Issue No. 603
Opinion
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Opinion |
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Reflections
Nights at the circus
Osama Bin Laden as midwife may cut a somewhat comic figure, but that, in fact, is the most apt way to describe his sordid contribution to a no less sordid post-9/11 world. The ugliness and inhumanity of the delivery portended the grotesque nature of the new born: the world according to Dubya.
"A blow to the heart of imperialism," an Egyptian leftist gleefully opined soon after the attacks on New York and Washington a year ago. Rubbish. I don't know where the comrade got his Marxism from but I've yet to find a work on imperialism that has traced its ever-elusive "heart" to the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. But then rubbish seems to be the stuff of which much of Egyptian and other Arab intellectual and political production is made of these days.
Over the past year I've been as horrified and enraged as most people in our region and elsewhere by the madness that has swiftly come to hold the world in an iron grip. The viciousness, the cynical cruelty, the double- speak, the heartlessness of the masters of the universe and their countless minions found its supreme expression in Palestine. The world looked on as a whole people were being coldly and systematically destroyed, where every known moral or legal canon was being flaunted with the abandoned brutality and the pitiless precision of a Nazi occupation. War criminal Sharon is butchering the Palestinian people, albeit with a blunt American knife, while the civilised West, basking in the superiority of its democratic values, is ensuring that the sacrifice was tied and gagged and ready for the slaughter.
But the past year has also been one in which I've grown more and more disgusted with our own helplessness, with the way we seem to wallow in it, indeed, to hang on to it as a cherished identity, a political ideology and a way of life. I am, I must confess, as sick and tired of the comrades as of the brethren (and all those in between); of the masses no less than the intellectuals; the opposition as much as the governments. I'm sick and tired of the whining, the self-pity and the debased, wife-batterer's machismo -- all of which seem to constitute the bases of our self-definition as a miserable, dysfunctional Arab/Muslim family. But oh, how we cling together, morbidly joined in lamenting past glory and moaning over contemporary humiliation.
As it happens, comrade, the attack on the Twin Towers (in which some 3,500 'fellow workers' were killed) was not a blow against imperialism, neither to its heart nor, indeed, to any other part of its corpulent-corporate- corpus. Rather it provided the golden opportunity, the necessary ideological cover, for a new form of global imperial domination to come to its own -- a new imperial world system that is unprecedented in the degree of its centralisation (a single imperial center), the depth and breadth of its global reach (what with the tremendous advances in transport and communications; the collapse of the Soviet system; Third World industrialisation and urbanisation; and the virtual disappearance of subsistence economies -- if you're outside the market, you're most likely dying of starvation, and even then, you're probably receiving food aid -- and its military supremacy. US military technology is said to be at least a generation ahead of the most advanced Western countries, and possessed of more military hardware than the rest of the world, combined.
And so midwife it is, for Bin Laden and his sorry band of suicidal simpletons cannot take credit for helping conceive this new monster. They just helped with the delivery. The conception, in fact, was happening well before the Saudi billionaire was a twinkle in CIA eyes; it was happening back in the early seventies as the working classes around the world were everywhere reaching the limits of their various "interventions" in the Capitalist State, through social democracy in the West, the Soviet system in the East and different forms of populist authoritarian state systems in much of the Third World. It was these interventions that gave us the "golden age of capitalism", the United Nations system and Third World independence, capitalisation and industrialisation. It all ended in crisis and collapse, so enter in Reaganism and Thatcherism, deregulation and neo- liberalism, the World Bank, the IMF, then the WTO, a repentant Third World begging forgiveness, of debts as well as past rebelliousness, the 'winds of change' sweeping through Eastern Europe. It came to a head with the Gulf War (putting the US at the head of the biggest military alliance since World War II, with another Arab clown on hand), followed shortly after by the final, shocking if hardly lamented collapse of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, though, it would take another decade, a rigged poll in Florida and Bin Laden's "blessed blow" to bring it all together.
On 9/11 Bin Laden helped deliver the world a new Rome which, parodying the mythological Minerva, was born fully grown. Hopefully, a year after the event, we will come to the realisation that even if the new Rome, like the old, cannot survive without a circus, we should perhaps be a little more hesitant to volunteer so readily to be the object of the entertainment.
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