Essentialising Culture

There is a very good post at the 'Kings of War' blog run by the King's College War Studies Dept. called 'The Trojan horse of culture'. The author is writing in relation to Counter-Insurgency Operations, but what he highlights is part of a broader trend of 'essentialising' culture - in other words thinking of some kind of idealized view of a society's culture as essential to its nature and the all-directing force behind the behaviour of its individuals. The author rightly describes the risks of this kind of view. In its most simplistic forms, it is little more than a form of racism and is about as useful in understanding the people it attempts to describe.

Its interesting that here in Pakistan, the military [and indeed many people in the society] tend to essentialize culture as well. In many ways this is a hold over of colonial thinking, soundly internalized by the army brass and bureaucratic elite in colonial educational and training institutions. This kind of thinking has had numberless harmful effects in Pakistani military [and therefore foreign policy] thinking.

One example can be found in the 1965 war. Raised on the colonial British myth of Punjabis and Pathans being a 'martial race', very different in essence to the 'effiminate' peoples of eastern and southern India, the military rushed into its foolhardy 'Operation Gibraltar' in 1965 with confident assertions that 'Hindu' India would be too cowardly to risk an all out war, and that, even if all our war came, in the words of Zulfiqar Bhutto, one Muslim soldier would be worth ten Hindu soldiers. History bears witness to the fact that the Indians not only did not flee in abject terror of the Pakistani army, but inflicted serious reversals on it. By the time the ceasefire was signed, the Pakistani position was desperate. The 1971 war was an even bigger military disaster.

But still the essentializing myths persist. Citing the repeated conquests and plundering raids of India by a variety of Muslim adventurers from Mohammad Bin Qasim in the 8th century to Ahmed Shah Abdali in the 18th, all part and parcel of a national narrative of martial prowess, Pakistanis still insist on the inherent inferiority of Indians when it comes to war. The myth is also deployed in other ways. Most political commentators who insist that Islamist militants should be given free reign in the tribal areas, and that the army should not oppose them, tend to reverse this myth of martial prowess and insist on the inherent superiority of the Pathan and Afghan as a fighter, as well as their inherently 'Islamic' nature. Thus the Taliban are presented as fighting to preserve their culture and Islamic identity against foreigners and the desultory efforts and rubbish performance of the Pakistani army in battling militants explained as the natural outcome of trying to oppose militants who have inherent fighting prowess ingrained by their culture.

Needless to say, once you have excuses like these, few feel the need to try to understand what is happening in a more detailed and intelligent manner. That the socio-economic and political environment of the tribal areas in 2007 is very different from 2000 is not understood. Nor that in 2000 it was very different from 1975, before the area was flooded with weapons, cash and drugs. The fact that culture is neither monolithic nor immutable does not occur to these people and therefore the response to militancy and extremism becomes circumscribed, banal and ultimately ineffective.

Behold! The American Holy Warriors Have Arrived!

Q. Which U.S. president issued this proclamation (originally in Arabic)?

Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems. O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the blessing of God be upon you.

This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest trees and as the grains of sand in the sea.

Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.

We have come to set you free. We have sailed across the great sea in many ships, on many beaches we are landing, and our fighters swarm across the sands and into the city streets, and into the wide country sides, and along the highways.

Light fires on the hilltops; shout from your housetops, and from the high places, and say the sound of the drum be heard in the land, and the ululation of the women, and the voices even of small children.

Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers.

We have come to set you free.

Answer: FDR in October 1942 upon the landing of American troops in North Africa. The speech continues in a smiliarly poetic vein. This part also stands out:

Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart. We are not as some other Christians whom ye have known, and who trample you under foot.

Now quiet apart from the question of just how "pleasing to the eye" the American fighting men were, the promise to be different from other European powers may have been heady wine indeed. Alas, the freedom brought by these worthy Holy Warriors was fleeting. Morocco was parcelled out between the French and Spanish, Algeria and Tunisia went back under French rule and Egypt continued to be ruled by the British. Libya happily achieved early independence due to the virtue of its having been an Italian colony, and Italy being on the losing side of WW2.

Still, at least lets give FDR's speech writers some credit (including Carleton Coon, noted anthropologist, OSS agent and developer of the theory of the parallel evolution of different racial types... of whom he believed the European race was the "most refined") for at least proclaiming war without the use of the word crusade. Dubya certainly didn't learn from history on that front.

IZ

Combatting Fascism

Reading widely on the web one comes across so many things...

There's this quote from the author Martin Amis:

There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.

Its quoted in an article by everyone's favourite Briton-turned-American and lefty-turned-righty Christopher Hitchens. Mr Hitchens then goes on to quote "my fellow atheist" Sam Harris, the author of 'The End of Faith':

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

Sam Harris seems to have gained himself a fan club of sorts. "New York Times Best-selling Author" Dan Simmons mentions his book in an article defending his short story where a time traveller from the future journeys back to the present to extol the 'West' to lose its forgiving and tolerant ways, inculcate ruthlessness and launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Islamic world:

“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and you, the innocents of 2006 and beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame your brothers and yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law, tolerance, science, democracy – even while your enemies grow stronger.”

“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and growled at him. “The world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

He stood and set the Scotch glass back in its place on my sideboard. “How, we wonder in my time,” he said softly, “can you ignore the better part of a billion people who say aloud that they are willing to kill your children . . . or condone and celebrate the killing of them? And ignore them as they act on what they say? We do not understand you.”

I still had not turned to face him, but was looking over my shoulder at him.

“The world, as it turns out,” continued the Time Traveler, “is not nearly so complex a place as your liberal and gentle minds sought to make it.”

For sheer vitriol little can beat Simmons' article. He's also quoted the entire pantheon of pseudo-fascist writers and 'Clash of Civilization' hacks. All objections to the reduction of 2000 years of complex history to the clash of monolithic 'ideologies' that exist more on the pages of neoliberal political science best-sellers than in reality are brushed aside as 'materialist' (read here the old bogeyman: Marxist). Wow, if only they had read some sociology somewhere in the last 120 years, they would have found in the writings of Max Weber a 'ideological' theory of social change that was far more formidable and nuanced than their cartoonesque formulation of history.

I mean, I guess I'm one of the billion people Mr. Simmons is talking about, and I haven't ever really felt like killing anyone... not even Mr. Simmons.

But lets take that last paragraph in that quote: “How, we wonder in my time, can you ignore the better part of a billion people who say aloud that they are willing to kill your children . . . or condone and celebrate the killing of them? And ignore them as they act on what they say?"

I suppose these are questions I too should ask myself, since Mr. Simmons' alter-ego is essentially saying that he is willing to kill my (as yet unborn) children or at the least condone and celebrate the killing of them. What would my answer be?

1. Sorry, but your understanding of the world is woefully disconnected from reality, though I realise that as your deluded myth of confrontation infects ever growing numbers of people the danger of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy grows. Did you know that your much-cherished 'Clash of Civilizations' has been a best-seller in Iran, Pakistan and China?

2. Instead of advocating genocide I repudiate your whole agenda and way of thinking and will do my utmost to defuse this growing threat of 'justifiable genocide' under whatever cloak it wears (liberal-fascist or Islamo-fascist or whatever) by promoting through teaching humanism the very values you feel need to be discarded at a drop of the hat.

3. And why don't you put your time-travelling ass to good use and go help people like in Quantum Leap or something, you bum!


IZ