Climate of Fear
Page 6
I am persuaded that this is a ritualistic offering that no man-eating dictator, with the innate theatrics of that breed, could ever refuse.
Three
Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds
I propose to address this topic from two directions— one, the political; the other, the religious. Given the fact that, in the present day—and indeed, in a nearly unbroken continuum of history—both often prove to be merely two sides of the same coin, it should not be surprising if, from time to time, it would indeed appear that all we are engaged upon is tossing up, just like a coin, one two-sided notion. We watch it spin through the air in a blur of rapid alternations, and succumb to the law of gravity—known as coming down to earth—to reveal one side or the other, almost interchangeably. The sanctimoniousness that often characterizes one— the political—on the one hand, and the sacrosanctity that is claimed as the foundation of the other, even when it extends its constituency to the political and the mundane, make it clear that they are both claimants to the same highway of influence and control of human lives whose ultimate destination is power—the consolidation of power in itself, or the execution of policies that aspire to the total control of a polity.
Thus, the president of a powerful nation addresses a political situation in what amounts to the language of revelation tinged with messianism. Nearly on the other side of the globe, a religious leader whips up his citizens in a frenzy of alarm whose tenor is that the very salvation of their collective soul—and only incidentally the survival of the state—is jeopardized. In the hysterical condition that is aroused in the populace, hundreds of youths are sentenced to be hanged for the crime of being “agents of Satan,” “enemies of God,” and so on. Back again on the other side, wars of dubious justification are launched, humanity is savaged, the globe destabilized, and all rhetoricians of power sleep soundly, until it is time for the next hysterical whip-up. The coupling within “for God and country” is no historic accident.
Let me, as we proceed, call attention to the fact that hysteria is not always an outwardly expressed abnormality, usually loud and violent. In fact, there is the quiet form of hysteria, as medical experts will testify. Hysteria can also manifest itself as a collective and infectious outbreak, one that cannot always be accurately traced to a logical causative event. At its most affective, it emerges as the product of a one-way communication—a monologue, in short—that succeeds in blinding its followers to the very realities that surround them while sealing them in a community of conviction, even of the unresolved kind. That condition is indifferent to verification of the content of what is being communicated, indifferent to the moralities or justice—if any—of its claims, or the probable consequences of its pursuit. The moment is all, and creates for each affected member a highly solipsistic existence within a charmed circle, whose only reference point is that infinite moment of mass excitation. The rhetorical hysteria that is produced in such circumstances often dissipates soon after, but not always. Numbers promise more than safety, as in “safety in numbers”—they often guarantee certitude and invulnerability. Thus the collective conviction that sustains the individual may be dissipated with the physical dispersal of the crutch of numbers—let us say, after a political or religious rally. In such a case, the pathology of the moment is redressed by a return to reality, and each individual regains his or her whole being—until the next time.
However, a hard core of the message embedded in that emotive ferment may linger on, resulting in individual recalls, at various levels of consciousness, of the basic tenor of the collective experience, urging on the execution of its embedded message. The core of retention may be beatific, resulting in a resolve to improve the lot of a long-neglected neighbor, make restitution where some illegality has been committed, or an immoral advantage secured. It can lead to a grandiose vision for the betterment or salvation of mankind. The religious variety is prone to generating such an aftermath, a Moral Rearmament longing of one kind or another. On the other hand, alas, it may produce the very opposite, the destructive and apocalyptic. The ideological route is an equally mixed bag, but usually more disruptive, more contradictory, since it lays claim to rational processes yet acts with the dogmatism of pure revelation.
What I have referred to as rhetorical hysteria may therefore be safely considered the product of a one-way communication; that is, the monologue or public harangue. Dialogue, on the other hand, actually involves exchange, and the circumstances must be very abnormal indeed when it results in the hysterical condition. It is both convenient and relevant to personify, at this point, the difference between these two through the contrasting personalities of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and others of like temper, and the current, embattled leader of Iran, President Khatami. We shall return to this most instructive pair toward the end.
It would also help, perhaps, if we advanced our exploration of the rhetorical theme through the terrain of light relief, if only to nudge the more self-assured nations, movements, and religions in the direction of a sense of proportion. We might reflect their certitudes through escapades that are often no more than self-indulgent gambits, which they would prefer to despise as simplistic mimicries of their own more advanced and elaborate, as well as better-structured and -packaged manifestos. What often develops to the level of rhetorical hysteria may begin as small pinpricks designed to annoy a complacent society and perhaps reinforce a group feeling of dissidence, but may grow into veritable monstrosities of absolute notions that run amok, consuming all within sight until they eventually consume themselves or are consumed by more rabid challengers. I shall share my favorite example, but not just yet. First, we should establish the sociopolitical background and context, just to situate ourselves in the general ambience of its times.
Many here will still recall that leftist phase of the sixties, labeled Trotskyite or Maoist, one that is now being superseded by other radical motions toward the transformation of man and society. It is a phase that is now receding into obscurity, thanks mostly to the collapse of communist ideology. I happen to believe that the humanistic foundation of the socialist ideal has not been thereby invalidated, but this belongs to another discourse entirely. In any case, the passion for a basis in ideological righteousness is still daily manifested in isolated anarchic acts against society, as well as in ideologically based wars around the globe. The period that I wish to recall was characterized by the exploits of the Red Brigade, based largely in Italy, Action Directe in France, the Baader-Meinhof in Germany, etc., with clones in Latin America and Japan, in addition to one or two isolated spots in Asia. Perhaps the most sensational single event of that period was the kidnapping and murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Kidnapping of businessmen or their relations for ransom was commonplace, nor can one easily forget the ruthless, cult-style executions in hidden mountain caves of Japan for alleged crimes of deviation from the pure strain of the revolutionary ideal. Not too surprisingly, other variants resulted in convoluted alliances between ideological and criminal impulses—drug trafficking allied to radical idealism in countries like Colombia.
The famous youth-inspired 1968 uprising in Paris that attempted to resurrect a commune modeled after the Paris Commune of the French revolutionary ferment was another notable manifestation of the passion for change, a severe testing of the status quo, and very French in temper, despite its continental alliances. Other names like Daniel “Danny the Red”, Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray, and Angela Davis entered the lore of world revolutionary gladiators, satellites in orbit around the ultimate symbol of the times—Che Guevara. Depending on which arc of the class spectrum one occupied, and the methodology of action advocated and deployed, the overall movement evoked among the world population extreme degrees of admiration, revulsion—and fear. How wide would the movement spread, especially among youth? How deeply would it undermine the fabric of society?
This, then, was the setting for a far less sensational but widely spread offshoot of the same cast of mind—the junior
partner, if you like—that had sprung up within the radical atmosphere of the sixties. It is the extract from the diffuse, nonlethal offshoot, a proliferating mantra, that I wish to identify as typifying the nature of rhetoric that, in varying degrees of flippancy and adolescent conviction, can graduate over time into an agenda for unreflective extremism. It builds up to a hysterical level that turns an otherwise rational section of humanity into active conduits for, at the very least, a mandatory suspension of disbelief. It is a phenomenon that reveals itself in its abandonment of skepticism. A new community is born, imbued with its own moral code—again, not one that is subjected to rigorous tests—that places itself outside existing social arrangements. A complacent society views it at first with a condescending amusement, later with trepidation.
How I came to observe this process firsthand was just as relevant to my observations. I was in self-imposed exile, a therapy I had embarked upon for another situation of lethal rhetorics that had sacrificed a million or two of Nigerian humanity under the rhythmic mantra: To keep the nation one is a task that must be done. Our civil war was being concluded in a mood of euphoria and, as I emerged from prison detention, I was not sure which form of hysteria grated more—the tone of nationalist jingoism that had surrounded me before I was locked up, one that made that war inevitable in the first place, or the barely suppressed triumphalist smugness into which I was thrust as I regained my freedom. Military success was equated with a divine vindication of the war.
On the other side, in the breakaway Biafran state, the same syndrome had more tragic results. Youths went into battle with nothing but wooden guns in their hands, captives of the same rhetoric that was drummed daily into their heads—No power on the African continent can subdue us. That belief had somehow translated into the mimic guns with which they charged the federal foe, as reported by a colleague who pronounced himself numbed by the experience. Was it any different, I wondered, from the self-submission of normally hardheaded men to the rhetorical powers of a Ugandan, Alice Lakwena, and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces? Alice’s volunteers charged into hails of bullets, convinced that they were immune to their penetration, that the force of bullets was neutralized as a result of the inoculation that Alice had administered to them. After the capture of Alice in Tanzania, a university professor who had been part of her army was asked, in an interview, how it was possible for him, a man of presumed intellect, to have been persuaded of the supernatural powers of this woman, and for so long. He could proffer no answer, only that he supposed that they had all been under some spell. Fatalities, he said, had been rationalized away—such victims were only the weak in faith. This scenario has been sadly encountered in many more civil-war zones all over the continent, most especially among the child soldiers.
And now we come to the nurturing environment of the mantra. As I began my lecture tour of some European universities during that exile, it did not take long for me to realize that the mood of the historic Paris uprising was still in the ascendant, never mind the failure of that movement—and perhaps the zeal, being all that was left, was even more willfully embraced on that account. I came into daily contact with students and all manner of disenchanted youths seeking a revolutionary answer to the inequalities, the oppressive contradictions of their societies. Maoists, or Maoist-Leninists, or Trotskyites,
Proudhonists, or Maoist-Leninist-Trotskyites, Stalinist-Leninists . . . no matter what hyphenated revolutionary tendencies they professed, all had one fundamental trait in common. They were bearers of a new illumination on the condition and future of human society. They were the subversive agents who would topple the bourgeois order and liberate the “new man” with all his potential, unfettered by the norms of a failed society, its hypocrisies and dubious ethical values. They formed a compact of solidarity with the marginalized no matter how remotely placed—from the bauxite mines of Jamaica to the coal mines of South Africa. Ideologically schooled in Marxism, even at its most rudimentary, most did not directly espouse anarchism as a social philosophy, but gave a practical, anarchic demonstration of the cue they had elicited from Karl Marx’s analysis of law: law was not neutral, but was an instrument to protect the interests of the ruling classes. In a class struggle, therefore, which it was their avowed mission, indeed their duty, to initiate, law itself was to be repudiated.
As for wealth, from where did wealth emanate but from the exploitation of man by man, proven by the immoral profit from the surplus labor of others? Thus, logically, their enabling mantra, based on the authority of Karl Marx, which declared quite simplistically that All property is theft. That slogan was put into practice in any number of ways, from the merely self-dramatizing gesture to the socially disruptive, once it was placed in tandem with Marx’s interpretation of law, which could now be taken as advocating its own overthrow.
In Germany or France of the late sixties to early seventies, a student who took a parked bicycle, motorbike, or motorcar that belonged to another did not consider it an act of theft. He kept it and returned it at his leisure, or simply kept it for as long as it took him to acquire a more attractive or convenient one, abandoning the former hundreds of kilometers from where its owner last saw it. Libraries bewailed their helplessness as students took away books and never returned them, often returning to exercise their right to “borrow” some more. Others felt that the shelves of bookstores should be open to the acquisitive mood of the reader. Students felt quite noble in raiding the accounts of a parent or guardian—or indeed, the neighborhood store. All property is theft—and that, do take note, included intellectual property. In short, plagiarism was no crime.
I recall an incident in my own university in Ibadan, Nigeria, where a radicalized section of the student body had also caught the fever. If my former students are listening, I hope they will excuse me—I promise that this is the last time I shall make use of this incident, but it was a most revealing episode for me at the time, given my own search for an ideological anchor within the troubled and questing postcolonial generation in my own society. In any case, it is simply too juicy a recollection for me to abandon so easily! There was a protest demonstration; I no longer recall the cause, but it grew violent. In the process, a professor whose role was considered objectionable during the crisis became a target of the students’ ire and a prime candidate for “revolutionary justice”— another of those rhetorical devices embraced by states in their postrevolution phase and adopted by radical movements. The professor’s house on campus was invaded and vandalized, then his office. His research papers were set on fire. Later, I tackled some of the students: why, I demanded, had they gone so far as to destroy what was, in effect, the lifework of this senior colleague (whose politics, incidentally, I also despised)? The reply I received was straight from the European revolutionary cookbook that I had encountered in Paris or Frankfurt: intellectual property, they declared, is not the product of any one individual; thus, the professor had no personal claims to anything that was lost.
That same tendency—albeit by no means of the same pyromaniacal temper—was echoed at the time by radical caucuses in Europe and the United States. It gave rise to the buzzword “collective.” Even performance groups were no longer acting companies or drama troupes, but “collectives.” A famous American author caught the fever. She went—for a while—to the extreme extent of refusing to credit her own person with authorship of her books: it was the work of collective humanity, she declared, and she was merely the humble medium through whom these insights were expressed. It was one of those revivalist periods of the thoughtful, committed, but guilt-laden left—personal proprietorship of any kind had become the original sin. I recall meeting her during this period and asking her how she resolved the issue of collectivism when it came to the distribution of royalties. Frankly, I do not remember that she provided any satisfactory answer.
This was an infectious, but only mildly misleading eruption of the rhetorical hysteria that overtook radicalized minds all over the world, one that was characterized by
a one-dimensional approach to all faces of reality, however varied or internally contradicting. The most dangerous of these catchphrases has surely resurfaced in the minds of many of us in contemporary times: There are no innocents! Yes, it was prevalent even then. The sixties and seventies’ mood of extreme militancy, its repudiation of all “bourgeois morality,” a natural proceeding from the logic of the class-subservient interests of law, led remorselessly to the tacit, sometimes loudly argued endorsement of acts of sabotage, kidnapping, and even murder. At the time, the self-willed hysteria was induced by a deliberate exercise of blinding the mind to other considerations, screaming doubts into silence. Sometimes it was a silent scream, inaudible, but it was one that was nonetheless legible on the faces of a number in any crowd of those “conscientization” sessions if one was not caught up in the rhetorical fervor. The sessions were closer in temper to a Billy Graham religious revivalism than to the models that they sought to emulate, such as Fidel Castro’s famous marathons.
Shall we take one more example? It would be a great pity to leave out a revolutionary favorite of that infectious season of liberation, whose total, self-sacrificial idealism was certainly shared by many of us in that generation, indeed, must be regarded as inevitable, given the circumstances of colonial repressions: Power grows from the barrel of a gun—attributed to Mao Zedong. It filled the revolutionary airwaves, but, even if this were a truthful absolute—and I use this only as an illustration of the elisions that are built into the rhetorical structure—what was conveniently suppressed were the innumerable contradictions and cautions of the dialectical propositions that would arise effortlessly from such a thesis, and which strike us today, in hindsight, with such demonstrable force from one continent to another. I refer to potentially inhibitory discoveries of history and society, such as Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nowhere was this more robustly exemplified than in the Soviet Union and its empire, which were held up as fulfillment of radical absolutes that sometimes proved little more than rhetorical devices. There is room for dialectical thought within rhetoric—indeed, rhetoric may be reinforced by legitimate syllogisms—but the heady rhetoric whose goal is mass hysteria is not designed to pause for sequences of logical, even if purely theoretical, deductions.