A rchive Date
[ 10-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Arab-Muslims ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
The intellectual defence of tyranny
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
July 10, 2003
In an essay titled "Dignity and solidarity" published recently in Egypt's leading English journal Al-Ahram Weekly, Edward Said writes: "Whatever one thinks of Saddam Hussein, and he was a vicious tyrant, he provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place."
Said is a professor of comparative literature in New York's Columbia University. His well-known book Orientalism (1978) has had a wide influence both within and outside the Middle East. As one of the sophisticated voices of Arab intellectuals - both nationalist and secular - Said's latest reflection on Saddam Hussein does not come as a surprise.
He belongs to that modern school of Arab thinking, shaped by the traumatic defeat of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, that readily faults the West for most of the ills in the Arab-Muslim world.
On this matter, Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi-Arab writer who has toiled to expose the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, observed pointedly that Said's major work "is premised on the morally wrong idea that the West is to be blamed in the here-and-now for its long nefarious history of association with the Middle East."
The surprise is in the phrasing of Said's qualified apologetic for Saddam, in that it echoes those offered by other apologists for tyrants and dictators in the past.
It is a reminder of the sort of excuses made for Hitler and Mussolini, the leaders of German and Italian fascism - that, whatever their faults, they ran the trains on time. But of greater interest in Said's remarks about the Iraqi despot, is to witness again the performance of those intellectuals who see themselves as defenders of the common people, as anti-imperialists, as swimming with the currents of history to liberate the down-trodden and the oppressed and at the end becoming, at least in part, apologists for mass murderers.
Said is only the most recent example. The most prominent is that of the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Said has written about the influence of Sartre in his thinking, of Sartre as the public philosopher who "opposed France in Algeria and Vietnam."
But what is most remembered about Sartre is not what Said writes, not about his declining the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, nor his Marxism and the intricacies of his existentialist philosophy, but his defence of Stalin even after the details of his crimes were denounced from the altars of Bolshevism by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1956.
Apart from eccentricity, there are complex reasons why an intellectual defends Stalin in the case of Sartre, or Hitler and the Nazis in the case of Martin Heidegger.
Sartre offered a clue - self-loathing - in an essay titled "Situations" (1961). He wrote: "In the name of the principles my class had inculcated in me, in the name of its humanism and humanities, in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, I dedicated to the bourgeoisie a hatred which will end only with myself."
Sartre, like Heidegger, was not a solitary intellectual, nor his views inconsequential for the public to which he wrote and spoke. He remained loyal to the Soviet Union, he was an establishment figure of the left, and his views buttressed the position of the French Communists in the period when Soviet communism appeared to be invulnerable.
Similarly, Said is no mere academic, or a lonely writer with his views confined to a narrow circle of students specializing in contemporary literature and literary criticism.
He is a celebrated public figure in the Middle East, a widely published author in America, a former member of the Palestinian National Council, and the most eloquent representative of Arab nationalists in the West.
Yet Said's faulting of the West, and America in particular, for the Palestinian condition, led him to become an apparent apologist for Saddam Hussein.
Consequently, again, like Sartre, Said has provided false comfort to a great many Arabs and Muslims in their morbid self-deception to escape responsibility from a history this is partly of their own making.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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