This article was forwarded to me by Ebrima Sall. I thought I could share it with as there is apparently slow traffic on the L. Enjoy another authoritative and respectable voice against the saber-rattling against Iraq:
Sidibeh
Subject: [CCS-l] Fwd: Edward Said: Will the last person to leave please
turn out thelights
Edward Said in last week's Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo newspaper):
"Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights?"
***********
One opens The New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent
article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the
United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers
and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of
officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. 62,000 more
soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately
intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside
the country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint
relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering,
even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George
Bush proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the
population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is
in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply
does not exist. Israel asks for 15 billion dollars in additional loan
guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the US
mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.
Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and
continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable
disapproval. A generalised indifference (which may conceal great
over-all fear, ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the
administration's war- mongering and its strangely ineffective response
to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of
Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a
war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and
energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the
Arabs and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar.
For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration
officials, journalists have repeated the charges that have become
standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of
this chorus pre- dates 11 September, as I have shown in my books
Orientalism and Covering Islam. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been
added the authority of the United Nation's Human Development Report on
the Arab world which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the
rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women's rights.
Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and
that the Arab educational system is a disaster, in effect, a school
for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams
and their wealthy followers (like Osama Bin Laden) but also by
governments who are supposed allies of the United States. The only
"good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab
culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless
cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves
or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American
formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print. We lack
democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do
more about driving away the specter of Arab nationalism and the credo
of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what
we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam -- vague
re- cycled Orientalist clichés of the kind repeated by a tireless
mediocrity like Bernard Lewis -- is true. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic
enough. "We" need to join modernity, modernity in effect being
Western, globalised, free- marketed, democratic -- whatever those words might
be taken to mean. (If I had the time, there would be an essay to be
written about the prose style of people like Ajami, Gerges, Makiya, Talhami,
Fandy et. al., academics whose very language reeks of subservience,
inauthenticity and a hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust
upon them).
The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his minions are trying
to fabricate as a cover for a preemptive oil and hegemony war against
Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building,
regime change and forcible modernisation à l'américaine. Never mind
the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions which are unmentioned. This
will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and
replace them with a re-drawn map of the whole region. New Sykes Picot.
New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we
are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and
perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine worsens
all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Sharon and
Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we
ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an
entire people continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an
announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area
of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60- ton American-made
Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of
agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132
children. The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are
flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas, George Bush identifies with
Sharon, not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield
by Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking,
and presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for 10 years the first
time, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His
faithful lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press,
suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less.
Remarkably though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing
to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry,
dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice
of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have
done. What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes on
resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as
supplicants before the Americans?
In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the
utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The
American government and its servants issue statement after statement
of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and
destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely
muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military
bases in our territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.
Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?
The largest power in history is about to launch and is unremittingly
reiterating its intention to launch a war against a sovereign Arab
country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of
which is not only to destroy the Baathi regime but to re-design the entire
region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to re-draw
the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and
many borders in the process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm when
it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty). And
yet, there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite
demurral in response. After all, millions of people will be affected.
America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them.
Do we reserve such racist derision?
This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a
region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to
fall without attempting a collective roar of resistance and a loud
proclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will completely
dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last
words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of
history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed
utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses nevertheless
goes on functioning. Arab babies are born every hour, children go to
school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play, and laugh
and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and
companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and
misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the
business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab
leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty
gestures at the so-called "Arab street" invented by mediocre
Orientalists.
But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a
people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics
and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab
governments -- no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom --
sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up,
threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16's to deliver the punch.
The silence is deafening.
Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of
prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families
destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?
This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of
what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate
seriousness. Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation are
not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our
tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that
treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of
society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with
great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that, and
bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our
political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce a little
bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans
somehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival, and perhaps of
heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land,
the water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No
one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression
in English that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable
helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when
our strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to
leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of
upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little
left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for
extinction.
Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to
formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our
world?
This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knows
that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return
to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let
us live in peace, another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy.
Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our
future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening
arrogance? I hope someone is listening.
***********
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