The West Needs Moderate Voices
By Shajahan Madampat
03 August, 2006
Countercurrents.orgAs the Israeli forces continue to test the limits of impunity, the so-called international community is scripting a macabre drama, marked by deceit, complicity, and simulated objectivity.
A duplicitous West, near-united in dubiousness of purpose and rhetoric of callous inaction, the proverbial 'movers and shirkers' in the Arab world, sandwiched between the hereditary nobility of an outraged public and the pathological self portraits of spinelessness and passivity, and the world public opinion, the last repository of moral wisdom which is currently on the brink of gradual oblivion or cooptation - the players are greeted with exultant mirth by the voyeuristic excitement of the republic of couch potatoes the world over.
Shun the gory details. They are irrelevant to the story, like the Lebanese, like the Palestinians, like the Iraqis, like the other faceless and disposable abstractions of a new world order. (Buy your own irrelevance and even death if you will, and get democracy free, so goes the adage, courtesy Condoleezza Rice, or Rise, who went back from the region without even as much as condoling the dance of death and destruction).
Same old coinages all around - terrorism, right to self-defense for the Israelis (not even right to self-defiance for the Arabs, mind you), and the New Middle East, wherein will metamorphose into milk and honey the spilling blood of the Lebanese, the Palestinians, and any Arab who dares to dissent. We have seen it all umpteen times before, in countless incarnations of the 'march of civilization' into the region - Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, 1967, 1973, 1982. The only difference this time is the unprecedented quiet with which much of the world watches the drama.
Much as one abhors grand monolythic descriptions like Islam and the West, the geographic or creedal essentialism presses itself into the scene here. And the parody of a by now consensual conclusion is inevitable, sans the condiscension and imperious self-righteousness that mark the original: The West is in serious need of moderate moral voices. The ones that exist - like Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Jean Baudrillard - are all completely marginalized from the public, or have been conveniently imported whole sale into the East. The East, of course, loves them all intensely, but that is of hardly any consequence, unless they are heard clear and loud in the West.
The Arab-Muslim world - that amorphous entity of amazing internicine rivalries and fiercely competitive claims to absolute monopoly over truth - can actually have the moral high ground here for a change, at least at the level of rhetoric, if not substance: It has completely banished from respectable mainstream life all the undesirable elements, the Ladens, the Zarqavis, the Zawahiris. All those who are found 'guilty of murder most foul' of innocent civilians. Even Hizbullah's hands are relatively free from civilians' blood, at least in the present conflict. No Muslim country seems to be willing to accommodate the medievalist worthies whose self-styled heroism is relegated to the utter margins of the much marginalized Muslim world. Their moments of glory are still ensured thanks to the Westerm media, which revel in catapulting them on to the Muslim communities with sadistic pleasure.
Whereas the extremists of all kinds are centrestage in the West -from George W Bush, Tony Blair, and John Ashcroft to Samuel Huntington and the rest. Worse, they all enjoy legitimacy and authority, despite acts of genocidal violence, violation of international norms and rules, trampling underfoot sovereignity of other nations, and protecting tyrants and dictators around the world. By contrast, the moderate voices that reflect the consience of the West are all banished from the mainstream. An American commentator recently lamented the forced exile of Noam Chomsky from the Western mainstream media, in spite of being the foremost moral philosophers of out time and the father of modern linguistics. The reason is not far to seek: the havens of civilization and democracy can not stomack organic intellectuals who are not subservient to the sinister interests of the military industrial complex. Different shades of establishmentarians are most welcome, for they sustain the lie of freedom of expression and democracy. Unpleasant voices are bombed into memory, if they are hapless citizens of the 'demonized territories, and obfuscated into oblivion, if they are on the home soil.
The last few of days of Western response to the massacre in Lebanon and Palestine confirm the suspicion, expressed by many during the last two centuries. The West has systematically marginalized its sane voices. Extremist elements of all kinds have occupied centrestage, and they are unleashing their genocidal energies in the most brutal fashion possible either directly as in Iraq or through the mindless agency of Israel, comparable in cruelty and racist hatred only to Natzi Germany.
It is high time the West stopped cultivating moderate Muslims. It had better utilize the time and energy for searching moderate Westerners. Or restore those moderate and moral voices to the position of eminence and respect that they deserve. They are too important to be left to the East, all the more so at these crucial junctures of history when savagery and self righteousness rule the roost.
As Gandhi said, Western civilization is a great idea.
Shajahan Madampat is a cultural critic and commentator with with two widely acclaimed books in Malayalam to his credit. He writes in both English and Malayalam, and has published in leading newspapers, journals and other periodicals. Shajahan has an M.Phil in Middle Eastern Studies and an MA in Arabic Literature, both from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.Shajahan Madampat
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