[Nettime-bold] FW: <nettime> Understand the Whispers by Rajeev Bhargava

["Paul Hilder" <paul.hilder@opendemocracy.net>]

I recommend Rajeev's piece to nettimers as a wonderful, nuanced explanation
of problems often lost in the rasping form of their presentation. He and his
wife Tani are the New Delhi outpost of www.openDemocracy.net, and he wrote
it for us last week - it joined over 150 other reflections and contributions
across the spectrum and around the world on these events. Feel free to join
us trying to think through the fog.

An overview of the debate so far is at
http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=95&DocID=656.

For the latest of four reflections from Todd Gitlin, our man in New York:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=95&DocID=680

Here's a chunk -
-----------
A primal process is at work. The rage that Americans and many outside
America feel after the immense crimes of September 11 conjures a metaphor to
package the feeling. The metaphor entails other metaphors, as ‘war’ entails
‘victory’. And this is when we get into grave trouble. Metaphors can be
lethal. People die and massacre in their name. The metaphor is that shining
simplification that enables us to believe that we understand what we are
about to destroy. We ought to have no trouble understanding how those who
speak of ‘Holy War’ one minute become mass murderers the next. In an
emergency, volcanic eruptions deliver the unvarnished truth. In the US
today, most of those in charge seem to be thinking with their blood.
-----------

...............
Paul Hilder
www.openDemocracy.net
After Ground Zero

-----Original Message-----
From: nettime-l-request@bbs.thing.net
[mailto:nettime-l-request@bbs.thing.net]On Behalf Of Shuddhabrata
Sengupta
Sent: 28 September 2001 08:56
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Understand the Whispers by Rajeev Bhargava



Apologies for cross posting to those on the Sarai Reader List
Here is a text that has been sent in by Rajeev Bhargava, a political
philosopher in New Delhi, on the moral dilemmas that are being obscured by
the rhetoric of war and vendett in the aftermath of September 11.

Shuddha
____________________________________________
Understand the Whispers
Rajeev Bhargava

In India, as elsewhere, every person understood the cry for help: the horror
and fear writ large on terror stricken faces, the trauma in the choked
voices
of people who saw it happen, the hopeless struggle to control an imminent
breakdown in public, the unspeakable grief. For one moment, the pain and
suffering of others became our own.

In a flash, everyone recognised what is plain but easily forgotten that
inscribed in our personal selves is not just our separateness from others
but
also sameness with them,that despite all socially constructed differences of
language, culture, religion, nationality, perhaps even race, caste and
gender, we share something in common. Amidst terror, acute vulnerability and
unbearable sorrow, it was not America alone that rediscovered its lost
solidarity. In these cataclysmic events, all people across the globe reclaim
their common humanity.

As we empathised with those who escaped or witnessed death, and re-lived the
traumatic experience of those who lost their lives, we knew a grave,
irreparable wrong done to individuals, killed, wounded or traumatised by the
sudden loss of family and friends. These individuals were not just subjected
to physical hurt or mental trauma, they were recipients and carriers of a
message embodied in that heinous act. From now on they must live with a
dreadful sense of their own  vulnerability. This message was transmitted
first to other individuals in New York and Washington, then quickly to
citizens throughout the democratic world. The catastrophe on the east coast
has deepened the sense of insecurity of every individual on this planet.

However, this was not the only message sent by the perpetrators. Others are
revealed when we focus on our collective identities. These messages are
disturbingly ambivalent, morally fuzzy. They are less likely to sift good
from evil, more likely to divide than unite people across the world.

One such message which the poor, the powerless and the culturally
marginalised would like communicated to the rich, powerful and the
culturally
dominant is this: we have grasped that any injustice done to us is erased
before it is seen or spoken about; that in the current international social
order, we count for very little; our ways of life are hopelessly
marginalised, our lives utterly valueless.

Even middle-class Indians with cosmopolitan aspirations became painfully
aware of this when a country-wide list of missing or dead persons was
flashed
on an international news channel: hundreds of Britons, scores of  Japanese,
some Germans, three Australians, two Italians, one Swede. A few buttons
away,
a South Asian channel lists names of several hundred missing or dead
Indians,
while another flashes the names of thousands with messages of their safety
to
relatives back home.
Intangible wounds

Hard as it is to talk of this right now, it must be acknowledged that the
attacks on New York and Washington were also meant to lower the collective
self-esteem of Americans, to rupture their pride. Not all intentional
wrong-doing is physically injurious to the victim, but every intentionally
generated physical suffering is   invariably accompanied by intangible
wounds. The attack on September 11 did not merely demolish concrete
buildings
and individual people. It tried to destroy the American measure of its own
self-worth, to diminish the self-esteem of Americans.

Quite separate from the immorality of physical suffering caused, isn’t this
attempt itself morally condemnable? Yes, if the act further lowers the
self-worth of  people with little enough. But this is hardly true of
America,
where the ruling elite ensures that its collective self-worth borders
supreme
arrogance, always over the top. Does not the Pentagon symbolise this false
collective pride?

Amidst this carnage, then, is a sobering thought.It occurs more naturally to
poor people of powerless countries. Occasionally, even the mighty can be
humbled. In such societies, the genuine anguish of people at disasters faced
by the rich is mixed up with an unspeakable emotion which, on such
apocalyptic occasions, people experience only in private or talk about only
in whispers.

I have spoken of two dimensions to the message hidden in the mangled remains
of the destruction of September 11. The moral horror of the individual
dimension of the carnage is unambiguous and overwhelming. But as we pause to
examine its collective dimension, a less clear, more confusing moral picture
emerges. How, on balance, after putting together these two dimensions, do we
evaluate this more complicated moral terrain?

The answer has to be swift and unwavering. For now, the focus must remain on
the individual and the humanitarian. To shift our ethical compass in the
direction of the collective weakens the moral claims of the suffering and
the
dead. This is plainly wrong. Nor is it enough to make merely a passing
reference to the tragedy of individuals, a grudging concession before the
weightier political crimes of a neo-imperial state are considered. The moral
claims of individuals are currently supreme.

But we cannot permanently screen off the collective dimension. To do so
would
obstruct our understanding of how tragedies of individuals can be prevented
in future; in any case, in the long run it extends another already existing
moral  wrong.

Victim must not turn perpetrator

>From all accounts, the victims in America have reacted with quiet dignity
in
the face of  overwhelming grief. But there is also a growing moral revulsion
and perhaps an understandable expression of the need for vengeance. Even as
some people unfairly, even preposterously, become the victims of this newest
hatred, the American President has promised revenge.

Can anything be wrong with hating ruthless strategists who achieve their
political goals by the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians? How
can it be wrong for a woman to hate the rapist who has permanently scarred
her, or for victims to hate leaders or organisers of mobs that lynched them?

At issue here is not the feeling of an intense desire to hurt others in
order
to gain advantage for oneself. Of course, malicious hatred is obnoxious. But
those who hate  the perpetrators of the carnage on September 11are not
driven
by malice or spite. Hating the wrong-doer is not morally inappropriate. If
so, it must be morally permissible to desire to hurt the wrong-doer. It is
extremely abnormal if self-respecting persons do not experience righteous
anger, even hatred towards those who have wronged them.There must be some
room in our moral topography for what the philosopher, Jeffrie Murphy calls
retributive hatred.

Yet it may not be wise or morally appropriate for victims to act on these
feelings. It is imprudent because retaliatory action sparks off escalating
cycles of revenge and reciprocal violence. Retaliation by the US and counter
retaliation will almost certainly plunge the entire world into greater
suffering, pain, vulnerability and insecurity. Revenge can unleash even
greater tragedies.

How do we make sure that today's victims do not  become tomorrow's
perpetrators of much worse? What if the original motive of revenge unravels
an unappeasable thirst for violence? If lessons of history teach us anything
at all, it is that the barbaric acts of one group solicit equally barbaric
acts from others. No matter on whom the first blow was struck, if our aim is
to terminate barbarism, then, it must be stalled now, suddenly, and
abruptly.
In the shifting sands of the complex ethic at work here, the entire moral
advantage rests with victims of the immediate crime. If the vision that
generally motivates them is to come good eventually, it is best, all things
considered, to forgo the temptation to act on retributive hatred and
feelings
of vengeance.

Retribution, not revenge

To restrain vengeful motives is wise for another reason. Undoubtedly, the
massacre on the East coast is motivated by the desire to question the
economic, political and cultural supremacy of the USA in a radically unequal
world. If and when the mightiest nation in the world retaliates, it will not
be to grant equal status to offenders. It is rather more likely that, by a
massive display of strength,
they will be shoved further back in their less than equal place. The not so
hidden text of American retaliation will be an abject lesson to all to never
again dare American supremacy.

Will it surprise anyone if a disproportionate and symbolic show of force to
maim and crush the enemy flows from the very same motive of vengeance? It is
true, of course, that some acts of revenge are the wellspring of equality
and
refute claims of supremacy  by wrong-doers. However, the spectacular show of
violence on September 11 and in the days to come is likely to reveal a
different,warped logic of alternating claims of superiority.

We need retribution for sure, but not revenge. In the days to come, we must
not be forced to witness ghost towns in other parts of the world with more
terror-stricken faces, choked voices, desperately crying for help. American
might must be restrained, perpetrators must be brought to book in an
international court of justice and tried for  crimes against humanity, our
common humanity.

This would just be a beginning. To set a larger process of reconciliation in
motion, the messages of marginalised collectives hidden under the gruesome
rubble of Tuesday's destruction must be decoded and discussed by moderates
from all over the world. Only by properly understanding the social, cultural
and spiritual basis of self-respect in our troubled times can we ever begin
to address the problems violently thrown at us on September 11.

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