If I could steal another Joeuser’s name it would be shadesofgrey. I’ve always believed that there’s more to life than black and white; that nuance, subtlety and context are important when appraising any situation. I’ve always suspected those who assume to possess The Truth, who believe themselves to be completely right and noble and their opponents to be entirely wrong and evil.
Currently I’m ploughing through John Pilger’s “Hidden Agendas”, an expose of the underhand actions of western governments and the media’s complicity in covering them up. In some ways it’s a fine read, full of surprising new facets to “well-known” events. Yet I can’t say I’m enjoying reading Pilger. The man’s black-whiteness (to coin a phrase) is infuriating. In his mind, western states are always greedy, lying, thieving scoundrels. Their victims are always pure and admirable. No disruption of this dichotomy is ever allowed.
I think my aversion to black-whiteness comes from my upbringing in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The society I grew up in was not so much black and white as green and orange. The long and intense struggle between nationalism and unionism led understandably to both sides seeing the world as a zero-sum struggle between “us” and “them”. Any advantage for the one was assumed to mean a loss for the other. If “they” were happy about something then “we” should be unhappy, this was the only proper reaction. The notion that the Good Friday Agreement could be beneficial to both sides is a concept which many still struggle against.
When debating with the other side, the aim was never to concede ground, “not an inch”, as the old unionist maxim goes. For unionists their ideology was 100% true and good while nationalism was 100% false and debased, and vice versa. The thought that the other side’s ideology had some merit, that their fears and grievances were reasonable, had to be dismissed.
To maintain such an attitude it’s necessary to close off one’s mind, to dispel all doubts about one‘s politics. This, I suppose, is the mentality of war. If you happen to be cornered by a hungry tiger, such a mentality would stand you in good stead. But to live like that forever, to always act as if at war, is a debilitating condition.
In the past ten years the peace process has led to a slow change in this black and white mentality in Northern Ireland. Elsewhere in the world though the trend has been in the opposite direction. The upsurge in religious fundamentalism across the world has fuelled this tendency. Fundamentalists of whichever stripe share at least one common trait, the view that the world is divided into the pure “us” and the damned “them”. For fundamentalists their religion is right, 100% right. All other points of view are wrong, 100% wrong.
This fundamentalism is far from a purely Muslim phenomenon. It’s Jewish, through the Uzi-toting settlers of Hebron, it’s Protestant, through the Darwin deniers in America, it’s Buddhist through the belligerent monks of Sri Lanka, and it’s Hindu through the hardliners of India’s BJP. We live, unfortunately, in a time of religious revival across the world, a veritable counter-Enlightenment, a new era of black-whiteness.
This fundamentalism is perhaps most notable in the activities of Osama Bin Laden and his followers. Al-Qaida, as I argued in a previous blog, divide the world into a tiny “us” of “good” Muslims and a vast “them” of everyone else. Reading Bin Laden’s pronouncements one has the unmistakable impression that we, as a species, have let him down. We are a fallen planet and only he can bring us back to the right path.
Across the Atlantic the religious fundamentalism of Bin Laden is met by the black-whiteness of Bush’s neo-con cabal. Their god is not Allah, nor Jesus, but power. For them the spread of American economic, military and political hegemony across the globe is their divine mission. America, or rather their America, is always noble, pure and true. That such a wonderful country should dominate the world is, they believe, best for all concerned. Any who stand in the way of this grand plan, be they Saddam or Chirac, are “evil”.
This worldview was given voice immediately after 9-11 when Bush stated plainly: “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”. No quarter is given to overseas allies who wish to attack terrorism differently. By Bush’s logic, France is “with the terrorists”. Likewise, for the millions of Americans who oppose the Iraq war or the PATRIOT Act, there is bad news. According to Bush, they too are “with the terrorists”.
When the Bushies mention terrorism no explanation is ever given for its existence beyond “evil”. No acknowledgement of the messy reality that terrorism, however terrible, comes from political realities rather than the failing of human morality. No acceptance that the US has ever behaved immorally anywhere in the world. No, it’s goodies against baddies, just like when you were a kid.
These two fundamentalisms, political Islam and neo-conservatism are at loggerheads. Black and white are clashing but they produce not shades of grey but torrents of red. The blood of innocents flows in cities across the world, in New York, in Kabul, in Bali, in Baghdad and now in Madrid.
The violence of one feeds the violence of the other. The more al-Qaida attacks the West, the more people there look on Islam in general and Muslims in particular as their mortal foe. The more bombs the US drops in the Middle East, the more Muslims see the West as their eternal enemy. One thing we know only too well in Northern Ireland is that violence, once initiated, has a dynamic of its own. Each death embitters, polarises and divides, making further death more likely.
Somehow both sides, Islam and the West, must abandon the idea that they are 100% in the right. For the West this means accepting that it has sown the seeds of terrorism through decades of support for repressive Arab regimes and for Israel’s slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It also means going back to the old-fashioned idea of war as a last resort.
For the Islamic world it means taking some of the blame for the backward state of Arab regimes. The fact that they are poor, corrupt and repressive is not just America and Israel’s fault. Also it means accepting that, no matter what your grievance, murdering civilians is not acceptable.