Climate of Fear (7 page)

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.

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 destruc
tion
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.