Home Free: What are we entitled to hope for?
Last week I published an article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn addressing the retired cricket star Imran Khan’s recent surge in popularity as an alternative to Pakistan’s discredited established politicians. The article elicited many more online comments than anything else I’ve written, which is a tribute not to me but to the urgency many Pakistanis feel about the topic, which is not really Imran Khan himself but the yawning chasm of national hopelessness that he aims to fill.
Nearly as striking to me was how many commenters scolded me for having compared Imran to Obama. I hadn’t even mentioned Obama by name. What I had written was: “Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.” As far as I can tell, the readers who scolded me had no real reasons to offer for why Imran and Obama have nothing in common, only wishful assertions. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
There might well be real differences in the personal character and mettle of the two men. I think there are, in fact, and those favor Imran. He has been toughing it out in the political wilderness for more than fifteen years, through many changes of circumstance and regime, when he really didn’t have to. He has earned his credibility the hard way, above all through his tireless and successful work building and funding the justly famous Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore. Obama had accomplished nothing comparable to that before becoming President of the United States, and he still hasn’t.
But what the commenters failed – willfully, I would venture, if understandably – to appreciate is that I wasn’t comparing the men, but the phenomena. The questions both raise are: Why do desperate societies feel a need to invest their hopes in a single charismatic would-be leader? What is the best result we can hope for, when that happens? What are the dangers? If (more likely when) the leader disappoints us, is that his or her failure, or our own? Above all, what are we entitled to hope for?
I write these days under two rubrics: twice monthly on Fridays in Dawn on topics directly to do with Pakistan, and every Monday on my own website (excerpted in Dawn) in a series called Home Free, which will also be the title of the book I’m working toward, reporting from the grassroots and commenting on the current and coming crisis here in the USA. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line where one ends and the other begins, and indeed one of my standing aspirations is that anything I write should, ideally, speak in some way to anyone who reads English, anywhere in the world. This installment is a case in point.
So these musings are prompted in part by what I see as the dangerous over-investment of hope many Pakistanis are placing in Imran Khan. Expecting too much from him is not fair to him or good for the Pakistani nation and society. At the same time, what’s been on my mind is how the Republican presidential primaries have been dominating mainstream news coverage in the U.S. for far too long now. What that shows is not only the infamously interminable quality of American elections in general, or even Obama’s all too real failure either to be the leader we elected him to be or to assert himself politically. Beyond proximate contexts and personalities, what I’m sensing is a greater than usual disconnect between the ostensible and the actual, as American society atavistically clings to the vestiges of its formerly functional institutions.
A litany of these reads like a roll call of the institutions that defined the America I grew up in, from once-prestigious book publishers and record companies to General Motors to the nightly news to Hollywood to Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. The truth we’re disinclined to face in our national politics is that not only have the Republican and Democratic parties become similarly vestigial and pointless, but maybe so has the presidency itself. What’s been lost along with all of the above is something intangible but that, now that it’s gone, we know to have been crucial. Call it community or share purpose, or at least a tacit agreement that we’re all on the same page. Also lost is a sense that we’re all in the same boat, traveling together to a destination that we believe to be worth the journey.
The veteran political writer Elizabeth Drew begins a new entry on the New York Review of Books blog, ominously titled “Can We Have a Democratic Election?”, thus:
Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of broadscale, coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and the previously banned unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president. The assumptions underlying that process—that there is a right to vote, that the system for nominating and electing a president is essentially fair—are at serious risk.
Drew’s questions are bracingly candid, but even she feels compelled to couch them in fairly conventional language, at a moment in history when the conventions we’ve lived by either have fallen or are fast falling away from beneath our feet. The answer to her main question clearly is no. We’ll have an election, and it will have a result, but – whether that result is a second term for Obama or one of the Republican buffoons who are mediocre and silly enough to want the job – it will solve no real problems and will leave at least tens of millions of Americans feeling disaffected, unrepresented and un-led. Just like in Pakistan. The question then will become: Now what?
So, to answer my original question: We’re entitled to hope for what we ourselves, individually and in collaboration with each other, and with clear vision and hard work, possess the capacity and willingness to accomplish. Whatever that is, we’re not entitled to ask either Obama or Imran Khan to accomplish it for us.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: What are we doing to ourselves?
Happy New Year. There’s a lot to catch up on since I paused this column over the holidays in order to finish writing and otherwise finalizing my book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, which is now at the printer and will be published March 1. You can read an excerpt and/or pre-purchase Bearing the Bruise here.
The latest thing we’re all being forced to try to make sense of and/or pick up the pieces from is the video of four U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Last Friday I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling an itch in my brain, so I got out of bed and wrote “Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” If you want to know what I think about the incident itself, please read that article. This article is about some of the comments posted on that one, which brought home that some things that seem glaringly obvious to me are quite a bit less so to many of my fellow Americans.
“To call for these four guys’ heads over something so minor is ridiculous,” asserted one reader.
In response to my remark that I’ll remember the urination incident the next time I witness passengers in a U.S. airport breaking out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” another wrote: “You are free to think that, you are free to write this column … thanks to men and women in uniform. Your statement shows your ignorance of the service and sacrifice of people like myself who give of ourselves and willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to ensure our loved ones and people like yourself can be free. This also shows blatant prejudice of an entire group based on the actions of a few. May you continue to enjoy the freedoms earned by men and women that volunteered to ensure you never lose them.”
My response to such pro-military bullies and blowhards is: No, I’m not free because of the sacrifices of “our men and women in uniform.” I’m free because I’m free. You can’t give me my freedom, nor can you withhold it. It’s mine by right. That’s what America is all about – right?
I’m prepared to insist on that point because, even though freedom is mine by right, I can keep it only by exercising it. So I’m going to continue exercising it, because it’s not possible to be both completely free and completely secure, and I prefer freedom. Fetishizing “our men and women in uniform” leads to justifying, excusing, or explaining away whatever they might do in the heat of battle. But should they even be in battle in the first place? And, despite their bravery and training, “our men and women in uniform” seem somehow to have failed or neglected to protect me from the National Defense Authorization Act, which since December 31 provides for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. It’s fair to ask whether the Taliban are truly more dangerous to Americans’ freedom than the United States Congress or Supreme Court.
A commenter on Sebastian Junger’s fine Washington Post article “We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy” wrote: “It’s tribal. It’s not a police action. While these acts are deplorable, they are also understandable. In a warrior’s mind, they already dehumanized the enemy.” I can’t disagree with this; as Junger pointed out, “A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s [allegedly] okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.” We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?
How you see this incident depends on whether you’re willing to acknowledge that the corpses urinated on were those of human beings. One all too typical commenter on the version of my article published in the Huffington Post trotted out familiar tropes:
Radical Islamic men use their own children as suicide bombers, stone women to death because they have been raped and want to kill and destroy anyone or any society on this earth that does not agree with their violent way of living life under their extreme religious beliefs. So why should I have an issue with some Marines pissing on the dead bodies of those same men who would kill me simply because I exist? Well, I don’t have a problem with it. You truly reap what you sew [sic] in this world and when you want to destroy all others, you can’t afford to be offended by a little urine.
Wow. Does this writer know anything about the daily lives, culture, and history of Afghan people, or is he or she just guessing?
I’ll give the last word, for now, to Jafar Siddiqui, my fellow American whose “PenJihad” blog I quoted in my previous article. “Good article Ethan, but I disagree with your title,” he wrote.
How do you, or anyone else, know the dead men were “Taliban” or “insurgents” or even armed and posing a threat to the soldiers who killed them? … The dead men could very well have been the good guys and our guys were simply looking for a kill. Far too many of the people our guys kill “out there” … are not proven as hostiles but simply as “suspected insurgents.” Innocents, in my book.
I foresee the need to continue this conversation, and I’ll be doing just that as I drive around America this autumn.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?
I haven’t fully digested the disgusting news that U.S. Marines have been caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, so this post is not offered as a coherent think-piece. But what is there to think about, anyway? What is there to say, really, except that there’s absolutely no excuse? No excuse for the policy makers and officers, but neither is there one for the brutalized young perpetrators. Their lowly enlisted status doesn’t excuse them; we should offer them compassion, but not absolution, for the guilt they carry. The next time I’m in a U.S. airport and the passengers break out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” I’ll remember this incident.
In keeping with its maddening, self-regarding role as the American Pravda, the New York Times worries in a hand-wringing “analysis” that “the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war.” Well, how could they not have that effect? And why shouldn’t they?
Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American acquaintance of mine who lives near Seattle, where I live, writes a reliably candid blog called “PenJihad.” In his latest installment, aptly titled “Marines Urinating on Dead Muslims,” Jeff offers this challenge to his fellow American Muslims: “There is no action against the anti-Muslim hate-mongering climate in this country because we Muslims do not do anything to make ourselves politically significant so, why should anyone care about us?” This echoes my own 2010 article “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?” The question mark is important, because I’m not a Muslim, and I won’t presume to tell people who are more vulnerable in American society than I am what they should do. But I am an American, and I still believe, as I wrote in that article, that “Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today” – not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our politically rudderless and morally feckless society as a whole.
I happen just this week to have submitted to the “Books & Authors” section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn my long-overdue review of a powerful book, a collection of writings from Indian periodicals and websites compiled and edited by Sanjay Kak, titled Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Congratulations to Penguin India for publishing such a book. In one piece, “Kashmir’s Abu Ghraib?”, contributor Shuddhabrata Sengupta describes an appalling YouTube video tagged “brothers watch, sisters please do not watch” and popularly known as the “Kashmir Naked Parade Video,” apparently shot by an offending Indian soldier himself with a cell phone. There’s no need for me to describe the video; you get the picture. “At least in the pitched street battles, we see adversaries, albeit unequal adversaries, policemen, paramilitaries, soldiers one side, and the angry tide of stone-pelters on the other,” writes Sengupta.
Here, there are no adversaries. Prisoners are not in a position to be adversarial when surrounded by heavily armed men in uniform. What we see instead are unarmed captives, people who are in no position to threaten or endanger the security forces. That such people should be made to undergo a humiliation such as this is proof of the extent to which the forces of the Indian state in Kashmir have become brutalized by the experience of serving in Kashmir.
Ultimately it’s not – and shouldn’t be seen as – being about what Americans or Indians do to Muslims, but what any of us are willing to do, and be seen doing, to each other, and – framed more constructively – what we might still do to reclaim our humanity. I have some thoughts on that, which will need to wait for another time (soon). For now, here are some of the extremely hard questions that Sengupta raises:
While the making of atrocity images such as these have for long been a part of the apparatus of violence, the ubiquity of mobile phones as recording devices, and of internet-based social networking sites as vectors of circulation has taken the phenomenon to a new level. We have no clear understanding of what motivates the making of these images. Are they meant as evidence of a “job well done” – to be shown to superiors who actually sanction torture and humiliation but have no way of assessing their effectiveness or actual operation because of the legal difficulty involved in maintaining official records of “unofficial” secrets? Or, are they simply testosterone-fuelled perversities, operating in the same sphere as MMS messages of pornographic sadism?
Sengupta also asserts that
There is need for further research on questions such as whether or not the makers of these atrocity images are also consciously seeking each other out, both as audiences and as competitors, in a new economy of prestige linked to the capacity to represent and circulate one’s own cruelty. In other words, are the makers of the videos in Kashmir, or in the Jaffna peninsula, aware of, and in some senses seeking to out-do the actions of their peers and predecessors in Abu Ghraib? Also, is there an informal network of know-how, pertaining to techniques for torture and humiliation that lubricates the virtual matrix inhabited by the protagonists of the so-called “global war on terror”, that operates in much the same way as the networks that bring together paedophiles and sex offenders on online platforms in the darker parts of the internet? Finally, how and why do these videos leak out of these networks into the wider public domain? Are there weak, conscience-stricken, anonymous whistle-blowing links at the fringes of even the darkest recesses of power (as is evident from the centre of the WikiLeaks storm) that cannot bear the burden of carrying power’s dirtiest secrets?
But here’s something for Muslims to reflect on: a video of Pakistani soldiers killing captives in the Swat valley was briefly circulated on Facebook as one of Indians killing Kashmiris. Sengupta points out, all too rightly:
The irony of a Pakistani atrocity being briefly misattributed as an Indian one only underscores the fact that when it comes to the everyday operationalization of state terror, the security apparatuses of India and Pakistan aspire to the same low standards, which make it quite possible for those seeking to score a few cheap propaganda points on either side to – deliberately or otherwise – confuse one perpetrator for another.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the U.S. military and security apparatuses obviously aspire to, or at least achieve, the same low standard.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Choosing Haiti: Prologue to Bearing the Bruise
“In Bearing the Bruise, Ethan Casey offers up a heartfelt account of his travels in Haiti. As an eyewitness, Casey gives readers an informed perspective on many of the political and social complexities that vex those who seek to make common cause with Haiti, our oldest neighbor, as it seeks to emerge from decades of strife and one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent history.”
- Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health and author of Haiti After the Earthquake
The following excerpt, “Choosing Haiti,” is the prologue to Bearing the Bruise:
“Wee-eek up!” I heard from below my window. “Wee-ee-eek up!”
“Ki moun ou cheche?” I called. Who are you looking for?
“Ou menm! Paul Farmer wants to see you.”
It was only nine in the evening, but it had been a long day of hard travel. I forced myself to sit up and dress.
It seemed I came to Haiti anymore only when something bad had happened. This time, the occasion was the second abrupt and forcible ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been such a divisive central figure in Haiti’s drama since the late 1980s. On February 29, 2004, Aristide had boarded a U.S. plane at the airport in Port-au-Prince and somehow ended up in the Central African Republic. Farmer, the co-founder of Partners in Health, subject of Tracy Kidder’s bestselling book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and author of The Uses of Haiti, was not alone in calling it a coup. Others were pretending not to hear the hard questions Farmer and many Haitians were asking about the incident’s circumstances. Most Americans failed even to notice that it had happened. One American who had noticed was Dick Cheney, whose comment was characteristic: “We’re glad to see him go.”
Earlier that year, when the cable news channels had been carrying disturbing accounts of “rebels” mobilizing against Aristide in provincial Haiti, I was in Pakistan. The semester I had signed up to spend teaching at a university in Lahore ended in early February, and I returned to my home in a London suburb. Matters were coming to a head there as well after my long absence but, when I had a choice to make, I chose Haiti. I always chose Haiti. I quickly wrote and submitted the book I was writing on Pakistan, explained myself as best I could, then fled the suburbs again. I couldn’t not go to Haiti at such a time, or so I told myself; and if I had wanted to stay in the suburbs, I would have stayed in the suburbs in the first place.
So, at what turned out to be decisive cost to my personal situation, I chose Haiti yet again.
I was still groggy as the burly Haitian and I walked out of the compound and across the road. “You’re a writer?” he asked in Creole as we picked our way up a dirt path toward a small house hidden away on a wooded hilltop. His name was Ti Jean.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not as well known as Tracy Kidder …”
“Se zanmi mwen,” said Ti Jean. He’s my friend. I felt one-upped.
A tall man wearing little John Lennon spectacles stood at the entrance to the yard in front of the house. “I’m Paul Farmer,” he said, offering his hand.
It felt like meeting Kurtz at the end of the long journey upriver, but the air of mystery dissolved quickly. In the light Farmer was a bland-looking white guy in early middle age, younger than I had imagined. He wore a light-blue Haitian shirt with stitched palm trees and stylized peasant figures on it. In his small front room he had set out glasses and bottles of rum and Prestige beer on a low table.
They were wary at first, and I blundered by describing the events surrounding Aristide’s departure as “complex.”
“Haitian professionals don’t really buy that peasants and slum dwellers ought to vote,” asserted Farmer. “People who can express themselves in international languages are not on the side of a popular vote. They’re just not, sociologically. The poor happen to be ninety percent of the population here. Reporters, even of goodwill, don’t talk to the poor. That was the purpose of The Uses of Haiti: to say, ‘Look, these people are human.’”
Ti Jean claimed attention and deferred to no one, and he felt insults keenly. If you could communicate with him in Creole, you quickly recognized a shrewd and alert intelligence. “In the U.S.,” he said, “I’ve never seen a Haitian go into a store or a restaurant with visible firearms. But in Haiti, Americans go into stores openly armed all the time. When I see you writing, it doesn’t make me hate you. When I see Paul with a stethoscope, it doesn’t make me feel bad. But when I see an American soldier in Haiti, it makes me want to kill myself.”
“This must be a lot like what you got in the Islamic world,” remarked Farmer. “These are the people I work with, and this is how they talk to me. But Haiti is America’s oldest neighbor. You can only have one oldest neighbor, and for the U.S. this country is it. It’s not Iraq or any other country.”
Farmer later told me how Ti Jean had gone from being a manual laborer to being his right-hand man.
“Everybody has to have a hobby, right?” he said. “Well, mine is planting trees, more than anything else. Trees. But once a place is reforested, then you have to plant other things. So I started with trees, and I’m still into trees, but I also plant other things: perennials, small plants, house plants, whatever, but outside. Water plants, bog plants. And when I would go back to Boston to be on service at the hospital there, I’d be gone for a month solid. And so I’d ask my neighbors, ‘Would you mind watering my plants?’ And they’d always say, ‘Oh please, Doctor Paul, we’d be so happy to water your plants for you. You’re such a fantastic guy, great doctor, we’d be thrilled.’ And I’d come back, and everything would be dead.
“I tried various neighbors. And you get kind of sheepish thinking, well, you know, it’s not like there’s a lot of water around, it’s not like things to eat are coming out of these plants and trees. They’re ornamentals. And so I never really could feel too put out. I always felt kind of sheepish. And Ti Jean was at the time, as he would say, lifting sacks. He would wash the cars, the vehicles, the ambulances, and on Fridays go to a local market and carry back these huge bags of things. And I would just see him in the courtyard. His brother was a patient of mine; he was one of eighteen kids. I knew lots of people in his family. Whenever they were sick, you know. He’s obviously a pretty sharp character, and I asked him would he mind watering my plants. And I came back from being in Boston for a month, and everything was lush and verdant.” He emphasized the adjectives with relish. “I had been expecting the worst. And I said, ‘Wow, Ti Jean, man, thank you so much for doing this. I owe you big-time. I’d like to do something for you.’
“And he said, ‘I’d like a computer.’
“And I was completely floored by that, and I said, ‘What do you want a computer for?’
“And he said, ‘Oh, did someone ask you that when you asked for your first computer?’ And I said, ‘Ouch.’ And it just so happened I had just been given a new computer, so I had two. And I did give him a computer. And now his chief complaint these days is likely to be, ‘I told you I’m sick of Windows 98. I want Windows XP 2000.’”
“The masses have no one sticking up for them anymore,” Ti Jean insisted. “Even now, with Aristide in exile and all the repression, he would be elected again for seventeen years. You can call this a government. We call it a tchoul, a lackey. It’s not elected. They’re jobbeurs, Bush’s hired hands. Haiti is a small country. But it’s the first independent black country. That’s why Aristide was overthrown. Aristide is a black man who wants to stay black. Rich Americans and rich Haitians conspire to make sure Haiti will always be a tchoul state. On February 29, 2004, they restored slavery to Haiti. All Haitian people elected a president. As soon as all Haitians elected him, they blocked international aid. And then when they kidnap him, they restore aid. It’s like The Lord of the Rings.”
I asked Ti Jean whether he believed Aristide had been kidnapped.
“They kidnapped him from his house and took him in handcuffs to the Palace,” he said. “Paul Farmer doesn’t know this. I know this. I have a good source.”
Ti Jean walked me back across the road and left me with a lot to think about.
“Merci, Ti Jean,” I said at the door to the guesthouse.
“Ou merite-l,” he said. You’re welcome.
The literal meaning of the Creole clause Ou merite-l is You deserve it. But was it true? And I couldn’t know whether Ti Jean had meant it literally. I guessed maybe not.
Farmer told me later that, after that first meeting, he had said, “Ethan’s progressive,” and Ti Jean had replied, “It seems that way, but wait until we read his book.”
Special pre-publication offer: Purchase Bearing the Bruise using this button before March 1, 2012 for $14.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
Review: The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple
To most Americans, the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 out of a clear blue sky not only literally, but figuratively as well. But like any event, that one had a history. And if we decline to know that history, it can only be because we are morally as well as intellectually lazy. Nothing could justify such an attack, needless to say. But there are understandable reasons that Muslims resent the West, and these are not flattering to the Western self-image. And if, rather than wallowing in self-pity, self-congratulation, and plausible deniability, we truly want to understand why “they” are angry at “us,” there can hardly be any better book to begin with than The Last Mughal.
The Uprising of 1857 was a crucial episode in the history of the British Empire, forcing as it did not only the transition from the East India Company to direct rule by a viceroy under the British Crown, but also the formal end of the Mughal Empire ruling from Delhi, which had already been for half a century little more than a convenient fiction. The British victory over the rebels – which for months was far from certain – also had consequences, both intended and otherwise, that led to much that has ensued more recently, from the horrendously bloody partition of the subcontinent at the moment of independence in 1947, to the seemingly inevitable rupture between the ostensibly allied U.S. and Pakistani governments that we’ve been watching unfold in slow motion over at least the past year.
William Dalrymple made his name at a young age as an author of travel books but, truth be told, he’s a scholar and historian at heart. I’ve tried to enjoy a couple of his earlier books, and I think part of what made them (in literary terms) only partial successes is that he was trying to shoehorn a scholarly sensibility into the format of personal, rather than historical, narrative. The Last Mughal is a much more assured and seamless accomplishment than either In Xanadu (Dalrymple’s first book, published when he was 24) or From the Holy Mountain (about Christian communities in the Middle East). These aren’t fair comparisons to make, but those are the only two other of Dalrymple’s books that I’ve read (though I now plan to read them all). The Last Mughal is a product of its author’s talent and interests in their full maturity.
It’s also clearly a labor of love, and a feat of both scholarship and narration. Dalrymple has lived for many years by choice in Delhi, and it’s with loving attention to the history and landscape of the city that he calls “the principal centre of the Uprising” that he narrates it, from the multiple points of view of its denizens both Indian and European. He also makes splendid use – along with colleagues Mahmood Farooqui and Bruce Wannell – of
20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers, that we found on the shelves of the National Archives of India. These allow 1857 in Delhi to be seen for the first time from a properly Indian perspective, and not just from the British sources through which to date it has usually been viewed.
The book’s title refers to Bahadur Shah, known as Zafar, the powerless, 82-year-old ruler around whom the rebels rallied in May 1857, and whose “catastrophic failure of nerve on the evening of 16 September” – his refusal to lead a counter-attack at the last moment at which it might have mattered – “marked the beginning of the end” of the Uprising. The Uprising had punctured British arrogance and when, after much death and destruction on all sides, the British retook Delhi, they wrought more of the same not only on those who had rebelled but also on their hapless civilian subjects, in an orgy of spite and vengeance. Dalrymple quotes a Major William Ireland: “Offenders who were seized were handed over to a military commission to be tried. The work went on with celerity. Death was almost the only punishment, and condemnation almost the only issue of a trial. The gentlemen who had to judge offenders were in no mood for leniency.” Another British officer, Fred Roberts, called his entry into Delhi “a gruesome proceeding”:
[N]ot a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen. Dead bodies were strewn about in all directions in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume, in every stage of decomposition. … The atmosphere was unimaginably disgusting, laden as it was with the most noxious and sickening odours.
Thus at the very historical moment at which, with the legitimacy of both the Mughal court and the East India Company destroyed or severely compromised, the British Crown was required to begin ruling India in earnest, its representatives undercut their own moral authority, just when they needed it most. The more British credibility diminished, the shriller and more heavy-handed became their rhetorical, legal, and political approaches to the population they presumed to rule. And, rather than – with some exceptions – engaging in soul-searching to address hard questions of what had brought on the Uprising, they scapegoated not only the last Mughal emperor but the entire Muslim community of India and, indeed, of the world: “Harriott [the prosecutor in the emperor's trial] maintained that Zafar was the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort.”
“The Uprising in fact showed every sign,” writes Dalrymple,
of being initiated by upper-caste Hindu sepoys reacting against specifically military grievances perceived as a threat to their faith and dharma; it then spread rapidly through the country, attracting a fractured and diffuse collection of other groups alienated by aggressively insensitive and brutal British policies. Among these were the Mughal court and the many Muslim individuals who made their way to Delhi and fought as civilian jihadis united against the kafir enemy. Yet Harriott’s bigoted and Islamophobic argument oversimplified this complex picture down to an easily comprehensible, if quite fictional, global Muslim conspiracy with an appealingly visible and captive hate figure at its centre, towards whom righteous vengeance could now be directed.
Having literally obliterated much of the city that the Mughals had built, the British proceeded systematically to favor India’s Hindu majority over the already weakened and demoralized Muslims. This tactic has traditionally been called “divide and rule” and, looked at one way, it was demonstrably effective for ninety years after 1857 (albeit less so nearer the end). But, equally demonstrably, it is the wellspring of much bitterness that still ramifies throughout the subcontinent and the world today. Dalrymple writes that “as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two.”
The rest is more recent history, whose traumas on all sides are all too raw. The post-1857 response of one portion of India’s Muslim community was, as Dalrymple puts it, “to reject the West in toto and and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.” The madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of Delhi, “therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.”
One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Defining terror: Better late than never? by Ahad Khan
Guest article by Ahad Khan
In his recent article “Home Free: Waging War on Ourselves,” Ethan Casey writes about what I know as “the American dream” or, as he calls it, “the ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs.”
As a person of Pakistani heritage, I didn’t need help to notice the near exact parallel between the history of black people in America on one hand, and the plight of the U.S. government’s ghosts somewhere in “Afpakistan” on the other. I am talking about the victims of America’s drone war in the “Af-Pak” border region, home to the folks who supposedly hate the American way of life (courtesy U.S. presidents of the past decade). If we are to believe their advocates, Predator drones are so advanced that they even have their own conscience. You don’t have to worry about them mistakenly firing on women and children alike.
Our world’s affairs have arrived at a confusing point. Wars between different countries, overt and covert, increasingly appear to be conflicts between civilizations. I should not say that we can’t tell where it may lead us during the course of our own generation. History has clearly taught us time and again that struggles for freedom become inevitable wherever people are forced to live with a feeling of being suppressed. It was just such a struggle that gave birth to an America that dreamt of liberty and justice for all. It was such a struggle that solemnized the rights of the black people of America, through the brilliance of heroes like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
It was that same struggle that led to the creation of Pakistan, by a nation of people that – like black Americans – had grown sick and tired of being denied equal treatment in their own society. It is this freedom that we, as human beings, have shown to hold so dear, that it has served to justify our restless campaigns for the rights we demanded to live in honour and dignity.
It is no less amazing what man would do to defend what he perceives to be his freedom, or any symbol that represents it. While it still holds true that the horrific events of 9/11 raised more questions than answers (technically speaking), who would dare to challenge the notion that the USA was dealt a devastating blow to its core beliefs? To repair America’s presumably unshakeable spirit of justice, someone was going to have to pay. A determined U.S. military thus engaged in a worldwide war on ‘terror’. Over a decade later, we find the same forces holed up in Afghanistan, unwelcome and surrounded from all directions. Their enemies (those that were meant to be paid back) are stronger than they were at any point during the course of the war and easily project effective control over most of the country. The lack of a clearly defined war strategy is just one rampant example out of many to show how American leadership is completely clueless about what it’s doing there. But at least bin Laden’s dead. Mission accomplished, whatever it’s been.
As the world looks at its old ally today – they who slammed the lid on Hitler’s coffin – it’s been curious to know what the USA really aims to achieve. As America’s government continues to pursue ‘the terrorists’, it has made that country itself into the biggest victim of terror. Before anyone jumps me for contradicting other countries’ body counts: terror succeeds where people allow themselves to be terrorized; you can’t terrorize the dead. Thus, in my humble opinion, the primary victims of terror are not those that are now laid to rest in their graves; they’re the people amongst us who are ready to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the mirage that’s presented as “threats to national security.” Those who refused to come to terms with their defeat once, failing to learn from it, are thereby damned to fail in future.
In my humble opinion the Obama administration does know that it had failed, long before the latest breakdown in relations with Pakistan after Pakistani soldiers were attacked without reason. When was the last time you heard any U.S. government official tell the world that they’re trying to “win the hearts of minds” of people on the other side of the world? They never intended to bomb their hearts and minds out, it depends on the means chosen to aim at the target. The tendencies that champion the death sentence as a means for the sake of internal security, favor the use of drones when it comes to external security.
As much as we’ve suffered as Pakistanis under America’s misleading wars, I can’t help but feel sorry for America. As this great nation’s ideology is its biggest victim of war, the defeat couldn’t be greater. The rampant paranoia at present about hunting “terrorists” does not represent the example America gave to the rest of the world in the course of the previous century. Sadly, most of our generation will remember it by the images of a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. Pakistan and the emerging Arab nations will learn what democracy is on their own. They’ll take an example in future of what happened in America when people allowed themselves to be governed by fear instead of by a determined leadership. Justice will be sought and found, even by some of those people that the knights of freedom would describe as terrorists.
Ahad Khan is a Dutch Pakistani whose parents hail from Karachi. A health management student from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he’s a dental practice manager in everyday life.
It is indeed about Greg Mortenson, by Mahvesh Khan
Guest article by Mahvesh Khan
When I disagreed with some ideas in Ethan Casey’s recent article “It’s not about Greg Mortenson,” he very kindly responded with certain clarifications and invited me to contribute a guest article. On reading his clarifications, I realized that, had I read the article more carefully, I would have seen that his argument was balanced enough to include my point of view. So this is not an article contradicting Ethan. It is simply a further elucidation of my own views.
I stated two basic points to Ethan. The first is that it is indeed about Greg. Although his story might have inspired Americans to hope for a better future as regards their relationship with Pakistan, the lies he told destroyed his credibility and provided one more reason for cynicism in a turbulent world.
I am Pakistani. I grew up here in Pakistan, I was educated here, I work here. Therefore, I understand and, to an extent, share certain perspectives with my fellow countrymen. These include the idea that all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the Americans are fronts for the CIA. Americans working in the development sector and caught telling lies are automatically used as further evidence for this view. Therefore, whatever Greg might have done for the American public, he has certainly contributed enormously to the negative image of American aid to Pakistan.
This idea might seem absurd from an American perspective, but our lack of trust in our own government – with good reason – provides a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and many of these revolve around American intelligence agencies. An example is the February 2010 furore over Blackwater operatives said to be employed by an American NGO in Peshawar. The incident was covered by the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.
From a more pragmatic, less suspicious point of view, if I were to donate to a charity, I would prefer to donate to one I trust. If the founder of a charitable organization has lied about the organization itself, whatever his reasons, I will take my donations elsewhere. This is not an exercise in theory. I live in a badly governed country and am obliged by my religion to give a certain portion of my income in charity every year. This means that, like most Pakistanis I am close to and will consult with, I am always on the lookout for a trustworthy charitable organization. For American donors giving money to a charity halfway around the world, this verification becomes imperative, and therefore the face (and reputation) of the organization is indeed important.
My second point is that a “serious and large-scale engagement” with the American public is not necessary for Pakistan to turn its education system around. The only engagement Pakistan requires is with its own self. This I hold to be true for any Pakistani system, education or otherwise.
Leaders for social change emerge from the struggle within their own societies. They do not visit the society in question from time to time, inject a little money to assist a certain project, then go off home to continue with their other, more comfortable lives. A highly relevant example is Mother Teresa, who settled in India to carry out her work. Martin Luther King is a wonderful, American example. Our homegrown example is Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi, who truly should be celebrated much more than he is. Nelson Mandela is a leader I admire tremendously. Indeed, of all world leaders today, he is the one I respect and honor most.
In fact, I believe that attempting to change aspects of a culture that is not one’s own can only bring grief, both to oneself and to the people one is trying to benefit. The intentions may be noble, but history is littered with noble intentions leading to ignoble results. For example, one reason for taking state custody of the stolen generations of aboriginal Australians was “child protection.” Recently in the U.S., the issue of taking state custody of obese children is being debated.
The point is that when we are obviously unable to decide what is best for ourselves, within our own culture, it is extremely arrogant to assume that we know what is best for others who are operating in a different and completely unknown culture. One question that cropped up on Ethan’s blog was: Where are the Pakistani leaders for social change? In addition to Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi’s work, here are links to a Pakistani charity for the blind, the Layton-Rahmatullah trust fund, and to the Ittefaq Hospital Trust set up by the father of our former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Ethan has included quite a few links related to local charities working for education in his blog. I am inserting these links here simply to demonstrate that we do not lack people seriously attempting to alleviate the issues faced by our country.
A problem Pakistanis face both within and outside the country is our own inability to project ourselves. This means that a lot of good work done here is done so quietly that the media – whether Pakistani or foreign – either does not know it’s being done, or does not project it as an impressive achievement. Therefore, instead of idolizing the true, Pakistani heroes and heroines, we are reduced to applauding the foreigner whose impact on the country is obviously going to be much less than that of local change-makers.
Or maybe we are such a media-saturated society, encouraged to pity the less prosperous and convinced that nothing is worthy unless it occurs on a large scale and becomes famous, that we are unable to recognise the true heroes when we see them. In Lasbella, Balochistan, I met a young government school teacher. She told me that her father was a daily wage labourer (for Pakistani readers, a mazdoor) who had always wanted to educate his daughters. However, while they lived in their local village, her father’s elder brother managed to dissuade him from doing so. It was when they shifted to Lasbella, a semi-urban area, that her father was able to educate his two younger daughters. Her four older sisters were completely illiterate.
I asked her if her father was happy with the result, and she replied, “Of course. Today I receive so much respect!” Sufficient people like this young lady and her father will create the Pakistan we would so dearly like to see.
By the way, while we were having this conversation, we both had our heads covered. It is the culture in Balochistan, which I adopt when I go there.
If Americans actually have an emotional and spiritual need to believe in and support constructive, life-affirming projects, their collaboration with Pakistanis is always welcome. Books and blogs like Ethan’s, or documentaries revealing the positive side of Pakistan – and we must have some positive aspects since, as far as I know, we are of human descent – are undoubtedly useful.
However, if money is being sunk into development projects, I would suggest that the citizens themselves ensure that the project is actually carrying out the work it is supposed to be doing. Physical verification of that work, and an impact analysis, would be good ideas. After all, it’s hard-earned money. Why waste it?
Mahvesh Khan belongs to a family that shifted en masse from Indian Punjab to Pakistan during the Partition of 1947, leaving behind a 400-year-old settlement. Her grandmothers observed purdah in India. In Pakistan they were the first women to inherit property, due to the shariah. Supported by her father, Mahvesh obtained a master’s degree in business from a university in Australia at a time when women from her family were not encouraged to study abroad. She has been a teacher/administrator for a private school system and is currently employed in the development sector.
Home Free: It’s always right to try
Last week was an eventful one on multiple fronts, though really they’re all of a piece. The dust-up in the London Review of Books between the neo-imperialist British historian Niall Ferguson and the prolific Indian writer Pankaj Mishra spurred me to write a critique – not of Ferguson, who has been amply critiqued (most amply of all by Mishra), but rather of Mishra. The broader purpose of my essay “Has Pankaj Mishra Ever Been to South Dakota?”, published this week in the Indian magazine Open, is to ask people worldwide who see themselves and/or their countries as victims of Western imperialism to remember with compassion that odious system’s other victims, namely the ordinary and provincial people of the West itself.
A teach-in at the Occupy Seattle encampment on the grounds of Seattle Central Community College in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, December 9, 2011.
There’s more to say on that than I have space for here; suffice it to say that I’ll be continuing to write on that subject. It must sound cheap or glib for an American to assert that we’re all in it together, but the millions of American families whose homes are in foreclosure are not equivalent to the power that’s killing civilians in Waziristan with unmanned drone aircraft. The fact that Americans themselves will soon be on the receiving end of drone surveillance is not something from which Pakistanis or anyone else should be taking any pleasure or satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the slugger Albert Pujols made a most peremptory non-verbal statement to the people of St. Louis, a venerable and very serious baseball town, by signing a gargantuan ten-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels. Actually, the statement Pujols and his agent, and the powers that run America’s sometime national pastime, are making ramifies far beyond St. Louis, indeed beyond baseball, which is why I feel a need to devote next week’s entire column to it. Watch this space.
And on the streets of the real America, I witnessed the dismantling of the Occupy Seattle encampment on the grounds of Seattle Central Community College. My friend Jeb Wyman, who teaches at Seattle Central, emailed and phoned Friday morning urging me to join him at a teach-in that afternoon. The college was planning to evict the encampment over the weekend, so this would likely be my last chance to see the Occupy movement in the flesh, at least in its original incarnation.
Various criticisms have been made of the Occupy movement, by its enemies as well as by some who share many of its goals. Some of these are legitimate; others are distractions or even lies. What isn’t feasible is to dismiss the movement entirely. Since September it has touched a very sensitive national nerve and genuinely redirected the public conversation in America, not definitively (yet), but irreversibly. As we slouch ominously into a thoroughly uninspiring election year, the establishment that presumes to control the conversation and everything else in America has been put on notice.
After using the filthy men’s room, I walked out the south exit of Seattle Central’s main building to the urban intersection that Occupy has been occupying since getting kicked out of Westlake Plaza downtown some weeks ago. A man standing on a wooden box and wearing a black-on-blue “FACULTY UNION” t-shirt was telling a small crowd that we can’t necessarily expect history to turn out the way we want it to, but at every moment we have both an opportunity and an obligation to do what we can to move it in the right direction. “All you can know is that it’s always right to try,” he said.
I drifted away from the speaker and walked around, watching occupiers raking up straw from the ground around the tents they’ve been sleeping in (Friday was a cold day, near freezing). Then a young woman approached me, introduced herself as Marisa, and handed me off to Ian Finkenbinder, who was pepper-sprayed by Seattle cops on the same recent occasion as 84-year-old Dorli Rainey. Like several others I met and saw that day, Ian had a photocopied 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet paper-clipped to his back that read:
NON-VIOLENT
SEATTLE CENTRAL
STUDENT AND
PROTESTER
Ian, it turns out, is a student of Jeb’s, an Iraq veteran, and an assertive political activist and blogger. Just that morning, he told me, “I was doing my morning walk-through, which I do every day before class.” He saw some Seattle Central administrators taking pictures of the encampment. “And I overheard them say, ‘We’re gonna have to resod all of this, and it’s gonna cost a lot of money.’ So I turned to them, and I said, ‘Perhaps a better use of that money would be replacing ceiling tiles that are soaked with rat pee in every classroom.’ So they laughed at me, and I walked away.”
Prof. Jeb Wyman of Seattle Central Community College (left) and Ethan Casey at Bill's Off Broadway, Seattle, December 9, 2011.
As things turned out I didn’t get to share the speaker’s wooden box with Jeb, which was fine, because I wasn’t sure what I could have said that the occupiers hadn’t already figured out for themselves. And while Jeb was speaking I got caught up in an interesting conversation with Rich Jensen, who described himself as having been briefly president of the famous Seattle-based Sub Pop Records and a lifelong Northwesterner, a member of this region’s pervasive white middle class, who in recent years experienced a kind of conversion to a truer awareness of Seattle and of America as a whole.
“Seattle is a very interesting microcosm,” Rich told me. “Many of the neuroses that we have in Seattle are essential American neuroses.” Seattle, he accurately said, “is so segregated that the white liberals of the northern neighborhoods don’t even know.” That hit home for me, because I live in one of those northern neighborhoods.
Rich thought that what’s begun happening the past few months might qualify to be described as a revolution. “People see Che Guevara and bullets and stuff,” he said, meaning that’s what people think a revolution is. “But most of a revolution is a change in consciousness. My experience is definitely not unique. It’s not really reported, but it’s the kind of transformation that’s happening throughout the culture.”
“The media discussion has been so sterile for so long, that just one weed in the sidewalk gets everyone’s attention,” he said. “The 1 percent/ 99 percent dichotomy is very real. The 99 percent are not at the table, and are not allowed at the table. This is just ordinary people who are saying, ‘You know what? I’m not gonna wait for the Democratic Party.’”
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: Waging war on ourselves
A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the U.S. about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. … What the U.S. is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these U.S. attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in U.S. domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry, everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
We’re all guilty of this, that, or the other. I know I am. As Russell Baker (bless him for sticking around among us so long; the old guy is a national treasure) noted in reviewing Clint Eastwood’s new film about J. Edgar Hoover:
The FBI chief trafficked in fear, which flourishes best when the fog is thickest, the uncertainty deepest, and people who have always thought themselves above suspicion begin to wonder if perhaps there is some long forgotten incident in their distant past that might be dug up, exposing them to public humiliation, Congressional investigation, criminal indictment, destruction. It is a rare life that hasn’t a few deplorable incidents in its chronicle. As Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and “passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” and when someone looks deep enough for dirt, “There is always something.”
The ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs is that we don’t mind horrible things being done to people in our name, as long as they’re done to other people. This is the truth Grisham identifies in pointing out that white Southerners still support the death penalty, but black people know better.
Analogously, many Americans apparently don’t mind if the U.S. military is used to arrest U.S. citizens within U.S. borders, so long as those U.S. citizens are Muslims or other brown people. One non-Muslim who does mind is Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL). As he wrote last Thursday in a letter to constituents: “This week, the Senate considered legislation specifically authorizing our military to arrest and detain anyone, including U.S. citizens inside America, who the President suspects may be connected to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In my view, American citizens inside this country have inalienable Constitutional rights that can only be removed by a civilian jury of your peers.”
In taking such a stand, Senator Kirk is behaving like a patriot, in the true sense of that word. If I lived in Illinois, I might even vote for him. What he understands is that we can’t take away others’ freedom without taking away our own. And, as the dawn of the domestic drones should bring home to us, we can’t wage war on others without also waging it on ourselves.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Pakistan and the US: We are free to choose peace
My latest article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn is headlined “We are free to choose peace.” It includes this paragraph:
Our two countries have arrived at a depressing and discouraging pass, both in relation to each other and internally. The exigencies of “defense,” which is a euphemism for war, have brought us here. As individuals, we feel (because we are) largely powerless to affect the course of events. As human communities there’s more we can do, as the Occupy Wall Street movement has been showing in America, and as the lawyers’ movement showed in Pakistan.
Read the full article here:
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