<nettime> Hitchens -- Against Rationalization: Minority Report

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20011008&s=hitchens

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Printed from http://www.thenation.com
© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
Back to Web View
------------------------------------------------------------------------

COLUMN | October 8, 2001
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Against Rationalization: Minority Report


It was in Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, as the Red Army
was falling apart and falling back. I badly needed a guide to get me to the
Khyber Pass, and I decided that what I required was the most
farouche-looking guy with the best command of English and the toughest
modern automobile. Such a combination was obtainable, for a price. My new
friend rather wolfishly offered me a tour of the nearby British military
cemetery (a well-filled site from the Victorian era) before we began. Then
he slammed a cassette into the dashboard. I braced myself for the
ululations of some mullah but received instead a dose of "So Far Away."
>From under the turban and behind the beard came the gruff observation, "I
thought you might like Dire Straits."

This was my induction into the now-familiar symbiosis of tribal piety and
high-tech; a symbiosis consummated on September 11 with the conversion of
the southern tip of the capital of the modern world into a charred and
suppurating mass grave. Not that it necessarily has to be a symbol of
modernism and innovation that is targeted for immolation. As recently as
this year, the same ideology employed heavy artillery to destroy the Buddha
statues at Bamiyan, and the co-thinkers of bin Laden in Egypt have been
heard to express the view that the Pyramids and the Sphinx should be turned
into shards as punishment for their profanely un-Islamic character.

Since my moment in Peshawar I have met this faction again. In one form or
another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people
who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who
maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who
machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry what they
may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind
for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced
techniques. Just a few months ago Bosnia surrendered to the international
court at The Hague the only accused war criminals detained on Muslim-Croat
federation territory. The butchers had almost all been unwanted
"volunteers" from the Chechen, Afghan and Kashmiri fronts; it is as an
unapologetic defender of the Muslims of Bosnia (whose cause was generally
unstained by the sort of atrocity committed by Catholic and Orthodox
Christians) that one can and must say that bin Ladenism poisons everything
that it touches.

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic
e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the
Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With
all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of
Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western
statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point
out that Clinton's rocketing of Khartoum--supported by most liberals--was a
gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese
government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight
of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the "bounce in the polls" achieved by
their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute
refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers
Street.) But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be
held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been
lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers. The people
of Gaza live under curfew and humiliation and expropriation. This is
notorious. Very well: Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from
Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a
moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad
make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on
principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi
regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as
something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the
Shiite minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to
extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely
breathing after the fundamentalist assault.

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or
the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and
Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic
face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate
about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't
like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about
it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its
separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming
home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by
Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.
Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or
their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this
magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those
buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our
ruling class is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush Administration
handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43 million in abject gratitude for the
assistance of fundamentalism in the "war on drugs." Next up is the renewed
"missile defense" fantasy recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats
who seek to occupy the void "behind the President." There is sure to be
further opportunity to emphasize the failings of our supposed leaders,
whose costly mantra is "national security" and who could not protect us.
And yes indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey's
CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the
infallible Koran. But that's only one way of stating the obvious, which is
that this is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net