Issue No. 597
Opinion
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1 - 7 August 2002 Issue No. 597 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
No more heroes
The July Revolution must escape the bonds of its own symbolism if it is to spur people forward, writes Azmi Bishara
Golden jubilees are not religious ceremonies, nor is 50 a magic number. But such is the bleakness of the Arab situation that this commemoration appears to have become a supplication for a hero- saviour in the form of the mighty sultan of a powerful state. "Oh for a leader!" is a plea for help; it is a cry of desperation, a form of self-consolation; it is the delirious dream of the weak and infirm. The Arab people must be liberated from such appeals for a deliverer if only because they are inimical to modernisation, hampering autonomous attempts to free ourselves from underdevelopment and colonialism. If the commemoration of the 23 July Revolution is to spur people towards the liberation of their nation and themselves, the celebration must itself be liberated from such symbols as Saladin and the "knight with divine protection".
We must also rescue the legacy of 23 July from the clutches of the politics of identity that have created around the revolution a form of political and ideological clannishness that entitles the Nasserists to celebrate its anniversary to the exclusion of all other "sects". Which is not to say that this privileged coterie, should they be seized by a spirit of good will towards "others", would not condescend to grace outsiders with their best wishes for the occasion. Nasserism was a political movement that took place at a particular time. It was a movement that merged with Pan- Arabism, which predated it, in a drive towards modernisation and development, using the instruments available in the fifties and sixties: the centralised state and, above all, the army. In this context, Nasserism discovered the post-liberation clash with neocolonialism. It sought to dominate that clash by intersecting with Pan-Arabism in a drive to Arab unity that has continued to inspire the people of the Arab world at the threshold of each and every crisis. Although the historical mission of Nasserism is embedded in the Arab consciousness, Nasserism is not a political identity in conflict with other identities. Were that the case, the commemoration of the revolution of the Free Officers would merely occasion a lament for the vestiges of the Arab nationalist movement -- a form of nostalgia that grants only temporary solace from impotence.
Nostalgia is not a political platform, nor a source of real hope or consolation. And when nostalgia begins to beatify the past it forfeits the lessons of the past and handicaps the present. In all events, there is little reason for nostalgia or vain boasting. Nasserism was a splendid experiment, but an experiment that failed or was driven to failure -- there is no difference between the two when it comes to history's bottom line. It is part of modern Arab history, a history over which neither Nasserists, Baathists or Arab Nationalists -- regardless of whether they were liberals or authoritarians -- exercise a monopoly. It was the brightest and most alluring chapter in this history, which is why it provokes gushes of sentimentality, why every event evokes a musical refrain, a march, a song, a speech, a popular joke in Egyptian, Syrian or Lebanese dialect. It is why it conjures up images of the Arab multitudes repelling the invasions of the Suez Canal and Port Said, of surging throngs celebrating the victory of the October War in the squares of Damascus. It underwrites the picture we maintain of some politicians being just like ordinary people, with a sense of humour, possibly smoking much too much, not acting like emperors, wearing odd clothes or trying to be something they were not.
The final line in the biography of Abdel-Nasser is that when he died he did not bequeath to his family material wealth of any sort. This is indicative of the moral fibre of that great man. But nor did he bequeath to those who championed him a revolution; rather, he left a cumbersome state apparatus riddled with corruption, and a population fed up with Arab nationalist missions, and above all the Palestinian cause.
So why is it that this particular phase of history, naïve as it appears with hindsight, continues to appeal, if only on an aesthetic level? What, in any case, has aesthetics got to do with politics?
Nietzsche rendered the distinction between the ugly and beautiful equivalent to the distinction between bad and good, which became equivalent to the distinction between the morals of the slave and the morals of the master, ultimately giving rise to the aesthetics of spectacle that characterised fascist politics. This danger lurks in every nationalist exultation, or conceptualisation of national exultation, that renders politics a process of expressing emotions and affiliations of identity more than a rational process intended to promote national interests.
Politics, of course, has no strictly defined compartments. Even in liberal democracies politics exploits the visceral, in the sensationalism of the media and in the cheap pulling of heartstrings by politicians on which journalism thrives. The important question, though, is one of scale, the extent to which these elements are used to justify political ends and means. The fascist and communist aesthetic of spectacle was so all-inclusive as to blur the lines between the reality and the symbol, between reason and emotion, between argument and rhetoric, between political ritual and religious liturgy.
The Arab nationalist state had never been powerful enough to even approach the totalitarianism experienced in the West -- there was always that family, tribe or sect that escaped its grip -- and even at its most authoritarian it had to conform with religious rhetoric. In addition, the Arab nationalism that was brought to bear in the fight against colonialist fragmentation was never racist. Nor was the state party, however powerful, and the intelligence apparatus, however heavy-handed, sufficient to justify the legitimacy of the regime.
The allure of the nationalist phase was that it emanated from and responded to Nasser's eternal call: "Lift up your head, brother." This was the phase of the nationalisation of colonial interests. It was the phase that opened the gates of university education to the children of the poor who, according to the order of things until that time, had been relegated to reproducing themselves as a class, and to reproducing the poverty, ignorance and disease associated with agricultural labour. Even in that liberal period between the two world wars, when there was no shortage of enlightened pashas, the fellah fell outside the bounds of civilisation. The Nasserist phase, too, also demonstrated, as never before, the ability of the nationalist enterprise to unleash the expressive and artistic energies of rising social classes and the broader masses.
The Arab nationalist aesthetic was neither fascist nor totalitarian, despite the fact that the system that generated it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberal democracy was not even an option for any of the countries newly liberated from colonialism. However, the generation that led the revolutions, in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan and Lebanon believed that they were democrats, in the sense that they represented the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people against colonialism, monarchical regimes and feudalism. They even felt that they were defending people against a liberalism that was elitist and out of touch with the immediate needs and concerns of the people. Unfortunately, the failure of those revolutionaries to appreciate the value of liberalism cost the Arab peoples dearly. The Arab peoples also paid the price for Arab nationalism's excessive populism and lack of a democratic culture. This is why it was so easy for political Islam to appropriate "the masses" once the June 1967 defeat pulled the rug from under Arab nationalism's claim to revolutionary legitimacy, and all the more so when the Arab nationalist state apparatus became prey to corruption, a function of its undemocratic nature, its opacity and reliance on "the revolution" as its sole justification for self-perpetuation.
Because the democracy of the Arab nationalists, like that of the Jacobites, was hostile to liberalism among the aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, Arab nationalism gave rise to a parody of itself in the form of harlequin Napoleons trying to imitate Abdel-Nasser. Because of that hostility, too, society was unable to reproduce itself outside the state apart from along tribal or sectarian lines. Nor could the state abandon its Bonapartism (the state had not always been such a travesty) and move towards a true liberal democracy while continuing to pursue modernisation and national and Arab national causes.
The Arab nationalist project, born of the marriage between the Free Officers' revolution and Levantine Pan-Arabism, was a modernising enterprise that, today, moves the Arabs to fits of nostalgic rapture in the face of current regression. And it is difficult for those in the throes of rapture to comprehend the relationship between today's backwardness and mysticism in political culture, on the one hand, and the failure of the project and the mistakes it made in its approach to modernisation, on the other.
The Arab nationalist project was a unifying enterprise that defied colonialism and that was inspired in spirit and in its cardinal principles by the calamity that befell the Palestinians. It, therefore, inspires a yearning for a surge in Arab nationalism in the face of the international public auction to liquidate what remains of Palestinian goods. But such ardent yearning allows little room for fathoming the relationship between the 1967 defeat and what Israel and the US are reaping today from the historical projections of that defeat.
Abdel-Nasser was the target of a flagrant colonialist war in 1956, and he was the primary target of another war of liquidation in 1967. These wars were waged against him not because he occupied another country, not because he was suspected of sending suicide bombers to New York, but because he was the leader of a project the dual goals of which were modernisation and unification.
On the 50th anniversary the July Revolution we are caught between our great awe for Abdel- Nasser, who inspired all those conspiracies against him so as to undermine his project, and our dismay at him for having been inextricably lured into a premature battle. We are caught between our admiration for him and our anger at the vain men with whom he surrounded himself and who entered that battle unprepared. We are amazed at the scale of the project that necessitated all that colonialist scheming, which was as unjustified as US aggression is today, and we are indignant at the pettiness, hollowness and one- upmanship of the standard-bearers of that project, who neutralised and neutered society.
Some Arab nationalists, today, wonder at how little impact widespread actions of solidarity with the Palestinians have had on the decision-making processes. But while this particular surge of Arab nationalism appears more extensive than expressions of solidarity with Egypt at the time of the Suez crisis it is also true that then there was a political project that offered itself as an alternative to what already existed. Then, mass movements were part of the project that sustained them and offered them hope. This is no longer the case, and the result is that no sooner does a wave of protest erupt than it ebbs, leaving in its wake bitterness and frustration.
Bewildered Arab nationalists wonder why they cannot put themselves forward as an alternative to the status quo. They ask why there are no alternative political projects to sustain and steer mass protest so as to transform it into a channel for political pressure. But they should also ask, would Abdel-Nasser have been able to rise to power, stay in power and launch a political project -- which was the only project to merit the name in our time -- had he been a Nasserist in today's doctrinal sense? Could the Arab nationalist trend, in general, have posed itself as a project had it fallen out of step with politics, in the strict sense of the word?
We are living in very difficult times. Yet it is my belief that we do not need an Abdel-Nasser, a Saladin. What we need is a political enterprise that will take us the rest of the way. If we are not to begin from scratch we must assess the period following 23 July 1952 with a clear head. The purpose of such an assessment is to derive an understanding of the shortcomings of the revolution, without judging it, retroactively, by the concepts and standards of today. This will lead to an understanding of the nature of the state the revolution established and of the current government apparati that are an extension of the state.
The greatest challenge in this process of assessment is to reach a judgment on our current powerlessness, using as criteria the circumstances of the day rather than the missed possibilities of the past. In this context Arab nationalism has the additional task of assessing its relationship to the individual nation-state. Its resolution of this problem is the prerequisite for resolving all other problems, including the efficacy or lack of efficacy of protest.
The writer is a leading Palestinian political activist and member of the Knesset.
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