Ideas, philosophy, politics, current events and happenings, music, literature, art and simple incidents out of my everyday life; Reflections and observations which, I hope, might just get you thinking ...
Do you know the feeling, that feeling of anger and disgust
at the amount of fucked-up stupidity, evil and hopelessness in the world?
Today a couple of (almost certainly) Islamicist fanatic
terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people.
There is video coverage online of two gunmen shooting a policeman down in the
street and then finishing the execution with a headshot, even as the man on the
ground raises a hand, possibly in a last plea for mercy. It’s horrific in its
brutality so I’m not going to post a link to the video itself here. The photo shows enough.
Charlie Hebdo is
not a particularly pleasant newspaper; but that’s not what its makers want it
to be. It is relentlessly satirical, regards nothing as sacred, and is prepared
to lampoon anyone and anything in the news, be they pope, prophet or president,
moron, mullah, or messiah. That’s their job as they see it. And it’s their
right in a free, pluralistic, secular society. If you don’t like what they
publish you don’t have to buy it or read it. If you feel personally damaged by
something they publish you can sue them. That’s the way a civilized society
works, particularly a civil society which sees freedom of expression and the
press as a basic value.
One result of this barbaric event will certainly be calls
from the populist (partly proto-fascist) right in France (led, no doubt, by Marine Le Pen and the Front National) and
worldwide for clampdowns on Islam, and Islamic foreigners, and foreigners
generally; migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The usual cacophony of
ignorance, fear- and hate-mongering. Indeed, this may have been one of the
perverted, calculated aims of the mad, evil bastards who planned and carried
out the attack.
Here in Germany in the past number of weeks we’ve been
treated to the dubious spectacle of thousands of ignoramuses marching every
Monday night in the streets of Dresden under the banner of a strange
organisation calling itself PEGIDA[Patriotic
Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]. According to the Saxon
Interior Ministry in 2010 0.1% (around 4,000) of the population of Saxony (of
which Dresden is the capital) describe themselves as Muslims [Source: Spiegel Online]. Biiiiig threat.
Last Monday night, as a sign of some hope for sanity in my adopted
home-country, thousands of people marched in Cologne, just a few miles down the
road from me, in favour of tolerance and an open society. Cologne has 120,000
Muslims out of a population of around a million. For those who can’t do the
math, that’s 12%. Around a hundred times higher than in Saxony.
Personally, I’m not a great fan of Islam. But then, I’m not
a great fan of evangelical Protestantism, traditionalist Catholicism,
neo-liberal free-market capitalism, or Justin Biber either. This nevertheless
doesn’t mean that I would ever contemplate or tolerate any calls for or moves to
forbid people their right to believe whatever they want to and to freely
profess and express those beliefs, however idiotic I may consider them to be.
This freedom is one of the constituting principles of a humane civil society.
It goes further; even people who profess beliefs abhorrent to these
constituting principles – like, I am forced to conclude, quite a number of
those marching in Dresden – have a guaranteed right to do so, as long as they
don’t resort to violence, or incitement to violence, against others. That’s
what a humane civil society has to be able to tolerate and, I have no doubt,
any healthy civil society is well able to withstand the irritation caused by
such misguided fools.
Of course, that does imply that those of us (the vast
majority, I like to think) who value these basic principles of humane civility
sometimes have to speak out for them and defend them.
A journalist friend just told me the story of an initial
interview she did this afternoon. It was with a young man who’s been in Germany
for four years now. He was born in one of those war-torn countries we
frequently hear of in the news but his family fled terror and conflict when he
was a child, finishing up in Iran. He spent seventeen years there and managed
to obtain a degree in computer-programming before realising that, as a
stateless person with no official identity-papers, he had no future in the
mullah-dominated Islamic Republic. His mother sold the last of her jewels to
provide the necessary money and he (alone of his family) made a long,
dangerous, illegal journey, culminating in a frightening boat-trip across the
Aegean from Turkey to Greece before finally ending up here in Germany four
years ago.
In Germany he has the status of a tolerated (but not recognised) asylum seeker. He still has
no legal papers, so that his “official” status, such as it is, can be described
as stateless. Inquiries at the embassy
of his native country have resulted in no practical prospects of ever getting a
passport. He is given enough to live on – barely – in Germany. He is not
allowed to work, although he has good training in a field where his skills are
demanded everywhere. His freedom of movement here in the country is extremely
uncertain, since he has no official papers. Without them he cannot open a bank
account or make a contract for telephone and internet access with a
telecommunications provider. He spends his life in fear of police controls, of
suddenly being thrown out of the country. He has little hope for the future and
has been suffering – increasingly – from depression.
No wonder.
This is one of those people the fools in Dresden seem to be
protesting about. This is one of those people who will be regarded with
increased suspicion and even hatred as a result of the brutality of the terrorists
in Paris today.
This is someone who only wants to live an ordinary life,
someone with the skills and potential to offer a positive contribution to any
society which would welcome him.
The way our world is so screwed up, it doesn’t look like
he’ll be welcomed anywhere.
That humane civil society I was defending earlier in this
essay still has a long way to go.
It’s
happening again. Once more, somebody has been less than respectful about Islam,
or the prophet Mohammed, and once more throughout the Islamic world –
particularly the Arab world – enraged mobs are demonstrating before embassies
and consulates, burning them down when they get the chance and not even
stopping short of killing westerners, should they get their hands on them. Whether
it’s Salman Ruhsdie’s Satanic Verses,
a film by Theo van Gogh, caricatures in a Danish newspaper, the provocative burning
of the Qur’an by a lunatic American fundamentalist – any perceived insult to
Islam seems to provoke protest and violence by thousands of adherents of that
religion against the easiest target they can find to which some kind of tenuous
connection can be constructed with those responsible for that insult.
In common
with millions of others, I’m getting really sick of it. I am the last person to
deny that the ordinary – and particularly the poor – people of countries like Egypt, Libya,
the Yemen, Sudan, etc., may have many good reasons to be
angry with the USA,
and western countries in general; reasons associated with colonial history,
economic exploitation, the support of brutal dictators. That’s fine; if they
were (peacefully) protesting about such issues before western embassies
throughout the world, I’d be the first to be cheering them on. But they’re not.
What they are doing, in essence, is protesting at the fact that our societies
allow people to have free opinions and to express those opinions, even if these
opinions are offensive to a few, some, many, or even the majority of their
fellow citizens or the whole population of the planet.
Let me just
get a few things straight – for the record. The film The Innocence of Muslims is a badly made, artistically worthless, obnoxious
piece of junk. I’ve watched a few clips from it on YouTube and I’m not putting
up a link here because, honestly, it’s really not worth viewing and I do not
choose to help its makers reach any more viewers. If you’re really interested,
you can google it easily enough anyway. Moreover, the sole purpose behind it
seems to be to provoke Muslims to precisely the kind of reaction we have been
seeing worldwide in the past days. It is a reprehensible, worthless product of
small-minded, fundamentalist bigots, designed to insult and elicit a violent
reaction from other small-minded fundamentalist bigots. The only real
difference between the Christians initially behind this film and the thousands
of Muslims protesting against it is that most of those Muslims have at least
the excuse of being very poorly educated members of societies without a
democratic secular tradition. Worse, they are being manipulated by more
intelligent, better educated bigots called mullahs or imams, dangerous ideologues
who really want to create some kind of Islamic-theocratic world order by
whatever means they regard as necessary, or cynical people in power who
encourage this kind of thing to divert the attention of the masses they are
exploiting from the real scandals in their societies.
In this
context, I want to look at what has been happening here in Germany a
little more closely. Last week an angry demonstrating mob attacked the German
embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. The demonstrations were
reportedly instigated by a number of Muslim preachers who had picked up on
reports that anti-Islam protests had taken place in Germany this summer, which had
involved caricatures of Mohammed.
Those
reports were true – as far as they go. In the past couple of years, a new
extreme right-wing group has been growing in Germany. It began in Cologne, coalescing
around protests against the building of a large mosque there. In a cynical move
to gain support, the group called itself Pro-Cologne.
It has now organised itself on a national level and calls itself Pro-Deutschland.
Let’s keep
this in perspective. There is a continual, very small minority in Germany which
is consistently prepared to vote for the far right. Such nuts are present in
every country; in Germany
we have been lucky that they have never amounted to more than two or three
percent nationally. In their latest incarnation, they have taken an overt stand
against Islam, realising that they may be able to gain support from many people
worried about the problems arising around the whole question of the integration
of Muslim immigrants into German society.
They have
turned up in my home town of Remscheid
too, where we have quite a substantial Muslim minority (around 12%), mostly of
Turkish origin. On Mayday this year, they announced a demonstration against the
proposed building of a new mosque. A spontaneously formed group (“Remscheid
Tolerant”) quickly called for a counter-demonstration. My regard for the views
represented by Pro-Deutschland being around the level of my enthusiasm for
root-canal work without benefit of anaesthetic, I decided to take part.
It was a
nice, sunny first of May afternoon as a work colleague and I joined of group of
maybe four hundred to march through town to the planned site of the new mosque.
About two thirds of the demonstrators were of Turkish origin, but the rest was
a motley crew, from local politicians to punks and even some representatives of
the near-anarchist Autonome
movement. As my colleague had some friends among those general left-wingers, I
finished up marching with them.
It was fun.
The atmosphere was good humoured and I found myself reflecting on other demonstrations
I had taken part in when I was younger. With a feeling that I was indeed
getting older and more staid, I realised that it had been nine years since my
last demo – the huge protests against the impending Iraq war in 2003.
When we got
to the site of the planned Mosque, the demonstrators from Pro-Deutschland were there – all eleven or twelve of them. They
were a sorry little group, separated from us by around sixty policemen and
women, around half of them in riot gear. They half-heartedly waved a couple of
placards, featuring reproductions of Kurt Westergaard’s famous
Mohammed-as-a-bomb caricature. They tried to chant a couple of slogans, Deutschland für die Deutschen, stuff
like that, but were comprehensively shouted down by our much larger group, the
punks delightedly challenging them to, “Piss off home, you Nazi wankers!” and
inviting them to go fuck themselves. Meanwhile, the politicians and trade union
leaders were making speeches about tolerance and solidarity and a group of Turkish
schoolgirls were doing a folk dance. Just an ordinary demo, a practical public
expression of the democratic rights of anyone to express their opinions in
public. The cops looked attentively bored and there was no suggestion of
violence, though in neighbouring Solingen,
another little group of Pro-Deutschlanders
were stoned by some Salafis
- planned provocation and a planned response. After about an hour everyone went
home.
In the
midst of the current controversy, Pro-Deutschland
have announced that they plan to hire a cinema in Berlin and publicly screen The Innocence of Muslims. There are also
reports that they have invited Terry Jones to attend, that mad Florida pastor who is so
keen on burning Qur’ans. Made nervous by the events in Sudan last
week, and under pressure from various Muslim groups, there are reports that the
German government is looking into the possibility of banning the showing.
That would
be, in my opinion, a mistake. At the core of this issue is not the question of insulting
Muslims, or Mohammed, or Allah, but the question of freedom of opinion and
freedom of expression. And this is a value which is central to any free, open
society.
The freedom
of opinion, of belief, of expression has, at its foundation, the realisation
that people will have different, often contrary opinions, and that no society
has the right to force anyone to believe particular things. This also has the
corollary that no group or section in that society has the right to forbid
others from holding different opinions to themselves, or from expressing them –
even if they find that expression personally offensive, providing that
expression does not infringe on the particular rights of others (as is the case
with libel or slander). There are also limits with regard to questions like
incitement to violence or crime, but otherwise the right to one’s opinion, and
the right to express that opinion, is a central component of any free society.
Religions
often have problems with this necessary aspect of secular society, because
religions tend to claim to possess absolute truth. If Christians are right,
then atheists are wrong – and so are Muslims. If Muslims teach the truth, then
Christians are in error.
Christianity
has two advantages over Islam in this regard. Firstly, it has had over two
hundred years, since the American and French Revolutions to get used to the
idea. Secondly, the modern philosophy of the secular state, as a-theistic as it
may be, evolved initially within Christian dominated cultures. Even so, the
Catholic Church only finally made its peace with modern secular society in the
1960s with the Second Vatican Council (and I frequently think that there are
many among its current leadership who would like to roll that back).
Islam still
has a long way to go here, but it is a road that it must take. No religion has the right to dictate how any modern
society should be organised on the basis of its self-proclaimed divinely
inspired teaching. The very right to freedom of opinion and expression for
everyone, including – especially – those
who think differently than we do, is the only guarantee that any religious
group has for its own security in a multi-cultural world. To claim otherwise
would be to acknowledge that the interpretation of this world religion as held
by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban is implicitly correct. And if that is the
case, then the modern world is indeed at war with Islam and we will all have to
accept that the teachings of this religion are incompatible with the way most people
– including many Moslems – understand themselves and the world.
And so,
much as I find their views disgusting and reprehensible, I must argue that Pro-Deutschland, that ghastly group
against whom I protested a few months ago, should be allowed to go ahead with
their laughable screening of that worthless film. To prohibit it would be to
concede that anyone who claims to be insulted – for whatever reason – by someone
else on religious grounds would have the right to prohibit that other person
from expressing their views. It is an admission of the superiority of religious
beliefs over all other ideas, views, and opinions. It is incompatible with any
vision of an open, tolerant and free society.
In the end,
the whole Muslim perception of insult is rather pitiable anyway. It is a sign,
for me, of a deeply seated insecurity, even a self-perception of inferiority. How
can a God who is as great, compassionate, merciful and all-powerful as Muslims
proclaim Allah to be, really be mocked by the writings of a Salman Rushdie? How
can a man as reputedly wise and blessed as the prophet Mohammed, who has been
dead for nearly 1.400 years, really be insulted by a Danish caricature or a worthless
film produced by a vindictive, criminal American Christian of Coptic origin?
The author
of The Satanic Verseshas been much in my mind while writing this. Twenty three years ago, the
Ayatollah Khomeini spoke a fatwa,
basically condemning Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy. Rushdie spent many
years under police protection and had to endure major forced changes in his
life because of his literary treatment of the prophet. In an interview in The Guardianyesterday, he commented on the current controversy,
‘"The
film is clearly a malevolent piece of garbage," says Rushdie. "The
civilised response would be to say of the director: 'Fuck him. Let's get on
with our day.' What's not civilised is to hold America responsible for everything
that happens in its borders. That's crap. Even if that were true, to respond
with physical attacks and believe it's OK to attack people because you're upset
at this thing, that's an improper reaction. The Muslim world needs to get out
of that mindset."’
Note: The famous quotation from Voltaire isn’t, unfortunately, from him,
but rather attributed to him (as a summary of his position) by Evelyn Beatrice
Hall (1906)
A group of
US soldiers in Afghanistan,
charged with guarding Taliban suspects, first took away their Korans – in case
they would use them to pass secret messages to each other – and then burntthem. As if this wasn’t bad enough, they
were then careless enough to let other Afghans see them doing this and spread the happy news.
Let me just
see if I’ve got this straight. The US
armed forces – accompanied by the armed forces of many other nations – went into
Afghanistan
over ten years ago to kick out the Taliban who had given hospitality and
support to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida. They succeeded in doing that pretty
quickly but, for reasons too complex to go into here but which had a lot to do
with the fact that Dubya was more concerned with offing Saddam (something his
daddy had wisely refrained from doing), finished up getting stuck there. Not a
good idea, as the Soviets, the Brits, or even the ancient Greeks under
Alexander the Great could have told them. Afghanistan is definitely not a country you want to get stuck in
when you’re perceived as a foreign occupying power.
The Afghans
don’t like any foreigners telling
them what to do, and a large part of their obscure, complex tribal culture has
to do with their young men learning to use guns and any other weapons available
before they would be ready to shave (if, that is, they shaved, which they
generally don’t). The longer the US and other foreign forces
remained in the country, the more they were going to be resented and resisted.
It is hard to believe that all the experts in the State Department and the
Pentagon didn’t know this. Maybe they did, but just decided to ignore it. Or
maybe it was just one of the things, as Rumsfeld put it, they didn’t know that
they didn’t know.
At any
rate, we have moved from a situation where, a decade ago, most Afghans were
delighted to see the backs of the Taliban, to a situation where they are now
back in a powerful position and gaining ever more support from many Afghans,
who see them increasingly as potential liberators from foreign oppressors. What
a wonderful example of winning the war only to lose the peace.
Ok, so Afghanistan has
turned into a complete mess. To use a US military expression, SNAFU –
situation normal all fucked up. In the wake of 9/11, the collective US leadership seems to have forgotten one of the
major lessons of Vietnam;
be careful about getting into a situation without a clear plan about how to get
out of it again. This was something Daddy Bush and Colin Powell understood
quite clearly when they sent their troops off to kick Saddam’s ass in Desert
Storm over twenty years ago. Dubya never learned this and Powell, apparently,
didn’t have the guts to make it clear to him. Anyway, the US – and all
their allies – now want nothing more than to get out of there as quickly as
possible. At least officially; the chances are that if they succeed in their
current disengagement plans there will still be thousands of “advisors” left
there, just as there are in Iraq.
But that’s all right, it’s just part of the neo-liberal wave of privatisation –
war can be privatised too; it passes off the nasty business to mercenaries, who
aren’t subject to the same degree of public control and scrutiny as national
armed forces, where influential private companies (like Academi, the Company Formerly Known as
Blackwater) can earn lots of money, and where military veterans with diverse
reasons for not wanting to return to civilian life can find well-paid work.
But even
getting out officially isn’t easy. I believe that the US and its allies don’t
really give a tinker’s curse about Afghanistan; as far as they are concerned,
if the Afghans are intent on living in a barbaric medieval theocracy, where women
are treated as chattels, those who don’t share the faith of the rulers live in
fear of death, and there’re more or less continual low-level wars between
various tribes, then they’re welcome to do so. Admittedly, there is the poppy
problem – Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of non-pharmaceutical
grade opiates (92% in 2007) and also, incidentally, the world’s largest
producer of hashish – but, despite all the hype about the so-called War on Drugs, I have a feeling that (for
all sorts of reasons, many sordid, which I won’t go into here) the US and most
other countries can live with that. No, the real problems are the two 500 pound
gorillas next door, Iran to
the west and, especially, Pakistan
to the east.
In the
ordinary course of events, Iran
would be the easier one. In terms of sympathy, the US and the west have little to lose
there anyway. But, leaving aside the large number of people within Iran (many of
whom are devout Muslims) who might just have been persuaded that the west could
offer them moral support and an alternative model for organising their country,
the last thing anyone could want right now is more propaganda fodder for Ahmadinejad
and the Islamicist mullahs pulling his strings. Israel
and Iran
are playing a dangerous game of nuclear chicken at the moment, with vast
possibilities of dire consequences and anything which adds fuel to that
particular mix, you would think, would be something anyone sane would want to
avoid at all costs. Maybe they forgot to tell that to the US soldiers who
decided to do some book-burning, and their superior officers who were ignorant
enough to allow the situation to develop where they could even consider the
idea.
Pakistan is potentially an even bigger
problem. While it is still officially seen as the West’s major ally in the
area, it is hopelessly corrupt, increasingly unstable, and large areas of its
territories bordering on Afghanistan
seem to be factually under the control of the Taliban or groups sympathetic to
them. After all, that’s where they finally got Bin Laden, in Abottabad in the province of Waziristan. An increasingly likely
return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan
might just push Pakistan
over the edge into chaos, civil war and an ultimate Islamicist takeover there. It
wouldn’t take much pushing. Pakistan
has nuclear weapons. It’s an open question as to how India, also a nuclear power, would (understandably)
react to such a course of events.
The blatant
ignorance which gave rise to this Koran-burning incident is simply
mind-boggling. Apart from damaging any claim to some kind of moral high ground which
the US might like to appeal to in this whole situation – a claim which actually
had some justification in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but which has been steadily
losing credibility ever since – it is abysmally stupid from a practical
strategic point of view. If the US
wants to ensure any kind of stability in the country and the region after the
troops are officially pulled out, the struggle for the hearts and minds of as
many Afghans as possible is more vital now than ever.
It makes me
wonder about the mind-set prevalent within the US Armed Forces, when any
trained soldiers would not be aware of the consequences of such an action. No
matter what strength of suspicion about the level of involvement of the
detainees with the Taliban, the burning of Korans is a gratuitous act of insane
provocation which can only suggest that those responsible are seriously
dehumanised. They are not the actions of troops who are fighting to defend the
ideals of the American republic throughout the world, but rather of arrogant,
imperial occupiers, who could best be compared to the Roman legionaries who
played dice at the foot of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth, whom most of them
regard as their Saviour and God.
NATO has apologised,
Obama has apologised, but it’s not doing all that much good. Perhaps because
the incident is not an isolated one. Only a few days earlier, pictures were
released of US
troops apparently urinating on the bodies of dead opponents. Not to mention all
the “collateral damage,” particularly the various killings of innocent children
since the ISAF forces arrived in Afghanistan over ten years ago. And
then, of course, there was that highly publicised Koran burning by that mad
pastor in Florida
last year, though at least that one can’t be blamed on the military.
One of the
frightening aspects of all this is that it doesn’t even seem to be creating
much of a stir in the US, more occupied as it is with Whitney Houston, the Oscars
and the ghastly, unreal comedy of the Republican presidential nomination
campaign. It would offer some kind of hope if there were any real signals of
some sort of public feelings of shame at the actions of its soldiers. But why
should the Roman public be concerned about the doings of its legionaries in a
remote country, mostly populated by religious fanatics; Pharisees, Sadducees
and Zealots – or raghead Salafists, Shi’ites and Talibans? Particularly when
there are more interesting bread and circus issues at home.
