Fwd: [FOIL] Feminist Reflections on the Battle between Global Capitalism & Fundamentalist Terrorism (fwd) (fwd)

[Scott F. Kiesling]

Some of you may be interested in this given its feminist and discourse (sort
of) approach. It's also just a great piece.
SK

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

To: foil-l at foil.org
Subject: [FOIL] Feminist Reflections on the Battle between Global
Capitalism & Fundamentalist Terrorism

Phantom Towers:
Feminist Reflections on the Battle between Global Capitalism and
Fundamentalist Terrorism

Rosalind P. Petchesky

Presentation at Hunter College Political Science Dept. Teach-In, Sept. 25,
2001

These are trying times, hard times to know where we are from one day
to the next.  The attack on the World Trade Center has left many
kinds of damage in its wake, not the least of which is a gaping
ethical and political confusion in the minds of many Americans who
identify in some way as "progressive"-meaning, anti-racist, feminist,
democratic (small d), anti-war.  While we have a responsibility to
those who died in the disaster and their loved ones, and to
ourselves, to mourn, it is urgent that we also begin the work of
thinking through what kind of world we are now living in and what it
demands of us.  And we have to do this, even while we know our
understanding at this time can only be very tentative and may well be
invalidated a year or even a month or a week from now by events we
can't foresee or information now hidden from us.

So, at the risk of being completely wrong, I want to try to draw a
picture or a kind of mapping of the global power dynamics as I see
them at this moment, including their gendered and racialized
dimensions.  I want to ask whether there is some alternative, more
humane and peaceable way out of the two unacceptable polarities now
being presented to us:  the permanent war machine (or permanent
security state) and the regime of holy terror.

Let me make very clear that, when I pose the question whether we are
presently facing a confrontation between global capitalism and an
Islamist-fundamentalist brand of fascism, I do not mean to imply
their equivalence.  If, in fact, the attacks of Sept. 11 were the
work of Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network or something related and even
larger-and for the moment I think we can assume this as a real
possibility-then most of us in this room are structurally positioned
in a way that gives us little choice about our identities.  (For the
Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans among us, who are both opposed to
terrorism and terrified to walk in our streets, the moral dilemma
must be, I imagine, much more agonizing.)  As an American, a woman, a
feminist, and a Jew, I have to recognize that the Bin Ladens of the
world hate me and would like me dead; or, if they had power over me,
would make my life a living hell.  I have to wish them-these
"perpetrators," "terrorists," whatever they are-apprehended,
annulled, so I can breathe in some kind of peace.  This is quite
different from living at the very center of global capitalism-which
is more like living in a very dysfunctional family that fills you
with shame and anger for its arrogance, greed, and insensitivity but
is, like it or not, your home and gives you both immense privileges
and immense responsibilities.

Nor, however, do I succumb to the temptation of casting our current
dilemma in the simplistic, Manichean terms of cosmic Good vs. Evil.
Currently this comes in two opposed but mirror-image versions:  the
narrative, advanced not only by the terrorists and their sympathizers
but also by many on the left in the US and around the globe, that
blames US cultural imperialism and economic hegemony for the
"chickens coming home to roost"; versus the patriotic, right-wing
version that casts US democracy and freedom as the innocent target of
Islamist madness.  Both these stories erase all the complexities that
we must try to factor into a different, more inclusive ethical and
political vision.  The Manichean, apocalyptic rhetorics that echoed
back and forth between Bush and Bin Laden in the aftermath of the
attacks-the pseudo-Islamic and the pseudo-Christian, the jihad and
the crusade-both lie.

So, while I do not see terrorist networks and global capitalism as
equivalents or the same, I do see some striking and disturbing
parallels between them.  I picture them as the phantom Twin Towers
arising in the smoke clouds of the old-fraternal twins, not
identical, locked in a battle over wealth, imperial aggrandizement
and the meanings of masculinity.  It is a battle that could well end
in a stalemate, an interminable cycle of violence that neither can
win because of their failure to see the Other clearly.  Feminist
analysts and activists from many countries-whose voices have been
inaudible thus far in the present crisis-have a lot of experience to
draw from in making this double critique.  Whether in the UN or
national settings, we have been challenging the gender-biased and
racialized dimensions of both neoliberal capitalism and various
fundamentalisms for years, trying to steer a path between their
double menace.  The difference now is that they parade onto the world
stage in their most extreme and violent forms.  I see six areas where
their posturing overlaps:

1. Wealth - Little needs to be said about the US as the world's
wealthiest country nor the ways in which wealth-accumulation is the
holy grail, not only of our political system (think of the difficulty
we have even in reforming campaign finance laws), but of our national
ethos.  We are the headquarters of the corporate and financial
mega-empires that dominate global capitalism and influence the
policies of the international financial institutions (IMF, World
Bank, WTO) that are its main governing bodies.  This reality
resonates around the globe in the symbolic pantheon of what the US
stands for-from the MacDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken ads
sported by protestors in Genoa and Rawalpindi to the WTC towers
themselves.  Acquisitiveness, whether individual or corporate, also
lurks very closely behind the values that Bush and Rumsfeld mean when
they say our "freedoms" and our "way of life" are being attacked and
must be defended fiercely.  (Why, as I'm writing this, do unsolicited
messages about Wall Street investment opportunities or low fares to
the Bahamas come spewing out of my fax machine?)

Wealth is also a driving force behind the Al-Qaeda network, whose
principals are mainly the beneficiaries of upper-middle-class or
elite financing and education.  Bin Laden himself derives much of his
power and influence from his family's vast fortune, and the cells of
Arab-Afghan fighters in the 1980s war against the Soviets were
bankrolled not only by the Pakistani secret police and the CIA--$3
billion writes Katha Pollitt in The Nation, "more money and expertise
than for any other cause in CIA history"-but also by Saudi oil money.
More important than this, though, are the values behind the terrorist
organizations, which include-as Bin Laden made clear in his famous
1998 interview-defending the "honor" and "property" of Muslims
everywhere and "[fighting] the governments that are bent on attacking
our religion and on stealing our wealth. . . ."  Paul Amar rightly
urges us not to confuse these wealthy networks-whose nepotism and
ties to oil interests eerily resemble those of the Bush family-with
impoverished and resistant social movements throughout the Middle
East and Asia.  There is no evidence that economic justice or
equality figure anywhere in the terrorist program.

2.  Imperialist nationalism - The Bush administration's initial
reaction to the attacks exhibited the behavior of a superpower that
knows no limits, that issues ultimatums under the cover of "seeking
cooperation."  "Every nation in every region has a decision to make,"
pronounced Bush in his speech to the nation that was really a speech
to the world; "Either you are with us or you are with the
terrorists."  "This is the world's fight, this is civilization's
fight"-the US, then, becoming the leader and spokesman of
"civilization," relegating not only the terrorists but also those who
refuse to join the fight to the ranks of the uncivilized.  To the
Taliban and to every other regime that "harbors terrorists," he was
the sheriff stonewalling the cattle rustlers: "Hand over all the
terrorists or you will share in their fate."  And a few days later we
read "the American announcement that it would use Saudi Arabia as a
headquarters for air operations against Afghanistan." As the war
campaign progresses, its aims seem more openly imperialist:
"Washington wants to offer [the small, also fundamentalist,
drug-dealing mujahedeen mostly routed by the Taliban] a role in
governing Afghanistan after the conflict" (NY Times, 9/24), as if
this were "Washington's" official role.  Further, it and its allies
are courting the octogenarian, long-forgotten Afghan king (now exiled
in Italy) to join in a military operation to oust the Taliban and set
up-what? a kind of puppet government?  Nothing here about
internationally monitored elections, nothing about the UN, or any
concept of the millions of Afghan people-within the country or in
exile-as anything but voiceless, downtrodden victims and refugees.

Clearly, this offensive involves far more than rooting out and
punishing terrorists.  Though I don't want to reduce the situation to
a crude Marxist scenario, one can't help wondering how it relates to
the longstanding determination of the US to keep a dominant foothold
in the gulf region and to maintain control over oil supplies.  At
least one faction of the Bush "team," clamoring to go after Saddam
Hussein as well, is clearly in this mindset.  And let's not forget
Pakistan and its concessions to US demands for cooperation in return
for lifting of US economic sanctions-and now, the assurance of a
sizable IMF loan.  In the tradition of neo-imperial power, the US
does not need to dominate countries politically or militarily to get
the concessions it wants; its economic influence backed up by the
capacity for military annihilation is sufficient.  And, spurred by
popular rage over the WTC attacks, all this is wrapped in the
outpouring of nationalist patriotism and flag-waving that now
envelops the American landscape.

Though lacking the actual imperial power of the US, the Bin Laden
forces mimic its imperial aspirations.  If we ask, what are the
terrorists seeking?, we need to recognize their worldview as an
extreme and vicious form of nationalism-a kind of fascism, I would
argue, because of its reliance on terror to achieve its ends.  In
this respect, their goals, like those of the US, go beyond merely
punishment.  Amar says the whole history of Arab and Islamic
nationalism has been one that transcended the colonially imposed
boundaries of the nation-state, one that was always transnational and
pan-Arabic, or pan-Muslim, in form.  Although the terrorists have no
social base or legitimacy in laying claim to this tradition, they
clearly seek to usurp it.  This seems evident in Bin Laden's language
invoking "the Arab nation," "the Arab peninsula," and a "brotherhood"
reaching from Eastern Europe to Turkey and Albania, to the entire
Middle East, South Asia and Kashmir.  Their mission is to drive out
"the infidels" and their Muslim supporters from something that looks
like a third of the globe.  Provoking the US to bomb Afghanistan
and/or attempt ousting the Taliban would surely destabilize Pakistan
and possibly catapult it into the hands of Taliban-like extremists,
who would then control nuclear weapons-a big step toward their
perverted and hijacked version of the pan-Muslim dream.
3.  Pseudo-Religion - As many others have commented, the "clash of
religions" or "clash of cultures" interpretation of the current
scenario is utterly specious.  What we have instead is an
appropriation of religious symbolism and discourse for predominantly
political purposes, and to justify permanent war and violence.  So
Bin Laden declares a jihad, or holy war, against the US, its
civilians as well as its soldiers; and Bush declares a crusade
against the terrorists and all who harbor or support them.  Bin Laden
declares himself the "servant of Allah fighting for the sake of the
religion of Allah" and to protect Islam's holy mosques, while Bush
declares Washington the promoter of "infinite justice" and predicts
certain victory, because "God is not neutral."  (The Pentagon changed
the "Operation Infinite Justice" label to "Operation Enduring
Freedom" after Muslim-Americans objected and three Christian
clergymen warned that "infinite" presumed divinity, the "sin of
pride.")  But we have to question the authenticity of this religious
discourse on both sides, however sincere its proponents.  A statement
written by a distinguished list of Islamic scholars firmly denounces
terrorism-the wanton killing of innocent civilians-as contrary to
Sh'aria law.  And Bush's adoption of this apocalyptic discourse can
only be seen as substituting a conservative, right-wing form of
legitimation for the neoliberal internationalist discourse that
conservatives reject.  In either case, it is worth quoting the always
wise Eduardo Galeano:  "In the struggle of Good against Evil, it's
always the people who get killed."

4.  Militarism - Both the Bush administration and the Bin Laden
forces adopt the methods of war and violence to achieve their ends,
but in very different ways.  US militarism is of the ultra-high-tech
variety that seeks to terrorize by the sheer might, volume and
technological virtuosity of our armaments.  Of course, as the history
of Vietnam and the survival of Saddam Hussein attest, this is an
illusion of the highest order.  (Remember the "smart bombs" in the
Gulf War that headed for soda machines?)  But our military technology
is also a vast and insatiable industry for which profit, not
strategy, is the driving rationale. As Jack Blum, a critic of US
foreign policy, points out, "the national defense game is a systems
and money operation" that has little if any relevance to terrorism.
Missiles were designed to counter hostile states with their own fixed
territories and weapons arsenals, not terrorists who sneak around the
globe and whose "weapons of mass destruction" are human bodies and
hijacked planes; nor the famously impervious terrain and piles of
rubble that constitute Afghanistan.  Even George W., in one of his
most sensible comments to date, remarked that we'd know better than
to aim "a $2 billion cruise missile at a $10 empty tent."  And yet
four days after the attack the Democrats in Congress piled madness
atop madness and withdrew their opposition to Bush's costly and
destructive "missile shield," voting to restore $1.3 billion in
spending authority for this misconceived and dangerous project.  And
the armaments companies quickly started lining up to receive their
big orders for the impending next war-the war, we are told, that will
last a long time, maybe the rest of our lives.  US militarism is not
about rationality-not even about fighting terrorism-but about profits.

The war-mania and rallying around the flag exhibited by the American
people express desire, not for military profits, but for something
else, something harder for feminist and anti-war dissidents to
understand.  Maybe it's just the need to vent anger and feel avenged,
or the more deep-rooted one to experience some sense of community and
higher purpose in a society where we are so atomized and isolated
from one another and the world.  Barbara Kingsolver writes that she
and her husband reluctantly sent their 5-year-old daughter to school
dressed in red, white and blue like the other kids because they
didn't want to let jingoists and censors "steal the flag from us."
Their little girl probably echoed the longings of many less
reflective grownups when she said, wearing the colors of the flag
"means we're a country; just people all together."

The militarism of the terrorists is of a very different nature-based
on the mythic figure of the Bedouin warrior, or the Ikhwan fighters
of the early 20th century who enabled Ibn Saud to consolidate his
dynastic state.  Their hallmark is individual courage and ferocity in
battle; as one Arab witness wrote, foreshadowing reports of Soviet
veterans from the 1980s Afghan war:  "utterly fearless of death, not
caring how many fall, advancing rank upon rank with only one
desire-the defeat and annihilation of the enemy." (M. Ruthven, Islam
in the World, p. 27)  Of course, this image too, like every
hyper-nationalist ideology, is rooted in a mythic golden past and has
little to do with how real terrorists in the 21st century are
recruited, trained and paid off.  Moreover, like high-tech
militarism, terrorist low-tech militarism is also based in an
illusion-that millions of believers will rise up, obey the fatwa, and
defeat the infidel.  It's an illusion because it grossly
underestimates the most powerful weapon in global capitalism's
arsenal-not "infinite justice" or even nukes but infinite Nikes and
cd's.  And it also underestimates the local power of feminism, which
the fundamentalists mistakenly confuse with the West.  Iran today, in
all its internal contradictions, shows the resilience and
globalized/localized variety of both youth cultures and women's
movements. (Sciolino, NY Times, 9/23/01)

5.   Masculinism - Militarism, nationalism, and colonialism as
terrains of power have always been in large part contests over the
meanings of manhood.  Feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe
remarks that "men's sense of their own masculinity, often tenuous, is
as much a factor in international politics as is the flow of oil,
cables, and military hardware."  In the case of Bin Laden's Taliban
patrons, the form and excessiveness of the misogyny that goes hand in
hand with state terrorism and extreme fundamentalism have been
graphically documented.  Just go to the website of the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), at www.rawa.org, to
view more photos of atrocities against women (and men) for sexual
offenses, dress code offenses, and other forms of deviance than
you'll be able to stomach.  According to John Burns, writing in the
NY Times Magazine in 1990, the "rebel" leader in the Afghan war who
received "the lion's share of American money and weapons"-and was not
a Taliban-had been reputed to have "dispatched followers [during his
student movement days] to throw vials of acid into the faces of women
students who refused to wear veils."

In the case of transnational terrorists and Bin Laden himself, their
model of manliness is that of the Islamic "brotherhood," the band of
brothers bonded together in an agonistic commitment to fighting the
enemy to the death.  The CIA-Pakistani-Saudi-backed camps and
training schools set up to support the "freedom fighters" (who later
became "terrorists") in the anti-Soviet war were breeding grounds not
only of a worldwide terrorist network but also of its masculinist,
misogynist culture.  Bin Laden clearly sees himself as a patriarchal
tribal chief whose duty is to provide for and protect, not only his
own retinue, wives and many children, but also his whole network of
lieutenants and recruits and their families.  He is the legendary
Arabic counterpart of the Godfather, the padrone.

In contrast to this, can we say that the US as standard-bearer of
global capitalism is "gender-neutral"?  Don't we have a woman- indeed
an African-American woman-at the helm of our National Security
Council, the president's right hand in designing the permanent war
machine?  Despite reported "gender gaps" in polls about war, we know
that women are not inherently more peace-loving than men. Remember
all those suburban housewives with their yellow ribbons in midwestern
airports and shopping malls during the Gulf War?  Global capitalist
masculinism is alive and well but concealed in its Eurocentric,
racist guise of "rescuing" downtrodden Afghan women from the
misogynist regime it helped bring to power.  Feminists around the
world, who have tried for so long to call attention to the plight of
women and girls in Afghanistan, cannot feel consoled by the prospect
of US warplanes and US-backed guerrilla chiefs coming to "save our
Afghan sisters."  Meanwhile, the US will send single mothers who
signed up for the National Guard when welfare ended to fight and die
in its holy war; US media remain silent about the activism and
self-determination of groups like RAWA, Refugee Women in Development
and NEGAR; and the US military establishment refuses accountability
before an International Criminal Court for the acts of rape and
sexual assault committed by its soldiers stationed across the globe.
Masculinism and misogyny take many forms, not always the most visible.

6.  Racism - Of course, what I have named fascist fundamentalism, or
transnational terrorism, is also saturated in racism, but of a very
specific, focused kind-which is anti-semitism.  The WTC towers
symbolized not only American capitalism, not only finance capitalism,
but, for the terrorists, Jewish finance capitalism.  We can see this
in the reported misreporting of the Sept. 11 attacks in Arabic
language newspapers in the Middle East as probably the work of the
Israelis; their erroneous allegation that not a single person among
the dead and missing was Jewish, so Jews must have had advance
warning, etc.  In his 1998 interview, Bin Laden constantly refers to
"Jews," not Israelis, in his accusations about plans to take over the
whole Arab peninsula.  He asserts that "the Americans and the Jews. .
. represent the spearhead with which the members of our religion have
been slaughtered.  Any effort directed against America and the Jews
yields positive and direct results." And finally, he rewrites history
and collapses the diversity of Muslims in a warning to "Western
governments" to sever their ties to Jews:  "the enmity between us and
the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted.  There is no
question that war between the two of us is inevitable.  For this
reason it is not in the interest of Western governments to expose the
interests of their people to all kinds of retaliation for almost
nothing." (I cringe to realize I am part of the "nothing.")

US racism is much more diffuse but just as insidious; the pervasive
racism and ethnocentrism that fester under the American skin always
boil to the surface at times of national crisis.  As Sumitha Reddy
put it in a recent teach-in, the targeting of Sikhs and other
Indians, Arabs, and even tan Latinos and African-Americans in the
wave of violent and abusive acts throughout the country since the
disaster signals an enlargement of the "zone of distrust" in American
racism beyond the usual black-white focus.  Women who wear
headscarves or saris are particularly vulnerable to harassment, but
Arab and Indian men of all ages are the ones being murdered.  The
state pretends to abhor such incidents and threatens their full
prosecution.  But this is the same state that made the so-called
Anti-Terrorism Act, passed in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing
(an act committed by native white Christian terrorists), a pretext
for rounding up and deporting immigrants of all kinds; and that is
now once again waiving the civil liberties of immigrants in its
zealous anti-terrorist manhunt.  Each day The New York Times
publishes its rogues' gallery of police photos of the suspects, so
reminiscent of those eugenic photographs of "criminal types" of an
earlier era and imprinting upon readers' minds a certain set of
facial characteristics they should now fear and blame.  Racial
profiling becomes a national pastime.
*     *     *
If we look only at terrorist tactics and the world's revulsion
against them, then we might conclude rather optimistically that
thuggery will never win out in the end.  But we ignore the context in
which terrorism operates at our peril, and that context includes not
only racism and Eurocentrism but many forms of social injustice.  In
thinking through a moral position on this crisis, we have to
distinguish between immediate causes and necessary conditions.
Neither the United States (as a state) nor the corporate and
financial power structure that the World Trade Centers symbolized
caused the horrors of Sept. 11.  Without question, the outrageous,
heinous murder, maiming and orphaning of so many innocent people-who
were every race, ethnicity, color, class, age, gender, and some
60-odd nationalities-deserve some kind of just redress.  On the other
hand, the conditions in which transnational terrorism thrives, gains
recruits, and lays claim to moral legitimacy include many for which
the US and its corporate/financial interests are directly responsible
even if they don't for a minute excuse the attacks.  It is often
asked lately, why does the Third World hate us so much?  Put another
way, why do so many people including my own friends in Asia, Africa,
Latin America and the Middle East express so much ambivalence about
what happened, both lamenting an unforgivable criminal act and at the
same time taking some satisfaction that Americans are finally
suffering too?  We make a fatal mistake if we attribute these mixed
feelings only to envy or resentment of our wealth and freedoms and
ignore a historical context of aggression, injustice and inequality.
Consider these facts:

1. As Walden Bello in the Philippines reminds us, the United States
is still the only country in the world to have actually used the most
infamous weapons of mass destruction in the nuclear bombing of
innocent civilians-in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2. The US persists to this day in bombing Iraq, destroying the lives
and food supplies of hundreds of thousands of civilian adults and
children there. We bombed Belgrade-a dense capital city-for 80
straight days during the war in Kosovo and supported bombing that
killed untold civilians in El Salvador in the 1980s.  In the name of
fighting Communism, our CIA and military training apparatus sponsored
paramilitary massacres, assassinations, tortures and disappearances
in many Latin American and Central American countries in Operation
Condor and the like in the 1970s and has supported corrupt,
authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and
elsewhere-the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, the Saudi dynasty,
and let's not forget the Taliban regime itself.  Sept. 11 is also the
date of the coup against the democratically elected Allende
government in Chile and the beginning of the 25-year Pinochet
dictatorship, again thanks to US support.  Yes, a long history of
state terrorism.

3. In the Middle East, which is like the eye of the tornado or the
microcosm of the current conflagration, US military aid and the Bush
administration's disengagement are the sine qua non of continued
Israeli government policies of attacks on villages, demolition of
homes, destruction of olive orchards, restrictions on travel,
assassination of political leaders, building roads and enlarging
settlements that bantustanize Palestinian territories and deepen the
occupation, and continual human rights abuses of Palestinians and
even Arab citizens-all of which exacerbate hostility and suicide
bombings.  And so the US contributes to the endless cycle of violence
there.

4. The US is one of only two countries-along with Afghanistan!-that
has failed to ratify the Women's Convention, and the only country
that hasn't ratified the Children's Convention.  It is the most vocal
opponent of the statute establishing an International Criminal Court
as well as the treaties banning land mines and germ warfare; a
principal subverter of a new multilateral treaty to combat illegal
small arms trafficking; and the sole country in the world to threaten
an unprecedented space-based defense system and imminent violation of
the ABM treaty.  So who is the "outlaw, " the "rogue state"?

5. The US is the only major industrialized country to refuse signing
the final Kyoto Protocol on Global Climate Change, despite
compromises in that document designed to meet US objections.
Meanwhile, a new global scientific study shows that the countries
whose productivity will benefit most from climate change are Canada,
Russia and the US, while the biggest losers will be the countries
that have contributed least to global climate change-i.e., most of
Africa.

6. As even the World Bank and the UNDP attest, two decades of
globalization have resulted in enlarging rather than shrinking the
gaps between rich and poor, both within countries and among
countries.  The benefits of global market liberalization and
integration have accrued disproportionately to wealthy Americans and
Europeans (as well as small elites in the Third World).  Despite the
presumed democratizing effects of the Internet, a middle-class
American "needs to save a month's salary to buy a computer; a
Bangladeshi must save all his wages for eight years to do so."  And
despite its constant trumpeting of "free-trade" rhetoric, the US
remains a persistent defender of protectionist policies for its
farmers.  Meanwhile small producers throughout Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean-a great many of whom are women-are squeezed out by US
imports and relegated to the informal economy or sweatshop labor for
multinationals.

7. The G-8 countries, of which the US is the senior partner, dominate
decision-making in the IMF and the World Bank, whose structural
adjustments and conditionalities for loans and debt relief help to
keep many poor countries and their citizens locked in poverty.

8. US-based corporations can cough up billions overnight to "aid"
their counterparts whose offices and personnel were destroyed in the
WTC attacks, and Congress can vote instantly to hand over $15 billion
to the beleaguered airline industry.  Yet our foreign assistance
appropriations (except for military aid) have shrunk; we, the world's
richest country, don't even meet the UN standard of .7% of GNP.  A
recent WHO report tells us the total cost of providing safe water and
sanitation to everyone in the world who needs it would be only $10
billion, only no one can figure out where the money will come from;
and the UN is still a long way off from raising a similar amount for
its proclaimed World HIV/AIDS Fund.  What kind of meanness is this?
And what does it say about forms of racism, or "global apartheid,"
that value some lives-those in the US and Europe-far more than others
in other parts of the globe?

And the list goes on, with MacDonald's, Coca-Cola, CNN and MTV and
all the uninvited commercial detritus that proliferates everywhere on
the face of the earth and offends the cultural and spiritual
sensibilities of so many-including transnational feminist travelers
like me, when we find pieces of our local shopping mall transplanted
to downtown Kampala or Kuala Lumpur, Cairo or Bangalore. But worse
than the triviality and bad taste of these cultural and commercial
barrages is the arrogant presumption that our "way of life" is the
best on earth and ought to be welcome everywhere; or that our power
and supposed advancement entitle us to dictate policies and
strategies to the rest of the world.  This is the face of imperialism
in the 21st century.

None of this reckoning can comfort those who lost loved ones on Sept.
11, or the thousands of attack victims who lost their jobs, homes and
livelihoods; nor can it excuse the hideous crimes. As the Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish writes, "nothing, nothing justifies terrorism."
Still, in attempting to understand what has happened and think how to
prevent it happening again (which is probably a vain wish), we
Americans have to take all these painful facts into account.  The
United States as the command center of global capitalism will remain
ill equipped to "stop terrorism" until it begins to recognize its own
past and present responsibility for many of the conditions I've
listed and to address them in a responsible way.  But this would mean
the United States becoming something different from itself,
transforming itself, including abandoning the presumption that it
should unilaterally police the world.  This problem of transformation
is at the heart of the vexing question of finding solutions different
from all-out war.  So let me turn to how we might think differently
about power.  Here is what I propose, tentatively, for now:

1. The slogan "War Is Not the Answer" is a practical as well as an
ontological truth.  Bombing or other military attacks on Afghanistan
will not root out networks of terrorists, who could be hiding deep in
the mountains or in Pakistan or Germany or Florida or New Jersey.  It
will only succeed in destroying an already decimated country, killing
untold numbers of civilians as well as combatants and creating
hundreds of thousands more refugees.  And it is likely to arouse so
much anger among Islamist sympathizers as to destabilize the entire
region and perpetuate the cycle of retaliation and terrorist attacks.
All the horror of the 20th century surely should teach us that war
feeds on itself and that armed violence reflects, not an extension of
politics by other means, but the failure of politics; not the defense
of civilization, but the breakdown of civilization.

2. Tracking down and bringing the perpetrators of terrorism to
justice, in some kind of international police action, is a reasonable
aim but one fraught with dangers.  Because the US is the world's only
"superpower," its declaration of war against terrorism and its
supporters everywhere says to other countries that we are once again
taking over as global policeman, or, as Fidel Castro put it, a "world
military dictatorship under the exclusive rule of force, irrespective
of any international laws or institutions."  Here at home a "national
emergency" or "state of war"-especially when defined as different
from any other war-means the curtailment of civil liberties,
harassment of immigrants, racial profiling, and withholding of
information (censorship) or feeding of disinformation to the media,
all without any time limits and under an ominous new Office of
Homeland Security.  We should oppose both US unilateralism and the
permanent security state.  We should urge our representatives in
Congress to diligently defend the civil liberties of all.

3. I agree with the Afro Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization
(AAPSO) in Cairo that "this
punishment should be inflicted according to the law and only upon
those who were
responsible for these events," and that it should be organized within
the framework of the
United Nations and international law, not unilaterally by the United
States.  This is not the same as the US getting unanimous approval
from the Security Council to commandeer global security, which is a
first step at best.  Numerous treaties against terrorism and
money-laundering already exist in international law.  The pending
International Criminal Court, whose establishment the US government
has so stubbornly opposed, would be the logical body to try terrorist
cases, with the cooperation of national police and surveillance
systems.  We should demand that the US ratify the ICC statute.  In
the meantime, a special tribunal under international auspices, like
the ones for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, could be set up as
well as an international agency to coordinate national police and
intelligence efforts, with the US as one participating member.  This
is the power of international engagement and cooperation.

4. No amount of police action, however cooperative, can stop
terrorism without addressing the conditions of misery and injustice
that nourish and aggravate terrorism.  The US has to undertake a
serious reexamination of its values and its policies with regard not
only to the Middle East but also to the larger world.  It has to take
responsibility for being in the world, including ways of sharing its
wealth, resources and technology; democratizing decisions about
global trade, finance, and security; and assuring that access to
"global public goods" like health care, housing, food, education,
sanitation, water, and freedom from racial and gender discrimination
is given priority in international relations.  What we even mean by
"security" has to encompass all these aspects of wellbeing, of "human
security," and has to be universal in its reach.

Let me again quote from the poet Mahmoud Darwish's statement, which
was published in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam on Sept. 17 and
signed by many Palestinian writers and intellectuals.

"We know that the American wound is deep and we know that this tragic
moment is a time for solidarity and the sharing of pain.  But we also
know that the horizons of the intellect can traverse landscapes of
devastation.  Terrorism has no location or boundaries, it does not
reside in a geography of its own; its homeland is disillusionment and
despair.
"The best weapon to eradicate terrorism from the soul lies in the
solidarity of the international world, in respecting the rights of
all peoples of this globe to live in harmony and by reducing the ever
increasing gap between north and south.  And the most effective way
to defend freedom is through fully realizing the meaning of justice."

What gives me hope is that this statement's sentiments are being
voiced by growing numbers of groups here in the US, including the
National Council of Churches, the Green Party, a coalition of 100
entertainers and civil rights leaders, huge coalitions of peace
groups and student organizations, New Yorkers Say No to War, black
and white women celebrities featured on Oprah Winfrey's show, and
parents and spouses of attack victims.  Maybe out of the ashes we
will recover a new kind of solidarity; maybe the terrorists will
force us, not to mirror them, but to see the world and humanity as a
whole.

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------

            Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL) - HTTP://WWW.FOIL.ORG
To post to this list send mail to foil-l at foil.org. Only subscribers may
post. To subscribe to this list, to unsubscribe, or for more information
email info at foil.org. Tech support help at foil.org.


---------- End Forwarded Message ----------r

-------------------------------------------------------

--
Scott F. Kiesling

Assistant Professor			
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh

kiesling at pitt.edu
2816 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260  USA

412-624-5916 (voice)
412-624-6130 (fax)