[Part 3 of 6]

I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies.

-Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.¹

The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and Pakistan or the Cold War context of the conflict, though they are not completely ignored. Her stated aims are to study and scrutinize how the war of 1971 is remembered, perhaps to illuminate what is willingly forgotten. Growing up in West Bengal, India, Sarmila Bose was familiar with a particular narrative about the conflict: “Our Bengali brethren …once again fight for freedom” from their fellow countrymen from West Pakistan, who “seemed for some inexplicable reason intent on killing them all.” India had played the role of “white knight to the beleaguered Bangladeshis.” The latter claim she deftly dismantles.² During her research, realizing that something was off, she militated against this narrative (and her Bengali informants). As Naeem Mohaiemen points out in his incisive review of her book, “her fury was of the naïf making a late discovery. What animates Dead Reckoning therefore is that palpable rage.” Having grown up with my own nationalist blinders, I empathize with the rage that comes with the realization that one has let oneself be duped. But Bose’s research and her book, perhaps still guided by the force of the nationalist narratives, “goes so far to the other side as to create a new set of biases, even more problematic.”³

Bose makes much of her neutrality, balance, and objectivity, and so do the Pakistan Army officers she interviewed and some of the Pakistani reviewers of her book. She writes that “it would be impossible to humanize the conflict without emotional empathy for the subject,” but her empathy seems to be reserved only for the Pakistan Army and the victims of pro-liberation Bengalis. The Bangladeshi voices that she presents either exonerate the Pakistan Army of Bangladeshi allegations of wrongdoing or expose the lies in Bangladeshi national narrative. Of course, not all allegations would be correct and there are fabrications and lies in epics of nationalism. It is her lax critical standards in accepting her Pakistani sources with which to debunk them, and her constant and consistent berating of her Bangladeshi subjects, that cast a cloud of doubt on her scholarly enterprise.

Reserving others’ voices for making the most objectionable assertions about Bengalis, Bose deploys two Bengali voices to note something seemingly inherent or innate to Bangladeshis. “The Bengalis are noted for a negative and destructive attitude […] they also have a tendency to put the blame on others” says one. The second voice chimes in, “in this attitude I see a similarity in all Bengalis […] to court suffering in order to nurse self-pity by way of emotional satisfaction.” This bizarre passage reflects a pattern in her book: hammering Bangladeshi “attitude” and culture of victimhood, their penchant for complaining too much (and that too using the wrong statistics!),  and a tendency to exaggerate. All of this is presented without the objective scholar dwelling over the injustices meted out by West Pakistan on the East. One of her many assertions that clearly demonstrates her decontextualized reading of events, lack of empathy for Bengalis, and uncritical acceptance of Pakistani sources, is her approving mention of a Pakistan Army official who took part in the abysmal, late, and bungled effort at providing relief to those affected by the Bhola cyclone in 1970 – one that killed, displaced, and affected hundreds of thousands. The aforesaid officer, Lt Gen. Ghulam Mustafa, notes that “even as they [the Pakistan Army] worked, Bengalis watched from the sidelines and complained that nothing was being done.” That this delay in and mismanagement of relief emblematized (West) Pakistan’s attitude and lack of sympathy for its citizens in the East, and is, in fact, in line with how East Pakistan was marginalized from the get-go, is not commented upon.

With respect to Bangladeshi history’s singular focus on exploitation by West Pakistan in the pre-liberation era, and colonialism being the only language with which to remember the Pakistan period, Yasmin Saikia, in her book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, offers a valuable insight. She writes that “the intimacy of the Other (Pakistan and Pakistanis) as well as the fear of remembering so engulfs the Bangladeshis today that they have willfully lost the segment of pre-1971 history.” This insightful and sympathetic reading of a silence is contrasted by Bose’s denial of Pakistan’s colonial relationship with East Bengal by a reasoning that suggests that Bangladeshis’ perceived grievances were due to its historically being an economic backwater and not because of systematically sustained inequality. The disparity between Bengalis and others in government and military jobs, in Bose’s reckoning is different from discrimination, which she defines as lack/denial of equal opportunity. The state’s privileging of Urdu, its machinery being disproportionately manned by West Pakistanis, or the racist attitude of the West Pakistani elites and civil society towards Bengalis who were considered not Pakistani enough, had, it seems, nothing to do with the disparity and Bengali grievances. A longer view of history is conveniently outside of the time line of her project, but if that is the case, why resort to essentialisms of Bengladeshi attitudes, calling it a culture of complaint, exaggerations, and victimhood, or characterizing Bangladeshis as “a swarm of [angry/excited] honey bees?” Divorced from the power relations between East and West Pakistan, the conclusions she draws stoop to charging Bangladeshis with innate violence (though chaotic and unorganized; you see, they can’t do anything right!), false bravado, and a penchant for lying, exaggerating, and complaining.

Bose gives scant attention to how the memory of the pre-1971 history shaped the events of 1971 and continues to shape how 1971 is remembered. She describes the demolition of Shahid Minar by the Pakistan Army as “a pointless waste of time and resources,” an act of vandalism “that added fuel to Bengali rage,” and finds “no military reason to demolish a memorial to the language movement of the 1950s.” But there was a point. The demolition of Shahid Minar [Martyr’s Tower] marked the commencement of the military operation–dubbed “Operation Searchlight”– to crush the budding Bengali uprising; an act of destruction that symbolized Pakistan’s attitude to Bengali history, and was a signal to the people of what is to come with the intended effect of demoralizing them. It is also the kind of move that almost always backfires, as it did in 1971. The Shahid Minar was a memorial to the Ekushey massacre; it commemorated a movement that lasted five years; and marked a milestone in the struggle of the people of East Pakistan against (West) Pakistan’s colonial exploitation, dominance, systemic discrimination, and mission civilisatrice. But deliberation on these contexts do not fit with Bose’s gleeful debunking crusade; and such a decontextualized reading of events produces distortions that pervade her book.

A League of Extraordinary Pakistani Gentlemen

Most of Bose’s Pakistani interviewees were retired Army officials. Initially she did not have much success, but with the efforts of her Pakistani and American friends she was able to get a foot in the door and impress her interviewees. The interviewees connected her with their fellow veterans of the 1971 war, and they thus formed the close-knit network of Pakistani Army officials that informed her and whose word she seldom seems to doubt or find flaws in. Bose’s focus on complicating the Bangladeshi national narrative at the cost of what amounts to legitimating a militarist Pakistani nationalism is unhelpful. This lack of concern for the official Pakistani narrative, and willed ignorance of Pakistan’s political history is captured in her laudatory remark about General Yahya Khan, the martial law administrator of Pakistan in 1971, being “the only military ruler who actually kept his word on returning the country to democracy one year after taking power.” No reflection is on offer regarding the fact that a defeated and discredited army had no legitimacy left to continue ruling a country that was in open revolt even in its Western wing since 1968.⁴ And as for the act of handing over power to democratic rule, C.M Naim’s words are worth bearing in mind:

Yahya Khan resigned, but in his last act helped perpetuate one-man rule and disregard for constitutional processes by transferring power not to the duly elected National Assembly but to Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, whom he personally appointed as Chief Martial Law Administrator.

Bose’s Pakistani interlocutors, these gentle military men, “unlike the Bangladeshi … had no hatred towards their former countrymen.” What she does not dwell on is how, in Yasmin Saikia’s words, “the rhetoric of Bengalis as brothers occupied the same space as the representation of them as ‘betrayers’ and ‘Indian-like,’ that is, the Other or ‘Hindu-like.’” On the other hand, having brushed aside the injustices of the Pakistan period and exalted the Pakistan Army’s conduct during the war, Bose contends that Bangladeshis have an unwarranted visceral hatred of the Pakistan Army which was created through Bangladeshi war-time propaganda. For the ethnicization of Bangladeshi society, she blames “political alchemists,” Bangladeshi nationalism, and Mujib’s “campaign of hatred.” (or is it the Bengalis’ innate penchant for excitement and violence?) What she does not comment upon is the dominant power, namely the Pakistan state, which produced not only this ethnicization through its racialized discourses, imperial practices, and colonial exploitation, but also the Bangladeshi nationalism with its own parochialisms, inequalities, and hatreds, in a dialectical opposition to it.

Jalal Alamgir and Bina D’Costa remind us that “a deeply racist agenda accompanied the war crimes,” and the East Pakistani population was considered “ethnically sub-par:” from Yahya Khan’s genocidal language (as reported by Asia Times: “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands”⁵) to Ayub Khan’s racial language (“East Bengalis … probably belong to the very original Indian races … they have been and still are under considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence…they have all the inhibitions of downtrodden races”⁶), to Jinnah’s view of the Bangla Language Movement being a plan to break up Pakistan and absorb it back into the Indian Dominion by “our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still some Muslims.” C. M. Naim’s survey of the press coverage of 1971 shows that racialized othering was pervasive in the West Pakistani literate society, and that the charge of treason was “leveled…unequivocally against all the Hindus of East Bengal.” And indeed this should be noted, for the ire of the Pakistan Army fell most brutally on the Hindus of East Bengal who were deemed always already Indians or closet-Indians, and in any case, traitors working for and with India in weaving a secessionist conspiracy in East Pakistan. Bose too notes that during the 1971 war, “Hindu men appear to have been more likely to be presumed to be insurgents solely on the basis of their religion.” This othering and racialized language was pervasive in the officer cadre as well. Oldenburg mentions Salik’s book Witness to Surrender, where he writes about officers chatting in the Officer’s Mess on the afternoon of March 26, 1971 and one Captain Chaudhury says, “The Bengalis have been sorted out well and proper—at least for a generation.” One Major Malik chimes in with the familiar colonial bile “Yes, they only know the language of force. Their history says so.”⁷

The Language of Force

The Pakistanis believed that the war would be quickly won as Bengalis being “weak and unmartial, and cowardly” would quit their rebellion. This “myth of power” over Bengalis held sway over rank and file Pakistani soldiers, whose ignorance about Bengali society, language, people and even body language, and the martial “manliness of bravado” made for a destructive brew. At checkpoints, young Bengali men were forced to remove their lungis [sarongs] in front of their elderly and womenfolk to see whether they were circumcised and thus Muslim. One can imagine what befell those that failed this racialized test of religion so familiar to South Asian history.

General Niazi, whom Bose notes as a dissenter (perhaps to maintain her self-perception of being “balanced” or whatnot), did not object to the war or Pakistan’s military action but that “it should have been conducted differently:” “instead of wholesale attack, the rebels’ so-called strong points might have been smoked out …” She documents one ‘smoking out’ attempted at Jinjira where a blockade was set up to encounter the rebels as they escaped the assault from the other direction, but, “what they had not expected, however, was when the firing started, the civilians started to run as well.” (How easy it seems to be able to place people in one’s own categories of choice: civilians or rebels. What about rebel-civilian or civilian-rebel?) Then, she takes her informer on his word that the kind soldiers fired over civilians’ heads only to induce them to run in the direction of the assault. This she explains with the fog of war argument whereby soldiers have to make split second and difficult decisions, and bad things happen, and that can’t be helped. She does not entertain the possibility that the Pakistanis did not expect the civilians to escape the assault from one direction into the line of fire from the other because the civilians either did not enter the inhuman calculus of war; or were considered fair game or “collateral damage,” in today’s parlance, whose lives didn’t matter enough to merit a change of course; or perhaps the population were considered the support system of rebels or future/potential insurgents and thus, being a “terrorist population,” a legitimate target.

This “smoking out” is evident literally in another incident Bose discusses wherein during the assault on Dhaka, Pakistani soldiers set fire to a slum by throwing ‘a powder-like substance’ on the slum and then firing on it (this burning down of dwellings seems to be a widely used tactic by Pakistan army as Bose mentions it in many incidents but without much deliberation and reflection on its systematic use) and shot at people as they fled the inferno. Bose notes this incident rather briefly as an example of the discord within Pakistan army on the level of rank and file soldiers that she quickly counters with the example of Pakistani soldiers giving water to a survivor of an attempted execution earlier by another set of Pakistani soldiers. You see, there were bad soldiers but there were good soldiers too, hence the Pakistan Army’s conduct cannot be denounced as all bad by people whose villages were burned to the ground, their men lined up and shot, their women raped. Even when Bose mentions that after the assault on a village called Satiachora on the road to Tangail from Dhaka, soldiers, “some half a dozen” bad apples as she would have it, “went hut to hut in the village, setting them on fire and killing anything that moved,” she ensures that the reader is left with the silver lining that “the soldiers did not harm women in anyway.”

Bose presents a superb reconstruction of the massacre at Thanpara, a village on the India-East Pakistan border remembered as ‘the village of widows.’ She tells the story of Pakistan army’s horrendous massacre where all the men whom the commanding officer deemed Indians and/or Hindus (always already assumed to be Indians and Indian agents), were “rounded up together and shot. Their bodies were stacked in a pile and set alight.” The in-coming Pakistani soldiers were on foot, and proceeded “through the villages along the side of the road, destroying everything they came across,” burning villages with a substance that set huts on fire when they shot. Bose mentions General Mitha, (for the second time as “the legendary founder of the Special Services Group (SSG) of commandos in the Pakistan army”) who saw from air that ‘‘in many of the villages near the road, almost all the huts were burnt and there was not a soul in these villages.” (One wonders what became of the unharmed women and children.) She masterfully teases out how the commanding officer was playing god not only when he shot all the Bengali men in batches with the subsequent batch stacking up and setting fire to the previous before being shot, but more so when he spared a young boy’s life whom the officer did not believe to be a Bengali. After the massacre of the first batch of men, the captain took the second batch back to the academy where they were shot. (The survivor recalled that the Captain’s higher officials thanked the Captain for having done a good job.) Bose mentions the soldier who helped the boy get a pardon and that some soldiers had tears rolling down their cheeks as the massacre unfolded. That may be, and there is much good in representations that humanize soldiers, but what needs to be highlighted is the fact that they still went along and assisted in the cruelty that so troubles them, moves them to tears, and, at least in some cases, haunts them for the rest of their lives. One explanation for that may be the militarist nationalism that idolizes the military and puts the defense of a nation—always deemed under siege from enemies without and within— at the forefront of national self-hood. Another explanation is the very institution of military that has at its core obedience, hierarchy, and killing which is writ large when it is unrestrained by public scrutiny and accountability.

What is unforgivable, however, is Bose’s pointing out the “eerie similarity between what happened in Thanpara and the military action in Dhaka university a couple of weeks before, in the way a few villagers were kept in reserve to stack the dead bodies before being lined up and shot next to the corpses they had just been made to carry,” and then in the same paragraph falling back to the “few bad apples” apologia as she gently chides the Pakistan military to hold those “one or two companies of a single regiment” to account, that have brought ill repute to “an entire army” and “a whole nation.” (A comparison with her vicious denunciations of the lack of accounting of the pro-Bangladesh perpetrators of violence and the Bangladeshi national denial of its own atrocities is instructive.)

Bose states that due to the small number of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, “many young officers were left to shoulder responsibilities, in terms of territory or decision-making, that they never would have had to bear in peace-time or conventional wars.” These young officers would include those that played god in the Bangladeshi countryside and urban areas, and the likes of the aforementioned Captain Chaudhurys and Major Maliks of Pakistan Army celebrating the ‘sorting out’ of the Bengalis. If the absence of any accountability on the part of Pakistani state and military of its conduct in East Pakistan is not sufficient evidence of indifference to and a systemic legitimation of indiscriminate violence, then, short of some master document sanctioning a general and wonton attack on the populace, one is left to wonder what is.

1. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Columbia University Press, June, 2011, p97
2. For India’s role in exacerbating the conflict, see Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Notes on South Asia in Crisis,’ Bulletin of Concern Asian Scholars, Winter, 1972. Available online at http://www.bitsonline.net/eqbal/articles_by_eqbal_view_9C3140B3.htm
3. Naeem Mohaiemen, “Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971,” Economic & Political Weekly, vol xlvi no 36, September 3, 2011.
4. “In truth, the threat to the Army’s predominance has always come from its own people. The only time the old Pakistan was genuinely united was during the 1969 uprising from below that saw students and workers in Dhaka and Karachi, Chittagong and Lahore, topple the dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. The Army never forgave its Bengali citizens this act of treachery, and embarked on a bloodbath when they proceeded to elect the leaders of their choice. It is worth stressing the point, glossed over in so many recent accounts, that the Army which demands such vast sums to preserve the state actually provoked its break-up in 1971.” Tariq Ali, “The Colour Khaki,” New Left Review, January – February 2003. http://newleftreview.org/A2429
5. Quoted in Jalal Alamgir, Bina D’Costa “The 1971 Genocide: War Crimes and Political Crimes,” Economic & Political Weekly, 2011 vol xlvi no 13, March 26, 2011.
6. Quoted in Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733.
7. Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” 1985.

[Part 2 of 6]

Painted on a wall inside my old school.

 Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this basis, the Muslims of the Indo-Pak Subcontinent understand themselves to be a separate nation. This was also the reason why two societies, that is, the Hindu society and the Muslim society, came into being in the Subcontinent. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal stressed that Muslims are not a a faction but a separate nation. When with the beautiful efforts of these elders, Muslims came to believe firmly that Congress, established by an Englishman Allen Hume, is an anti-Muslim Hindu organization, they put forth a demand for a separate homeland for themselves. Foundational Principles of the Ideology of Pakistan: 1. The Muslims of the Subcontinent constitute one nation. 2. The Muslims will live freely in accordance with the eternal principles of Islam. 3. The Muslims of the Subcontinent need a free country to retain/maintain their separate/distinct national existence, so that they can make religious, societal, political, cultural, and economic progress. Truth is weary of bodies without soul / The living God is the God of the living.

Bengal played a crucial role in the Pakistan movement, but within a little over two decades after the creation of Pakistan, a political movement with broad popular support in East Bengal turned secessionist and sounded the death knell for the State of Pakistan as it had existed. This parting of ways of the erstwhile East and West Pakistan, as Philip Oldenburg has persuasively argued, “cannot be called inevitable unless one considers forces centered in West Pakistan which pushed the country apart.” Different conceptions and models of the state animated ideas of Pakistan in the two so-called wings of Pakistan. The West Pakistani model of the state, in Philip Oldenburg’s words, “saw the state of Pakistan as inseparable from the Muslim nation of the Indian subcontinent, a nation locked in combat with the Hindus,” and Urdu formed a central plank of this narrative. To the East Pakistanis/Bengalis, the creation of Pakistan meant the escape of the majority from the economic, intellectual/educational, and political domination of Hindus. The fact that Muhajir and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan imposed its own vision of the state of Pakistan on East Pakistan to the detriment of all other visions is central to the making of the second partition.¹

East Pakistan/East Bengal had more than half of the population of Pakistan, was demographically its largest province, and had a vibrant history of activism and political awareness. The Muslim League and the West Pakistani elites construed Bengal as a threat, since in a democracy, Bengal would have dominated Pakistani politics. “The Muslim League thus tried its best to contain East Bengal and deny its rightful representation in the nation-state both at a symbolic level (in the ‘imagined community’ of the nation) and at the level of the state (that is, political representation, recruitment into the bureaucracy and the military, and access to economic resources),” writes Saadia Toor, in her book, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jinnah had re-organized the Muslim League into a centralized political party, and the centralizing drive of Jinnah’s leadership continued and cemented his control over both the party and state after independence with, among other things, his retention of the colonial office of Governor General, and abandonment of the idea of a federal state with a weak center and strong provinces. The vertically integrated and centralized state structure—one that did not include many Bengalis at higher echelons– involved unification of the civil services under its aegis and a highly powerful civil and military bureaucracy that acted as the shadow government of Pakistan at the expense of elected officials. Through this vertical integration of the State and the non-representation of Bengalis in the center, what was set in motion was a clash between a Bengali middle class seeking equal representation and, in Toor’s words, “an increasingly fascist ruling party at the center dominated by not just the (predominantly Punjabi and Muhajir) West Pakistani ruling elite but also the Bengali Ashraf.”

The earlier Hindu-Urdu language controversy informed the stubbornness with which Bengali linguistic demands were met. The Hindi-Urdu controversy, Toor writes, “had resulted in the breaking up of the shared and syncretic literary tradition represented by a single language (Urdu/Hindustani) into (Muslim) Urdu and (Hindu) Hindi under pressure from Hindu nationalist forces.” Thus Urdu had become a cornerstone of the ethnic nationalism of the North Indian Muslims whose “ideology of Muslim nationalism […] underpinned the demand for Pakistan.” Urdu’s stature in the Muslim nationalist narrative had become even more heightened due to the fact that many of the landmark monuments of the Indo-Islamic history, on the basis of which the separate nation-hood of Indian Muslims was asserted, were now in the state of India. The declining status of Urdu in the Post-Independence India further exacerbated the sense of siege that proponents of Urdu felt, and Hindi being declared the national language of India prompted Urdu’s proponents in Pakistan to harden their stance for Urdu as Pakistan’s national language. Last but not the least, the Bangla-Urdu language controversy heightened anxieties of Muslim nationalists of the geographically non-contiguous “wings” of Pakistan that perhaps there was also a cultural non-contiguity.

With Bangla not appearing on coins, stamps, and official forms, the status of Bangla language became a contentious issue almost immediately after the creation of the state of Pakistan. The demand that Bangla be the national language was buttressed by the fact that a majority of Pakistanis spoke Bangla, albeit mostly in East Pakistan, while Urdu was the first language of just 5 percent of Pakistanis, whatever the claims of the latter being a lingua franca of Indian Muslims and central to their cultural identity. However, in November 1947 Urdu was proposed as the medium of instruction and recommended as the national language in the National Education Conference. Even when Urdu’s use as the medium of education was left to the discretion of provincial governments, thanks to the strong opposition of the Bengali participants, the federal Minister of Education continued to make statements that Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan. On December 5^th 1947, a street demonstration protested the conference. The State responded by invoking the very colonial-era law prohibiting public assembly that Bengalis had fought against on the road to decolonization. The resulting clash between the protesters and the Police only fueled Bengali resentment towards the Muslim League government.

The East Bengal Language Committee (EBLC) was set up in 1949 to pursue the possibility of writing Bangla in the Arabic script to make it more of an “Islamic language.” This would purge it of its Hindi influence and help it to shed its Sanskrit past, thus bringing it “into harmony and accord with the genius and culture of the people of East Bangal in particular and Pakistan in general.” (EBLC, 1949:2) The committee, despite its retrograde assertions of Bangla being a non-Muslim language, did not agree to the proposed change to Urdu script. But this was too little, too late, and did not allay the popular Bengali fear that the state will impose Urdu on them. In the aftermath of the massacre of tens of protestors on February 21, 1952, remembered as Ekushey, the government did declare Bangla as the second national language, but the West Pakistani elite’s anxieties over Bengal’s demographic majority remained and would lead to the declaration of emergency rule and the unification of West Pakistan into one administrative unit by executive order.

The Bangla script and vocabulary was seen to be too close to Sanskrit and therefore Hinduism. This was consistent with the West Pakistani view that Bengalis were ‘Hindu-like’ and under the influence of Hindus. This identification of Bengalis and Bengali culture with Hindus, Hinduism, and thus with India, became the reigning paradigm with which all things Bengali would be considered. As Toor shows, two tropes were deployed to conceptualize and represent East Pakistan: East Bangal as a problem province rife with Hindus and Communist subversives working to destroy Muslim Pakistan; and Bengali culture, language, and people as ‘Hindu-like’ and under heavy influence of Hinduism, and therefore, not Pakistani enough. As Raj Kumar Chakravarti, a Hindu Congressman from East Bangal noted in a 1952 Constituent Assembly Debate, “whenever there is trouble in Pakistan, it is attributed by the people to ‘the enemies of the State’ and, by insinuations, the Hindus are regarded as these enemies.” The paranoia about Indians “dressed differently” crossing into East Bengal to sow discord had manifested into scapegoating. As Toor puts it, “This chain of significance (dressed ‘differently’ = Hindu = Indian) also relied on and reinforced the idea that to be a Hindu was not to be Pakistani.” Toor quotes Shri Dhirendra Natth Dutta, an opposition member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, whose complaint to the Speaker of the House captures the deleterious impact of the aforesaid state discourses: “If we put on Loongi, poor Muslim clothes in Eastern Bengal, it is said we disguise ourselves. If we put on Dhoti then it is said that we have come from West Bengal. There is such a sense of mistrust and this has been engineered under the Government of Pakistan.”

Jinnah himself was, of course, one of the sources and proponent of this paradigm, as is evident from his March 1948 address in Dhaka on his first official tour to the province in the wake of the initial agitations of the Bengali Language Movement, wherein he terms the proponents of Bangla language to be “enemies of Pakistan” and thus seditious: “Let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan.”²

Three days later Jinnah would go on to affirm Urdu as the language that “embodies the best that is in Islamic culture and Muslim tradition and is nearest to the language used in other Islamic countries.” He also located the demand for Bengali language rights in the infamous “foreign hand.” In Jinnah’s words, “Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still Muslims, have set about actively encouraging provincialism in the hope of weakening Pakistan, and thereby facilitating the re-absorption of this province into the Indian Dominion.” […] “[T]he recent language controversy … is only one of the many subtle ways whereby the position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province.” In short, the Bengali demands were not genuine but were the nefarious handy work of “our enemies” whose ranks were peopled mostly by Hindus. The Bangla Language Movement, in this view, was a Hindu/Indian conspiracy.

The colonial/Orientalist historiography at the heart of the two nation theory that posited Muslims and Hindus of India as not only historically separate and distinct, but also fundamentally different, is manifest in Jinnah’s conflations: Bengal’s Hindus (“Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still Muslims”) with Indians (“position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province”), Urdu language with Islamic culture, any attempts to dislodge Urdu’s dominance as sedition to the nation at the behest of the Hindu enemy across the border. These conflations will burst forth in all their murderous glory in 1971 with the genocidal attack on Hindus and ‘Hindu-like’ Bengalis.

1. Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733.
2. Quoted in Oldenburg, 1985.

[Part 1 of 6]

Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism.

~Yasmin Saikia

During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department and cooling ourselves down with hand-fans. But on cool autumn nights, blackouts were rather enjoyable, and we would ask Ammi to sing. ‘Aa ja sanam, madhur chandni mein hum,’ a Raj kapoor and Nargis number, apt for a moonlit night in the veranda, was her favorite. That was also the song that she and her favorite nephew (her eldest brother’s first son) used to sing at Eid dinners as a duet. The whole family adored him. He was brilliant and a high achiever. Every kid in the family, to this day, is compared to him: Those that do well in their studies are likened to him and those that don’t are chided to try to be like him. I never got to meet my cousin.

One day in 1978, my Mamu was told that his son, my mother’s favorite nephew, a 28-year-old major with the Pakistan Army, had committed suicide. Mamu never believed that his son committed suicide. His son had told him that he had taken on his superior for some financial malfeasance. My Mamu believed it was for this reason that he was murdered. The story that I grew up with was that the alleged suicide note had a blood stain on it and that Mamu had taken the matter to court, where the judge had said that it was not a suicide. The forensic investigation on his remains was never completed. Some military high-up threatened my Mamu with an offer to arrange for him to meet his dead son. Mamu stopped pursuing the matter, but his grief lingered and the story lived on in my family.

Despite the scar left on my family by the Pakistan Army, I, like so many kids, was fascinated by soldiery, even as I heard my father swear at the TV every night, as he watched General Zia on the TV screen. My brothers and I used to stage elaborate battles between two armies of toy soldiers separated by a Ludo board or an old desk calendar, and lob stones at the other side. Sometimes the artillery included lit matchsticks that had to land on, or sufficiently near, the enemy soldier for it to be counted as a fatal hit. That game of ours, in its indoor manifestations by the windowsill, ended when the curtain caught fire, but the war fantasy continued in other games. My brother and I would line up two chairs, one in front of the other, and throw a heavy blanket over them. This tent would sometimes be a helicopter, and at other times a tank, firing and dropping bombs at the imaginary enemy.

I grew up in 80’s with a heady dose of nationalist songs valorizing soldiers and military. Pakistan was heavily involved in the Afghan war at that time. All the same, war seemed distant to me— something that happened in the past or happens far away. My father would sometimes tell us the story of blackouts in Lahore when he was a young man. He told us of seeing flashes at the distant horizon and hearing sounds of gunfire. Our favorite story was about Dad sleeping on the roof and smoking a cigarette during a blackout and being visited by army men who respectfully asked him not to smoke.

The war of 1971, unlike the 1965 war, was not mentioned much in popular culture. This was perhaps due to the shame associated with Pakistan being defeated and dismembered at the hands of India. When remembered, it was always as a war between India and Pakistan and an episode in the continuing saga of antagonism between the two nation-states. The Bangladeshis themselves are simply forgotten, except as betrayers of Pakistan, collaborators with India against Pakistan, or at best, as victims of India’s plot who were duped or brainwashed by the enemy. There was not much understanding or recognition of the fact that Bangladeshis were once Pakistanis, and explanations such as the ‘betrayal by Bengalis’ or ‘Indian designs’ only work as convenient frameworks to stunt any meaningful reflection on why it is that East Pakistanis are now Bangladeshis. A discussion of Pakistan’s own conduct is simply not on the table. A search inward stops at the nationalist complaint of soobaiyat [provincialism] breaking up Pakistan, which in turn takes one back to Indian designs and affirms Pakistan’s raison d’être. Silence ensues, and endures.

What little public conversation about 1971 exists in Pakistan is saturated by nation-state-centered commentaries and that too of the zealous nationalist variety. Western commentators are assumed (and not without cause) to be tainted with Orientalism, West-centric chauvinism, racism, and Islamophobia, and both Indian and Bangladeshi commentators with their own nationalist partisan bias. So, what to do?

Genocide and mass rape are serious charges leveled against Pakistan that simply can’t be brushed aside by taking an identity-centric view that operates on an insider-outsider binary. This is a view that dispenses with all outsiders, and labels dissenters within as furthering outsider agendas. The near total dearth of dissent on the 1971 war –with admirable exceptions from the Communist Party of Pakistan, and some poets and writers such as Faiz, Jalib, and Eqbal Ahmad— in the face of a national and popular culture crowded with militarist nationalism and anti-India jingoism makes it that much harder to find one’s bearings and begin a search for a narrative outside the official history and collective memory.

The ‘foreign hand’ continues to deflect our attention elsewhere. A friend of mine who works for the Pakistani Army, when asked for his opinion on whether Baluchistan will eventually become another Bangladesh since it has been treated like East Pakistan was prior to its liberation, coolly remarked that there are many countries involved in fermenting separatist trouble in Balochistan, but not to worry, “hum ne wahan sab pakar liye hain” [We have apprehended/captured all of them.] Indeed, many have been apprehended, and some released as dead bodies on the roads bearing torture marks, something that Justice Raja Fayyaz, a Pakistan Supreme Court Judge, aptly described as “a reign of terror like Gestapo.” Power, blind to its own violence, projects its own inability to speak any language other than force on those at the receiving end of the imperial stick. This demeaning view of people and how to deal with a political conflict is captured in a Pakistan Rangers’ officer’s comment to Human Rights Watch regarding the Okara Uprising, that “It’s nothing we cannot deal with. These people only understand the language of the stick.”

During the people’s movement (popularly referred to as the Lawyer’s Movement) to oust General Pervez Musharraf in 2007, I started taking issue with the Pakistan Army’s heavy involvement in the socio-political life of Pakistan and its heavy-handedness in dealing with its citizenry. This dissent awakened me to the need to develop a social conscience that does not let my elderly uncle’s (and my mother’s) grief over losing his young son and being forced to abandon his search into the causes and circumstances of his son’s death, fade from memory. It also offered me a line of inquiry with which to probe the murky events in Pakistan’s history, such as the Balochistan issue. With such unraveling of the official narrative, it becomes somewhat possible to think of the 1971 war outside the tropes of Bengali betrayal and Indian designs, which, in turn, is sorely needed to understand and examine the present state of Pakistan and how we got here.

The pillage of East Pakistan and its bloody birth into Bangladesh offers an illuminating case to see the history of Pakistan’s centralizing state and society’s narrowing vision of what Pakistan is, the dominance of Pakistan’s Armed forces over the state and society and its repression of contending visions of Pakistan and Pakistan’s constituent parts. No meaningful public exploration, either in the roots of the East Pakistan conflict or the conduct of war was undertaken in Pakistan, and that has grave consequences. In Sepoy’s words, “the complaints of Swat, of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, of Balochistan for justice, for recognition are echoes of the cries of Dhaka.”

In this the 40^th anniversary year of Bangladesh’s liberation and the war of 1971, two historians, Sarmila Bose and Yasmin Saikia, have published their studies of the war of 1971 and how it is remembered, focused primarily on Bangladesh. Neither book offers a narrative of the Bangla Language Movement that sprang up in East Pakistan almost immediately after Pakistan’s independence. In the posts that follow this one in the coming week, I will offer a reading of the Bangla Language Movement as gleaned from Saadia Toor’s new book, to elucidate the relationship between East and West Pakistan, and then review Bose and Saikia’s books to discuss the events of 1971 and probe issues of history and memory.

Holy Jesus, Moses and Muhammad.

The power-points, I urge you to drop everything and just stare at them, are amazing. They really are. They show, quite clearly, the mental acuity of a 12 year old child when confronted with a newspaper. There is reading comprehension, of course, and even retention and maybe some kind of a inner monologue. But it is not making sense. No sir.

My dear friend Babu (oft. mentioned here) jotted off this passionate and erudite response to his Senator and I reproduce with his permission:

To: Senator Richard J. Durbin

RE: The FBI and Counterterrorism

Dear Senator Durbin,

As a resident of Chicago, and now Evanston, for the last twelve years, I have been extremely proud to have you as my Senator. Indeed, I have almost never felt the need to contact your office with gripes and concerns about policy, largely because every time I get worked up about something I look into it and find that you are almost always on the right side of the issue. This, indeed, is why I write to you today, hoping that you can help sound the alarm about some deeply troubling recent revelations about alleged “counterterrorism” briefings being given to FBI agents presently in the field.

Even from what little we already know, I can tell you that these briefings have come from some exceedingly dubious — indeed dangerous — sources: including, astonishingly, the openly Islamophobic blogger Robert Spencer (a favorite author of the right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik), and William Gawthrop.The details of these briefings are only coming to light thanks to the diligent reporting of Spencer Ackerman at WIRED magazine. Ackerman notes that Gawthrop had told the website WorldNetDaily, that in his opinion “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism”. WorldNetDaily, Ackerman says, “would later distinguish itself as a leader of the ‘birther’ movement.”

Ackerman’s reports can be found here:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/all/1

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/fbi-islam-101-guide/

As someone who holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and an assistant professorship in South Asian history at Northwestern University, with a specialization in medieval and early modern Indo-Persian intellectual history (including expertise in both Persian and Urdu cultural and political traditions), I can tell you with some confidence that the material being presented in these briefings is beyond misleading — it is utter garbage, not to mention self-defeating and counterproductive. If this is what our FBI agents know about Islam and Muslims, then I’m afraid they know less than nothing.

Indeed, virtually all of the “knowledge” presented in these briefings comes directly from long obsolete, and long discredited, Orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims propagated mainly by nineteenth-century British and French colonial administrations in India, Egypt, and the wider Middle East, primarily to justify Europe’s conquest and ongoing exploitation of those regions. People in the Muslim world, and, in fact, in most formerly colonized countries of the world, have a living memory of that colonial era, and thus are extremely sensitive about such rhetoric, which can only inflame existing concerns that the US is engaged not in a struggle against terrorism, but rather in a war against Islam, and a war for global empire inherited from our British and French friends and allies.

But forget about the sensitivities of faraway peoples — my own undergraduates would easily spot these frauds in a second, and yet the FBI appears entirely clueless about the utter bankruptcy of the instruction they are receiving. This is all especially ironic coming at a time when Congress and the Obama administration are busy slashing funding to critical education programs like Title VI language and Fulbright research fellowships, which for generations have been our country’s most proven and reliable means of training future scholars, and generally improving our larger understanding about the history and cultural traditions of Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Meanwhile, charlatans like Spencer and Gawthorp (and who knows who else) are somehow being allowed to step into the vacuum.

Congress needs to investigate this matter, and must urge the President immediately to open an internal investigation into how such outmoded, and frankly racist, forms of discourse about Islam, Muslims, and the Islamicate world could find their way into our nation’s most elite law-enforcement training apparatus. The FBI should have access to the most advanced scholarship, not the most ignorant Islamophobic canards. Indeed, how can they possibly expect to better protect us all from the legitimate threat raised by actual terrorists if they are schooled by people who either have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, or worse, are deliberately manipulating post-9/11 anxieties to foster and maintain a climate of fear?

To their credit, Senators Lieberman and Collins have already spoken out on this issue, but I urge you to do so as well. Besides being President Obama’s friend and erstwhile senior Senator, you also sit on both the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees, and serve presently as Assistant Senate Majority Leader. As such you are in an ideal position to insist on Congressional hearings that can get to the bottom of this situation. Representative Peter King has made quite a show in recent months of flaunting his so-called “radicalization” hearings. Now, you and others in Congress who have any sense at all must do the right thing and hold credible hearings about the damage being done to our values, our civic ideals, and our national security by these egregious lapses in judgment at the FBI.

We know roughly what was in the Power Point presentations that were delivered at some of these training sessions, but what exactly was said between the slides, to elucidate the content? Who did most of the talking? Were any other views sought, or any reputable academic specialists consulted? How were the speakers for these briefings chosen? Were they paid? What is the vetting process? Who has oversight over these procedures? Indeed what is the FBI’s general protocol for educating its agents about the culture and politics of the Islamicate world? What alternatives might the Bureau (and other state and federal agencies) explore in terms of enhancing their understanding of actual Muslim communities, rather than treating the latter collectively as a bunch of irrational, fanatical automatons mentally stuck in the 7th century? Are they even aware that the majority of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs? Are they aware that there are plenty of terrorists in the world who are not, in fact, Muslim? And finally, at the risk of sounding smug, but in all seriousness: has anyone at the Bureau even read a book in the last ten years?

When the general tenor of these briefings was first exposed back in July, the Bureau officially responded that the offending presentation was “a rudimentary version used for a limited time that has since been replaced” — but replaced by what, exactly? As citizens, we have a right to know, and clearly this week’s further revelations suggest that the problem is far more widespread within the FBI training program than we have been led to believe.

Again, I urge you to use all your power and influence as my elected representative in the U. S. Senate to do something about it. I have also faxed copies of this letter on my department’s letterhead to your offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Very sincerely yours,

Rajeev K. Kinra

I am rather stuck on the fliegender Teppich in the NPD ad. I want to continue the link I made between Hans Schweitzer’s anti-Semitic cartoons and the NPD flying-carpet by focusing on this particular relationship between orientalism and anti-Semitism.

The 1926 Lotte Reiniger movie Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was one of the first “animated” films and revolved around the story from 1001 Nights of Prince Ahmed and Pari Banu. 1001 Nights, properly entered Europe via Antoine Galland‘s French translation in the early years of the eighteenth century. Some of the tales, Sindbad, Ali Baba, Aladdin, found their ways into various other languages and became part of the Brother Grimm collection of children stories in the mid nineteenth century (perhaps through Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall‘s translation, but really, such texts were in relatively wide circulation as pamphlets, and small etchbooks). The flying carpet was in many of these tales, most prominently in Drei Prinzen und zwei Frauen (which features the adventures of Prince Ahmed, and Aladdin). The flying carpet – as the most potent symbol of Orient was seemingly everywhere in the late nineteenth century onwards. Nowadays, one can routinely see it in travel bureau ads as well as nice yogurt brands which transport you to other havens of delight.

The flying carpet in the NPD ad is more than an orientalizing gesture which evokes an image familiar to every German child (and subsequent adult). It is crucially the link between anti-Semitism of Germany and Europe and the Orient – for Johann Gottfried Herder, Jews were the “Asiatics of Europe”. The connection of Jews of Germany with the Orient was widespread in the nineteenth century Europe. Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) was one key biblical exegete who commented extensively on the dangers facing Germany by the Oriental Jews:

As an expert on ancient Judaism, Michaelis also took an interest in contemporary Jewry. In a review of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Juden (1749), a drama that broke with tradition to present a Jew as a noble character, Michaelis complained that finding nobility of character in a Jew was utterly impossible. .. In his critique of Dohm’s proposals for Jewish emancipation in 1782, Michaelis stuck by his original views, claiming that both Judaism and the Jews’ character were incompatible with citizenship. Citing their moral corruption, proclivities toward crime, and the clannish nature of Judaism as insurmountable obstacles to integrating Jews into the modern state, he claimed that granting them rights would risk transforming Germany into a “defenseless, despicable Jewish state”.¹

The solution for Michaelis lay in colonial expansion – specifically to the “southern” climate of the “sugar islands” which was suited to the “southern” Jew. The Orient of Michaelis as Jonathan Hess shows in his essay, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany” (2000) was never the Orient of Islam or Muslims – it was the Israelites and the Jews of his contemporary society. To access both that ancient past, and illuminate his current world, Michaelis sought to study the “contemporary Near East” as analogue. Such anachronism, as Said has argued, rest in the very bones of Orientalist formulation of knowledges. In the case of Michaelis, the contemporary travel accounts, the translation of Arabic epics, histories and poetry (as from Mosaic law). For Michaelis, the connection to folklore and children’s tales was another way of cementing his understanding Jewish danger. Hess notes that Michaelis also commissioned studies of Arabia Felix and the accounts were used by both Kant and Blumenbach in their anthropological writings. He further points out that Kant’s reliance on Arabian and Indian accounts for his racial classification in On the Various Races of Human Beings (1775). Blumenbach, while putting Jews and Arabs in the “caucasian” wrote, “The Jewish race .. can easily be recognized everywhere by their eyes alone, which breathe of the East“:

For Blumenbach, Jews mark an irreversible aberration from the original human variety that inhabited the southern slope of Mount Caucasus. Michaelis’s adaptation of this scenario similarly leaves no doubt as to the superiority of the “northern” Europeans over the “southern”race of the Jews. With its hegemony over the Orient secured in this manner, Christian Europe can safely lose all anxiety about the power and influence of its Oriental origins in religion and jurisprudence. In this way, racial theory secures for Michaelis precisely that which his Mosaisches Recht strove for: a vision of Europe as already de- Orientalized. Seeing the Jews as racial degenerates one might deport to German sugar islands does not merely envision Germany as a self-sufficient colonial power much like England or France; it also emancipates Christian Europe once and for all from the burdens of its Oriental heritage, allowing Michaelis’s northern European peers to gain complete ascendancy over their Oriental Jewish childhood.²

Such racializing of the Jews – look, again at that NPD poster – thus married the production of knowledge about the Orient with the political question of the “other” within. The fantasies of the Orient rendered onto the topography of France, Germany and England in the nineteenth century are hence most clearly visible in anti-Semitic writings of most great Enlightenment figures. I don’t want to go much further into Voltaire and the other founding figures of Enlightenment and their views on “tolerance” but it needs to be noted specifically for Germany that the popular play of Oriental tropes and the vilification of its own Jewish community went hand-in-hand. The Jews of Germany were simply not “volk” and you can check that with Fichte. In 1794, Saul Ascher who lived in Berlin and was a proponent of Jewish rights, wrote that Fichte’s writings were “a quite new species of opponents, armed with more dreadful weapons than their predecessors. If the Jewish nation had until now political and religious opponents, it is now moral antagonists who are arranged against them”³

The moral argument against Jews, the political argument against their participation in German military or society is now seen most clearly in the moral and political arguments against the Turks, and against Islam. In deadly comparison to the nineteenth century, the tropes of the Orientalized other – the beaked nose, the veil, the black-face – both familiarizes the sight and the hatred in the German viewer. The viewer has no need to confront the knowledge that contemporary German society is irrevocably tied to production of its “immigrant” community or that the state is working breathlessly to argue for more “ausländer” to come to Germany to teach, to work, to live.

The flying carpet is not a simple gesture of the Europe’s Orient. It is a gesture linking the history of anti-Semitism and imperialism and racial theorization in Germany with the present day Turkish and Arab Muslims. It provides one window on processes such as which Said called “orientalism” but which focused on Christianity’s relationship to Judaism and Germany’s political relationship to its Jewish population. The Orientalism that manifests itself in today’s hatred against Arabs, Turks and Islam is, I would argue, a culmination of both these strands of Orientalism – the gaze outwards and the “trouble” inwards. The history of Jews, along with the Roma and the homosexual, in Germany is then precisely the framework in which we need to place this xenophobia and Islamophobia.

1. Jonathan M. Hess, “Johann David Michaelis”, in Richard S. Levy, ed., Antisemitism: a historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (2005): 458
2. ibid., p. 91
3. quoted in Paul R. Sweet, “Fichte and the Jews: A Case of Tension between Civil Rights and Human Rights”, German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 37-48

When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism;it will be called, of course, “Americanism.”  Halford E. Luccock, Keeping Life Out of Confusion

Before

Times were good for many Americans—or, at least, times were good if appearances were to be believed. Even some of our sharper minds were deluded. After stapling the 1960’s and 1980’s in place with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities, journalist-by-novel Tom Wolfe addressed the impending aughts with the historically inapt essay, What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World, from Hooking Up.

Wolfe employs a Proletarian air-conditioning “mechanic” as everyAmerican—the sort of character David Brooks would later clothe in madras shorts and pop-neurology for the purpose of contriving New Yorker columns explaining his we to us. Wolfe’s pen is nimbler than Brooks’ iPad, but An American’s World still suffers from Ozymandian conceits, exemplified by messes like:

…[H]is own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home…

Which was true, far as it went. Everyone was getting mad-rich and feeling tres sexy, thank you very much—we told ourselves, and we believed us when we heard: these are the good old days. Yet, as Wolfe’s mechanic cavorts in St. Kitts among the ruins of Marxism, one detects a whiff of regret among the words, as though the writer is struggling to find a narrative peg on which he might hang a complaint:

…[I]t was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades’ standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter’s—in short, she was no longer sexy… the [new wife] and her big CEO catch were invited to all the parties, as though nothing had happened.

Many of us had similar misgivings at the time, I think. I remember scholar, blogger and writer Paul Kerschen giving a first-listen report on Radiohead’s 2000 release, Kid A that folded the nameless nagging into useful context: “It’s like two hours,” he said, “—an excellent two hours, understand, but two hours—of rain drizzling on the rusted shroud of a semi-functional HVAC unit. Things are not OK.”

There was plenty of evidence to help us shuffle through a decades-long sleep-walk.  The federal budget was in surplus. Peace, erupting everywhere: Bono partied in Sarajevo, Arafat chilled at Camp David, East Timor lurched at independence, Sinn Fein had lain down its guns, and many Rwandans committed to turning from a decade of barbarism and evil.

We focused attention on what seemed to work, ignoring what did not:  Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and the ensuing second intifada, for one non-starter. We glossed over others: Russian war crimes in Chechnya, Chechen war crimes in Chechnya, the sudden absence of diversion for central Europe’s dedicated Mujahids, queer diseases of the mind infecting humans who’d eaten meat from cows fed—for efficiency’s sake—with the brains and bones of other cows.

Americans failed to consider they were buying pets.com stock with money borrowed from retirement funds, paying for vacations with home-equity loans, or that they stood a greater chance of seeing an American manufacturing plant while partying in Tijuana than at home, in Toledo, Ohio.

But even those palliative facts were hard to come by in summer 2001. The transition from news to infotainment was complete by then, and Fox, having by its creation exposed a previous bias in favor of its non-existence, combined with Matt Drudge’s Report to frame the national conversation in inane leading questions seeming to consist of whether sharks were angry at swimmers, whether celebrity sex videos were good or bad, whether the erotic proclivities of U.S. Congressmen were interesting or not, and whether Liberals were evil, stupid or just plain un-American.

Dull, sated and conditioned by the Clinton carnival to watch politics rather than engage in them, Americans allowed a Presidential contest to be determined first by a group of screaming frat-boys in Florida, then by a group of scribbling nudges in Washington, D.C., in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the margin of error in the Florida recount, it’s likely we can never know for certain who won the 2000 U.S. Presidential election; what matters is we were told who won, and these years on, it is clear who lost.

“Winner,” George W. Bush plucked the residents of the Project for A New American Century—a neoconservative, Straussian think-tank that had for a decade clamored to remake the Middle East in its own image through regime change brought, in one proffered scenario, by catastrophic “pearl-harbor-type events”. Bush placed the tank’s alleged thinkers at the heart of America’s foreign policy apparatus. The list includes Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and William Kristol.

Lacking any adult supervision, they went about three tasks: cozying up to energy cartels, including the disgusting Saudi royals, preparing for war with Saddam Hussein, and ignoring with extreme diligence any intelligence on threats to U.S. “interests” that did not comport with a worldview they already held.

Despite warnings—in person, from Richard Clarke, and in a written brief titled Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US, President George W. Bush and cohort continued their Freudian obsession with “the guy who tried to kill my dad,” and brought America’s national delusion to its penultimate phase.

Remember the American Colossus? Shopping, screwing, drinking, drugging, investing on margin, engaging in voyeurisms of all sorts and to the last stroke before blindness lying, mostly to itself, but also to the world, lying and denying until there was almost no truth left; all this, all of it, while the unquiet, dissatisfied planet wobbled between its knees.

“…”

After

The 9/11 Commission Report is a bloated, condescending, piece-of shit doorstop. God willing, future historians will regard this fetid bilge-tank of doublespeak as symptomatic of the decline of one society, presaging the need, and rise, of another. For now, it is accepted “history,” a narrative that must be addressed on its own terms. Those terms are best defined in negative space, looking to what’s denied, rather than admitted. The Report is the civic equivalent of a mall-kiosk hidden-image poster.

Thomas Kean, who chaired the Commission that released this steaming turd, warned ahead of its release that neither Clinton nor W. were “well-served” by the FBI and CIA. As a result, the report made extensive recommendations for changes to prevent another attack, including the creation of an extra layer of bureaucracy atop the country’s dozens of publicly-acknowledged intelligence agencies, and a massive new Homeland Security apparatus. Implemented, all.

But remember, now: Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, was a son of the Saudi Royal Family’s chief architect and civil engineer, beloved by many for modernizing Mecca’s infrastructure and connecting the Kingdom’s cities with paved roads. Osama bin Laden lived in Arabia for much of his life, as well as Yemen and Sudan, but only Yemen and Sudan when he—and his evolving beliefs—had worn out his welcome in the Kingdom.

Bin Laden’s organization, al-Qaeda, was, and probably is, a shaky quasi-theological crime-syndicate built on a grab-bag of adulterated Salafist martyr-cult stupidity and the exported-on-cassette paranoiac rantings of the Egyptian Sayyid al-Qutb, further interpolated by Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who lusted bin Laden’s purse—fatter or thinner, depending on how Saudi benefactors regarded bin Laden’s most recent antics—to realize the goal of a post-Nasserite Egyptian theocracy.

After the Taliban secured victory over Northern Alliance foes in post-Soviet Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, having been drawn to the Jihad, found themselves without a worthy foe in the wild-east of the Afghan/Pakistani no-man’s land. Motivated by the objectively sickening U.S./Saudi alliance, which had given the Pentagon a foothold in the Arabian Peninsula, and secondarily by U.S. support for Israeli interests, they sought to take al-Qaeda, an Eastern-Hemisphere annoyance, global.

Al-Qaeda had dozens of documented contacts with Saudi Royals, Saudi government functionaries and Saudi citizens, at levels from the Court, to the Intelligence bureaus, to the parlors of fellow travelers.

Al-Qaeda and its aims were known to anyone paying attention. I remember discussing them in great detail in a law school International Relations seminar, in 1998. We spoke of Bin Laden’s interest in the subcontinent—because of the Pakistani “Islamic Bomb,”—and how the Kashmir/Jammu conflict could be manipulated by demagogues, as well as the dangers inherent in partnering with the ISI, which we regarded as a poisoned honeycomb, dripping with corruption, taking aid money with one hand, shaking the hands of jihadis with the other.

In 1998.

The University of Toledo College of Law is a fine school—but it is not the Kennedy School, Georgetown, nor The War College; if we knew those things, our betters should also have known them. It is disheartening to read, in the Report, and in Wright’s Looming Tower, how willfully blind America’s leaders were four years on; they should have known better. They did know better.

Acknowledging the obvious dovetails between bin Laden and his Saudi patrons, The Commission admitted fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, but “found no evidence the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al-Qaeda.” Without delving into the obvious fallacy we’re offered, i.e., that no evidence of is evidence of no, it’s easy to see enough room left between the words of the Report’s phrasing to rebuild the Kobar Towers with cash from Bandar’s BAE slush & bribe fund and drive a full tanker-truck right up next to them.

Formal or informal Saudi complicity, whether from sympathy or to buy internal peace, are real Acts of War. In any sane period of history, Bandar and his corrupt platoon of brothers would be rotting in the stocks of Leavenworth, or better yet, hung in Saudi for domestic crimes or omissions, from gallows fashioned by the hands of Saudis themselves—or, rather, gallows paid for with Saudi money and fashioned by the hands of Indian and Philipino craftsmen.

In our remembering Americans must not forget, no matter how deeply buried in the Report, or made a non-subject by the American media, that bin Laden’s story, 9/11’s story, our story, is peopled by a cast of characters dominated more or less by Egyptians and ideas popularized by Egyptians, and more, much more, by Saudis and Saudi culture, specifically metastasizing, exported Wahhabism, and other distinctly Saudi problems, like bin Laden himself. We must remember to remember:

This why George W. Bush sent American teenagers to Iraq.

No, it doesn’t make sense. And Americans must remember it doesn’t make sense, because the world as it is mapped today is nonsensical. Only by keeping to mind that America went down the rabbit-hole in the middle of the last decade can it begin to find its bearings.

Egyptian ideas, Saudi money.  Say it over and over until it stops making sense; say it and repeat yourself sane:

This why George W. Bush sent American teenagers to Iraq.

According to the Report, while meetings between al-Qaeda representatives and Iraqi government officials occurred, the panel had no credible evidence Saddam Hussein assisted al-Qaeda in preparing or executing the 9/11 attacks.

That is cold, late comfort to thousands of dead Iraqis and the confused, homesick soldiers Bush and the Boys sent to “defend our freedom.” Because from the President of the United States to various party flunkies at the local level, American leaders conflated Iraq, Islamism, Jihadis, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, terrorism, Israeli national security, the emotion terror, Islam itself, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Iraqis fighting Americans post-invasion, a group of terrorists the U.S. Media learned to call al-Qaeda in Iraq (as though bin Laden dealt in franchise licenses from Tora Bora), U.S. national security, Palestinian causes, Egyptian radicals and various other Middle Eastern regimes. Fox News anchors, in tone, gesture and connotation, abetted this slander 24/7/365, reducing complex foreign policy concerns to either/or polls and making a mockery of legitimate analysis.

Relatedly, and of pressing, current interest, the report also offered evidence of increased contact between Iran and al-Qaeda.

So, you know, stay tuned.

Instead

A pause, now, while we address the “conspiracy thing”: the Report ignores many incongruent threads of fact that, if only treated plausibly by people who could treat them, might dispense with inevitable counter-narrative spinning; so much so, that other Committees were compelled to address some of them in supplemental memoranda. Yet this is the nature of tales, even of many eye-witnessed events.

We might consider here the words of Hunter S. Thompson, whom, it should be noted, numbered among “truthers.” He wrote these lines long before 9/11, though, in bittersweet nostalgia for the Summer of 1967:

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Our problem is we are without any sweet to measure against the bitter. It is at least flattering to think someone with real power cared enough to throw, help throw, or allow the planet to be thrown into chaos, rather than think for a minute that a sickly Bond-villain hiding under a rock in Pakistan could play Jenga with Manhattan landmarks all by his lonesome.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. The truth, as received, is horrible enough.

Between

During the remaining Bush years, Americans became convinced by talk-radio idiots like Sean Hannity and the entire Fox roster, as well as anyone running for public office from either major party, anywhere in the country, that American shores, schools and courts faced imminent invasion from Sharia-spouting Jihadis and that individual Americans were at great risk of personal attacks from Muslims.

Americans tossed away freedoms—a subject to which we shall return presently—as well as the keys to the public treasury. No price seemed too high, no DARPA project too outlandish, no Pentagon request too expensive. Trillions spent, that’s with a T, and counting, with interest, if you care to amortize.

Little time-bombs of a more lethal, but less obvious character, began to blow in the middle-part of the decade. Bill Clinton had brokered a devil’s deal with Wall Street to break down the firewalls between investment banking (i.e., endlessly debt-ridden derivative speculation) and regular banking, where depositors loan a bank money for free, which the bank then loans to other people, at a profit. Clinton and Congress made this bargain with the likes Robert Rubin, the appalling Sen. Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, then the insipid, spittle-flicking, polysyllabic, idiot-savant Federal Reserve Chairman.

For their part, they had been inspired by a misanthropic, chain-smoking, Russian dwarf named Ayn Rand. When not wrecking the homes of ardent disciples, Rand spent her time subjecting the world of popular philosophy to the agonizing resolution of an Elektra Complex that had seized her after rampaging Bolsheviks collectivized her father’s business. Rand had discovered—and you can too!—that, despite hundreds of years of human economic experience, capital markets, if left to tend themselves, would put fuzz on bunnies and photosynthetically generate Vitamin C in babies’ bodies. All that stood in the way of a Capitalist Utopia were the sorry collective impulses that had robbed her childhood of privilege.

Amid the wars emptying the American treasury, PNAC’s ongoing project of American global dominance financed with the Federal Reserve’s Platinum Credit Card, and unrestrained by sensible New Deal legislation, the chain of bubbles supporting Western capitalism since 1980 began to collapse. Seems allowing banks to gamble on margin borrowed at a thousand-times deposits wasn’t a smart thing to do. One evening, thanks to Clinton, Cronies, Congress and Dwarf, Christian civilization learned it was bankrupt.

George W. Bush attempted to step aside for his—and our—true masters, and have Congress acclaim Henry Paulson, of Goldman Sachs, Emperor of the United States. This is not hyperbole, not cited to The Onion—look it up. To its credit, Congress balked at coroneting Paulson; still, as though to make amends, the Federal establishment fell all over itself borrowing money from the Chinese government on behalf of unborn Americans to satisfy debts owed by its friends, individual and corporate, to parties unknown, incurred at the trillion-dollar global banking mega-casino. In 2008, America was bruised, broke, angry and paranoid. Americans elected—without the help of the Supreme Court—a black man with an Arabicized name to fix this bullshit.

I overheard an old woman in Troy, Ohio, exclaim, after voting, “I think America hates Bush more than it loves racism.”

[we are aware Bush wasn’t officially running—ed.]

In 2009, Barack Obama took office. He made a nice speech to Muslims in Cairo. Angry people, organized under the name of a thrilling sexual pastime, yelled at him, though they seemed unsure why. Obama appointed the same bankers who ruined the economy to fix it. He threw twice as much free money into the bottomless pit at Wall Street, rigged the health-care system to guarantee in perpetuity, by law, paying customers for insurers. Then, without breaking a sweat, he picked up the PNAC project exactly where his predecessors left it. He even found some places it might be improved.

He also authorized a Navy Seal team to kill Osama Bin Laden. They obliged.

President Obama usually avoided getting his shoes dirty en route to signing catastrophic-when-not-ineffectual laws, as the paths through the White House grounds have been repaved with the clean, pure aspirations of those who trusted him, and sealed with the distilled, water-tight essence of what we once knew as the American Dream.

Within

How many wars? Iraq; Afghanistan; Yemen; Libya. Four? Probably more underway, under various definitions, forms and dispensations, if we had the information an informed citizenry should.

And we don’t.

At first, this lack of information was a function of our incompetent and negligent press; following 9/11, the flow was stymied by gate-keepers whose access to the cocktail party circuit would’ve been curtailed if they had done their jobs. When the resolve of those tasked with keeping State Secrets, and disseminating State Propaganda, splintered, the press itself came under attack. There is now no real refuge for useful public knowledge. The very concept is an Enemy of the State.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—I mention the count of wars because, focused as we are now on, if not in, Afghanistan, and with the—gasp—newly discovered, Pakistani loyalty problem, we generally forget the aspect of The Global War on Terror that affects Americans most. 2,752 people died in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Hundreds of thousands have died in the ensuing conflicts. Still, the least mourned victim is the American Republic itself. What over a million died protecting in the years between Independence and V-J Day was traded away on the memory of several thousand and a promise it wouldn’t be permitted to happen again.

The truest memorial America could offer those who died on 9/11 is to refuse to fall into the moral orbit of  the death-cults we claim to abhor. No reflecting pools, no spires at 1776 feet, none of it. We shouldn’t have become the photo-negative of jihadis seeking martyrdom, cowering in the skirts of craven politicians promising to shield us from harm and make our streets safe for commerce.

We should have rebuilt the towers exactly as they were, within a year. We should have marked the ground with a small, tasteful plaque, and held annual parades celebrating the season we brushed off the worst Osama bin Laden and his pals could dish, then turned on the demagogues screeching from the most shameful perspectives present in our national dialogue when they asked us to pay for the victims’ deaths with civil liberties. We should be whooping and hollering and singing songs about how al-Qaeda bored us, how bin Laden died from neglect, his corpse reeking in the stank of his own sick creed, how not one American teenager died thinking he or she was fighting Saddam over 9/11, and no Afghani or Iraqi teenager died thinking American teenagers were invaders, or occupiers.We should be celebrating how we were centered enough to tar and feather our own vilest blowhards and ride them to Harlem on a rail.

Alas, little more than six weeks after the attacks, Congress had a spryly captioned bill in the hopper—The USA PATRIOT Act.

The timing is a bit suspicious; anyone experienced with the Federal bureaucracy would be forgiven for asking, really? It can take longer than six weeks to get an acknowledgment that you, a constituent, have contacted your Representative in writing; it’s worse if you need action on an important matter. Washington does not move quickly. Is it beyond the pale to suggest that this law, or some version of it, had been pre-written, and was collecting dust in a drawer somewhere, awaiting the right calamity?

The Patriot Act is a travesty. It can be read to enshrine the noxious Korematsu doctrine that interned the Japanese Americans in World War II. It does not explicitly allow detention of U.S. Citizens, but without recourse to due process, a detainee has no forum to which he may claim habeas corpus, and assert his citizenship. It permits clandestine, secret searches of homes and businesses, allows the FBI to search phone, email and financial records without warrants, and lays open library borrowing records to law enforcement agencies.

The erotica you borrow from your public library is, by standing U.S. law, the intelligence community’s business. These are the same folks who claimed surprise at learning bin Laden himself enjoyed a blue movie now and then—if that was the case, and not some disinformative psy-op.

Worse—and it gets much worse—The Patriot Act represents what Americans were willing to give up, not what has been lost. Much more has been lost, as much more has been taken.

The Patriot Act is the public face of a ghost that has possessed the machine of the American Body Politic. Possession came welcomed, one assumes, upon the adoption of the Unitary Executive theory that Dick Cheney and Department of Justice ringers cooked up to allow Cheney himself, and the President, to operate outside six-hundred years of established Anglo-Saxon law. Under that specious theory, an American wartime executive enjoys immunity from impeachment for crimes committed pursuant to national security initiatives, domestic prosecution for acts taken pursuant to authority as Commander in Chief, and perhaps some defense to international war crimes proceedings.

What Cheney hath wrought, Obama embraces—under the 44^th President, whom I remind you, was hired to fix this bullshit, an Orwellian cancer has spread to the national lymph nodes. Obama has not even tried to stem it; his administration is part of it, thrives on it, is one with it. This totalitarian demon, which infuses almost every aspect of American life, is of a width and breadth unimaginably vast, and its aims seem nothing less than total awareness, total power and total obedience to its shifting whims.

Legal scholar, writer and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has done yeoman’s work providing an outline of its forms and habits; he has taken to calling this unclean thing the National Security State.

It needs perpetual war. Without it, claim to the powers it craves are laughable, on their face, to a free people. What luck then, that the external war in which we are now engaged has no fixed enemy, no fixed field, no fixed milestones for victory. After 9/11, America didn’t declare war on anything, except an abstraction—the emotion of fear, of terror. As such, the only end to the external war in which we are now engaged comes when our species evolves beyond fear of its own demise, or beyond the crippling empathy inspired by learning that harm may come to a loved one.

The National Security State is fragile. Only by knowing more about its citizens than its citizens know of it can the Beast coerce obedience to directives against the citizenry’s interests. George W. Bush and Barack Obama hid, and hide, their least defensible orders under the aegis of National Security, which usually terminates further discussion or challenge in public fora.

The National Security State’s expansive, wholly illegal wiretapping of the entire American telecommunications infrastructure under George W. Bush (or further back—Bush extended National Security protections retroactively, to protect former Presidents’ documents, if they want them classified) was shielded first under this notion, then retroactively ratified by a Congress that included then-Senator Obama. That Congress went as far as immunizing telecom companies from liability for violating the privacy of Americans, a reward for cooperating with illegal demands.

A successor NSA program currently rakes the telecom grid for bad-guys, and is overwhelmingly effective, because it does not differentiate between friend and foe; the NSA holds a record of your digital life, and mine, as well as those who might be planning to commit crimes. This initiative violates the long-standing ideal that citizens judge citizens in citizen tribunals—our military and intelligence apparatus operates outside our borders, not within them. Everyone knows this program is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional, but the National Security State must be fed with data, so highfalutin legal concerns be damned. Knowing the program is evil is not a sin; the sin lies in saying it is.  Well meaning, good hearted real patriots, in good faith, have tried to warn us; the National Security State has destroyed their lives in return.

The Bush administration fostered the program; while the Obama administration acknowledges it, the Administration regards criteria set for its use as a State Secret, and has revealed its claims to the program’s legitimacy and legality only to select Members of Congress, who, when not rubber-stamping such things, are prevented by from making their knowledge public. If they have concerns that might incline them to disclose criminal activity by the President or his subordinates, they are put in a double-bind—treason by silence, or treason by disclosure? Silence is the safer choice.

The National Security State is sadistic. America, as well as any other entity seized of corporate authority, ever, has and will torture. The idea that Dick Cheney invented water-boarding is ludicrous; however, Cheney, as an acolyte and High Priest of the National Security State, introduced the positively barbaric notion that torture should be euphemized into normality, and when it could not that  permissions for it be written into the standing, published law of this once Constitutional Republic—probably in anticipation of possible criminal proceedings resulting from orders he, or they, have given. Nevermind “torture” is a poorly cloaked rape-fantasy inspired by Jack Bauer fandom and snuff-films; never mind it is methodologically unsound and disavowed by those, like the CIA, who should be inclined to use it; never mind that in a scenario where it would work, it would be likely done anyway. 

There is something in the hoary nature of familiar evil that desires recognition, even as it obscures its own identity. Our current interrogation regime is a testament to this violent, literally tortuous facet of the National Security State’s multiple personality disorder.

The TSA is another tip-of-the-iceberg public aspect of the hidden thing, this National Security State, that has subsumed what was once America. For our safety, the National Security State has employed what seem to be the least observant, least capable, least fit examples of the population—many with personal, vocational or situational axes to grind with the world at large—and placed them in positions of authority, armed them the imprimatur of Homeland Security, and tasked them with enforcement of no-exceptions, no-common-sense- required, black-letter policies. America’s airports, in 2011, are kakistocracies. The only people inconvenienced by the TSA are those with someplace to go; idiots with C4 in their skivvies seem to get along, and get past, just fine. But that’s the point: the National Security State requires legalized brutality, humiliation, degradation and inhumanity because the National Security State gets off on it.

The National Security State fears Due Process and enumerated rights. At its core, the National Security State cannot justify itself without innuendo, hyperbole and fear; open and just civilian tribunals—for criminals, terrorists, “leakers,” for any accused person—expose the Beast’s dearest parts, its regions most sensitive to comment, criticism and ridicule. From that need comes FISA, secret detentions, black-site prisons, military tribunals, and the shameful Guantanamo Bay facility. The National Security State skulks in the curtilege because its reasons for being exist not for long, and only in shadow.

Finally, the National Security State requires control of the Word. Information is its antidote—the more accurate, the more timely, the more comprehensive, the more potent. While indefensible, pursuing “leakers,” in Washington is at least understandable, but the National Security State can brook neither dissent, nor the exposure of sunlight to its deeds if that exposure will inspire dissent, no matter from what direction the light comes.

Remember Bradley Manning, who has done allegedly to GWOT what Daniel Ellsberg did, to great acclaim, to Vietnam? Manning, very likely, now lies naked, fetal, in the throes of a long-term, dehumanizing breakdown and brainwash, for no purpose other than to be made an example of—his crime, allegedly, is having given information embarrassing to the powerful to someone who would make it public.

Achtung

Julian Assange, while in turns complicated and unsympathetic, is a hero. Full stop. Hero.  In Assange’s case, students of the history and practices of espionage will read “alleged rapist” on his vita as “dumbass poon-hound caught in a honey-pot.” He has much more bad to do before the good he has done is offset.

The Assange case is reminiscent of an earlier, deft move by the nascent National Security State on U.S. intelligence operative Scott Ritter, during the months preceding the Iraq war. Ritter, who worked as a contract employee with Central Intelligence and whose ongoing interests in sex with young girls would have been—or should have been—a matter of polygraph record, was nevertheless considered fit to serve on the U.N. Weapons Inspection Team in Iraq.

He was deemed unfit to comment in public, by the mainstream media, on the subject of whether those weapons existed, when he decided they did not. The reason? Not his qualifications, but an earlier sex sting arrest. Suddenly, his criminal past was highly relevant, available and a point of commentary from every interviewer who addressed him.

Flacking someone like Ritter, or in a better example, Assange, personally, is not enough to satisfy the National Security State when the information flow will not cease with personal destruction. As an independent source, Wikileaks itself is under constant DOS battery; the National Security State apparently thinks the exposure of policy and facts relating to the causes of death of innocents in the conduct of American foreign policy is a greater harm than the actual loss of human life. The concept of unmediated disclosure of “classified” material is what’s at issue, not the material itself. The Beast requires both the head, and the carcass, it seems.

If the National Security State cannot tell us its story, there can be no story at all.

Now

And so it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

God knows what bin Laden envisioned ten years on.

One assumes he would be pleased that if we did not collapse explicitly, we have come to take for granted that the democratic elements of the Republic have ossified to the point of uselessness and we have yielded wholly to autocratic elements imbued with a spirit of Fascism, which have expanded to fill the roles required for the operation of a functioning nation-state. Since 9/11, our systems—financial, moral, legal, constitutional and philosophical have gone bankrupt.  To the extent they continue to work at all, they serve those who can afford them. Our politics are nauseating: America’s “left” is right-wing and its right wing is fucking batshit crazy. Neither have anything relevant to say or constructive to propose.

Two successive presidents have spoken differently while acting uniformly; trillions of dollars have gone wasted on “security,” yielding arrests in conspiracies that law enforcement agencies appear to have concocted themselves, mostly for the purpose of making arrests. The law enforcement and intelligence community trumpet the apprehension of a few sorry wannabes like Jose Padilla, while real plots usually seem to be foiled by Muslim beef-frank vendors, airplane passengers or sharp-eyed locals.

With war upon war upon economic calamity upon natural disaster besetting America, the beleaguered Yank—perhaps an everyAmerican air-conditioning mechanic—who once might have been set to howling at the slightest encroachment upon his prerogatives, now learns the Central Intelligence Agency has set up shop within the New York City Police Department in order to spy on them, even though they are fucking American citizens who just happen to call God’s name in Arabic—he learns the CIA has done this, without compunction, with impunity, in bald violation of its charter.

And the “mechanic,” shrugs. It’s just one more thing.

Other one-more-things are coming—one-more-things akin to the general strikes, riots and conflagrations of the Maghreb, of Tel Aviv, or London and Paris, or Athens and Rome and Madrid and Reykjavík, which illustrate the real war unfolding between a financier elite and those of us they intend to have serve them, or at least service debts they claim are owed.

You can hear echoes, see the stirrings, on the San Francisco BART, can’t you? It’s almost an odor, rife with potential, terrifying and exhilarating at once—

On arrival of these somethings-else, these other, new things, our poor everyYank may find himself ill-suited to mark the time. In the course of human events he may find he surrendered more than convenience in his deal with the National Security State. He may find he surrendered the best parts of his humanity as well—the cruelest irony being the surrender will have been in bin Laden’s name, to exorcise the fear that the unexpected strike inspired and nurtured, but in bin Laden’s name all the same.

When he requires the tools he entrusted to the National Security State for safekeeping—his civil liberties, the rule of law, human rights—the mechanic may find they are not where the National Security State promised him they’d be. He may find, in buying his purported enemy’s defeat with what should have been the last things he would spend, he will have ensured the realization of his enemies’ ultimate aims.

Of all the things to reflect upon this sordid anniversary, and if only to keep a pinch of truth alive in dark times, we should note the facts of the post-9/11 American experiment, as they coalesce around us: unless we remember ourselves, unless we remember what we promised the world we could be, 9/11 will not only mark the day we began giving up our dearest ideals, it will mark the day America gave up altogether.

The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.”

- “With CIA help, NYPD built secret effort to monitor mosques, daily life of Muslim neighborhoods“, AP, Aug 24, 2011

In the months after 9/11, the FBI deployed its investigative apparatus as a blunt weapon. In November 2001, the Department of Justice began conducting “voluntary interviews” with 5,000 Middle Eastern non-citizens. Hundreds of FBI agents were dispatched across the country to conduct the interviews, with standard questions like “Are you aware of anybody who reacted in a surprising way about the terrorist attacks? Maybe you got to work and maybe a coworker said, ‘Good, I’m glad that happened’?”

- “To catch a terrorist: The FBI hunts for the enemy within“, Petra Bartosiewicz, Harper’s, Aug 2011.

One thing that the First World really gets right is good dental care. The more money you have, the better the teeth. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we Americans (at least those with good dental insurance) have some of the pearliest, straightest teeth in the world, we are seldom grateful for this gift. The word ‘torture’ is probably used far more by Americans to describe visits to the dentist, the periodontist, the orthodontist and the oral surgeon than it is to describe water-boarding or taking photographs of prisoners of war in humiliating poses. That’s why the US Government is so crafty when it shows us images of bad guys in captivity receiving dental care. Take the case of José Padilla, who was shown in a small video being marched down the hall from his solitary confinement to get a root canal (wearing goggles and sound-canceling headphones to keep that solitary real). This little bit of film was so noteworthy that it was even discussed by Graham Bader in Artforum, according to Amitava Kumar, who writes:

Bader’s point is that the most intensely politicized contemporary images are those that concern “the state’s role in authoring the most basic experiences of life and death.” Images like those of “the broken figure of Jose Padilla, shuffling to the dentist down the hall from his cell” enter our conversations about art as new evidence to be examined and understood.

Having not, in fact, read the original Artforum article, I confess that I am flummoxed as to how the video managed to pass directly from the hands of Homeland Security (or the CIA?) directly into the pages of one of the nation’s leading art journals. It’s so hard to keep track of what art is nowadays.

My interest was piqued by the description, however, as it reminded me of one of my personal favorites in the galaxy of GWOT imagery, specifically the Iraq war: the photographs of Saddam Hussain receiving the best of all possible medical care at the hands of the United States military after he was dragged out of his hiding spot and taken into custody. It’s one of those pieces of propaganda that makes it hard to decide whether you are looking at a really clever piece of psy-ops or an elaborate visual gag. How civilized, and how supremely humane of the United States to supply that bastard Saddam with the best possible dental care in the world! And yet, when Americans see the picture, we know what’s really going on: they’ve sent the dentists in; he’s being tortured.

The saying goes that we all have rituals – and the sayer points, often times metaphorically, to baseball players. The raise, the pinch, the shuffle, the swing, the dust-off, the spit, the spit, the spit. Ritual seems a bad word, suddenly. Habit? Superstitious habit? Let us stick with ritual for a second. I don’t think I have many rituals that I can consciously identify. Even now, as I sit thinking about my rituals (how do I write when I write?) I get mostly vague mental images of turning on music before cooking.

My ritual, my habit, the thing that I planned when I planned was to shave before going to the airport.

This ritual is a habit because, well, I fly a lot. Since moving to Berlin, I have been flying even more than my usual a lot.

Yesterday, in planning for my airport flight tomorrow, I went to my usual barber (a gentle man from Istanbul who speaks with kind eyes) and asked him to go ahead and make me pretty for the immigration control officer. As I sat there looking at the mirror, I realized that 1) I rather liked my face covered in short, grey, splinters. And 2) I was afraid of what these short, grey splinters would tell someone else about me.

I realized that this particular habit began ten years ago. I flew back into Chicago from London on Sep 16th, 2001. I was originally scheduled to come back on Sep 12th. I remember shaving. I remember shaving every single time since then. Now, this was not a rather well-thought out thing. There was no reason, I don’t think in retrospect, to conclude that NOT having a beard was a good idea.

Except that the images we were watching were of Usama and Omar and I was reading about Sikh elders getting attacked and the world had decided that a beard was really the marker of hate – but only on brown skin, naturally.

My younger brother grew a beard around 2006-7. He had a manicured kind long before, but then he began a proper Sunnah beard – emulating the Prophet. Long, uncut, with little hair on the mustache. My father as well. I love their beards – they represent faith, devotion, a sense of commitment to their ethical and moral lives.

My own adventures in hirsuteness came from laziness. I was not a fan of the daily shave, preferring the shadow. Either way, there was not much stock in my facial hair pot – it represented nothing, I believed.

But my clean shave on the eve of flying did make a representative gesture and maybe even an identitarian one, as well. I did because I wanted no “trouble” at the border. I wanted to see my loved ones and reach my destinations. It was a small thing to do.

Ten years later, the small thing was a grooved-in habit.

There is, of course, much to say about the last ten years and I feel that we all should. There is every reason to think back, willfully and in full light of history, about what we lived through, enabled and participated in. The wars, the killings are but one aspect of our global re-ordering. When I say “we”, I ought to qualify it by saying Americans or Iraqis or Afghans or Pakistanis or Muslims or whatever else. I will not do that. I read some of the fiction that came out after 9/11 when I was writing this piece and I remember a discussion (phone, was it?) with my editor Jonathan Shainin (who wrote this must-read tracing Updike’s post 9/11 novel) about pointillism or minutiae in the American gaze on 9/11. I remember, if I can recreate my own thoughts, being very adamant that this microscopic examination was another form of refusal by the American imagination to look up and out, to refuse to be historical and global.

I will probably still make that argument. Perhaps with more qualifiers, though.

In the meantime, I want to look at my own minutiae.

I have a new piece up at The National, Pakistan: why the US must think outside the ‘military’ box:

A decade after the events of September 11, we continue to know little and understand even less of Pakistan. This despite the fact that we are entering a golden age of production of knowledge on that same nation. But there is a critical distance between knowledge and understanding.

“They understand that they must not understand,” commented Robert d’Humières on British imperial troops back from the fronts of Africa and Asia in 1905. The British soldier, he mused, was wary of bad analysis, of ill-perceived contexts – best to act; best to focus on ways to act. Rudyard Kipling, the prominent commentator on all things imperial before and after the beginning of the 20th century, agreed with d’Humières (he was Kipling’s French translator) and wrote that “to understand everything may be to pardon everything, but it also means to commit ­everything”.

There is a flexibility of action and intention that is possible only in the lack of knowledge. To understand fully is to be constricted, imperially speaking. The empire must not understand for that understanding carries with it a price that is simply too dear. Therein lies the distance between knowledge and understanding at the core of all imperial ventures. Knowledge is created, in heaps and mounds, by the empire – this is clear. However, understanding is something quite different.

Kipling’s warning is apt – if the empire understands the position of the colony, the condition of colonialism itself, it cannot maintain any lie about either its civilising mission nor its emancipatory one. Hence, the must of d’Humières. Understanding Pakistan requires an empathetic move that remains outside the bounds of knowledge production by the empire.

This concluding para came courtesy of my dearest Babu who sent me the d’Humières quote. I abused it myself, however. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I think that my last three pieces have really been all about the same thing: knowing/understanding. Read all! or buy my book!

I. A Terribly Attractive Man

I probably first heard the name Qaddafi on the radio, from NPR, an always present background noise in my childhood. But the name only acquired meaning when I heard it uttered by my Great Aunt in a stage whisper to my mother: “That Mr. Qaddafi is terribly attractive!” She hissed, more than once. The A’s in Mr. Qaddafi’s name were flattened as with Sir John Gielgud intoning, “Mr. Gandhi.” My Great Aunt was well over six feet tall, a raven-haired beauty in her day, and a force to be reckoned with at all times. I imagine her commenting on the physical loveliness of Mr. Qaddafi while running her hand along her pearls, her dark eyes flashing naughtily, her lower jaw jutting out to make an emphatic point in her native lockjaw. I must have been around ten years old, and she in her lower seventies. The fact that such whispered pronouncements were not meant for my ears, though fully audible, was brought home to me by the many unsuitable stories she liked to tell my mother at that same volume. Most memorable of these was a lengthy narrative from her youth about being greeted by a surly abortionist clad in a bloodstained apron after climbing a narrow tenement staircase in New York when she sought to terminate an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Sitting a few feet away with a book opened in my lap, I always pretended to read as she stage-whispered one startling story after the next on winter’s evenings when we went to dine at her house.

Over the years I paid little attention to Qaddafi though his name gained additional accretions of meaning in my mental inventory. He was not just terribly attractive, but was also the insane dictator who harbors terrorists, sleeps in a tent, and wraps himself in flamboyant robes. It was not until the current uprising began that I began to pay closer attention– already an Egyptian revolution addict, I was sprawled on my voyeur’s divan hoping for another drama to unfold that would be just as thrilling and edifying as Egypt. As things began to go poorly, and as the situation became more confusing and our Peacemaker-in-Chief began to play drone video games with the Qaddafis, I started to look for more information about Libya. The tweets and articles of Libyan author Hisham Matar were compelling, and I ordered his 2006 novel In the Country of Men.

Thence began one of the most difficult reading experiences I have undertaken in a long time. In the Country of Men is beautifully written, spare and precise, and it does the novel a great disservice to speak of it as merely a source text for insight into the Qaddafi regime and the history undergirding the current situation in Libya. But the portrait painted of the pervasive and chilling influence of a powerful dictator is disturbing beyond belief and does much to dispel the opera buffa caricatures of Qaddafi in the Western media. This is, indirectly, and through the eyes of a narrator looking back on his childhood, a portrait of how a shrewd and powerful man managed to effectively infiltrate the homes, families and consciousnesses of his people so effectively that he was capable of shattering family units, neighborhoods, communities.

Two scenes stand out. One, in which the narrator, a child, watches the interrogation of a family friend and neighbor that is being televised. As with most transmissions on Libyan state TV, this program is bracketed by static images of pink flowers. Brutality nests in a soothing field of blossoms. It is said, the narrator observes, that the Guide has his own controls of the broadcasting system, and can switch on and off the images that his people see in their living rooms. The other scene features a phone call. There are more often than not, it seems, people listening in on phone conversations. But they are not merely mutely recording calls. They sometimes interfere, speak up, persuade. During one conversation between the narrator and a comrade of his father’s, a third voice insinuates itself into the conversation making remarks about the beauty of the narrator’s mother and asking questions about her alcoholism. These are just two of many examples of how the regime tampers with the lives and mental health of its citizens. This psychological control seems almost more devastating than the aggressive brutality of the state. Almost, but not quite. State TV also broadcasts executions of ‘traitors’ of the regime. Haplessly sitting in one’s living room, one can suddenly be subjected to the sight of a physically tortured human hanging to death while a stadium-full of people cheers its support.

It took me months to read this short novel because I could not bear the narrative tension. The way in which the story unfurled, the family unit disintegrated, and the state became more powerful than ever felt inevitable but worth avoiding as a reader. The palpable psychological control of Qaddafi’s regime makes one experience the suffocation and dismantling of the characters in a most uncomfortable fashion. This is the man that NATO is ineffectually attempting to take out, that rebels have shown great bravery in attacking. He is not a clown in a tent, he is a military mastermind in a bunker. There’s no doubt that he planned for, even expected the current turn of events. After reading In the Country of Men, it’s hard not to wish for his annihilation. And yet.

II. A Missed Opportunity

As a child, I was often seated at dinner parties next to an elderly gentleman with whom most other guests did not wish to converse. It was clear that he, a bit dull, and I, a child, were being pushed off into corner dead spaces so as not to ruin the flow of conversation. This gentleman was married to a younger woman whose sparkling wit and snappy repartee were a must at any smart dinner table. And thus her husband had to be tolerated. In anticipation of this recurring arrangement, my mother began to coach me in the car rides to dinner: “He enjoys history. Ask him what his favorite historical event was.” “He likes to play golf, ask him how is day on the course went.” I don’t remember his responses, or even if I got up the courage to ask him any of these questions. Last month, on the death of his wife (he had died years before), I learned from her obituary that he had been a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. This fact would have meant nothing to me at the time, but now I felt confronted with an enormous missed opportunity. I have so many questions for him now.

When recently reading Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, I could not help but wonder if guests at the American Embassy’s terrible barbecue that the author imagines so vividly now sigh over the opportunities they missed by avoiding chatting with that crashing bore Osama bin Laden. In Hanif’s telling, bin Laden is a maladroit guest who lists about unsuccessfully trying to strike up conversations with important people. He is a teetotaling version of Peter Sellers in The Party, with the dénouement of his role in this particular party occurring many years later and extra-textually.

History is rife with Frankensteinian examples of the United States going to spectacular lengths to destroy the monsters it has gone to spectacular lengths to create. While bin Laden was one such monster, General Zia, the central focus of Mangoes, appears not to have been, to the discredit of our government. Zia, the planter of many ghastly seeds that continue to bear fruit to this day (among these fruits, the system which was able so handily to harbor Mr. bin Laden in his twilight years), Hanif weaves a Murder on the Orient Express-like web of motivations for the assassination of Zia, wherein the actual crashing of the aircraft that carried him was merely one of many knife-thrusts to his by then barely beating heart. None of his would-be assassins is American, however, and Very Important Americans go down with him when his plane crashes. Indeed, Zia is even infested by an internal army of tapeworms that could conceivably have taken him down. The godly stature of dictators lends them a very real air of immortality it seems, and their Rasputinish ability to escape death adds to the mythos that surrounds their persons. General Pervez Musharraf, for example, happily trots out story after story of his own nine lives in his memoir.

In Maria Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, it takes a carload of assassins, each of whom harbors a hair-raising revenge motive, to gun down General Trujillo as he drives to an evening’s assignation. The assassins are backed not only by the United States and the Catholic church but also by members of Trujillo’s own inner circle. The car, the driver, and the General are riddled with bullets, but Vargas Llosa has also imagined Trujillo as afflicted with prostate problems and impotence, conditions which are destroying his ability to satisfy his legendary libido. The truly awful dénouement, which is not his assassination, is a rape and deflowering by the impotent dictator of a young girl, offered up to him by an out-of-favor vassal. Vargas Llosa seems to imagine this moment as both a tribute to Trujillo’s numerous sexual victims and a metaphor for the way in which the old man was able to continue to screw over his people long after his real power was gone.

III. A Brand New Kind of Poetry

It is the peculiar challenge faced by the artist that he must continually come up with ideas that are wholly new and original. Yet once he is successful, he must also conform to expectations of his distinctive imprimatur. One of the dangers of fame, my father always likes to say, is that you can end up ‘doing yourself,’ by which he means that artists cursed with fame and renown run the risk of feeding public expectations by producing art that is imitative of their own most successful works. With fame, the works of Joe Smith become Joe Smithesque, pastiches of that Joe Smith style we’ve all come to know and love.

A similar challenge is faced by torturers. How to be creative enough to extract new information from detainees? To truly break a person’s spirit? What if the victim is jaded? Has seen and heard it all? What if he is even desensitized to torture? And furthermore, to combine these two propositions, how does a novelist write about torture in a manner that is uniquely horrifying but not the stuff of horror films? How does a creative writer create a creative torturer that shakes his complacent reader to the core but does not cause that reader to drop the book in revulsion? There will be humiliation, physical pain, rows of instruments, dark fetid chambers covered with disturbing stains. Some regimes will have particular trademark features to their torture regimens: ‘the chair,’ ‘the clamps,’ etc. As with the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one’s initial horrified reaction can become dulled and desensitized. It’s natural to push our reaction to a psychologically acceptable position where we will not be in a position to feel tormented by disturbing information.

In succession I read A Case of Exploding Mangoes, In the Country of Men, The Feast of the Goat. Each one featured at least a modicum of torture. The Feast of the Goat featured a whole lot of torture. Just about enough torture to make it tortuous to read about the torture. I recall reading somewhere (Wikipedia, perhaps?) that Vargas Llosa included a great deal of realistic torture in his novel about Trujillo as an antidote to the tendency among Latin American fabulists to use magical realism to discuss the excesses of dictatorial regimes. Vargas Llosa chose instead to use regular realism to discuss these things. The result is both disturbing and strangely dull; there’s just a touch of Human Rights Watch report about the pacing of the narrative. Virtually every assassin and conspirator implicated in the murder of Trujillo is hunted down, incarcerated and tortured. Each torture is documented, as is each death. The narrative is part fiction and part accounting. It eventually wears thin, though the novel clearly serves a particular purpose that has nothing to do with creative work.

I later, on the advice of a friend who learned I was reading lots of novels about torture, read a slim novel by Naguib Mahfouz called Karnak Café. The novel concerns the habitués of a cafe in Cairo under the regime of Nasser. The narrator observes the slow crumbling of a social circle of young students as they are imprisoned, tortured and released in several rounds of purges of ‘enemies’ of the revolution. Eventually the social circle, reduced in its numbers, is reconstituted, the bonds between its members badly damaged. One day the man who has tortured them all, their direct torturer, appears in the cafe himself. In the interim, he too has been arrested and tortured. He is no longer part of the regime; through experience, he has become one of them. They are jaded, all of them, and they accept him with a strange equanimity. An encounter that one might imagine to be fraught and horrifying feels almost flat.

The strange flatness of affect in parts of The Feast of the Goat and Karnak Café make the not magical realism but certainly not conventional realism of Roberto Bolaño an excellent antidote. In Bolaño’s short novel Distant Star set during the beginning of the Pinochet regime in Chile, a character appears in a group of young poets who promises that he will totally change the nature of Chilean poetry. [Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD] The character turns out to be a bright young regime apparatchik and torturer whose wholly original poetic interventions include arresting most of the poets, murdering the most attractive women poets, sky-writing portions of Genesis in Latin for admiring crowds of fascist regime supporters, and creating an installation of photographs and poems documenting his torture and murder of women poets. Bolaño’s off-the-wall imagining of a revolutionary poet who uses torture and death as his art perfectly captures the torturer’s conundrum by marrying it to the conundrum of the writer or artist. How to create a signature style that is utterly new yet clearly one’s own? It’s classic Bolaño.

Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) by D. H. Lawrence

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:

Rum + Savage = 0.

Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.
Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines ?

The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red lndian, the Esquimo, the Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers.

Ou sont les neiges d’antan?

My dear, wherever they are, they will come down again next winter, sure as houses.

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it. As far as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic. Even when he doesn’t know it. He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn’t believe in us and our civilization, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth.

Belief is a mysterious thing. It is the only healer of the soul’s wounds. There is no belief in the world.

The Red Man is dead, disbelieving in us. He is dead and unappeased. Do not imagine him happy in his Happy Hunting Ground. No. Only those that die in belief die happy. Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin come back unappeased, for revenge.

A curious thing about the Spirit of Place is the fact that no place exerts its full influence upon a new-comer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America. While the Red Indian existed in fairly large numbers, the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the daimon, or demon, of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes. The Mexican is macabre and disintegrated in his own way. Up till now, the unexpressed spirit of America has worked covertly in the American, the white American soul. But within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.

There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian. First was Franklin’s feeling, that a wise Providence no doubt intended the extirpation of these savages. Then came Crevecoeur’s contradictory feeling about the noble Red Man and the innocent life of the wig-wam. Now we hate to subscribe to Benjamin’s belief in a Providence that wisely extirpates the Indian to make room for ‘cultivators of the soil’. In Crevecoeur we meet a sentimental desire for the glorification of the savages. Absolutely sentimental. Hector pops over to Paris to enthuse about the wigwam.
The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today.

The bulk of the white people who live in contact with the Indian today would like to see this Red brother exterminated; not only for the sake of grabbing his land, but because of the silent, invisible, but deadly hostility between the spirit of the two races. The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. So there you are.

….

When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.

Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.
But probably, one day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however. When the factories have fallen down again.

You fill the air with smiles
For miles and miles and miles
Though you’re no Mona Lisa
For worlds I’d not replace
Your sunny, funny face

–”Funny Face” Lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin (sung here by Fred Astaire)

After watching Gone with the Wind at an impressionable age, I became obsessed with the flexibility of Clark Gable’s eyebrows. I endeavored for many months afterwards to develop the muscles necessary to produce similar effects with my own eyebrows. I now bear the mark of my success on my 42-year-old-face: a surprising fountain of wrinkles originating from my left eyebrow and shooting upward toward my hairline that seem to have materialized overnight. At night, brushing my teeth before the mirror, I stare intently at the wrinkles and try to produce the facial expressions that created them. And then I naturally think about age, and about death, and about Osama bin Laden’s face, and what, exactly, the Navy Seals did to it that makes photographs of it unfit for public consumption.

Whenever an impossibly famous individual disappears without a public viewing of the body (and sometimes even then; cf: Elvis), rumors abound as to whether the personage in question is actually dead. The curious decision to keep from the public the image that would prove the kill has naturally fueled an abundance of theories. So that members of the United States Government might not also feel inclined to indulge in such conspiracy theorizing, the White House set up a limited access peep-show to which select individuals of prominent stature, such as John McCain, were invited to see the booty captured and killed by our boys. They came away convinced, slightly shaken, perhaps a little horrified, but gratified that with their tremendous stature came access to the nation’s top-drawer death porn.

Were his brains blown out? His eyes shot from his head? And if his face was revoltingly disfigured, how then would such a photograph make indisputable his identity in death? What vestige of his face was left to prove to John McCain with a photo that we had our man? With the capture of Saddam Hussein, the captors chose to distribute a humiliating image of the former leader sticking his head out of his foxhole, groggy, ungroomed, a wild-eyed old man blinking in the sudden light of the sun. “He was in the bottom of a hole with no way to fight back,” reported Major General Raymond Odierno proudly. “He was caught like a rat.” The photograph was depressing as it was convincing, and in any event, he was executed eventually. Blood lust satisfied, conspiracy theories crushed (unless it was one of his doubles?).

In Osama’s case, at least, there is said to be a photo, and there is said to have been a body, now swimming with the fishes off the coast of Karachi. In the case of the alleged killing of militant Ilyas Kashmiri by drone last month, there seems no way of proving the deed. As Interior Minister Rehman Malik put it, officials were “98% sure” that Kashmiri was one of the humans blown out by a drone strike. The target was said to be taking his tea in an orchard at the time, an image that bears with it a fragile, civilized gentility in comparison with the CIA’s not particularly covert video game-like military operation in Pakistan. Soon after he was supposedly killed, Kashmiri’s family gave an almost irritable interview that seemed rather pointed in its criticism of the missing father and husband. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write; if you are reading this right now, Ilyas K, you should know that your family is not pleased with your behavior. They said they’d believe he was dead when they had proof. Of course they’ll never have it; the United States has become too fastidious to parade its victims’ heads in the village square.

I.

Rudolph says to the sheriff,
“For five long years you’ve tried.
And you can search as long as you like,
you can try with all your might,
but I’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.
I’ll see you in the sweet bye and bye.”

Sheriff says to Eric Rudolph,
“Through caves and abandoned mines,
We’ll search through scraps and the old feed sacks.
In every old place you could hide.”
– Ballad of Eric Rudolph, Michael Holland (2008)

For a time, Mr. Rudolph’s success as a fugitive reframed the conflict, from criminal vs. the law to local boy vs. federal intruders. It made him a celebrated underdog, with T-shirts being sold bearing the phrases “Run Rudolph Run” and “Hide and Seek Champion.”
– New York Times, April 9, 2005

Eric Rudolph disappeared for five years in the United States. He planted bombs and killed civilians at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, family planning clinics, and a gay club in 1998 and then, went on the run. It was hard to believe, sitting in the States, that someone can disappear like that. We were all in the known universe. I don’t believe at his capture, much was made of him. John Ashcroft called him “the most notorious American fugitive”. This was in 2003. The coverage, which I followed, didn’t make any connection between Rudolph and terrorism or between the plausibility of local help and Rudolph’s long evasion. Rudolph belonged to some other America – not the one where on May 1st, 2003 George W. Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” and where John Ashcroft was busy busting potheads. Rudolph was some lingering story – one about battles long over. His acts, his flight, his evasion or his capture had little to offer us.

II.

Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world…
– New York Times, May 2, 2011.

It is wrong to claim that Osama b. Laden was irrelevant long before he was killed. He wasn’t. He represented, and represents, hundreds of thousands of lives lost since December 2001 when US forces reportedly failed to capture or kill him. He disappeared for the next decade but that absence was filled with wars in Iraq and Pakistan – wars waged on the heads of civilians, among urban centers, and at the cost of trillions. Just the technological developments of killing from the skies accomplished in this decade are mind or moral numbing. No, Osama b. Laden was never irrelevant and he was never off the script. Sure, George W. Bush or Pervez Musharraf told us that the battle was now bigger, the stakes higher and the cost greater, but they were empty words. The deaths of September 11th, 2001 and the destructions that followed hold us accountable – to remember that the cost of those lives began in a bid for this one life. So, we must deal with that life and the narratives it spawned. NYT claims that he was a “hero in much of the Islamic world”. The obituary moves on, and we are left with that “fact”. What are we to make of it? Heroes, after all, were gods and immortals.

III.

The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.”
- New York Times, May 2, 2010.

I recently spoke at a conference in Chicago about teaching South Asia critically and I concluded with:

To tell the story of America’s entangled history with South Asia is the first and most basic step in teaching South Asia critically. Elihu Yale, who lived and worked in India for nearly three decades with the British East India Company from 1670 to 1699 donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods- Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India – laying the foundation of their first building. The first seated chair of Sanskrit emerged at Yale. In 1800 when Alexander Dow negotiated yet another treaty with the Sindhi Mirs to establish ports and harbors on the Arabian Sea, he specifically noted that Americans were to kept out of Sindh. The1856 Guano Islands Act passed by Congress claimed for the United States any “unclaimed” island with sufficient supplies of bird waste (to be used as fertiliser by American farmers) by any American entrepreneur, and this annexation to be defended by the US Navy. The list of island territories annexed, claimed or contested – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, and so on – is long and scattered around the globe. But that act of Congress is also part of the legal framework that created Guantanamo Bay and that enables drone assassinations in “remote frontier” regions of Pakistan where there “is no rule of law”. The opium trade network which sustained the East India Company coffers in the mid-19th century by supplying Bengal-raised opium to China was remitted through American cotton and that money seeped right into the Southern slave economy.

These entanglements disrupt the teleologies of postcolonial study in the United States, and they complicate the relationship of the academic to the funding bodies, to the region, and to the student. The politics of provincializing Europe are all too evident but the necessity to provincialize America bears laying out. We must look at the American state-war on the Native American populations – decreed explicitly by the post-Civil War Congress. We need to look at the barbary Muslim pirates in whose encounters American power first went ashore. We need to look at the American imperial gaze that stretched out towards the West and called it the open Frontier and sought to settle it, sought to categorize its people, its histories, build ethnographic portraits of the good Indians and the bad Indians. It is of utmost importance to our understanding of the American engagement with the Tribe post 2005 that we recall the work of John Wesley Powell and the Bureau of American Ethnology. We need to pay as much attention to Locke, Jefferson, Whitman, Turner, Wilson as we do to Hegel or Heidegger or Bentnick or Curzon.

The “Indians” or the “hostiles” as they were once named remain an indelible part of our national myth. The myopia we extend out to the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan exists in North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma. We have programmed forgetfulness in our civic and political lives. We have enabled our academic lives to non-entities in the public sphere.

IV.

I go myself, as agent of the British Government, to a Court of the language and manners of which I am utterly ignorant, and to accomplish that of which the most sanguine have no hope. It is simply a matter of duty .
- James Abbott, Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburgh (1843)

Abbottabad was named to memorialize the service of Sir James Abbott, commissioner of the Hezara region. One can say that he became immortal.

V.

So I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes, airports, military bases, and anything else that is of great value but doesn’t shelter innocent civilians. If it happens to be the wrong country, well, too bad, but it’s likely it did something to deserve it anyway. Or would in the future. And its leaders, as well as other troublemakers, would get the message: Terrorism is too costly a game.

President Clinton says we should be cautious about placing blame or taking action. OK. But when the time comes for punishment, it wouldn’t be an eye for eye. That’s just a swap. We should take both eyes, ears, nose, the entire anatomy. That’s how to make a lasting impression.
– Mike Royko, April 21, 1995, Chicago Tribune

Salman Rushdie wants Pakistan to be declared a terrorist nation and expelled from the “comity of nations”. To Rushdie a 6 ft 4in man wandering around a country of 5 ft 8in plebeians without getting noticed is inconceivable and, hence, the entire 180 million must pay the price. They were all in the know. Keeping mum even as drones kept killing their lots; even as the Taliban kept blowing up hotels, police compounds, intelligence agency offices, shrines and hospitals; even as the US kept endorsing and supporting dictatorial power over them; even as the US kept funding their military to the tune of tens of billions while “non-humanitarian aid” was pegged to a billion or so; even as an earthquake and a flood shook their geography loose. The millions of Pakistan kept their quiet, maybe giggling in anticipation of whenever Uncle Sam would catch them in the act. Now they have been caught! The ISI knew! This validates all the drones missiles! It means MORE DRONE MISSILES! Yeah. That is what it means. They were all in it, Rushdie. Every stinking lying one of them.

Royko wrote what I quote above after the Oklahoma City Bombing. I remember that morning. I was ironing my clothes for my night shift at the restaurant. I remember Connie Chung breathlessly telling me that men of Middle Eastern hue had been seen fleeing the scene. She was literally out of breath: The war in the Middle East has finally come to the United States. Royko was similarly shocked and convinced. It wasn’t important that almost immediately the call had went out to look for white caucasian suspects. Later, in October 2001, we kept hearing that Timothy McVeigh got his training or his weapon or something from Iraq. Royko’s wish came true – we got both ears, nose, the entire anatomy. Maybe Rushdie’s wish would come true as well. Who remembers Geronimo anyways?

In the Fall, I am hoping to teach a class on Experts as a category of Knowledge Brokers in the colonial and postcolonial world. Thinking a riff from Richard F. Burton to TE Lawrence to Rory Stewart by way of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Plus databases and spying drones. Here is somewhat of a programmatic preview in The National:

Flying blind: US foreign policy’s lack of expertise

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America’s imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of “expert”. We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens – Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan – a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of “experts” such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation – that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised.

Do read the whole thing and let me know here (I would be SERIOUSLY GRATEFUL for syllabus recs). Also the print version has nice pictures [pdf].

Also, I should note that this piece is a continuation of two earlier efforts at the National, and should be read as such: