SPEAKING
FREELY Freedom dead, democracy
dying By Aseem Shrivastava
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
"Let us not speak
falsely now, the hour is getting late." - Bob
Dylan
Imagine: among the recent incidents
following the publication of cartoons of the
Prophet Mohammed was one that went oddly
unreported. In Tehran,
Iranian police managed to catch a few European
teenagers who were throwing glasses and plates at
the crowd from the windows of the Danish Consulate
when Danish flags were being burned on the street
outside.
Later, police took the boys to
the nearest station and gave them a thorough
thrashing. One of the boys was kicked in his
genitals by a policeman, while others held him
down. Another was held against the wall and given
a sound hammering with batons on his back. A third
was kicked by several of them as he lay prostrate
on the ground. "Naughty little boys" and various
unmentionable abuses were barked at them by the
policemen, who were obviously reveling in the
sadistic enterprise.
All this was recorded
on video by someone and handed over to the
television channel that broadcast it this morning.
Back to reality.
Of course, the
above story is made up, but not really, because
all I did was make the characters involved switch
roles, much as in role plays schoolkids are often
asked to do in multicultural neighborhoods around
Europe, in order to understand where "others are
coming from".
The above is precisely what
could be seen on TV screens across the world,
after the British tabloid News of the World
released the video clip of the beating of Iraqi
teenage boys carried out by British soldiers some
months back.
Let's have, if only for a
change, the same rules for everyone.
Let
us not fall into the temptation of the old alibi
that it was the work of a few bad men in an
otherwise decent establishment. In the video there
are plenty of soldiers passing by as the beating
is going on. None tries to stop it. How many times
they must have seen such things, or done them
themselves, or seen their superiors do or order
them.
When brutalization is banal, it is
too boring to talk about, let alone stop.
How many pictures and videos have been
banned from the TV screens of the world at the
orders of the Pentagon? If there were nothing to
hide, we would indeed be living in a free world at
the moment.
It won't do to pass the buck
downward. Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, the
highest military officer to be punished
("scapegoated", in her own words) in the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq (she was demoted to
the rank of colonel), in her recent book One
Woman's Army says the entire chain of command,
starting with Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, must be held accountable for the crimes
at the prison since the blame "goes all the way to
the top". Her interview with Amy Goodman on the
news radio Democracy Now! program speaks
volumes for the depth of cover-up going on
quietly.
The New Standard had reported
some months back that a Federal Bureau of
Investigation e-mail released by the US government
at the demand of the American Civil Liberties
Union in December 2004 revealed that President
George W Bush had sent out an executive order
permitting the use of new interrogation
techniques. The White House has neither confirmed
nor denied that torture orders were given from the
very top.
When the rot is this deep, it is
understandable that justice cannot be done: for
each finger pointing down at someone who
infringed, there will be many times more pointing
up toward the bosses who, far from disallowing,
actually appear to have encouraged the tortures.
Britain has boasted much about its
standards of military justice being some of the
highest in the world. Let us see how far up the
chain of command investigations are able to reach.
Let's see whether the defense secretary is called
upon to answer for the crimes.
If we are
serious about such matters as peace and security,
let us stop denying what is obvious to people
living in Muslim countries. Let us not just keep
our attention anchored on the silly cartoons and
their aftermath on the streets of the Middle East.
Let us consider the far graver matters threatening
the moral core of civilization itself.
Now
the actions last week on the streets of Cairo,
Jakarta and Tehran appear in quite a different
light. It should have been obvious that the issue
- for people living there - did not concern
freedom of expression at all. It should have been
evident that it wasn't just a matter of a few
cartoons. The actions against the cartoons are
only at the little-rippling surface of surging
anger among people living in Muslim countries at
the systematic injustices they continue to suffer
at the hands of the West, especially the United
States and the United Kingdom. The Muslim clergy
is able to make hay only because the blazing sun
of foreign injustices refuses to set.
The
Abu Ghraib revelations took place almost two years
ago - those at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba
even earlier. More recently, it was learned that
special Central Intelligence Agency flights were
being routed through Europe to carry suspects to
be tortured in places where it would be safe to do
so. Illegal detentions and tortures continue in a
global archipelago of prisons run by Washington.
No significant (by which I mean
proportionate) justice has been done with regards
to the torture revelations. Muslims, much more so
than others, cannot forget that. Nor has there
been any promise that the practices would be
stopped. On the contrary, Washington has sought to
legalize torture.
When one has come to
live in such a brutalized global village, when men
in suits and ties calmly impose barbarities on
others in the name of defending something they
call civilization and for passing on the torch of
liberty to less fortunate souls in strange lands,
the time has come to ask for a clear definition of
"civilization".
If you reserve your
brutality for bar-room brawls and post-soccer
angst, or export it abroad in the shape of
oil-seeking military missions masquerading as
human-rights campaigns, it does not make you any
less barbaric than those Muslims who were openly
burning European flags and throwing stones at
consulates last week. On the contrary, machines
kill more effectively than machetes.
Much
deeper things than just freedom of speech are at
stake these days. The very dignity of human beings
is under the sword - everywhere.
Long
before the first atom had been split and the
first-ever bomb dropped from the air (by the
Italians on Libya in 1911), the great 19th-century
American writer Herman Melville had written with
self-critical honesty that few in this modern
world (which, we are assured, is freer today than
ever before) would dare, though the truth is far
more grim today:
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-creature.
Times
have moved on much since Melville. But the world
is such that the integrity of a white man still
has greater impact on human destinies than the
honesty of others (who are by no means exempt from
their duty to find and tell the truth). One
shudders to imagine what Melville would have
written today. But the rest of the world expects
exactly such honesty from Western citizens today.
And we know, from the example of numerous noble
exceptions, that they are capable of it. It is for
them to terminate their indoctrinated ignorance,
seek the truth and make it count.
We are
truly scratching the bottom of the barrel of
civilization now.
Civilization is not just
about good manners, about neat and tidy exteriors
that conceal a beastliness that would put animals
to shame. At least with the anti-cartoon protests
in Islamic countries the barbarities were on the
surface, obvious to onlookers. But how do you
detect the insane, well-entrenched barbarism of
civilized societies if you are only going to be
allowed occasional peeks at the scale of organized
evil, if the iceberg of dehumanized depravity pops
up but once in a while, staying underground long
enough to lull us all into the sleep of drugged
babies - until the next set of revelations arrive?
When dated defensive ideologies of freedom or
human rights are used to defend indefensible state
actions?
Freedom is dead. Democracy is
dying. There are no human rights for those without
power. The example of Iraq should teach us that
there are things - loss of human dignity, for one,
civil war for another - worse than dictatorship.
It is for the citizens of Europe and
America to terminate their shameful silence,
resume the struggles for freedom, peace and
justice that have been in abeyance since the
1960s, and march in their millions on the streets
of Western capitals.
Next month we await a
show called Death to Iran. If it is allowed
to be aired, Westerners will find little left in
their pockets after they have paid their rising
oil bills.
Beyond that, all bets are off.
Aseem Shrivastava is an
independent writer. He can be reached ataseem62@yahoo.com.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
