IHT: Europe could discover self-censorship
American bloggers are wondering why the good people of the USA are suffering the scorn of Pakistanis and Muslims during the current protests. Europeans are wondering how a bunch of countries expect them to rethink their principle of freedom of expression. Muslims are wondering why it is difficult for the West to understand this isn't about a cartoon, its about provocation during difficult times for the international community.
- Robert Wright does acknowledge that small, peaceful demonstrations held in Denmark back in September never made it to the media/international radar screens.
- He also draws an interesting analogy between the civil rights movement of the 60s and the current spate of voilent outbursts across Asia ("what triggers an uproar? what fuels it?" and that history is littered with voilent movements).
- Wright muses what's making the Europeans shirk in horror over the concept of self-censorship. "The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing - the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable."
Well said, Wright, well said indeed.
posted by Zunaira @ 11:56 PM
2 Comments:
I see why you bring in the Middle East situation to this current cartoon controversy. Fundamentally, the radical Islamic groups hold a grudge against a lot of "Western powers" for not being able to solve this on-going conflict for decades.
Let's switch back to the present. While the "Western powers" continue to sit on a ticking time bomb in ME, along comes a new issue to challenge their patience even more.
You have to see the current issue: the publication of the cartoons and the ensuing voilence in a local context rather than an international one, is my proposal. Why is it easier for school kids to ditch classes, and ran amock in the streets, destroying public property at the call of a few elements or 'unseen hands' as the govt of Pakistan likes to call them? Why was it a matter of minutes for a peaceful protest in Lahore to turn so ugly that it left the city shut down in horror at the callousness of its own citizens?
Disillusionment. With the diplomatic system, with the institutional system with the international system of governance that cannot take up issues quickly before they become a melting pot. This of course does not justify what happened from Feb 13 to 18. Far from it.
Any social movement, freedom of individuality, freedom of independence, or freedom of life, is worth drawing parallels from. Wright's article hinted at why a 'mob mentality' might use violence as an outlet. Why is a good question.
If you think about it, a whole lot of this has nothing to do with religion. It has nothing to do with politics either; it is about economics and money.
Before you think I am completely nuts, think about one thing: what do most of these rioters and protesters have in common? And I don't mean in just one specific country, I mean across the countries mainly affected by all this chaos? They are all part of the destitute, lower strata of each of their respective societies -- the people out there on the streets involved in all this mayhem. Do a categorical analysis of these riots. Where are they taking place and where has the most trouble happened? In Pakistan, Indonesia, Libya and Nigeria? Have you heard of a single riot or even plank of wood being damaged in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Malaysia, or many other Muslim countries? There are about some 70- or 80-odd countries in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). All the trouble happening across the "Muslim world" as it is called, is really restricted to about less than a dozen countries out of the entire lot. Does that mean the Muslims in 80-90% of all the other countries are a bunch of soft-assed no-goods who are traitors to their religion? I don't think so. Because they have nothing to gain or lose by engaging in all this rioting. But think very carefully and logically who does?
The common denominator is that all the countries where things are running amuck are the ones with the lowest GDP's, poverty and education levels. And the people out there with the sticks and stones are the ones who have no steady source of income, who are endlessly unemployed with no access to healthcare, educational facilities or proper lives. The vast majority of them are daily wage earners. Yes, there are some people out there truly in the name of their religion but they are few and far between. But the vast majority are people with no access to proper economic resources to better their lives. And this has been very casually ignored or not noticed by the powers that be and these very people are being used as the poster child representation of the "Muslim world" by the world's media. There is something very wrong here.
If this whole episode started with Scandinavia and northern Europe, why hit out at American assets worldwide, when America has nothing to do with it at all? People torched Citibank in Pakistan -- hell, do they even know that the single largest shareholder in Citicorp. is Waleed Bin Talal, a Saudi, and it is actually thus an asset of the Muslims per se? Why burn Citibank? Because it is all about the symbolism. Hitting out at "American" assets and power has become a way of getting your message out on the international media circuit because the world's media is vastly influenced and/or controlled by America. You burn some dingy shack on a street-corner and no one will take notice. It won't even make the daily 2-pence eveningers. You burn a tire in front of a KFC outlet at that same location and it will make headline news on CNN and the whole planet will know about it. That is why these people are hitting out at the Citibanks, KFCs, Pizza Huts, and McDonalds of the world. Because they are trying to give their governments and the Western governments a message that really has nothing to do with religion -- they are trying to say that they are disillusioned with their lives and have very little to live for -- THAT is why they are out on the streets doing this, even if it means getting killed to get that message out.
Every schmoe out on the street knows he can be shot and killed because security forces in many countries have opened fire on protestors killing them. Dozens are now dead. Yet why are they still coming out and doing this when they know they could be jailed or worse killed? While ALL the Muslims out there worldwide are offended by what happened with those cartoons, this specific bunch is using it as an excuse and exercising violence to get a hidden message across. The target of those messages are their own governments and Western governments because they can do something about it. This is all an attention grabbing tactic. And some people with their own private agendas are capitalizing on the situation, too, to forward their interests by adding fuel to the fire. If you investigate, you may even find that many of these chaos-causers are actually paid by someone to do what they are doing and there is actually a system at work underneath and it is not all random.
There is anger and vengeance at being left aside to rot by their respective systems. A lot of these people may know deep down what it is really about but they have started to believe in their own rhetoric. I can bet you that if all these people were offered jobs at the majority of the very places they have attacked and are attacking, with decent salaries and perks, the majority of them would accept and go away just like that. They don't hate these places because of religion or affiliation with any country -- they are hating and hitting them because they represent exactly what they and their dependents and families want and are deprived of so much so that they [even] find very little value in living -- prosperity and a secure livelihood. They see the people who work and use these places like Citibank or KFC, in the 3rd world, as smug, arrogant, and belonging to another strata of society that doesn't have to face the hardships that they do everyday and they think that the people who are associated with these establishments have no concern or interest in the value of their lives. And that is true if you know the 3rd world especially the Muslim world. There is the mentality that either you are "on this side of the line or that" i.e. either you are successful and living the dream or you're struggling and people living the dream look down upon you. Unlike the West, there is a hidden caste system in place between the poor, the middle-class and the rich that no one talks about but everyone knows is in place, and is veiled in the garb of values and other ethnic, social, ritual and religious excuses. If you are a blue-collar person like a security guard or a janitor or a bus driver, you belong to another strata of society than a professional like a doctor, a banker, an engineer or a manager at some place. The guy in the lower class of society is just there to service the guy up in the food chain. The guy up in the food chain eats out at KFC and McDonald's to show off his wealth, drinks bottled water and keeps his income in Citibank. The guy in the lower strata doesn't even have access to clean water for drinking and often keeps his salary under his bed. The two will never associate socially and there is always a master-slave relationship of the subtle kind in this hidden caste system. The guy up can strive to send his kids to the most expensive universities for a degree while the lower guy cannot even send his kids to school. In the West, the Citibanks, KFCs, Pizza Huts and McDonalds are there for all and sundry and every can afford it but that is not really the case in these countries. There, they are only there to cater to the whims and fancies of some insignificant percentage of the population belonging to the middle and elite classes, who can afford it, while the vast majority of the population can only look and feel deprived when their kids also ask their parents or elders to take them there but they cannot because they cannot afford it. That is why the majority of the population resent their presences in their midst because they represent the kind of prosperity that many of them think they will never attain.
And [man of] those being looked down upon hate it and look for excuses to hit back every chance they get, whether against an individual or the system. They want to bring the happy and prosperous down to their level in order to make them feel their pain. And that is exactly what is going on right now. What is happening in those parts of the Muslim world is in a way deja vu of what happened in the late 18th century in France just before the Revolution began.
This trouble is all about social and economic problems; it has little to do with religion as far as the violence goes, else the riots would be far more widespread than in a few countries in the Muslim world and to a few hundred thousand people out of over 1 billion Muslims -- religion and this episode is just the means to an end in all of this and is acting like a lens to focus the real underlying problem, even if no one wants to admit it.
-U
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