Climate of Fear : The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

Three Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds

I propose to address this topic from two directions— one, the political; the other, the religious. Given the fact that, in the present day — and indeed, in a nearly unbroken continuum of history — both often prove to be merely two sides of the same coin, it should not be surprising if, from time to time, it would indeed appear that all we are engaged upon is tossing up, just like a coin, one two-sided notion. We watch it spin through the air in a blur of rapid alternations, and succumb to the law of gravity — known as coming down to earth — to reveal one side or the other, almost interchangeably. The sanctimoniousness that often characterizes one— the political — on the one hand, and the sacrosanctity that is claimed as the foundation of the other, even when it extends its constituency to the political and the mundane, make it clear that they are both claimants to the same highway of influence and control of human lives whose ultimate destination is power — the consolidation of power in itself, or the execution of policies that aspire to the total control of a polity.

Thus, the president of a powerful nation addresses a political situation in what amounts to the language of revelation tinged with messianism. Nearly on the other side of the globe, a religious leader whips up his citizens in a frenzy of alarm whose tenor is that the very salvation of their collective soul — and only incidentally the survival of the state — is jeopardized. In the hysterical condition that is aroused in the populace, hundreds of youths are sentenced to be hanged for the crime of being “agents of Satan,” “enemies of God,” and so on. Back again on the other side, wars of dubious justification are launched, humanity is savaged, the globe destabilized, and all rhetoricians of power sleep soundly, until it is time for the next hysterical whip-up. The coupling within “for God and country” is no historic accident.

Let me, as we proceed, call attention to the fact that hysteria is not always an outwardly expressed abnormality, usually loud and violent. In fact, there is the quiet form of hysteria, as medical experts will testify. Hysteria can also manifest itself as a collective and infectious outbreak, one that cannot always be accurately traced to a logical causative event. At its most affective, it emerges as the product of a one-way communication — a monologue, in short — that succeeds in blinding its followers to the very realities that surround them while sealing them in a community of conviction, even of the unresolved kind. That condition is indifferent to verification of the content of what is being communicated, indifferent to the moralities or justice — if any — of its claims, or the probable consequences of its pursuit. The moment is all, and creates for each affected member a highly solipsistic existence within a charmed circle, whose only reference point is that infinite moment of mass excitation. The rhetorical hysteria that is produced in such circumstances often dissipates soon after, but not always. Numbers promise more than safety, as in “safety in numbers”—they often guarantee certitude and invulnerability. Thus the collective conviction that sustains the individual may be dissipated with the physical dispersal of the crutch of numbers — let us say, after a political or religious rally. In such a case, the pathology of the moment is redressed by a return to reality, and each individual regains his or her whole being — until the next time.

However, a hard core of the message embedded in that emotive ferment may linger on, resulting in individual recalls, at various levels of consciousness, of the basic tenor of the collective experience, urging on the execution of its embedded message. The core of retention may be beatific, resulting in a resolve to improve the lot of a long-neglected neighbor, make restitution where some illegality has been committed, or an immoral advantage secured. It can lead to a grandiose vision for the betterment or salvation of mankind. The religious variety is prone to generating such an aftermath, a Moral Rearmament longing of one kind or another. On the other hand, alas, it may produce the very opposite, the destructive and apocalyptic.The ideological route is an equally mixed bag, but usually more disruptive, more contradictory, since it lays claim to rational processes yet acts with the dogmatism of pure revelation.

What I have referred to as rhetorical hysteria may therefore be safely considered the product of a one-way communication; that is, the monologue or public harangue. Dialogue, on the other hand, actually involves exchange, and the circumstances must be very abnormal indeed when it results in the hysterical condition. It is both convenient and relevant to personify, at this point, the difference between these two through the contrasting personalities of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and others of like temper, and the current, embattled leader of Iran, President Khatami. We shall return to this most instructive pair toward the end.

It would also help, perhaps, if we advanced our exploration of the rhetorical theme through the terrain of light relief, if only to nudge the more self-assured nations, movements, and religions in the direction of a sense of proportion. We might reflect their certitudes through escapades that are often no more than self-indulgent gambits, which they would prefer to despise as simplistic mimicries of their own more advanced and elaborate, as well as better-structured and — packaged manifestos.What often develops to the level of rhetorical hysteria may begin as small pinpricks designed to annoy a complacent society and perhaps reinforce a group feeling of dissidence, but may grow into veritable monstrosities of absolute notions that run amok, consuming all within sight until they eventually consume themselves or are consumed by more rabid challengers. I shall share my favorite example, but not just yet. First, we should establish the sociopolitical background and context, just to situate ourselves in the general ambience of its times.

Many here will still recall that leftist phase of the sixties, labeled Trotskyite or Maoist, one that is now being superseded by other radical motions toward the transformation of man and society. It is a phase that is now receding into obscurity, thanks mostly to the collapse of communist ideology. I happen to believe that the humanistic foundation of the socialist ideal has not been thereby invalidated, but this belongs to another discourse entirely. In any case, the passion for a basis in ideological righteousness is still daily manifested in isolated anarchic acts against society, as well as in ideologically based wars around the globe. The period that I wish to recall was characterized by the exploits of the Red Brigade, based largely in Italy, Action Directe in France, the Baader-Meinhof in Germany, etc., with clones in Latin America and Japan, in addition to one or two isolated spots in Asia. Perhaps the most sensational single event of that period was the kidnapping and murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Kidnapping of businessmen or their relations for ransom was commonplace, nor can one easily forget the ruthless, cult-style executions in hidden mountain caves of Japan for alleged crimes of deviation from the pure strain of the revolutionary ideal. Not too surprisingly, other variants resulted in convoluted alliances between ideological and criminal impulses — drug trafficking allied to radical idealism in countries like Colombia.

The famous youth-inspired 1968 uprising in Paris that attempted to resurrect a commune modeled after the Paris Commune of the French revolutionary ferment was another notable manifestation of the passion for change, a severe testing of the status quo, and very French in temper, despite its continental alliances. Other names like Daniel “Danny the Red”, Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray, and Angela Davis entered the lore of world revolutionary gladiators, satellites in orbit around the ultimate symbol of the times — Che Guevara. Depending on which arc of the class spectrum one occupied, and the methodology of action advocated and deployed, the overall movement evoked among the world population extreme degrees of admiration, revulsion — and fear. How wide would the movement spread, especially among youth? How deeply would it undermine the fabric of society?

This, then, was the setting for a far less sensational but widely spread offshoot of the same cast of mind — the junior partner, if you like — that had sprung up within the radical atmosphere of the sixties. It is the extract from the diffuse, nonlethal offshoot, a proliferating mantra, that I wish to identify as typifying the nature of rhetoric that, in varying degrees of flippancy and adolescent conviction, can graduate over time into an agenda for unreflective extremism. It builds up to a hysterical level that turns an otherwise rational section of humanity into active conduits for, at the very least, a mandatory suspension of disbelief. It is a phenomenon that reveals itself in its abandonment of skepticism. A new community is born, imbued with its own moral code — again, not one that is subjected to rigorous tests — that places itself outside existing social arrangements. A complacent society views it at first with a condescending amusement, later with trepidation.

How I came to observe this process firsthand was just as relevant to my observations. I was in self-imposed exile, a therapy I had embarked upon for another situation of lethal rhetorics that had sacrificed a million or two of Nigerian humanity under the rhythmic mantra: To keep the nation one is a task that must be done. Our civil war was being concluded in a mood of euphoria and, as I emerged from prison detention, I was not sure which form of hysteria grated more — the tone of nationalist jingoism that had surrounded me before I was locked up, one that made that war inevitable in the first place, or the barely suppressed triumphalist smugness into which I was thrust as I regained my freedom. Military success was equated with a divine vindication of the war.

On the other side, in the breakaway Biafran state, the same syndrome had more tragic results.Youths went into battle with nothing but wooden guns in their hands, captives of the same rhetoric that was drummed daily into their heads—No power on the African continent can subdue us. That belief had somehow translated into the mimic guns with which they charged the federal foe, as reported by a colleague who pronounced himself numbed by the experience. Was it any different, I wondered, from the self-submission of normally hardheaded men to the rhetorical powers of a Ugandan, Alice Lakwena, and her Holy Spirit Mobile Forces? Alice’s volunteers charged into hails of bullets, convinced that they were immune to their penetration, that the force of bullets was neutralized as a result of the inoculation that Alice had administered to them. After the capture of Alice in Tanzania, a university professor who had been part of her army was asked, in an interview, how it was possible for him, a man of presumed intellect, to have been persuaded of the supernatural powers of this woman, and for so long. He could proffer no answer, only that he supposed that they had all been under some spell. Fatalities, he said, had been rationalized away — such victims were only the weak in faith. This scenario has been sadly encountered in many more civil-war zones all over the continent, most especially among the child soldiers.

And now we come to the nurturing environment of the mantra. As I began my lecture tour of some European universities during that exile, it did not take long for me to realize that the mood of the historic Paris uprising was still in the ascendant, never mind the failure of that movement — and perhaps the zeal, being all that was left, was even more willfully embraced on that account. I came into daily contact with students and all manner of disenchanted youths seeking a revolutionary answer to the inequalities, the oppressive contradictions of their societies. Maoists, or Maoist-Leninists, or Trotskyites,

Proudhonists, or Maoist-Leninist-Trotskyites, Stalinist-Leninists… no matter what hyphenated revolutionary tendencies they professed, all had one fundamental trait in common. They were bearers of a new illumination on the condition and future of human society.They were the subversive agents who would topple the bourgeois order and liberate the “new man” with all his potential, unfettered by the norms of a failed society, its hypocrisies and dubious ethical values. They formed a compact of solidarity with the marginalized no matter how remotely placed — from the bauxite mines of Jamaica to the coal mines of South Africa. Ideologically schooled in Marxism, even at its most rudimentary, most did not directly espouse anarchism as a social philosophy, but gave a practical, anarchic demonstration of the cue they had elicited from Karl Marx’s analysis of law: law was not neutral, but was an instrument to protect the interests of the ruling classes. In a class struggle, therefore, which it was their avowed mission, indeed their duty, to initiate, law itself was to be repudiated.

As for wealth, from where did wealth emanate but from the exploitation of man by man, proven by the immoral profit from the surplus labor of others? Thus, logically, their enabling mantra, based on the authority of Karl Marx, which declared quite simplistically that All property is theft. That slogan was put into practice in any number of ways, from the merely self-dramatizing gesture to the socially disruptive, once it was placed in tandem with Marx’s interpretation of law, which could now be taken as advocating its own overthrow.

In Germany or France of the late sixties to early seventies, a student who took a parked bicycle, motorbike, or motorcar that belonged to another did not consider it an act of theft. He kept it and returned it at his leisure, or simply kept it for as long as it took him to acquire a more attractive or convenient one, abandoning the former hundreds of kilometers from where its owner last saw it. Libraries bewailed their helplessness as students took away books and never returned them, often returning to exercise their right to “borrow” some more. Others felt that the shelves of bookstores should be open to the acquisitive mood of the reader. Students felt quite noble in raiding the accounts of a parent or guardian — or indeed, the neighborhood store. All property is theft—and that, do take note, included intellectual property. In short, plagiarism was no crime.

I recall an incident in my own university in Ibadan, Nigeria, where a radicalized section of the student body had also caught the fever. If my former students are listening, I hope they will excuse me — I promise that this is the last time I shall make use of this incident, but it was a most revealing episode for me at the time, given my own search for an ideological anchor within the troubled and questing postcolonial generation in my own society. In any case, it is simply too juicy a recollection for me to abandon so easily! There was a protest demonstration; I no longer recall the cause, but it grew violent. In the process, a professor whose role was considered objectionable during the crisis became a target of the students’ ire and a prime candidate for “revolutionary justice”— another of those rhetorical devices embraced by states in their postrevolution phase and adopted by radical movements.The professor’s house on campus was invaded and vandalized, then his office. His research papers were set on fire. Later, I tackled some of the students: why, I demanded, had they gone so far as to destroy what was, in effect, the lifework of this senior colleague (whose politics, incidentally, I also despised)? The reply I received was straight from the European revolutionary cookbook that I had encountered in Paris or Frankfurt: intellectual property, they declared, is not the product of any one individual; thus, the professor had no personal claims to anything that was lost.

That same tendency — albeit by no means of the same pyromaniacal temper — was echoed at the time by radical caucuses in Europe and the United States. It gave rise to the buzzword “collective.” Even performance groups were no longer acting companies or drama troupes, but “collectives.” A famous American author caught the fever. She went — for a while — to the extreme extent of refusing to credit her own person with authorship of her books: it was the work of collective humanity, she declared, and she was merely the humble medium through whom these insights were expressed. It was one of those revivalist periods of the thoughtful, committed, but guilt-laden left — personal proprietorship of any kind had become the original sin. I recall meeting her during this period and asking her how she resolved the issue of collectivism when it came to the distribution of royalties. Frankly, I do not remember that she provided any satisfactory answer.

This was an infectious, but only mildly misleading eruption of the rhetorical hysteria that overtook radicalized minds all over the world, one that was characterized by a one-dimensional approach to all faces of reality, however varied or internally contradicting. The most dangerous of these catchphrases has surely resurfaced in the minds of many of us in contemporary times: There are no innocents! Yes, it was prevalent even then. The sixties and seventies’ mood of extreme militancy, its repudiation of all “bourgeois morality,” a natural proceeding from the logic of the class-subservient interests of law, led remorselessly to the tacit, sometimes loudly argued endorsement of acts of sabotage, kidnapping, and even murder. At the time, the self-willed hysteria was induced by a deliberate exercise of blinding the mind to other considerations, screaming doubts into silence. Sometimes it was a silent scream, inaudible, but it was one that was nonetheless legible on the faces of a number in any crowd of those “conscientization” sessions if one was not caught up in the rhetorical fervor. The sessions were closer in temper to a Billy Graham religious revivalism than to the models that they sought to emulate, such as Fidel Castro’s famous marathons.

Shall we take one more example? It would be a great pity to leave out a revolutionary favorite of that infectious season of liberation, whose total, self-sacrificial idealism was certainly shared by many of us in that generation, indeed, must be regarded as inevitable, given the circumstances of colonial repressions: Power grows from the barrel of a gun—attributed to Mao Zedong. It filled the revolutionary airwaves, but, even if this were a truthful absolute — and I use this only as an illustration of the elisions that are built into the rhetorical structure — what was conveniently suppressed were the innumerable contradictions and cautions of the dialectical propositions that would arise effortlessly from such a thesis, and which strike us today, in hindsight, with such demonstrable force from one continent to another. I refer to potentially inhibitory discoveries of history and society, such as Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nowhere was this more robustly exemplified than in the Soviet Union and its empire, which were held up as fulfillment of radical absolutes that sometimes proved little more than rhetorical devices. There is room for dialectical thought within rhetoric — indeed, rhetoric may be reinforced by legitimate syllogisms — but the heady rhetoric whose goal is mass hysteria is not designed to pause for sequences of logical, even if purely theoretical, deductions.

Is it any surprise that the new purveyors of fear of our time have moved beyond submission to such rational scrutiny? They are not the student cafeteria crowd, or the Sunday-afternoon rhetoricians of Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, who, after all, return home and redigest and debate what has been proposed. They are creatures not of uncertainty but of holy conviction, and they have demonstrated again and again that they consider their lives of value only when they expend them— not even incidentally, but in a deliberate act guaranteed to take the maximum toll on innocents — as the ultimate consummation of that conviction. Not for them the Buddhist route of a limited self-immolation as the ultimate statement, as was prevalent in South Korea under the reign of dictatorial incontinence. These belong to a most select, near-impenetrable community, from within whose ranks power, even posthumously, grows from the suicide bomb.

There are no innocents: this accentuation of the earlier rhetoric—All property is theft—which makes us all thieves since we claim life as property, however temporarily, is what marks the difference between the rhetorical hysteria that held the world in thrall in those fervid sixties and seventies, on the one hand, and the nature of what we are witnessing today. Combine those two limited shorthand rhetorical triggers and we move to the zone of the catechism that claims that All life is theft, and thus should be restored to its legitimate owner by any true believer, and as rapidly as possible. If only we could persuade the apostles of such gospels of the infinite justice of leaving such restoration to the personal intervention of the divine proprietor! Alas, they have constituted themselves agents of restitution, where innocents pay sudden forfeit, without even the consolation of seeking assurance of divine forgiveness for the lamentable lapse of living.

The question we must now confront is this: who or what are the principal agents of the season of rhetorical hysteria that now seek to bind and blind the world within our climate of fear?

We need a lot of objectivity, and a commitment to equitable dealing, in addressing this question. Fortunately — but what a costly piece of fortune! — the world has received a most exemplary piece of instruction in the devastating potential of the private addiction to a rhetorical condition that can spread and infect a whole nation. For this, we must thank the president of one of the most powerful nations of the world, the United States. For an intense period that began a year or more ago, our airwaves were bombarded with an entrapment piece of monologue of just four words—weapons of mass destruction. It was a sustained demonstration, both as metaphor and as prophecy, of how empty such rhetoric can prove, yet how effectively it can blind a people, lead them into a cul-de-sac, securing nearly an entire nation within a common purpose that proves wrongly premised. Outside that nation, more than a few others were swept up in the hysteria that was stimulated by no more than the simple but passionate evocation of that mantra, weapons of mass destruction. Predictably, it was only a matter of time before it acquired an acronym— WMD — either for ease of reference or perhaps as a relief for that uncooperative mantra that stubbornly refused to manifest its name. WMD aspired to the level of religious faith. Individuals who disputed its claimed reality found themselves subjected to abuse, sometimes of a violent nature. Both overtly and indirectly, unbeliever nations were either offered inducements or threatened with sanctions.

The hysteria that was inspired by that presidential monologue echoed, for many, the McCarthy period of anticommunist hysteria, when the mere failure to denounce the communist ideology with satisfactory fervor, or to denounce one’s colleagues for communist sympathies, became an unpatriotic act that was sometimes accounted treason. Thus came into being the damning tag unAmerican activities, to ferret out and punish which a standing committee was set up in the United States legislature.Was there any difference between that rhetorical device of the mid-fifties and that of the turn of this century? Certainly there has been continuity. To ensure that the nation co-option that fed on the rhetoric of “the enemy within” did not lack for nourishment, the decades between unAmerican activities and weapons of mass destruc tion were caulked with holding devices of the nature of “Evil Empire” and, latterly, “Axis of Evil.” The beauty of the political mantra has always been its ability to distill complex events and global relationships into a rhetorical broth that precludes digestion, but guarantees satisfaction.

Let no one underestimate the criminal immensity of September 11, 2001, that arrogant manifestation of the mantra There are no innocents, nor its hideous impact on global consciousness. The tasteless gloating of a handful of normally astute writers and intellectuals whose will to radicalism sometimes overpowers their humanism is only a measure of the pretentious detachment of some of us from the world we live in, and should not be permitted to cloud our individual revulsion over that event, any more than it should inhibit us from interrogating the choices of response that could be expected from the leadership of a stricken people. More than sufficient time has elapsed for objective consideration of the choices, with all due allowance also made for the fact that it was that space, not ours, that was most directly affected, most deeply traumatized, most deeply and forcibly injected with the virus of fear.

There were options, however, and the case is being made here that the leadership of that nation chose to substitute, for a hard assessment of its relationship with the rest of humanity, an emotive rhetoric that blinded it even further, driving that nation deeper into an isolationist monologue, even within the debating chambers of the United Nations. Afghanistan of the Taliban, sheltering and collaborating with the murderous quasi-state of al-Qaeda, had declared direct war on a people and thus richly deserved its comeuppance. However, the rhetorical momentum engendered since the monstrous date of September 11 has propelled the United States into an unjustifiable war in Iraq. A global wave of sympathy has been frittered away in a defiant unilateralism that appears to thrive on hysteria and deception. We have watched and listened in recent times to the unedifying acts and pronouncements of a nation that is not accustomed to being contradicted, deeming it a heresy on the part of any nation or world figure to balk at intoning the mantra of weapons of mass destruction.

Reprisals from the nation that draped its shoulders in a mantle of infallibility attained some bemusing dimensions. The greatest umbrage against the restraining community of skeptics was reserved for France, whose cultural penetration of the United States was more prolific in symbols of snobbishness than that of her partner in crime, the Federal Republic of Germany. Germany got off quite lightly. To the intense embarrassment of a substantial minority of Americans themselves, a number of restaurants that once proudly advertised themselves as French quickly changed their names or painted out the French tricolor designs outside their establishments. Nowhere is it recorded that any thought was given to the nation’s Canadian neighbor, which recognizes herself as bicultural. America’s lawmaking chambers took “French fries” off their cafeteria menu and renamed that item “Freedom fries.” The French baguette and croissants lost out to sourdough bread, bagels, and pretzels. Most incredible of all, many wineshops and bars threw out their stock of French wines, depleting their shelves as rapidly as they could by selling them at rock-bottom prices, where they were gleefully gobbled up by infidels to the gospel of WMD — among whom was most certainly a cash-strapped Nobelist who shall remain nameless. It was either you believed in weapons of mass destruction or you became overnight a pariah. It did not matter in the least that these WMD faithfuls understood that this was a dangerous religion that would not end in mere rhetoric but that guaranteed, from the very beginning, a denouement not simply of war, but of war-lust. The triumph of the monologue was supreme.

There are moments, it must be admitted, when the imperatives of dialogue appear to be foreclosed. Nevertheless, we dare not stop contrasting the dangers of the monologue with the creative potentials of its alternative, the latter holding out a chance of contracting, if not completely dissipating, our climate of fear. Certainly, the proliferation of this frame of mind can slow down the division of the world into two irreconcilable camps, and hopefully prevent such a division from taking permanent hold. Fortunately, a global awareness of the perilous consequences of avoidance is not missing and, thus, provides us with a positive note on which to end, invoking the lessons in contrast between two figures who may be held to personify the two polarities — monologue and dialogue. Both of them, most usefully, are products of the same history, the same religion, the same culture, and the same nation-state. I therefore invite you to accompany me to a milestone event that took place in the United Nations, with its symbolic timing for the end of the last millennium, an event that declared, in ringing terms, that it was time to eschew the sterile monologues of the past and cultivate a new spirit of dialogue, the only prescription that the world knows for the hysterical affliction that belongs to its adversary, the monologue.

The event was the elaborate inauguration of the project Dialogue of Civilizations at the United Nations headquarters in New York, attended by several heads of state, other world leaders, intellectuals, ministers of religion, and so on. There it was that President Khatami of Iran, the main sponsor of the project — in partnership with UNESCO — delivered a most enlightened speech, one that, I am certain, took his audience by surprise. On the minds of most of that audience, including mine, was unquestionably the keen awareness that we were listening to the leader of the same nation that, not quite a decade earlier, had imposed on the world a new era of fear by a unilateral appropriation of the power of life and death over any citizen of our world as it pronounced a death fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie for his alleged offense against his religion, Islam. A major religion, deservedly classified as one of the world religions, but, just the same, only one of the structures of transcendental intimations, or superstitions, known as religion.

It is not my intention here to pursue the rights and wrongs of the province of the imagination, certainly not my intention to berate or defend a writer accused of disrespect or insensitivity toward religious belief. My concern today is simply to call attention to the contrasting activities of the leadership of that country, Iran, in a truly elevating mission to restore dialogue to its rightful place as an agent of civilizations. Also, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the consequences of that precedent of a global incitement to murder are still very much with us, a poisoned watershed in the relationships between and within nations. It has contributed, to a large extent, to the very condition of global intolerance, bigotry, and sectarian violence to whose dismantling an elected Iranian leader now committed himself in the halls of the United Nations. All over the world, with a frequency, frenzy, and impunity that did not exist before the Salman Rushdie affair, a Friday sermon in a mosque over a real or imagined slight has led to mayhem in normally harmonious communities, in places stretching from Kaduna and the Plateau state in Nigeria to hitherto obscure Indonesian regions such as Aceh. Some may consider this timing a coincidence; if so, it is a coincidence that some of us did anticipate and openly predict at international gatherings.

A dismal instance within my own nation, Nigeria, was that of the deputy governor of a largely Muslim state in the north, Zamfara, who catapulted his boss, for whom he was only a mouthpiece, into international notoriety by this mimic route, pronouncing a killing fatwa on a young journalist. Her crime? A comment that the Prophet Muhammad did not lack an eye for beauty in womanhood. This alleged insult, in addition to claims of provocation in the staging of a Miss World beauty pageant, whose so-called female immodesty a handful of zealots insisted was an affront to their religious sensibilities, led to the destabilization of the country’s capital city, Abuja, and the unleashing of an orgy of death and destruction that stunned the world in its mindlessness and ferocity. Like a number of others around the globe, mine was a nation that, once upon a time, indeed as recently as forty years ago, could offer herself as a model of tolerance, but has suffered, in the intervening period, a spate of religion-motivated violence on an unprecedented scale, and is fast becoming only another volatile zone of distrust, unease, and tension.

We have a duty therefore to use every opportunity to disseminate efforts that counteract such moments of divisiveness and retrogression. President Khatami’s challenge has been taken up in several fora, even to the extent of the emergence of a permanent NGO— Dialogue of Civilizations. Still lacking, however, is a manifest global commitment, especially a sustained and dynamic reciprocity from rival cultures and religions. The word, of course, is “dynamic”—perhaps I should even use the word “aggressive.” The globe needs to be saturated, almost on a daily basis, with such encounters. There have been a number, admittedly, including one in Georgia of the former Soviet Union, under the same rubric as Dialogue; another in Macedonia. Others have taken place within Iran as well. I participated in one in Abuja, Nigeria, in December last year, the scene of the religion-instigated massacre to which I earlier referred.

Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents.We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favorite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, “There is no lavender word for lynch.” Now, that is one line I would not mind converting to the service of rhetorical hysteria. It leaves no room for the continuation of the culture of impunity currently enjoyed by sacred but unholy cows.

Our experiences in Nigeria — shared by numerous others — testify to the frequency of the lamentable conversion of the mantra of piety to the promotion of the most hideous form of impiety, which, in my catechism, translates as the slaughter of other human beings in the cause of religious or any other conviction. For those of us who grew up in an atmosphere where the first dawn sounds that lulled one out of sleep were the sounds of the muezzin — the jarring loudspeakers had not yet been co-opted — calling his flock to the first prayer of the day, soon to be intermingled with the chant of the Christian creed from the catechist’s household next door, it is an agonizing reversal to watch the faces of fanatics slavering after blood under the mandates of those same incantations. Those of us who are unlikely ever to be found intoning, either alone or amidst a congregation, those familiar spiritual calls such as Praise Jesus, Hallelujah, Allah akbar, Hare Krishna, and so on should at least be permitted to retain whatever memories we have of these religions in their nonaggressive states, share the inspirational value that others clearly derive from them, and indeed continue to nurse even a fragmented faith in their potential for human regeneration. But we also have a duty to challenge a general reluctance to inquire why the adherents of some religions more than others turn the pages of their scriptures into a divine breath that fans the random homicidal spore to all corners of the world. Political correctness, itself an immobilizing form of hysteria, forbids the question, but, for those of us who prefer politically incorrect discourse to politically correct incineration or other forms of complicity in our premature demise, this question must be given voice: just what is it that turns the mantra of a beatific chant of faith, such as Allah akbar, into a summons to an orgy of death? Why did Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ arouse violent reactions, condemnations, and exhortations to boycotts, as has more recently Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but not a universal outcry for the murder of the cinéastes, or of those who dared participate in these interpretative exercises?

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times. Even after half a century, films that touch upon the era of Nazi glorification, with their orchestrated chant of Sieg heil, continue to send a chill of apprehension down the spines of all with a historical memory. Scenes of mass religious frenzy increasingly resurrect these nightmares, and if Khatami’s inspired Dialogue of Civilizations leads, eventually, to the dissociation of the chant of millions to the greatness of God from the gross ultranationalist politics lodged in the chant of Sieg heil, we will have lifted one corner, a not inconsiderable one, of the shroud of fear that now envelops life, and humanity.