking from the Coalition’s project.

Nobody likes a loser, and the potential for failure here is huge. Already, the distancing game is on. Answering a nationally piqued media, Prime Minister John Howard reluctantly responded to the canal project with non-committal bleats. Shaped by the context of partisan politics, this lack of federal interest will translate to the cruellest perception of credibility failure. Indeed, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello’s remarks crossed necessary party platitude, and read as a veiled vote of no confidence.

This is mildly awkward for Howard, but it will be nothing compared to the shame Barnett will feel if he is forced to explain to corporate party backers why a seemingly unassailable position was surrendered so spectacularly.

Why is his position so threatened? Aside from the questions of credibility, raised by the Federal distancing, Barnett has stamped his face too forcibly upon an electorate previously content to vote for whoever was contesting Gallop. Gallop’s unpopularity was such that Barnett’s strength lay simply in being his challenger — now voters must negotiate with Barnett’s super-blown and now challenged image.

Prior to the canal proposal, Barnett was quietly and effectively handling the ”drugs issue”, the clearest example of wedge politics in this campaign. Barnett claimed the moral authority, charging that Gallop’s decriminalisation of marijuana was disastrous, and hinting at WA youths’ vulnerability to physical and moral atrophy through lax drug laws. Barnett took a hard right, peddling a conservative approach to drug use, distancing himself cleverly from Gallop and corralling the large pockets of fashionable conservatism.

In fact the drugs issue was such a divider that there was the slim chance WA would face an enlightened public discussion on the topic. The canal, and the questions it raises, will, for the time being at least, ensure that no such thing happens.

The media occupy an enhanced power here. Voters have short memories, and if the media drop this right now, it’s possible Barnett will recover. But this seems unlikely, considering the frenzy the canal proposal has already whipped up. Barnett’s next move will be the magician’s Sleight of Policy — a thick and sustained course of conservative policy announcements to divert attention. All of this while registering unwavering confidence in his canal dream. Barnett faces a very difficult juggling exercise that now gives Gallop a chance at this election. Stay tuned.

Posted by Marty at 12:34 PM

Strange Rumblings in the Suburbs: The WA State Election Wrap-up

— February 2005
Out here, in WA, it was a strange week, & that’s a value call — but in a week characterised by suicide phone calls, self-inflicted gun-shot wounds and hari-kari political strategy, it’s a fair call.
It began with news of Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide — a man whose time & skills were great, but already run & ruined by the turn of the 1980s. His meta-crippling mythomania & flailing self-conviction assumed grim levels & so, for what he must have thought were the best of reasons, he ended it with a pistol.
And so it was Election Night when I received a call from an older & skilled friend stuck on the idea of suicide & observing Barnett’s demise now seemed less fun. Yes, it was Election Night, & the State had decided that Barnett’s obvious errors were enough to elect an unpopular and charm-less incumbent. It was a spectacular loss, but this meant little to my friend, who was once again battling the old-wood splinters in his heart & determining if he had the conviction to defeat them. It’s an old struggle — it predates Socrates — & yet the force and subtlety of sunlight & swans won my friend over, and he decided to live. He told me this over the phone.
At the same time Gallop picked up the pieces & it translated to an easy victory, equating to some historic electoral command, & the voters settled into routines pre-designed and tested. Indeed. It was a loss for Barnett’s risk-taking & a profound loss for the Electorate’s imagination, & out in the suburbs the people quietly demanded to know when the next rose-bud would bloom.

Posted by Marty at 11:25 AM