Chris Hedges The World As It Is; Dispatches

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The more uncertainty, fear, and reality impinge on this utopian vision, the more strident, absolutist and aggressive are those who call for the eradication of “the enemy.” Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts “a radical evil.” He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love.It was the worst type of self-deception.It provided a moral façade for terror and murder.The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a “radical evil.”11The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many in the United States with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world.It had its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion.And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that drew its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power.It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb—a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street.The attack was carried out by an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.It left forty people dead and wounded more than two hundred.Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and Hamas.But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims.In Lebanon, during the attacks in the 1980s against French, American, and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists.Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists.Christians were responsible for three.The dehumanization of Muslims in U.S.social culture and the willful ignorance of the traditions and culture of the Islamic world reflect our nation’s disdain for self-reflection and self-examination.They allow us to exult in the illusion of our own moral and cultural superiority.The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil.We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue.We carry within us the same propensities for terror as those we oppose.At the end of the sixteenth century, the Muslim Indian emperor Akbar the Great filled his court with philosophers, mystics, and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians.They debated ethics and belief.Akbar was one of the great champions of religious dialogue and tolerance.He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief.He declared that everyone was free to follow any religion.His enlightened rule took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and in Rome the philosopher Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo dei Fiori for heresy.Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture.The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East.Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople.Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin.Our concept of the rule of law and freedom of expression, the invention of printing, paper, the book, as well as the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry, and universities were given to us by the Islamic world.The first law code was invented by the ancient Iraqi ruler Hammurabi.One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in India, in the third century B.C.by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka.And, unlike Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves.The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems.We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle.There are aged survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who can tell us something about our high moral values and passionate concern for innocent human life, about our own acts of terrorism.Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating.To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and our denial that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is driven by our historical and cultural illiteracy.The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident.We advance morally and intellectually when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own.The remains of villages destroyed by our bombs, the dead killed from our munitions, leave us, too, with bloody hands.We can build a new ethic only when we face our complicity in the cycle of violence and terror.The fantasy of an enlightened West that spreads civilization to a savage world of religious fanatics is not supported by history.The worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated by highly industrialized nations.Muslims, including those of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, have a long way to go before they reach the body count of the secular regimes of the Nazis, the Soviet Union, or the Chinese communists [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki