By Mathew Maavak
The oldest profession in the world is not the commonly attributed sleazy barter blamed on the fairer half. It is in fact, a masculine creation, borne out of a defective state where jealousy, power, the need for survival and approbation swirl to necessitate elimination.
Killing pre-dates prostitution, ever since Cain could not resist bludgeoning his brother Abel. How much has mankind evolved since that faithful day, and especially at a place not far from Eden. That very ground is still receiving the bloods of Abels and Cains; it is no longer discriminatory. With wars raging – and we are never bereft of it – does a global village really exist?
Take the last two momentous events alone – Sept 11 and the Gulf War 11. Momentous depends on what Power tells you. How many remember the Bangladesh floods, which killed 140,000, sometime around Gulf War 1? Even the Muslim media was more troubled over the liberation of Kuwait and its bloody aftermath. While CNN cheered, through Kuwaiti Sheikhs who gleefully waved off bombing missions from US bases, most of the region demurred, at best. The flood victims weren’t apparently worth much. A matter of power or perception, or both?
What is generally perceived in the West may be the opposite somewhere else. Osama bin Laden is the devil incarnate to some, but he is a hero to many. That’s what sanitized news tries to avoid. Saddam is definitely a monster but to many Bush is the greater evil. In between, mainly in the West, there are individuals holding a variety of opinion over one event like Sept 11 alone. What is this leading to? A global consciousness?
In ancient times, an invading army could wipe out an entire race, and erase any trace of their depredations. Communities without a written tradition had the added disadvantage of not leaving enough jigsaw remnants behind for a latter-day anthropologist or archaeologist to piece together. As species become extinct daily, without even getting the dignity of a Latin/Greek nomenclature, mankind too has lost its countless tribes. Many will never to be known. Furthermore, it was not possible in some regions to maintain delicate tomes. The weather would turn it into mildew within years, unless you had a dedicated priestly/intellectual class who could maintain an unbroken line of descent and scholarship i.e. the Brahmins of India.
This may be one reason why those with ancient written traditions, with extant documents, still dominate human endeavour. They have the recorded pedigree or myths that are so essential for identity. Notice the ferocious revitalisation process going on in Iran while the Saudis are regressing in practically everything, including financially. Persians can access antiquated records going way back to the time of Zoroaster while I haven’t yet heard of any notable pre-Islamic texts from the Saudi Peninsula. There might be, but they are likely stored elsewhere now. The Saudis lack, or aren’t allowed an alternate ancient connectivity, leaving them choked with limited interpretations and philosophical plurality. Sept 11 can be engineered easier in such conditions.
The desserts of Arabia had gifted science to the West at a time when Japan was isolated. Arabia lost much of its “blasphemous texts”, while the West modernised the world through them. One ultimate beneficiary was the once isolated Japan. It began to progress at a breakneck speed when four monsters, one carrying Commodore Matthew Perry, appeared unannounced at Tokyo Bay. Their presence petrified a nation, which, in less than a century, could sacrifice the Yamato, the greatest battleship of its time, in a chivalrous way. That’s the versatility of a society that could produce and maintain a classic called The Tale of Genji and others, spanning millennia.
But while Japan had to be reckoned, the perceived untermensch, with nothing much to offer for warring aliens, got weeded out. The Indians provided a wealth of knowledge, technology and most of all, a huge market for its one-time British masters. The Australian aborigines and Native American could offer limited novelties like boomerangs and tepees. Nothing has changed. The arrows of time still travel in a linear manner, with all our atavistic instincts intact. But it is travelling faster now, with mankind struggling to keep apace.
History is a poor narrator of our “civilizational progress”. Some of them are just plain dung. Of all established fields, it’s the most imprecise. We get to read the victor’s version all the time. The official US death toll in Vietnam, as quoted by historians, is around 58,000. The actual sum is probably double, mainly the result of suicides from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is no big difference between an instantly blown up body and a ticking biological time bomb. Nobody gets it right all the time in this field, a product of the innocuous cognitive factor or unresolved data. This doesn’t excuse the outright lies still spinning in our textbooks.
China’s last Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi was regarded as lascivious, “murderous old Buddha” who eventually destroyed her nation until recent scholarship, especially by Sterling Seagrave, portrayed an entirely different character - that of a kind, hapless and manipulated lady, deserving much empathy. Thankfully, Seagrave was honest enough to clarify this legend (in the Dragon Lady), a U-turn from the established fallacy he quoted in a previous work (The Soong Dynasty). Recondite records reveal a story starkly different from the factual chimera of a sex-crazed psychotic called Sir Edmund Backhouse, who went on to claim he had a steamy affair with the lady.
Historians rubber-stamped his twilight zone encounters and falsifications, as Backhouse was an indispensable source for benighted Far East correspondents from venerable dailies. Together, they generated Western indignation over this oriental Jezebel, made worse as her Ahab or Ah Seng wasn’t around. It’s the same story elsewhere. The attempted 1936 “rightwing coup” in Japan was later conveniently used to exonerate Emperor Hirohito of war crimes. The dailies that reported these first drafts of history are still around today. They are historical repositories that retain their vintage halo, churning out the same drivel, watered down but better packaged. Recall all those commentaries, editorials and expert analyses about the famous 45-minute claim, WMD, Al Qaeda links, and tons of viruses that were supposedly compacted in mobile labs?
Apart from the victor’s scripting, communications itself gets inflected over time, even inadvertently. The hidden signals between communicators take a life of their own, and the message gets varnished and grated along its way to distortion, redolent of Michael Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension. The sole eyewitness account of a nervy lady will differ from that of a cool, silk-stockinged soignée. Facts sometimes depend on whom you listen to. And so does history.
Heard about the looting at Baghdad’s museum, its subsequent rebuttal and the reassertion of most of the original reports? Thankfully, despite their mistakes, we have some of the world’s best reporting on this. Better yet, what about the daily conflicting reports emanating from either side of a Green Line separating two “cousins”? (The Israelis claim its DNA certified. They are indeed Semites!).
One side will choose to keep one side of any story; the stuff racists and tyrants of all types thrive on. William of Orange’s legacy resulted in blown up kids centuries later. Elvis will always be alive to some, but Bin Laden will be venerated by the hordes. St Bernard can be denounced by his own people now, but never so with Saladin. Will Saddam and Bin Laden become swear words in their region after two or three generations? That much is precise, as history will show you. The global village is not possible, except under a particular scenario.
How do you unite mankind in this information age when even the most outlandish claims are recorded for posterity? Both Saddam and Bin Laden may one day receive Saladin’s mantle, not for their (non-existent) moral qualities but more for their defiance, which will slowly ossify to create a monolithic symbol of Islamic resistance. After all, how are the Jaffa Street suicide bombers or the former Stern Gang’s terrorist surpremo Yitzhak Shamir regarded, on either side of Huntington’s seismic fault lines? If you read that historical novel O’ Jerusalem , Shamir happened to be eclipsed by an Arab Doppelganger called Fawzi al-Kutub. At the time of writing, a search for this elusive figure scored 72 hits on Google, with only three sites actually relating to him, in three separate ways. And this was the bin Laden of his day?
But if you think our search technologies are still primitive, and as reliable as our histories, read on.
Information and disinformation are being stored in incalculable zeroes and ones, promising much confusion and conflict for later generations. In this age, we are developing separate histories, potent and unparalleled, because we have the repositories for them. The myths or knowledge in an ancient edifice can now be compacted in a few tiny CDs, perhaps just one. Information overload burdens the rationale mind while impassioning the herd.
The solution? Genuflect to power and be selective! Delusions are safer than the truth in many a circumstance. Records will be kept for another generation, who will fight for a cause they didn’t know was a farce. The fictions of yesterday might become the gospel truth of today, all for a murder tomorrow.
Those descendents of slain pagans, the spoils of Jihads and Inquisitions, may profess new faiths now with much zeal, and refuse to acknowledge that their “salvation” was the result of murders and rapes long back. Their ancestors were going to hell and some kind souls stopped this ongoing tragedy by butchering many, raping others and converting all to open the gates of paradise. Blasphemous history is not popular.
How many texts are there to pose that question? Destroying them, or preventing their publication provides some “feel-good” sanctity. Western texts abound, what about the rest of the world?
If it weren’t for prior widespread dissemination, the knowledge at the library (or libraries) at Alexandria would have been lost forever, and in the process, impoverish mankind. Luckily, as the story goes, the great library also had a rival in Pergamon. However, there are three claimants for vandalism’s crowning glory - Julius Caesar, Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria and Caliph Omar of Damascus. That’s definitive history for you. The Mongol hordes led by Hulagu razed Baghdad’s library in 1258 until the Tigris turned black with the ink of its ravaged documents. Was that Baghdad looting recently an unstoppable, mindless act then? Or an attempt to macerate the soul of a society capable of great regeneration? Lost texts translate into lost identities. New histories have to be created, spawning a tenuous global link and competing power centres. They are fissiparous and a New World Order cannot be effectuated by conflicting grievances.
For the master builders, there is one ominous solution.
Pop songs are showing us the way. Something like this had been predicted long back, but the manner it is developing may have surprised even Foucault. We have finally crossed the Rubicon into the Age of Total Surveillance.
Notice how record companies have been hunting down music pirates with stunning speed and efficiency in recent weeks? Acquiring Yazoo’s Nobody’s Diary might entail weeks of foraging at US stores (its not an American genre) unless you resort to Amazon.com where you could cough up extra for unwanted peripherals. The primrose path, initially blazed by the likes of Napster, may land you in big trouble.
But that’s not the main point.
Is this a trial run for things to come, despite RIAA's very recent setback at the courts? Invading people’s privacy through their “friendly” net service providers to probe for illegal melodies is simply Orwellian. These tools can be used to extricate your sweetheart’s photos or insert child porn as well. Use your imagination; the possibilities are boundless.
Third World tyrants will drool over such tools to staunch “terrorist” activity. Assuredly, they will be given to “allies”. As Bush discharges a logorrhoea over “our freedom” and “terrorists” intent on destroying “our nation”, his team sure have got their priorities right. Shared MP3s, for our listening pleasure, have superseded “coded” terrorist messages in that coloured level of threat. In recent weeks, a pirated Whitney Houston was stark red. Grandmothers are now scared stiff when a threatening letter is issued all coz a young, suicidal soul in the house takes daily inspiration from Don McLean’s Starry, Starry Night or a divinely gospel hit.
This intrusive juggernaut was not developed overnight, even if Big Brother had 1,000 MacGyvers working round the clock for months, post Sept 11. It takes long planning while advertising great promises. Net savvy older people, who remember those laborious snail mail days, still pause to marvel at e-mails that are despatched thousands of miles away in seconds, for free. There is no such thing as a free meal.
We are hooked, forming a society of electronic junkies!
Sept 11 was a great opportunity to ramrod “anti-terrorist” bills. A cowed society exchanged them for their “freedom”. Ironically, they are losing just that. Now its MP3s, next what? You can bet that the Unabomber’s manifesto will still be around and so will terrorist proclamations. Are these the same ISPs that get hiccups over MP3s and yet foster the freedom ‘to kill’ by hosting the Anarchist Cookbook and another refreshing title called The Terrorist's Handbook and How to Make Bombs? The former offers recipes for confecting anything from atom bombs to rocket launchers for less than five bucks! (Guardian, July 1, 2000). A good steak costs more. This gourmet classic has panned out well; it is still around. Now, at least, we have the freedom of “speech,” the freedom to bear arms — some which somehow make way to the likes of Columbine School — but not the freedom to steal ballads. If the music industry thinks it has scored a coup, it can repay official benevolence by playing the Badenweiler March — country-style — the next time Bush trots up to deliver his State of the Union speech.
In the absence of personal freedom, a cause is needed to unify disgruntled souls. What better excuses than war and terror?
For the next stage, passions have to be inflamed until hell never freezes and then comes the grand nostrum — total surveillance, promising security, peace and freedom in exchange for a real-time detailed oversight of your life, even when you switch off the lights during those moments of love. Is this a ridiculous thought in an inured, callous society? Mutilated corpses elicit dutiful indignation from journalists over TV while an hour later, kids vicariously blow up limbs on the PC. Flesh that was once covered is bared for all, and children in Britain — a supposedly conservative society — are televisually coached in the fine art of copulation way before a number of them attain teenage pregnancy. Check out some programs there that start at 9pm, when the night is still young enough for tender minds to think that sex is cheap, more of a casual, bestial drive than an act of love.
That’s freedom of speech but a bunch of Anglican evangelicals who oppose gay bishops get excoriated badly by UK’s media zealots. The two-state solution we parrot about in the Levant somehow can’t be applicable to the church. You call this a clash of civilizations? But religion-dictated separation is applicable elsewhere, in other houses of worship. While in UK, a Hindu friend of mine accompanied a Muslim colleague to a mosque, only to be politely turned away at the entrance, by the same friend. It seems it was haram (forbidden) for non-Muslims to enter. It’s not an isolated case. Now, what is our doughty religiously correct British Press doing about this? Jesus Christ can be odiously depicted at elegant art galleries and movies, without inviting a lynching, but Salman Rushdie’s attempt at prose creates an international crisis. The likes of Rushdie are always on the minds of politicians and the media. Are they cowards, or are they not ready yet to take on brute force?
Religion bends to power.
A bare-legged, “short-skirted” Princess Diana can grace the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan in 1991, drawing additional fury when she was presented a copy of the Koran (Reuters, Aug 1, 2002). The same ilk now claims she had converted to Islam before that fateful crash. This is a country where teenage girls — the poorer ones that is —get horribly murdered just for chatting up a boy (a sin called khalwat or “close proximity”). Here is another irony. The very khateeb (an Islamic religious official) who welcomed her had issued a fatwa against Benazir Bhutto from becoming Prime Minister. Simply because she was a woman (later retracted)! The mullah fanatics loved it. The Pope, vested with more subtle powers, had a Damascene experience at the famous Omayyad Mosque in Syria. Since John Paul II wore papal robes, he was heartily lionized.
Double standards that reward brute power, arouse otherwise dormant or nonexistent sentiments. Many gladly gravitate to another power base called the Far Right, instead of listening to some dumb, intellectual mealy-mouthing. This may not be a game of minority appeasement but another where we are simmered to a boiling point, beyond which it’s time for the ogres to offer their panacea, that of a one-size-fits-all universal control. And that’s just one strand in the master plan.
A plan needs time in formulating. Many such undertakings failed before. You can’t wrench out freedom before promising security and peace. A semblance of real progress is needed. Confusion and weary minds make that plan easier.
We are trying to reconcile a largely pseudo heteropian modi vivendi and unbearable conformist pressures. We like personal PC settings, special ring tones and custom-made cars. All the while, our plurality is dwindling rapidly. We have become impoverished linguistically, culturally, morally and even sartorially. Pricey haute couture are another bluff; they are montages of the original stuff. We are converging in many ways. We wear the same suits, sit on the same Ikea sofas and lose our mother tongues for an alien language, while the family mores of yore (the good ones) languish. Was Christmas more enjoyable 50 years back? The post-modern era is one of atomized existence. On Christmas, expect children to celebrate the occasion with a relative as their mother maintains a bank’s database while the father guards its vaults.
My Muslim acquaintances tell me that their Eid ul Fitr is no longer as joyous either and it has nothing to do with Palestine or Iraq. They blame it on changing attitudes, modernity and even prosperity.
The days of innocence and simple joys are long over. Add in an avalanche of daily simulacra and you will know why Jean Baudrillard said, “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” The result? An agonised self mired in cynicism, groping for order, reality and tranquillity. Things should be simplified, and there are selfless souls ready to do this for you. Old Adolph tried, and had even matched the destruction of Alexandrian books, and that guy from Crawford ranch is currently doing his best.
This is the future Faustian pact we might have to make. Anything that stands in the way might get thunderbolts from a Cyclopean superstructure as The All Seeing Eye , an official US emblem borrowed from antiquity, will know where you are. Will there be a global village or a ghettoized planet?.
The Khmer Rouge tried it out, on a smaller scale, in their killing fields. Angka-indoctrinated nine-year-olds were on the lookout for spectacles, books, signs of education and independent thought. Two million perished.
A New World Order might work if Ray Bans, personal ring tones and standardised education and history proliferate. Freedom can be tossed away in return for material throwaways and comfort.
Is there hope? Ignore those fatalistic doomsayers. The arrows of time can yet be deflected.
Copyright@2003 Mathew Maavak
Aug 6 2003
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