※ [本文轉錄自 NTULabor 看板]
作者: Longtimenosi (正事) 看板: NTULabor
標題: [轉錄]薩伊德對美國攻擊事件發表的公開信
時間: Tue Sep 18 22:05:23 2001
作者 KarlMarx (卡辣馬耳庫思助夫兄弟們) 看板 Anthropology
標題 [轉錄]薩伊德對美國攻擊事件發表的公開信
時間 Mon Sep 17 02:28:48 2001
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現在還沒出現翻譯本
等到有翻譯版本時再貼出
Islam and the West are inadequate banners
The United States may too often have failed to look outside but it
is depressing how little time is spent trying to understand America
Edward Said
Saturday September 15 2001
The Guardian
Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser
degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown
assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless
destruction.
For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and
sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a
long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much
carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many.
New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally
rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure,
has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally,
and with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the city's
heroic police, fire and emergency services to admirable effect
and, alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice of
caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large
Arab and Muslim communities, the first to express the commonsense of
anguish, the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the
shattering blows.
Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of
course brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts
into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always
edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the
expected and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible
loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire
for vengeance and un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic
expressions of grief and patriotism, every politician and accredited
pundit or expert has dutifully repeated how we shall not be
defeated, not be deterred, not stop until terrorism is exterminated.
This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what
fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except
the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what 'we'
are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying
to understand America's role in the world, and its direct
involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have
for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and
virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that '
America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost
constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic
domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly
familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and
his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock
symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective
imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being
funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab
in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial
power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests
systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured
geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors.
Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about
with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the
winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not
more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter,
not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds
the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its
sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of
numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to
the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who
have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not
based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on
a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in
the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions
and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American
catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression
of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden
these things by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and '
freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly
hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil,
defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the
entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and
ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms every day.
Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical
sense of the actuality. There has been terror of course, and
nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied
on terror. This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the
others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenceless civilians with
F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as
more conventional nationalist terror.
What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and
political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away
from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness
has to try to make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle
East. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass
slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of
people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to
represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't
a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas.
This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations
even though some of their adherents have futiley tried to draw
boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet
history is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented
by demagogues who are much less representative than either their
followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or moral
fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution
and resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed,
seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication and
what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New
York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-
class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise
leadership that stresses education, mass mobilisation and patient
organisation in the service of a cause, the poor and the desperate
are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody
solutions that such appalling models pro vide, wrapped in lying
religious claptrap.
On the other hand, immense military and economic power are no
guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Sceptical and humane voices
have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as 'America'
girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there,
along with allies who have been pressed into service on very
uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step back
from the imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other
and re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources
available, decide to share our fates with each other as cultures
mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds.
'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow
blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to
condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as
a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of
injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and
mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary.
Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind
of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in
injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or
put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more
worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale
violence and suffering.
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南望吳興路四千,
幾時回去霄溪邊？
名與利,付之夭,
笑把漁竿上釣船！
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