Civilization Under Attack
By Aseem Shrivastava
26 August, 2005
Countercurrents.org"It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: "There is a boy under this vehicle.""
This is the report given by Yassin's father, Selim al-Sammerai, to Robert Fisk of The Independent newspaper this past weekend. Yassin was in the second grade in high school. According to Fisk, the Americans’ first reaction was to put handcuffs on the other two boys.
Was civilization on the attack once again? Or was it an attack on civilization?
9/11 was an attack on civilization. As were the Madrid and London bombings. And, lest we forget, Bali, Mumbai, Casablanca, Istanbul and most recently, Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
Everyone agrees with that. That is clear.
But what about the nearly relentless bombing of Iraq by American and British warplanes, not just in the initial "Shock and Awe" operation in March 2003, but in countless sorties for the past 27 months, long after President Bush had declared the end of the war, leading to tens of thousands of murdered innocents, not to speak of countless incidents of wanton destruction and murder engaged in by Anglo-American forces? Where in the Queen's dictionary do we find a name for that? If war is over and it is not terrorism, what is it? Language pleads defeat here.
Lying to your own people about everything under the sun in order to hurl an immoral, illegal war on Saddam Hussein's victims was not an attack on civilization. To save the dying dollar from the then newly launched Euro (2002) and seize the oil spigots of economic competitors it was presumably necessary.
And Bagram? Guantanamo? Abu-Ghraib? Rendition? Torture jets? Attempts to redefine torture? Sexual humiliation of women? Detention of children? Shall we not call them attacks on civilization too?
Remember that some 1700 of the pictures and videos of torture at Abu Ghraib have still not been released to the public, 15 months after the story first hit the newstands. Too dangerous! (for whom one might well ask). As one of the Vatican archbishops pointed out at the time, the torture revelations that began in May 2004 delivered a more serious blow to the United States than the 9/11 attacks. He was referring to American civilization as a whole, and not just to its buildings and their occupants. If I am busily firebombing my own house (because I run a bomb-making business), and generously encouraging my family to do the same, what does a hand grenade thrown by a passerby - once a friend, but now an enemy - count?
And lest one succumbs to fashionable amnesia, recall also that fateful day in April 2003, when the victorious Americans, keen to demonstrate to TV cameras the public "jubilation" over the removal of the hated tyrant, allowed - under their guard, keeping their eye solely on the Ministry of Oil - the public looting and plunder of Baghdad's museums, holding invaluable collections of irreplaceable artefacts from the earliest human cultures - Mesopotamia, Sumer, Babylon. Curators and archaeologists claim that hundreds of thousands of artefacts - including 80,000 cuneiform tablets - disappeared or got destroyed in a matter of hours. In the following days archives, libraries and books were burnt. Genghis Khan's grandson was the last potentate to ransack the city that for long centuries carried the mantle of being the cultural capital of the Middle East.
Were these attacks on civilization? Or merely civilization celebrating its triumph over barbarism?
"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," CNN reported the ridiculous Donald Rumsfeld as having said at the time. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here", he added. We know now what some of these wonderul things are.
Finally, it also bears sober consideration that to defend civilization, many mosques have been bombed and 3000-year-old monuments have had to be allowed to crumble into the desert earth (a consequence of helicopter movements, it is learnt).
Or perhaps one is getting the whole thing wrong. Seeing as how one so easily drowns in the sea of verbiage nowadays, confusion is the norm.While terrorism is obviously an attack on civilization, could it be possible that the rest of the stories recounted above belong to the annals of the famed "clash of civilizations"?
But if civilizations had only clashed all the time, would anyone outside India know about zero and the decimal system? Would Europe know anything about Aristotle and the Greeks? Which of the thousands of remedies and healing aids that the West inherited from Islam - from senna and camphor to nux vomica and distilled water - would be sold in pharmacies across the world today? How differently, if at all, would algebra and trignometry have evolved without the huge Arab contribution! When you actually get down to it you realize what historians have known all along, that cooperation between civilizations has been the norm throughout time, without which neither the use of fire and writing nor that of furnaces and computers would be as universal as they are in our world. Here and perhaps here alone, while referring to the shared heritage of humanity, one may be entitled to speak of civilization in the singular, keeping in view the fact that the diversity and plurality of civilizations does not necessarily entail a "clash" unless and until one or both parties are hell-bent on making it inevitable. (The latter appears to be the case these days).
In this sense, while referring to the shared heritage of humanity, one can certainly say that any form of terrorism is certainly an attack on civilization, although "crime against humanity" would be a more accurate label. But then what is more destructive of civilization taken in this sense than aerial bombardment in warfare, routinely engaged in by so many "civilized" countries in the past 100 years? Indeed, the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945 and the continuing and intensified threats of nuclear war constitute the very epitome of such attacks on civilization. How come they are not characterized as unadulterated evil? It is clear that today we can easily be bombed back to savage days of the human past and all the progress that human civilization has made would be reduced to just so much radioactive dust. Surely a redefinition of terrorism - to include the far more devastating consequences of organized state terror (always in a higher cause, doubtless) - is in order?
As for our reigning idea of civilization, are we to succumb to such a narrow and shallow conception of it as our leaders fling at us from the TV screens today, founded solely on material values (if one ignores the lip-service paid to "freedom", "democracy" and "human rights")? Is it just about sky-scrapers, bridges and airports then? What about moral values? How do we take notice of rapidly diminishing standards of decency, humanity and liberty everywhere, not to speak of science corrupted by corporations or art held hostage by commerce? What happens to civilization in an age when money becomes the weapon of mass discrimination and the human capacity for greed is harnessed by the undertakers of society at every streetcorner? Where and how in the tables of virtues do we reckon with that? Exactly which terrorist counselled capitalism and extolled the economic virtues of the military-industrial complex?
In the 19th century, when the blight was infinitely smaller in comparison, the English poet Matthew Arnold, among many others, recognized the difference between culture and civilization. He suggested that unless it is well rooted in culture and humanity "civilization itself is but a mixed good" and is a "corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health" and that a nation that finds itself living under these conditions will have a "varnished", as distinct from "a polished people." "It is humanity's duty today to see that civilization does not destroy culture, nor technology the human being", the German historian Wilhelm Mommsen echoed as far back as in 1851.
Surely we must know that on all these matters of the highest significance no terrorist can do as much damage to civilization as the voluntary surrender to the basest instincts - of fear and greed, under all else - that the leaders of society invite everyone to do today, even as they seem to parrot higher pieties? Taken in this deeper sense, couldn't the way we are encouraged or forced to live today, accepting the verdict of "free" markets as the highest of moral judgments, be seen as perhaps the most lethal of attacks on civilization imaginable, eating away at the very entrails of human culture and heritage like an insidious cancer, alas fated to be detected all too late?
An even more disturbing matter remains to be spoken about. Whether one takes the material or moral connotations (or some combination thereof) of civilization, there is a yet deeper historical association with the usage of the word, whereby the "civilized" are marked off from the "savages" or the "barbarians", the latter being shorn not only of the material attributes of civilization (because they are seen as bereft of even an organized social life), but of its moral qualities, its manners and mores, its modes of conduct, its very humanity. This usage has been widespread since the days of official European colonialism. Democracies have always held colonies or exercised hegemony over remote places and have had to resort to an alternative moral vocabulary to convince their populations (that bad deeds are after all not so bad) and execute their designs abroad. Anyone who believes that things have undergone a fundamental moral mutation since the end of colonialism needs to consult Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, where he argues that "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." Remember that Brzezinski worked for a Democrat president and was never a part of the Neo-Conservative crowd that advises President Bush nowadays. That is exactly how much things have changed since the days when, less than 50 years ago (and well after signing the 1949 Geneva Conventions), the French were blithely burning down Algerian villages and the British had no moral qualms about herding the Maumau into concentration camps in Kenya. In other words, white racism remains well intact. (This is not to deny the racism practised elsewhere, whether in India or China, Latin America or Africa. The ugly truth is that each part of the world appears to need its own inferiors, by stamping on whose dignity the identity of the local elites is sustained.)
But what happens when so-called civilization (and certainly the most powerful in history) asserts its moral rights by hurling its immense physical force upon people it regards as savages (or merely sub-human)? How are we to treat the matter when it is precisely civilization that stamps its barbaric foot on "inferior peoples"? When even the varnish, as Matthew Arnold would have it, peels off the furniture of civilized society? When all the morals and restraints of polite communities are suspended when dealing with the "inferior" (the not-quite-human)? It is not just Hitler and his henchmen who knew something about this. In virtually every recorded instance in the modern age the Western powers have tested new weaponry on non-Europeans. From the time that the British first tested rifles in Africa and the empire during the 1850s to our own times when the Americans experiment with Daisy-Cutters, Bunker-Busters and Depleted Uranium in the Middle East, not to forget the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, this has been true.
Someone who noted this with marked moral precision was the great 19th century American writer Herman Melville. In Typee he wrote:
The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth...it is needless to multiply the examples of civilized barbarity; they far exceed in the amount of misery they cause the crimes which we regard with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow-creatures.
He once spent some time with the Typees, a tribe in the South Pacific. It rocked his Anglo-centric world-view.
Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendship of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass anything of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe. If truth and justice, and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees? So pure and upright were they in all the relations of life, that entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement: 'Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of the divine and gentle Jesus.' I will frankly declare that after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.
The Anglo-centric view of civilization survived into the 20th century. Listen to World War II hero and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Winston Churchill, for instance, when he found out that the Royal Air Force was reluctant to use mustard gas (an early instance of the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction) against certain tribes in Iraq in the 1930s: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." And this is just one of legion instances of such foulspeak by an imperialist in the days before the lexicon of political correctness took over and suddenly - after the West was evicted from the colonies - development, democracy and human rights were meant for all.
History teaches that well before civilizations decline and disappear physically they collapse morally. Hypocrisy heightens and in the ensuing spiritual darkness the culture begins to first allow and then gradually accept conditions that increasingly betray its humanity. Horrors become routine and people learn to get along with evil. The case of modern Western civilization is not any different. The lessons of Verdun and Somme, Dresden and Hamburg, not to speak of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai and Song Ve, lie forgotten under the Arabian desert sands as yet another great power hurtles towards the abyss. We live through the dying throes, not merely of an empire but of a civilization at least some of which, to paraphrase Mark Twain in the light of recent torture revelations, belongs in a correctional facility.
What has happened to Yassin and his family - and all that it presupposes - is part of this larger story.
In the evolution of technologically advanced nihilism a stage is reached when violence overreaches itself and becomes something else. It becomes infinitely farcical. It starts doing things which do not even qualify for the label of violence. For violence would be too flattering a description for what the Anglo-American troops are engaged in doing to a courageous people. Violence presupposes emotion and intention, two psychological realities quite absent from the mechanical movements of Bradleys and Humvees operated by hands and feet trained on video games. Reality baffles and defeats language yet again. One is left thinking, "what can one say about all this?" One risks lapsing into silence and, by default, into complicity.
Language then has to wage a fight-back and, if at all possible, coin a term to describe the new reality that has to be faced. One can think of "hyper-violence", or in the manner of one of Stanley Kubrick's anti-heroes,"ultra-violence", but that again would distort the reality that has to be underscored.
The term militarism wouldn't work either because, apart from having other connotations and usages, it suggests a degree of strategic wisdom and tactical foresight that has been conspicuous by its absence from the entire Anglo-American misadventure in Iraq. (Experienced generals have made this point repeatedly and it has been a sore point between the American military establishment and their civilian bosses.)
So I settle for "weaponism", a condition in which the smart technology of destruction is not run by humans so much as the former overwhelming and enslaving the latter - both the executor and the victim - through its stupid mechanical force.
Now civilization attacks itself from all sides and in all ways possible. The bearded Mullahs in their caves smile as the gentlemen in suits and ties who issue the orders to the troops in uniform from their panelled offices, grope around for receding wisdom in the dark invisible world of folly, awaiting their moment of truth. For the outcome of the war that they inflicted on a defenceless people could be foretold before a single bomb was dropped.
That Yassin, like Tom, loved football was all they needed to take into account in the first place.
