Counterpunch: Orientalism 25 Years Later

[Wonder]

Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders

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Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds. Its aftermath is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.

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But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.

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And lastly, most important, humanism is the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies. The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet.

more...

http://www.counterpunch.org/

[bemildred]

1. Nice piece.

He has a very sophisticated mind. My wife was reading
"Orientalism" pursuant to a teaching credential in literature,
I may have to "borrow" it from her.

He shows way too much respect for Rumsfeld and Perle and that
lot, they are narrow and ignorant men who are not even correct
within their own sphere.

Was there some particular thing about this you liked?

[Wonder]

2. It fed my hunger for a compassionate viewpoint.

Said in this article gives voice to many of my own thoughts regarding this seeming inability to walk in another cultures shoes. Before I became more read on this subject, it seemed that not enough attentioned was paid to what Said terms the imperial intrusion. I always felt this another causal factor which has had it's effect on the present.

I found the part about Auerbach interesting. This seemed the heart of the Said's theme in this article: this lack of einfuhlung, which it seems he feels has given rise to (or enables) the various anti-arab orthodoxies and propaganda agendas currently at play. I tend to agree with his argument that this lack of einfuhlung is not only why these propaganda agendas have been as successful as it appears so far they are, but will also be why this military mission (like all those before it) have failed to address "the Arab" problem, because by the very nature of the imperial intrusion, these intruders have instead just created more problems for the Arab people, specifically because of their refusual to see them at eye level or address the history in its rightful context.

See, this article (and many of the essay's I have read by Said) provides me the context and the proper terminologies to express thoughts that I had already been mulling over for myself, but for my inability to articulate them. Said represents a very scholarly and well thought out arab perspective. A prospective I believe is sorely lacking in the current american rhetoric, as well as within our dialogues and discussion on the ME, and this war on "terrorism". He is also Palestinian. So far I have not encountered any reason to distrust his perspective, as his context and his facts always cross check and so far it seems he has them in their proper place.

The added delight this piece had to hold was Said's recognition of Giambattista Vico whom he credits as having had "anticipated those of German thinkers" and this idea of philology as it lends itself to humanism. I am partial to Neopolitans, being Neopolitan myself on my fathers side.

Said also writes in a cadence with a level of compassion that I respond to. I believe I could go as far as to say, I find I hunger for it.

[Wonder]

3. Here is the working link for this article

http://www.counterpunch.org/said08052003.html