The fear of Abacha had thus turned me into one baggageless passenger you could swear by on any flight, and thus the very first out of the customs area — that is, when I was not being interrogated for having three passports stuck together, plastered with visas and immigration stamps from cover to cover. This time, passage was smooth. I ensconced myself in the bus that had been provided to take us to our hotel, settled down with a book. An hour, one and a half, then nearly two hours later, I was still seated in the bus, increasingly impatient, joined by only a handful of fellow passengers. Cardiff was apparently not accustomed to receiving so many jumbo jets all at once, and the baggage handlers were in a total flounder.
I got down to look for someone at whom to rail for the delay, stretch my legs, find out into what hotel we were booked, and look for a taxi — then recognized some of the passengers huddled around a mobile telephone, while others queued up for the public equipment. Only then did I begin to suspect that something truly out of the ordinary was responsible for our turnaround. I approached the mobile-telephone owner, who was transmitting to his circle live developments from the United States. That was how, nine to ten hours after the event, I came to know that the world I knew was supposed to have disappeared, or become altered unrecognizably.
Well, I must confess that the world still looked the same to me, not only on the outside but from what I sensed inside. And this was because my mind flashed in that instant to the day, twelve years earlier, when, for me, the world chose to pretend that nothing unusual had occurred over the continent of Africa, at the edge of the Sahara, knowing full well that agents of a yet unidentified cause had sown the seeds of fear in the hearts of millions of people. The leadership of the world, including the leadership of that continent, chose to absorb this abnormality as only another incident in the war of causes, though even the most tenuous rules of engagement had been unilaterally rewritten to eradicate the rights of the innocent.
What had I expected? I suppose an equivalent at least of the sense of universal outrage that greeted the destruction of the World Trade Center, an event timed deliberately to take the maximum toll of innocents. Nineteen eighty-nine for me was, therefore, the moment when the world first appeared to have stood still, waiting for a response whose commensurate nature was required to restart the motions of the globe. That response was lacking, at least in intensity, certainly in its neglect of a global repudiation and mobilization. That lack consecrated Lockerbie and set the scene for September 11, 2001. From Niger to Manhattan, the trail of fear had stretched and broadened to engulf the globe, warning its inhabitants that there were no longer any categories of the involved or noninvolved. No longer could not just innocents, but even a community of historic victims who inhabit the African continent, lay claim to a protective immunity.
Just as there has been gloating on that continent over the predicament of white settler farmers in Zimbabwe, and a history of colonial injustice is held by some to justify current injustices even against former victims of that same injustice, while a suffocating climate of fear envelops the entire land and its citizens, black and white, even so was there gloating in places, including open festivities, over September 11, as the world was sentenced to life imprisonment behind the bars of fear. And the judges? Are they identified and/or justified by history? By geography? Race? Ideology? Or religion? That emotive last especially, religion — and, unquestionably, the occupation of world center stage by Islam during this epoch of global fear is a phenomenon that has provoked extreme reactions, from the attribution of collective responsibility on the one hand, to the guilt-ridden avoidance language of political correctness on the other. We shall explore some of these viewpoints in succeeding lectures.
Let it suffice for now to acknowledge that responses to any challenge to the security of human society and indeed survival are bound to be varied, some shaped by the history of unjust global relationships, others by instinctive partisanship — ideological, religious, racial, and so on — in a world that has become truly polarized. Any course of action, or inaction, that appears to encourage impunity implicates, however, the submission of the world to a regimen of fear. Yet that very recognition makes it possible to propose that it is within collective, not unilateral, action — a theme to which we shall return in this series — that we can sustain the hopes of humanity’s survival. Terror against terror may be emotionally satisfying in the immediate, but who really wants to live under the permanent shadow of a new variant of the world’s… Mutual Assured Destruction?
Two
Of Power and Freedom
The totalitarian state is easy to define, easy to identify, and thus offers a recognizable target at which the archers of human freedom can direct their darts. Not so obliging is what I have referred to as the quasi-state, that elusive entity that may cover the full gamut of ideologies and religions, contends for power, but is not defined by the physical boundaries that identify the sovereign state. Especially frustrating is the fact that the quasi-state often commences with a position whose basic aim — a challenge to an unjust status quo — makes it difficult to separate from progressive movements of dissent, with which, too, it sometimes forms alliances of common purpose. At the same time, however, there lurks within its social intent an equally deep contempt for those virtues that constitute the goals of other lovers of freedom. Thus, to grasp fully the essence of power, we must look beyond the open “show of force,” the demonstration of overt power whose purpose is to instruct a people just who is master. We are obliged to include — indeed, to regard as an equal partner in the project of power — the elusive entity that is conveniently described here as the quasi-state. We shall return to that mimic but potent entity in a few moments.
The formal state, in its dictatorial or belligerent mutation, represents power at its crudest — African nations, caught in an unending spiral of dictatorships and civil wars, are only too familiar with this exegesis of power. Equally familiar, to many, are the daylight or nighttime shock troops of state, storming the homes and offices of dissidents of a political order, carting away their victims in total contempt of open or hidden resentment.The saturation of society by near-invisible secret agents, the co-option of friends and family members — as has been notoriously documented in Ethiopia of the Dergue, former East Germany, Idi Amin’s Uganda, among others, all compelled to report on the tiniest nuances of discontent with, or indifference toward, the state — these constitute part of the overt, structured forces of subjugation. To apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders. The Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union.