http://www.theage.com.au/news/state/2001/11/11/FFX1XXE9UTC.html

The power of the powerless


By MORAG FRASER
Sunday 11 November 2001

Last week I read a Turkish novelist writing profound sense about the world post-September 11. His name is Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk was writing from Istanbul, but publishing in that most New York of literary institutions, The New York Review of Books. With George W. Bush's formulaic declarations ("I will prevail") echoing in your ears it is some comfort to read the subtlety of views and the depth of analysis coming out of (and feeding into) America. From the Middle East, from Europe, from India, from Pakistan, from al-Jazeera (the enterprising Qatar-based television station), you'd expect diversity. From America, flags flying everywhere, you might expect closed-ranks unanimity. But that has never been my experience of America. There, the word will out, even with formidable enemies ranged against it. Whether the word will issue into subtle and effective long-term policy - that's a different question.

Pamuk's New York Review article (and his others published in the UK - you can find them all on the web) was remarkable not for its rhetoric but for the careful, personal and grave way in which he approached a problem that we are all going to have to understand if we are to wrest peace from the current conflict.

After the planes struck the twin towers, Pamuk went out into the Istanbul streets because he couldn't bear to see what was happening. He met an old man, a neighbor, who said to him, "Sir, have you seen, they have bombed America. They did the right thing." The man had not watched the television images; he had just heard that something had happened. Afterwards, Pamuk reports, when the shock had subsided, the man changed his mind. "They" had not done the right thing after all.

But why the first reflex? It matters here that Pamuk is both a Turk and a novelist. As a Turk and as someone who has lived in America, he straddles two very different worlds. As a writer he is more interested in understanding human behavior than judging it. Not from him righteous condemnation of apparent inhumanity. And in any case the old man changed his mind.

What Pamuk saw in him, as in many others who live in countries where the majority of the population can only dream of the life Americans (or Australians) enjoy, was humiliation, what he calls "the anger of the damned". Pamuk asks: "What prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul to condone the terror in New York in a moment of anger, or a Palestinian youth fed up with Israeli oppression to admire the Taliban, who throw nitric acid at women because they reveal their faces?"

His conclusion avoids all the convenient polarities that we have been hearing since September 11 ("If not with us then against us", Christianity/Islam etc). Pamuk wants an end, not a side. A just end. What makes these people react as they do? Pamuk: "It is not Islam or what is idiotically described as the clash between East and West or poverty itself. It is the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such people to make their voices heard."

We have seen that impotent anger before, in Germany after the First World War. Then the settlements made by the victors left the German people bereft, degraded and prey to the demagoguery that issued in the horror of the Second World War. It may take years for humiliation to shape itself into concerted action. But it comes, eventually. And when it comes it does not necessarily serve the cause of freedom.

Pamuk is not talking about people who are necessarily righteous. He allows that part of their humiliation is often a piercing sense that their poverty is to some degree due to their own folly, or that of their family before them. But blame does not remove misery. And misery will have its consequences.

It was concern for consequences that prompted former Liberal minister for immigration Fred Chaney to talk during the week of a new Marshall Plan. It is very difficult, in the present climate, to imagine Western governments - let alone Australia - thinking in such terms. We no longer plan long term. We no longer look to much beyond our own short-term national or personal interests.

The irony is that if we do not plan more imaginatively and more generously - with an eye to the rest of the world, even those parts of which we do not approve - then our own interests will not be served either.

Morag Fraser is the editor of Eureka Street.

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