Society + Culture,

Politics As War by Other Means
By Lila Rajiva

Standing Clausewitz on his head may be the best way to understand the controversy provoked by Jyllands-Posten. This is no first amendment issue at all. The rash decision to publish the cartoons of Mohammed cannot be defended as freedom of speech for a simple reason - these cartoons are not speech but acts. Acts of provocation and belligerence. They are the opening - or perhaps continuing - rounds of war. 

How so? Don’t the cartoons express an idea and isn’t expression of our thoughts the most fundamental freedom of our western selves? Perhaps.  

But even if we concede this, the fact is that even under our own constitution, there have always been time, place, and manner restrictions to freedom of expression. You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater and plead artistic license; you cannot burn a cross in the backyard of a fellow American and claim that inquiring minds want to know.  

In both cases, the context gives the game away; it tells us that the right being claimed is not the freedom to speak but the license to injure. 

Context: 

As to time: has there been a worse time in the history of the world to blasphemously caricature the founder and prophet of the religion of more than a billion people?

War in progress in Iraq, war threatened in Iran, anti-Muslim slander and racial filth polluting the airwaves sanctioned by the power brokers of the world, the obscene torture of Abu Ghraib ineluctably branded on the consciousness of Muslim nations, with Baghdad in cinders and ashes, the treasures of Mesopotamia ransacked, plundered and laid waste as not even Genghis Khan could have laid waste. 

As to place: in post-Christian, militantly secular Europe, amid a rising tide of anti-immigrant zealotry, abetted by the brazen complicity of European governments in the rendition of Muslim prisoners and the petty bigotry of European governments toward the head scarves of little Muslim girls, in a smoldering keg of xenophobia, migrant joblessness,  despair, and alienation. With threats of sanctions and nuclear strikes ringing in the ears. In a right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-assimilation Danish newspaper with historical ties to fascism. 

As to manner: crudely, without explanation or rationale, unsoftened by artistic depth, naked to even the most incurious eye, flaunting, taunting, an affront impossible to hide from, in the most public of media, without qualification or contrition and in hypocritical contrast to the servility and frantic haste with which even the meekest criticism of Israel or Jews is withdrawn. 

On all three contextual counts then, the claim to free speech fails. 

Were Jyllands-Posten really concerned with free speech, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler who submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons about the resurrection of Christ

in April 2003 would not have been turned down. But he was. 

Had Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of  Jyllands-Posten, really been defending  provocative opinion, he would agree to publish pictures of Ariel Sharon strangling a Palestinian baby. But he would not. 

Were Europe’s defense of free speech genuine and not merely hypocritical or extremely confused - take your pick, historian David Irving as well as several others would not be languishing in jail in Austria for questioning the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. But he is. (1) 

Remember that the West, which is now so exercised about the value of uninhibited speech, lectured Mohammed Mahathir for commenting- rather tamely - about the influence of the Jewish people in world affairs. Remember that Mahathir was condemned as anti-Semitic, a label used automatically to shut down any criticism of  pro-Israeli policies. 

Remember that Holocaust Denial - as it is called - is a criminal offense entailing imprisonment in seven European countries and the EU itself. And even venturing anywhere near that terrain is liable to end the careers of promising authors 

The issue is not free speech.  

The issue is power. Who has it and who hasn’t. 

Were Iran and Syria bristling with nuclear weapons like America and Israel and were Saudi Arabia shooting spy satellites into outer space, Jyllands-Posten would be performing a public service. Were hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers camped out around Washington, DC, and American civilians being rounded up and raped in their thousands,  we would fall over ourselves to address the terrors of Islamic fundamentalism. Were Christianity being reviled as innately murderous, the Cross and the Torah being flushed down toilets, and yarmulkes banned in schools, were the Smithsonian in ruins and the Louvre burned to the ground, were the Sistine Chapel riddled with bullets and George Bush  trapped in a spider hole in the ground, we would fight to the death for the right to vilify Islamism.  

But in fact, the ideology that most terrorizes the world is not Islamic - as yet - but Western and the speech that most needs to be heard today is the one that challenges the ideology of Western domination.  

Not the speech that reinforces it and lays the foundation for its extension. 

From context, then, the claim of free speech for the cartoons fails.

Substance:  

And in substance too, the claim fails.  

Because of decades of misuse by corporate advertisers and commercial pornographers, we forget that the right to free speech is cardinally a right to the expression of political opinion not merely of any opinion. It is meant to protect political dissent, especially dissent that is vulnerable to persecution because it is unpopular. And so, identifying free speech is not simply a mechanical matter of checking off a list  that trumps everything else at all times but of discriminating between the competing values and demands of groups.  

That, of course, is the definition of politics.  

Practically, what this means is that while we defend the right of  Aryan supremacists to march through Skokie  -  under certain strict constraints  - we do so only because they have limited power in a society that protects its ethnic minorities. We could not sanely defend the right of neo-Nazis to free speech were Aryan Nation really in power in the White House and civil laws in disarray. Instead, it would be our moral obligation as citizens to stand up and denounce neo-Nazism as an attack on the free speech and indeed the right to exist of others.  

In other words, if the competing values at stake are my right to exist and your right to express your racist views, my right to exist takes precedence always and everywhere.

When the right to existence of Muslims is at stake, in Iraq, in Palestine, in Gujarat, and in Europe too - then the right to racist anti-Muslim free speech must take a back seat in those places.   

When  Islamism becomes the dominant oppressor, at that time, never fear, we will take up the cudgels against it and support atheists with as much fervor.  

It is a matter of discrimination and wisdom, not of hard and fast rules. This should be self -evident.  

The truth is that my right always faces off against your right and the obverse of any one’s claim is always someone else’s imposition. And common sense should tell us that rights always need  tempering with an equal responsibility. 

But in the often confused political culture of  the secular West, fundamentalism about rights easily rivals the most medieval religious bigotry. Rights are worshipped as theological absolutes, idolatrously. We let them grow like weeds so rankly that they strangle even the flowers and run riot untethered by context, common sense, or courtesy. We unleash them in public as assertions of group hostility. We assert them outrageously and legalistically in a manner fundamentally antithetical to politics, which after all - unlike law -  is a practical art, not a theological dictate.  

Politics is possibility and compromise. But modern rights - in this case the group rights of  secularists - are sentences handed down by a bewigged judge, divine and non-negotiable, flat declarations with punitive intent. Any wonder that today politics has lost the flavor of politics altogether and  become an extension of  war -  that war in which the battlefield is everywhere and the enemy is everyone.  

War: 

War was not always so. In Clausewitz’s dialectic, war as brute force always alternated with war as policy by other means, limited in scope and driven by attainable goals. His battlefield had room for passion and chance but also for rational calculation; it mixed bloody self-aggrandizement with the prudent attainment of social goals.  

But today, self-aggrandizement not only elbows out rationality and idealism completely, it does so while posing as rationality and idealism. We wade neck-deep into a criminal war while lecturing the world shrilly about the universality, rationality, and humanity of our goals.  

Mere self-interest would have its limits. Mere greed or even vanity would be satiated at some point. But a rationality that claims to be universal, to be always and everywhere supreme, has an insatiable appetite to devour everything in its way.  It cannot coexist peacefully with any other culture or world view but must impose itself on them all at every turn, while simultaneously crying self-defense. We pose as victims, even while our commerce and our culture roll with our military like a gaudy juggernaut over the globe. 

But what kind of a juggernaut? Unending imperial adventures have led to the militarization of politics but a militarization with a difference. Like war today, politics disguises its infinite lust for blood under the smiling face of reason; but also like war today, politics wages its most important campaigns not on terra firma at all but in the invisible battlefield of the mind. American intelligence may keep watch over the globe sleeplessly, it might probe the heavens and test the depths of the ocean, it might “own the night”; but it is in inner not outer space that the war is won or lost today.  

William Lind, a cultural conservative and military analyst, has described the transformation of military strategy in the modern West from line and column attacks, to the massed fire-power and synchronized order of World War One, to the war of disruption and maneuver of the Germans - the blitz-krieg,  and finally to non-state war between cultures in which mental and moral force takes precedence -  which he calls fourth-generation war. Americans, he thinks, have no idea that in the new mental war, the political leaders of the West, pampered and protected from the wars they initiate, have none of the moral charisma of a leader like Osama who lives ascetically in caves and mountains, subjecting himself to the same rigors that his followers undergo. The West he argues is losing the moral war to Islam from lack of understanding of the role played by the mental and psychological element in warfare. (2) 

Lind is somewhat misleading here. If the West is losing the moral war, it is not because it hasn’t grasped the power of the mental element in war. It has grasped it only too well. Millions, indeed billions, have been poured into both corporate and political propaganda since the days of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman. Decades of research into mind control, behavioral modification, and psychological torture have yielded their strange fruits today in the perverse cruelties of Abu Ghraib and the staged histories of PR firms. The airwaves and the Internet are clogged with the fog of fourth generation war as intelligence hirelings masquerade as journalists and poison public perception with lies and distortions.