VOL NO REGD NO DA 1589

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Headline

News Watch

Trade & Finance

Editorial

World/Asia

Metro/Country

Corporate/Stock

Sports

 

FE Specials

FE Education

Young World

Growth of SMEs

Urban Property

Monthly Roundup

Business Review

FE IT

Saturday Feature

Asia/South Asia

 

Feature

44th National Day of the State of Kuwait

National Day of Brunei Darussalam

Birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Asia Pharma Expo-2005

 

 

 

Archive

Site Search

 

HOME

SATURDAY FEATURE
 
Of tyranny, idiocy and terrorism
Syed Fattahul Alim
2/12/2005
 

          When one of the greatest poets and story writers of twentieth century Jorge Luis Borges(1899-1986) of Argentina drew the wrath of dictator Juan Peron for his support to the pro-democracy movement, he lost his job as the assistant librarian of the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Municipal Library. To his disgrace, he was promoted, though in name only, to the post of "Poultry and Rabbit Inspector" of the Buenos Aires municipal corporation. Borges resigned right away. After giving up his new assignment as the poultry and rabbit inspector, an outraged Borges addressed the Argentine Society of Letters with these words, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." In fact what pained the great poet and novelist more than the loss of his job was that a darkness of idiocy had descended on Argentinean society after dictators and tyrants took control of his dear homeland. Cruelty or oppression and idiocy are nothing but different sides of the same coin.
A poet is a warrior not with a sword, but with a pen. Borges, though a blind man in the meanwhile, did not stop his struggle against tyranny and idiocy with his pen till the end of his life.
But there was yet another Latin American fighter against darkness and tyranny who fought with pen and also with sword in one stage of his life. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (born on July 12, 1904 as Neftali Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto and died on September 23, 1973) faced such darkness of dictatorship and idiocy at the hands of Augusto Pinochet, another cruel dictator of Chile. A poet and a diplomat, from 1970 to 1973 he was Chile's ambassador to France under the Salvador Allende's government. He died 12 days after the coup that ended the Allende government. But Neruda believed in the people, but at the same time was aware of the power of capital and the establishment it nurtures to strengthen the grip of the would-be tyrants and dictators on society. These are the same forces that throughout the ages sow the poisonous seeds of sectarian dogmatism and seductive alienation among the people to blunt their power to protest against oppression and tyranny.
In the thirties of the last century Neruda sided with the Republican forces in Spain. He supported the then Soviet Union and the Republicans in Spain. He made a common cause with Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernandez and other fighters against fascists like Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco and Nazi Hitler. In the process, the neo-romantic Neruda was metamorphosed into a revolutionary who participated in the Spanish Civil War. About the decadence of alienation created by the oppressive juggernaut of power and tyranny that turns the victims into a bunch of idiots, Neruda continues to hope and hence prophesy in his realistic epic, Canto general, "And this world shall be born again, perhaps in another time without suffering, without the impure offshoots that dark vegetation adhered to my canto, and once again in the heights my impassioned heart will be burning and starry."
Of late tyranny has changed its form and so also has idiocy. Tyranny is now dished out in democratic garb, while idiocy through a new brand of terrorism. And what is the dominant discourse of power? It is the discourse of democratic universal market-globalisation, which is bent on bulldozing the entire world into a global monoculture of conformity. And the establishment is convinced that the method of force backed by science and technology is enough to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism perpetrated by the new idiots-the fundamentalists and the suicide bombers.
In spite of the fact the world is changing fast, what could not keep pace with this change is the establishment. It is not the establishment of any particular society that is yet to come to terms with the change. Like the phenomenon of global terrorism, the global establishment is yet to come out of its antiquated belief in the method of power. The attitude is the same whether it is in the Occident or in the Orient. Science and technology have not been able to change the perception of the powers that be about their appropriate role in the modern world. On the contrary, they are clinging to the old notions of power and politics, which has hardly undergone any change since the time of the pharaohs.
But even if one may understand the obligations of power to which establishments all over the world are beholden, it is still hard to understand why a section of the western intelligentsia likes to put themselves in the shoes of the establishment think tanks. Had they been able to free themselves from the trappings of the discourse of power pursued by the establishment ideologues, that could at least work as a deterrent to the single-mindedness of the pro-conformity establishment.
The solution to the crisis of terrorism that the world is plagued with cannot be fought with the ongoing battle-cry of war on terrorism only. The war needs to be fought on many fronts at a time. And one of these fronts is the intellectual front, where the weapon should be one of rationality against unreason. The rational mind needs also to look into the socio-economic and historical roots of terrorism including one of its variants, the suicide bombing. Nevertheless, the tyrannous establishment power and the idiotic terrorism go hand in hand, though ostensibly they are locked in a mortal combat. How to comprehend this grotesque absurdity? It is time they took stock of the whole situation from a distance.
The analytic minds of the western world need to have second thoughts on the problem of terrorism. One may take note of what Guy Claxton, said in his book, 'Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind.' He criticised the prevalence of one dimensional pattern of thinking among the thinkers in the western world and said: "As a culture we are in consequence, very good at solving analytic and technological problems. The trouble is we tend, increasingly, to treat all human predicaments as if they were of this type, including those for which such mental tools are inappropriate."

 

 
  More Headline
Of tyranny, idiocy and terrorism
Demanding that polluters should pay
Tourism industry needs patronisation
Saving cells
The day of the vague, arty type has come
The real estate business: problem or prospect?
A down-to-earth laboratory
HURRICANE!
Unilever House gets modern facelift, old corporate structure may be next
Terrorism network puts down local roots
The need for global collaboration is greater than ever
US allies fret at hard line of 'nuclear hawks'
 

Print this page | Mail this page | Save this page | Make this page my home page

About us  |  Contact us  |  Editor's panel  |  Career opportunity | Web Mail

 

 

 

 

Copy right @ financialexpress.com