Guest post: But for the oppressed people of the rest of the world they show the middle finger
Originally a comment by Carlos Cabanita on If you say “I’m not Charlie,” you are not a liberal.
I agree. How come Western liberals love their liberties so much, conquered through centuries of bloody wars and revolutions (and we aren’t halfway through, I think), but for the oppressed people of the rest of the world they show the middle finger?
Stay with your mullahs, accept your theocratic dictators, hide under your burkas and leave us alone! As long as you let us play our world chess and get cheap oil to finish poisoning the planet, it’s all right for us.
This position is imperialist, the same as that other one that demonizes Islam as an unhistorical evil power that threatens the West and against which all neocon aggression is justified. It’s like the good cop-bad cop routine of the enhanced interrogation (torture).
I’ve seen the Maghrebi women working in a Paris saturday morning, happy to show off their miniskirts and fashion. Paris gives them a taste of freedom, so precious we can’t imagine, because it’s scarce. Returning home they have to cover again, but they were able to taste a bit of freedom and it’s addictive. So those defending the rights of the religious Islamic patriarchic men want to police them even in France, under the pretext of respecting their culture. Why respect the culture if we don’t respect people?
If we denounce the terrorist attacks of Islamists, we are accused of playing into the neocon discourse. If we denounce the imperialist “war on terror”, we are accused of supporting the terrorists. The only solution is to take a clear stance against terrorism but also give support to those of our sisters and brothers who fight for freedom and human rights in the developing countries and among the migrant communities. After all, they are the only hope that their countries one day would become really democratic, progressive and peaceful.
Despite all the obfuscation happening now, this position will win in the long run, I hope.
The building of healthy working nations, with increasing openness and civil freedom is the only way of development that works for their societies. That’s what they have been doing all along, as soon as they managed to come out of the colonial stranglehold. Look at all those Latin American countries. Who liberated them? Themselves. Who torpedoed their independence and wealth all the way? The US.
Who scuttled the Sukarno Indonesian government in a terrible bloodbath to impose Suharto? Who chased Mosadegh to enthrone the Shah? More recently, who destroyed Libya? (No, they did not destroy the Qaddafi regime, they destroyed the country with Al Qaeda troops under the command of NATO military cadres and covered by the attacks of their Air Forces.)
Now the US/NATO is trying to do the same to Syria, after destroying Iraq (once more, they did much more than destroying the regime, they ruined the country).
Why do I say all this? Because racism, as much as it is prevalent in Europe and the USA against the Muslim immigrants, is not what stings the millions that are still in their countries. It’s imperialism.
And I return to Obama. He gloats that the US is the mightiest country in the world. Sure. And shows his hands red with the blood of the people he has been killing in illegal covert wars and drone attacks. His hands are not cleaner than Bush/Cheney’s, they are perhaps dirtier. Nobody knows, it’s all secret now.
So fuck him.
I’ve grown up somewhat tightly with the first wave of immigrants, and among many Algerian new comers in France.
Legally it was far from clear if we should call them immigrant because they were born French, and many considered to be both French and Algerian heartily. And yes, some people were racist at that time, and yes, many more people are racist today than at that time (and without any doubt communautarism leading to prejudice is strongly correlated to dire social and economic situation).
I fairly well remember how nice it was when my family was partying with their newly arrived friends and just how light, festive, and lovely it was… Discussing latest news from “the bled” (“the village”), playing chess, exchanging foods and recipes, singing and dancing and yes it involved smoking and alcohol.
Friendship despite recent history and the willingness of some from both sides to call out for bloody revenge and hate.
While ‘liberal modernity’ was diversely enrooted in North Africa among all the regions, there’s one thing for sure: many places were already enjoying cultural secularism and the right to define oneself within and outside religion, together, with respect, without rejecting anyone. You could both be woman with liberal clothes and still completely compliant to then religious standards and nobody would obfuscate.
Times have changed. Dogmatic religious takes on self-identification and expression is way more enforced today and the communautarian sidelines are so coldly expressed both ways.
I make the comment just as a reminder that muslim cultural heritage did evolve recently toward a more rigid social encoding which is closer to a mythical golden past than it is from what actually prevailed in history, especially in recent history.
Therefore, we should not be too confused and consider the current and strong individual enforcement as something inherent and historical and as a long standing set of social norms, for it isn’t. That would just be unfair to the actual golden legacy that islam contributed to during history, distant and recent. Because it doesn’t actually include regressive social norms.
The Western liberal approach to respecting fabricated cultural legacy narratives is not only imperialist, it is also strongly ignorant of the recent decades.
Of course, I did frame ‘liberal modernity’ with bracket to signify that it doesn’t refer to Western liberalism but to muslim liberalism of that time. It doesn’t suggest that it wasn’t true liberalism, because it was. Liberalism is certainly not something only shared by the Western world at all. Those who believe that are incredibly narrow minded, to not say things less politely.
‘…Al Qaeda troops under the command of NATO military cadres’
Not the Elders of Zion in black helicopters?
Liberal values are opposed to tyranny, whether imperial or religious. Western politics is so parochial, so devoted to internal schisms and grudges, that the fear of ‘playing into the hands of’ one set of Bad Guys makes us unable to address another.
Thank you Ofhelia fot the publication. I was not aware, as I was working and only now got to see it.
About what I say on Lybia, you can find out, as I did accidentally, several monts after the invasion (it was an invasion, not an Arab Spring).
The Arab Spring really happened in Tunisia. It happened too in several countries with diverse outcomes, but the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia used the Arab Spring script to attack the countries they have long decided to attack: Lybia and Syria.
Lybia is a model for modern imperialist warfare. It is a military covert war deeply masked in deception and propaganda actions, with the complicity of most of the news organizations. The embryo of that is the fake show about getting down the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad during the US invasion of 2003, with the “people” having been flown in just the night before.
Thank you for the content, Carlos.
I believe it will.
The ability to live and define ourselves freely as individuals allows each individual to grow and flourish in whatever way is best for them.
Humans that are happy, healthy and flourishing will always, in the long run, triumph over humans that are miserable, unhealthy and sickly. The only thing that the miserable, unhealthy and sickly can do against the happy, healthy and flourishing is to attempt to control and suppress them with violence and the threat of violence.
So long as humans that are willing and passionate to aspire to happiness, health and flourishing can escape the clutches of those who would stop them, then the success of the former is inevitable.
Those of us with the power to help such people escape have an obligation to act to help them.