Climate of Fear

by Wole Soyinka

  Is it any surprise that the new purveyors of fear of our time have moved beyond submission to such rational scrutiny? They are not the student cafeteria crowd, or the Sunday-afternoon rhetoricians of Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, who, after all, return home and redigest and debate what has been proposed. They are creatures not of uncertainty but of holy conviction, and they have demonstrated again and again that they consider their lives of value only when they expend them— not even incidentally, but in a deliberate act guaranteed to take the maximum toll on innocents—as the ultimate consummation of that conviction. Not for them the Buddhist route of a limited self-immolation as the ultimate statement, as was prevalent in South Korea under the reign of dictatorial incontinence. These belong to a most select, near-impenetrable community, from within whose ranks power, even posthumously, grows from the suicide bomb.

  There are no innocents: this accentuation of the earlier rhetoric—All property is theft—which makes us all thieves since we claim life as property, however temporarily, is what marks the difference between the rhetorical hysteria that held the world in thrall in those fervid sixties and seventies, on the one hand, and the nature of what we are witnessing today. Combine those two limited shorthand rhetorical triggers and we move to the zone of the catechism that claims that All life is theft, and thus should be restored to its legitimate owner by any true believer, and as rapidly as possible. If only we could persuade the apostles of such gospels of the infinite justice of leaving such restoration to the personal intervention of the divine proprietor! Alas, they have constituted themselves agents of restitution, where innocents pay sudden forfeit, without even the consolation of seeking assurance of divine forgiveness for the lamentable lapse of living.

  The question we must now confront is this: who or what are the principal agents of the season of rhetorical hysteria that now seek to bind and blind the world within our climate of fear?

  We need a lot of objectivity, and a commitment to equitable dealing, in addressing this question. Fortunately—but what a costly piece of fortune!—the world has received a most exemplary piece of instruction in the devastating potential of the private addiction to a rhetorical condition that can spread and infect a whole nation. For this, we must thank the president of one of the most powerful nations of the world, the United States. For an intense period that began a year or more ago, our airwaves were bombarded with an entrapment piece of monologue of just four words—weapons of mass destruction. It was a sustained demonstration, both as metaphor and as prophecy, of how empty such rhetoric can prove, yet how effectively it can blind a people, lead them into a cul-de-sac, securing nearly an entire nation within a common purpose that proves wrongly premised. Outside that nation, more than a few others were swept up in the hysteria that was stimulated by no more than the simple but passionate evocation of that mantra, weapons of mass destruction. Predictably, it was only a matter of time before it acquired an acronym— WMD—either for ease of reference or perhaps as a relief for that uncooperative mantra that stubbornly refused to manifest its name. WMD aspired to the level of religious faith. Individuals who disputed its claimed reality found themselves subjected to abuse, sometimes of a violent nature. Both overtly and indirectly, unbeliever nations were either offered inducements or threatened with sanctions.

  The hysteria that was inspired by that presidential monologue echoed, for many, the McCarthy period of anticommunist hysteria, when the mere failure to denounce the communist ideology with satisfactory fervor, or to denounce one’s colleagues for communist sympathies, became an unpatriotic act that was sometimes accounted treason. Thus came into being the damning tag unAmerican activities, to ferret out and punish which a standing committee was set up in the United States legislature. Was there any difference between that rhetorical device of the mid-fifties and that of the turn of this century? Certainly there has been continuity. To ensure that the nation co-option that fed on the rhetoric of “the enemy within” did not lack for nourishment, the decades between unAmerican activities and weapons of mass destruction were caulked with holding devices of the nature of “Evil Empire” and, latterly, “Axis of Evil.” The beauty of the political mantra has always been its ability to distill complex events and global relationships into a rhetorical broth that precludes digestion, but guarantees satisfaction.

  Let no one underestimate the criminal immensity of September 11, 2001, that arrogant manifestation of the mantra There are no innocents, nor its hideous impact on global consciousness. The tasteless gloating of a handful of normally astute writers and intellectuals whose will to radicalism sometimes overpowers their humanism is only a measure of the pretentious detachment of some of us from the world we live in, and should not be permitted to cloud our individual revulsion over that event, any more than it should inhibit us from interrogating the choices of response that could be expected from the leadership of a stricken people. More than sufficient time has elapsed for objective consideration of the choices, with all due allowance also made for the fact that it was that space, not ours, that was most directly affected, most deeply traumatized, most deeply and forcibly injected with the virus of fear.

  There were options, however, and the case is being made here that the leadership of that nation chose to substitute, for a hard assessment of its relationship with the rest of humanity, an emotive rhetoric that blinded it even further, driving that nation deeper into an isolationist monologue, even within the debating chambers of the United Nations. Afghanistan of the Taliban, sheltering and collaborating with the murderous quasi-state of al-Qaeda, had declared direct war on a people and thus richly deserved its comeuppance. However, the rhetorical momentum engendered since the monstrous date of September 11 has propelled the United States into an unjustifiable war in Iraq. A global wave of sympathy has been frittered away in a defiant unilateralism that appears to thrive on hysteria and deception. We have watched and listened in recent times to the unedifying acts and pronouncements of a nation that is not accustomed to being contradicted, deeming it a heresy on the part of any nation or world figure to balk at intoning the mantra of weapons of mass destruction.

  Reprisals from the nation that draped its shoulders in a mantle of infallibility attained some bemusing dimensions. The greatest umbrage against the restraining community of skeptics was reserved for France, whose cultural penetration of the United States was more prolific in symbols of snobbishness than that of her partner in crime, the Federal Republic of Germany. Germany got off quite lightly. To the intense embarrassment of a substantial minority of Americans themselves, a number of restaurants that once proudly advertised themselves as French quickly changed their names or painted out the French tricolor designs outside their establishments. Nowhere is it recorded that any thought was given to the nation’s Canadian neighbor, which recognizes herself as bicultural. America’s lawmaking chambers took “French fries” off their cafeteria menu and renamed that item “Freedom fries.” The French baguette and croissants lost out to sourdough bread, bagels, and pretzels. Most incredible of all, many wineshops and bars threw out their stock of French wines, depleting their shelves as rapidly as they could by selling them at rock-bottom prices, where they were gleefully gobbled up by infidels to the gospel of WMD—among whom was most certainly a cash-strapped Nobelist who shall remain nameless. It was either you believed in weapons of mass destruction or you became overnight a pariah. It did not matter in the least that these WMD faithfuls understood that this was a dangerous religion that would not end in mere rhetoric but that guaranteed, from the very beginning, a denouement not simply of war, but of war-lust. The triumph of the monologue was supreme.

  There are moments, it must be admitted, when the imperatives of dialogue appear to be foreclosed. Nevertheless, we dare not stop contrasting the dangers of the monologue with the creative potentials of its alternative, the latter holding out a chance of contracting, if not completely dissipating, our climate of fear. Certainly, the proliferation of this frame of mind
can slow down the division of the world into two irreconcilable camps, and hopefully prevent such a division from taking permanent hold. Fortunately, a global awareness of the perilous consequences of avoidance is not missing and, thus, provides us with a positive note on which to end, invoking the lessons in contrast between two figures who may be held to personify the two polarities—monologue and dialogue. Both of them, most usefully, are products of the same history, the same religion, the same culture, and the same nation-state. I therefore invite you to accompany me to a milestone event that took place in the United Nations, with its symbolic timing for the end of the last millennium, an event that declared, in ringing terms, that it was time to eschew the sterile monologues of the past and cultivate a new spirit of dialogue, the only prescription that the world knows for the hysterical affliction that belongs to its adversary, the monologue.

  The event was the elaborate inauguration of the project Dialogue of Civilizations at the United Nations headquarters in New York, attended by several heads of state, other world leaders, intellectuals, ministers of religion, and so on. There it was that President Khatami of Iran, the main sponsor of the project—in partnership with UNESCO—delivered a most enlightened speech, one that, I am certain, took his audience by surprise. On the minds of most of that audience, including mine, was unquestionably the keen awareness that we were listening to the leader of the same nation that, not quite a decade earlier, had imposed on the world a new era of fear by a unilateral appropriation of the power of life and death over any citizen of our world as it pronounced a death fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie for his alleged offense against his religion, Islam. A major religion, deservedly classified as one of the world religions, but, just the same, only one of the structures of transcendental intimations, or superstitions, known as religion.

  It is not my intention here to pursue the rights and wrongs of the province of the imagination, certainly not my intention to berate or defend a writer accused of disrespect or insensitivity toward religious belief. My concern today is simply to call attention to the contrasting activities of the leadership of that country, Iran, in a truly elevating mission to restore dialogue to its rightful place as an agent of civilizations. Also, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the consequences of that precedent of a global incitement to murder are still very much with us, a poisoned watershed in the relationships between and within nations. It has contributed, to a large extent, to the very condition of global intolerance, bigotry, and sectarian violence to whose dismantling an elected Iranian leader now committed himself in the halls of the United Nations. All over the world, with a frequency, frenzy, and impunity that did not exist before the Salman Rushdie affair, a Friday sermon in a mosque over a real or imagined slight has led to mayhem in normally harmonious communities, in places stretching from Kaduna and the Plateau state in Nigeria to hitherto obscure Indonesian regions such as Aceh. Some may consider this timing a coincidence; if so, it is a coincidence that some of us did anticipate and openly predict at international gatherings.

  A dismal instance within my own nation, Nigeria, was that of the deputy governor of a largely Muslim state in the north, Zamfara, who catapulted his boss, for whom he was only a mouthpiece, into international notoriety by this mimic route, pronouncing a killing fatwa on a young journalist. Her crime? A comment that the Prophet Muhammad did not lack an eye for beauty in womanhood. This alleged insult, in addition to claims of provocation in the staging of a Miss World beauty pageant, whose so-called female immodesty a handful of zealots insisted was an affront to their religious sensibilities, led to the destabilization of the country’s capital city, Abuja, and the unleashing of an orgy of death and destruction that stunned the world in its mindlessness and ferocity. Like a number of others around the globe, mine was a nation that, once upon a time, indeed as recently as forty years ago, could offer herself as a model of tolerance, but has suffered, in the intervening period, a spate of religion-motivated violence on an unprecedented scale, and is fast becoming only another volatile zone of distrust, unease, and tension.

  We have a duty therefore to use every opportunity to disseminate efforts that counteract such moments of divisiveness and retrogression. President Khatami’s challenge has been taken up in several fora, even to the extent of the emergence of a permanent NGO— Dialogue of Civilizations. Still lacking, however, is a manifest global commitment, especially a sustained and dynamic reciprocity from rival cultures and religions. The word, of course, is “dynamic”—perhaps I should even use the word “aggressive.” The globe needs to be saturated, almost on a daily basis, with such encounters. There have been a number, admittedly, including one in Georgia of the former Soviet Union, under the same rubric as Dialogue; another in Macedonia. Others have taken place within Iran as well. I participated in one in Abuja, Nigeria, in December last year, the scene of the religion-instigated massacre to which I earlier referred.

  Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favorite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, “There is no lavender word for lynch.” Now, that is one line I would not mind converting to the service of rhetorical hysteria. It leaves no room for the continuation of the culture of impunity currently enjoyed by sacred but unholy cows.

  Our experiences in Nigeria—shared by numerous others—testify to the frequency of the lamentable conversion of the mantra of piety to the promotion of the most hideous form of impiety, which, in my catechism, translates as the slaughter of other human beings in the cause of religious or any other conviction. For those of us who grew up in an atmosphere where the first dawn sounds that lulled one out of sleep were the sounds of the muezzin—the jarring loudspeakers had not yet been co-opted—calling his flock to the first prayer of the day, soon to be intermingled with the chant of the Christian creed from the catechist’s household next door, it is an agonizing reversal to watch the faces of fanatics slavering after blood under the mandates of those same incantations. Those of us who are unlikely ever to be found intoning, either alone or amidst a congregation, those familiar spiritual calls such as Praise Jesus, Hallelujah, Allah akbar, Hare Krishna, and so on should at least be permitted to retain whatever memories we have of these religions in their nonaggressive states, share the inspirational value that others clearly derive from them, and indeed continue to nurse even a fragmented faith in their potential for human regeneration. But we also have a duty to challenge a general reluctance to inquire why the adherents of some religions more than others turn the pages of their scriptures into a divine breath that fans the random homicidal spore to all corners of the world. Political correctness, itself an immobilizing form of hysteria, forbids the question, but, for those of us who prefer politically incorrect discourse to politically correct incineration or other forms of complicity in our premature demise, this question must be given voice: just what is it that turns the mantra of a beatific chant of faith, such as Allah akbar, into a summons to an orgy of death? Why did Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ arouse violent reactions, condemnations, and exhortations to boycotts, as has more recently Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but not a universal outcry for the murder of the cinéastes, or of those who dared participate in these interpretative exercises?

  The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest
killing device of contemporary times. Even after half a century, films that touch upon the era of Nazi glorification, with their orchestrated chant of Sieg heil, continue to send a chill of apprehension down the spines of all with a historical memory. Scenes of mass religious frenzy increasingly resurrect these nightmares, and if Khatami’s inspired Dialogue of Civilizations leads, eventually, to the dissociation of the chant of millions to the greatness of God from the gross ultranationalist politics lodged in the chant of Sieg heil, we will have lifted one corner, a not inconsiderable one, of the shroud of fear that now envelops life, and humanity.

  Four

  The Quest for Dignity

  The Times newspaper of London, on Saturday, February 21 of this year, carried the story of the suicide of a teenager in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Apparently, it should have been a double suicide, but that youth, after yet another bout of humiliation from his tormentors, decided that he simply could not wait. He was one of a close-knit group of seven, the report continues, who had attended school together and continued to spend all their spare time together. Of the seven, only two still survive. The motor accident that earlier took the lives of three of them may not have been deliberate, but it is on record that one of those three had also once attempted suicide. All lived in fear of some degrading punishment by the local vigilantes known as the INLA. In one case, a fourteen-year-old boy suspected of being a police informer was tarred and feathered, dragged through the streets, then “kneecapped”—that is, shot through the back of the knee, crippling the youth for life. Here is what a consulting psychiatrist in north Belfast had to say: