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

Five “I Am Right; You Are Dead”

The French nation lately was involved in a controversy over its decision to ban ostentatious symbols of religious faiths from secondary schools. I was invited to take part in that debate, and readily accepted. It was a chance openly to interrogate my long-held conviction that there should be a period in the development of the young mind when the perception of differences in humanity is reduced to an absolute minimum, even if, obviously, it cannot be eliminated completely. That period, it appears equally obvious, is that of school pupilage, where the space of instruction is cleansed of manifestations of private wealth, tastes, class, and so on. The symbol, as well as practical expression of this oneness, the leveler, is of course the school uniform.

Objections surfaced in the mind — the indelicate, even provocative timing of the French government— indelicate to the extent of almost sounding like a declaration of hostilities! Then the positive role of religious symbols as spiritual and ethical reminders in the consciousness of youthful minds at all times, a corrective mechanism when one might be on the verge of misconduct. In short, the mind was readying itself for the dialogue mode, anticipating even its extension into protest demonstrations on the streets of Paris and the wharfs of Marseilles. Capitulation by the government was a possibility. I foresaw a protracted dialogue, from objective to acerbic — the basic philosophy of education, instruction traditions from different cultures, inductions into age-groups in traditional societies, reconsiderations in view of the vastly changed nature of the world since Socrates preached his “impieties” in the street “schoolrooms” of Athens…

For some, alas, such dialogue was superfluous. A hitherto unknown group — vying to overtake rivals as the terminal censors of our time — warned the French government that it was next in line for a Madrid-style reprisal, and should prepare for a season of “sorrow and remorse” for its perceived assault on the Islamic faith. At first I was numbed, then surprised at my reaction. Of course, in the world we now inhabit, it should be only a matter of time before some public target, preferably even a school, is bombed, and the contested Islamic head scarves are torn off to serve as tourniquets for severed limbs — and even as shrouds.

Here is an even older terminating venture — the ironically named “Right to Life” crusaders in the United States, known plainly as antiabortion militants. One such group — self-styled the “Army of God”—boasts a supportive network for its assassins, one that extends to Europe.Their zeal for the conversion of minds requires that they gun down doctors, police guards, and the occasional patient or passerby. Their effective network provided protection for the one who named himself “Sword of God” while on the run for murder. Another of the same breed of Christian fundamentalists, an ordained priest, was executed in Texas last year, to a chorus of threats by his support group that they would unleash on the American populace reprisals that would make Timothy McVeigh’s crusade of vengeance look like child’s play. Timothy McVeigh, for the uninitiated, was that remarkable individual who was plagued by a unique social conscience that could be stilled only by his blowing up a public building, one that housed both a state security department and an infants’ school. His timing ensured, naturally, that scores of children were blown apart or maimed for life. McVeigh did not profess any religion. Nonetheless, he was a zealot of his own Supreme Purpose, the manifestation of a private irredentism. His chosen grounds of dispute were neither ideological nor theological, but he presents us with a clear psychopathology of the zealot, one who is imbued with a self-righteousness that must be assuaged by a homicidal resolution. It moves all possible discourse away from even the dogmatic monologue of I am right, you are wrong— itself a dead end — to one of I am right; you are dead.

The sacred — including the infant crèche — appears to diminish by the day, drowned perhaps by the saturation of the world in the rhetoric of sacrosanctity. Here is another lesson from school, an autobiographical note to consider in the collapse of logical (?) expectations from an evolving world:

The boarding school that I attended in Ibadan, Nigeria, was not without its share of bullies. My class was cursed with a singularly vicious specimen against whom we, the smallest and thus the most vulnerable, adopted a very simple strategy: we formed what, taking our cue from history books, we called the Tripartite Coalition. We summoned the bully into our presence and formally announced to him that, from then on, an attack on any one of the three of us would be considered an attack on all three. We moved together as much as possible, especially when changing classes or on the playing fields. Our strategy held the bully in check for a while, but he soon discovered that all he had to do was bide his time — since we could not always be together — and then pounce on the isolated wanderer. Unfortunately for me, I had a tendency to wander off on my own. Because of this, taken together with the fact that he had decided in his mind— perhaps because I was the smallest — that I was the architect of this defense agreement, he constantly stalked me and tried to teach me a lesson.

Well, I also had an answer to that. I schooled myself to keep to a certain perimeter whose center was the school chapel. I already had certain agnostic tendencies — which would later develop into outright atheistic convictions— so it was not that I believed in any kind of divine protection.What mattered was that he did.Well, not protection as such, but — interdiction. He could not bring himself to attack me in a house of worship. So I watched him prowl, taunt, dare, and do everything to invite me out to single combat. All he got in return was an equal dose of insults. Then, when the school bell rang for classes, I took off as fast as my short legs could carry me into the safety of the classroom.

Even the class bully, a creature of quite indeterminate religious conviction, to the best of my recollection, respected the mandates of sanctuary. Today, there are no more sanctuaries left in the world, not even the holy city of Mecca, whose time-honored serenity was shattered some years ago by a bunch of fanatics. Acting from a most ruthless determination, they destroyed all notion of a peaceful affirmation of faith that eliminated, for a few days of spiritual rapture, all distinctions of race, color, class, wealth, and so on, in what sometimes appeared to be a single concourse of one humanity. Nothing that the world knows today equals the annual hajj to Mecca, neither the combined pilgrimages of other religions, nor those of rival deities, such as the football World Cup. And thus, appropriately for our times, this proved the setting for the most heinous act of religious desecration that the modern world has known. The recent massacre in Iraq that accounted for nearly two hundred worshippers, a massacre that was timed for the holy festival of the Shiite sect of the Islamic faith, naturally shocks and dispirits, but it counts almost as a footnote to the memory of the outrage that was inflicted on the harmonizing potential of that concourse of humanity, one that does have its lessons even for non-Muslims or, indeed, nonbelievers in any deity.

We have to speak to religion! True, the issue is fanaticism, but this does not exonerate the mother — secular ideology or religious indoctrination — from the lapses of the child. We are obliged to recognize, indeed, to emphasize, the place of injustice, localized or global, as ready manure for the deadly shoots of fanaticism. However, the engines of global violence today are oiled from the deep wells of fanaticism, even though they may be cranked by the calculating hands of politicians or the power-hungry. These sometimes end up being run over by the juggernaut they have set in motion, but the lesson appears to be constantly lost on the next contenders for political domination. They believe that they have uncovered a secret that the erstwhile contender for power failed to grasp, and proceed to unleash a monster on an unprepared polity. It is time for all to recognize that there is no regulating mechanism for the fanatic mind. The sooner this is accepted, the earlier we can move to addressing the phenomenon of fanaticism in its own right. Not for nothing do the Yoruba warn that Sooner than have a monster child meet a shameful death in the marketplace, it is best that the mother strangle it in the secret recesses of the home. What this means, quite simply, is that the primary burden of exorcising the demon that escaped from the womb rests on the same womb that gave it life. Today, there is urgent need for Mother Religion, of whatever inclination, to come to the rescue of humanity with the benevolent act of infanticide.

It was not theocratic dictatorship but repressions of a secular order that evoked my sense of unease when, a full generation ago, I delivered a lecture entitled “Climates of Art,” to which I made reference at the beginning of this series. There is however a link, unsought, a sense of brutal continuity. That link is the attempted murder of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner, by the way, but what matters to us is that he was — and still is — a writer of his time and, most relevantly, place. Unlike a number of other creative minds trapped within the killing domains of the terminal censors, Mahfouz did survive. So, however, most lamentably, has the poised blade of fanaticism that has become even more proficient and inventive over its agency of execution: the time bomb, the suicide bomb, the sarin sachet, and even, possibly, that ominous pod, miniaturized, one that, almost on its own, bore full responsibility for the climate of fear of fifty years before — the atom bomb. Let Mahfouz serve us as a living symbol of that space of creative martyrdom that stretches from antiquity till now, from the communist world of the Soviet Union to Afghanistan of the Taliban through Iran, Ireland, and Yugoslavia to North Africa — Algeria most excruciatingly.The space of fanaticism aggressively expands into other nations of traditional tolerance and balance, including my own, Nigeria.

Once, the terminal censor flourished in the arena of ideological insecurity and/or the will to total mind domination, where the so-called crime of deviationism — that is, diversion from the strict party line — led, quite simply, to a Siberian wilderness or, straightforwardly, to death. Who can forget the notorious purges and show trials of the Stalinist era! Secular zealotry and intolerance appear to have lost steam since then, although we must be careful not to sing their demise too early. Still, it is largely the religious breed that remains to plague the world, a stubborn strain nestled in the vital organs of humanity from the earliest social orders — as the fate of Socrates eternally reminds us. Now that was one obsessed lover of dialogue, who reminds us that it is from the “dialectics of the mind” that truth is elicited and tested far more durably than from the monologue. The monologue, alas, continues to dominate the murderous swath blazed by succeeding religions — Christianity and Islam most notoriously. Deviationism — or heresy — is one shortcut to death.

My poem “Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known” was a tribute to Naguib Mahfouz, who was fated to expand into the religious those apprehensions of the secular to which I had given voice in “Climates of Art,” delivered some twenty-five years ago:

The nineteenth-century black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once declared that the issue of the twentieth century would be that of race. It is becoming clear that while that century, the last, did indeed inherit — and still remains plagued almost continuously by — that social issue, race was replaced toward the end by religion, and it is something that has yet to be addressed with the same global concern as race once was. The issue of the twenty-first century is clearly that of religion, whose cynical manipulations contribute in no small measure to our current climate of fear. Perhaps the Khatami-UNESCO initiative to which I referred in an earlier lecture, a series of contacts titled Dialogue of Civilizations, will succeed in bringing the world to confront this lethal successor to the secular monologue whose fanatic fringe has been lately deprived of oxygen, and much of its breeding ground. In the wilds of Thailand or Cambodia, in a few isolated spots in South America, the mind of the fanatic secularist still operates, locked in a vision of Utopia that demands a disposable approach to “unenlightened” humanity. Pol Pot, however, is dead, gone the way of those other architects of the necropolis, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and mixed company of both left and right. Today, the main source of the fanatic mind is religion, and its temper — one that, ironically, is grounded in the doctrine of submission — has grown increasingly contemptuous of humanity, being characterized by arrogance, intolerance, and violence, almost as an unconscious vengeful recompense for its apprenticeship within the spiritual principle of submission.

At stake is tolerance, and the place of dissent in social interaction. We would do well, however, to note — for practical ends — the differences between the workings of secular intolerance and those of the theocratic order. Such differences may assist us in assessing the very real threat to human freedom that the closed world of fanaticism poses to humanity. Secular ideology derives its theories from history and the material world. The mind has therefore learned to pause occasionally and reflect on the processes that link the material world to doctrines that derive from or govern it, to review changes in such a world, test theories against old and new realities — be they economic, cultural, industrial, or even environmental. The dynamic totality of the real world is given rational space. Even the craving after comprehensiveness and infallibility — as in the case of Marxism — may result in the exposure of fallacies and inconsistencies or, at the least, ambiguous zones within the theory.

Thus, within a secular dispensation, even under the most rigid totalitarian order, its underpinning ideology— that is, the equivalent of theology — remains open to contestation. Open questioning may be suppressed, open debate may be restricted or prohibited by the state or the party of power, but the functioning of the mind, its capacity for critique — even self-criticism — never ceases. Self-criticism was of course an expression that was much abused under totalitarian orders — Stalinist Soviet Union, China during the Cultural Revolution, or Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Within those self-righteous regimes, self-criticism meant one thing and one thing only: recantation, and a routine incantation of loyal pledges — according to prescribed formulae — to the party line. Despite those perverted rituals, however, the mind remained a free agent within its own space, free to roam outside the confines of the totalitarian order, to seek, and often find, kindred spirits, and form a conspiracy of nonbelievers or, at least, skeptics. This factor leads sooner or later to an alternative view, and perhaps to piecemeal erosion of the hermetic system.

Under the theocratic sibling, however, one that derives its authority not from theories that are elicited from the material conditions of society but from the secret spaces of revelation, this disposition of the mind toward alternative concepts or variants is next to impossible. Curiosity succumbs to fear, often masquerading as pious submission. The theocratic order derives its mandate from the unknown. Only a chosen few are privileged to have penetrated the workings of the mind of the unknown, whose constitution — known as the Scriptures — they and they alone can interpret. The fanatic that is born of this dogmatic structure of the ineffable, religion, is the most dangerous being on earth.

Again, it must be conceded that there are, naturally, numerous variants of the fanatic spore — as well as enabling environments. While psychologists and social scientists theorize over cause and effect, the Community is confronted with an immediate choice: either to submit or to protect itself. Poverty is a powerful recruiting agent for the army of the soul, we know that; so is political injustice — but society fools itself if it imagines that these are the only parameters for anticipating, preventing, or responding to a development where the totality of society is indicted to the undiscriminating extent that all are pronounced guilty who do not share this mind-set of the fanatic, or who dare propose a different worldview from that which motivates it. The philosophy that sustained Nazism was not a philosophy for the amelioration of the condition of the poor; on the contrary, it was a philosophy of elitism, a philosophy of the Chosen versus the Rest. And what we must seek is the common denominator that unites the opposite extremes of beliefs and ideologies but also breeds and nurtures the fanatic, intolerant mind.While we are engaged on that quest, we, the Rest, in whatever aspect of belief we are thus defined, must either lay our necks tamely on this versatile execution block or imaginatively pursue remedial action. This involves, certainly, eradicating those conditions that serve as ready recruitment agencies — poverty, political injustice, and other forms of social alienation — but, even more crucially, demonstrating in an equally determined, structured way our right, indeed our duty, to implement strategies of self-protection, making it abundantly clear that the other doctrine of the Chosen is intolerable to humanity. To do otherwise is to condone the doctrine that moves so arrogantly from I am right, you are wrong to its fatal manifestation as I am right; you are dead.

The world would of course be a simpler space to contend with if only religion kept within the domain of the spiritual. Historically, it never has. With the blindly submissive army of enforcers in its midst, ready to be unleashed on profane humanity, the religious is an order that remains incapable of remaining within a private zone that does not translate into power—as distinct from guidance—over others. There are a few exceptions to this in the world of religion, and we shall encounter one toward the end. The incursion of religion into the secular domain, appropriating the provinces of ethics, mores, and social conduct — and even the sciences — guarantees the clerical dominance of the total field of play. (What, in the name of all that is unholy, does a council of religious clerics in northern Nigeria know of modern medicine that it commands Muslims to resist inoculation against cerebrospinal meningitis— a scourge in that part of the nation that leaves hundreds of thousands of infants disabled for life — and claim its authority from the Koran!)

Submission, however, is the very foundation of faith. It is mostly within that theocratic order that we find those extreme offshoots that raise the stakes of those rhetorical devices, already touched upon, to the defining edge of existence.The provenance of faith is the soul and, by extension, the soul’s material housing, the body itself. In one easy step, the materialist declaration of All property is theft—a theme from one of our earlier lectures — is promoted to one of All life is theft. The secular ideologue might be largely content with brooking no dissent through the dictum I am right, you are wrong, but the ultimate ambition of the fanatic within the theocratic order is I am right; you are dead.

Homicidal hubris is the ultimate hallmark of the fanatic. The ice pick in the neck of Leon Trotsky, ensconced in the deceptive safety of Mexico, was forged in the same furnace as the knife that sought the throat of Naguib Mahfouz.

It is fortunate that we are sometimes able — thanks to modern communication — to identify the intrusion of political opportunism into the workings of religious zealotry, a common enough marriage of convenience that gives birth to monstrosities. And technology — the camera — assists in the close psychological study of mob arousal for religious reasons, such as led to the outrage in India that ended with Hindus razing to the ground an ancient mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh because this centuries-old mosque had been built on the very spot where Rama, a Hindu deity, first made his appearance on earth. The reverberations of that act have continued to haunt the Indian nation till today, but the immediate repercussions were orgies of killings, including the ambush of railway trains and commuter buses, the virtual “religious cleansing” of rival, but especially Muslim, neighborhoods, creating ghost villages and derelict urban sectors.

And here, let us pause, and use this episode to anticipate and silence those who, whenever an outrage that is linked to one religion or another attracts amply deserved rebuke and condemnation, immediately raise alarms of prejudice, sectarian hatred, and world conspiracies, tacitly claiming for such structures of faith an immunity from commentary. The world, East and West, including its official organs UNO and UNESCO, was unambiguous in its condemnation of that crime, even as it would later unite in condemnation of the iconoclasm of the Taliban against the historic statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.That former rebuke did not lead to any claims by Hindus that the world nursed a primordial hatred against Hinduism or had entered into a conspiracy to eradicate that religion from the world. What was factually indisputable was more than sufficient: an outrage had been committed, and that outrage deserved to be addressed in its own right, albeit without totally ignoring its antecedents and context.

Similarly, in my part of the world, Nigeria, time and time again, waves of fundamentalist violence have been unleashed on a prostrate populace, resulting in the deaths, often in the most gruesome manner, of hundreds of innocents — men, women, children, without discrimination. The majority of those who have commented— except of course the violators themselves — have been unambiguous in their condemnation of such barbarities committed in the name of religion. They have done so without damning the religion itself, or belittling its precepts. The world cannot, I am certain, have forgotten the massacre that resulted from the attempt to hold a beauty pageant in the capital city of Abuja. The culprits have always earned the names fanatics, criminals, fundamentalists, and zealots. I believe it should be possible to attribute the massacre of innocents anywhere in the world in the same way, thus placing the responsibility for a corrective response on the shoulders of believers and nonbelievers alike.

On a personal level, I found myself sufficiently exercised to note the Uttar Pradesh event in my poetic calendar of “Twelve Canticles for the Zealot,” published in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known:

Few spots in the world today are exempt from the depredations of the fanatic. I believe it should be possible to view the bombing of innocents in the United States, Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, or anywhere else in the same way. It is untenable to claim that, because those mass killers themselves implicated, and persist in invoking, the banner of Islam, seeking legitimization and a killing rapture from that religion, Islam is therefore under indictment. Equally unacceptable is to claim that any condemnation of the act or pursuit of the criminals reveals a hatred of the religion. A world in which a powerful European — and mostly Christian — organization, NATO, goes to battle against the Christian Serbs on behalf of a battered Muslim population, and brings the head of their violators to justice before an international tribunal, is not a world that is prejudiced against either Islam or Christendom, and the propagators of such doctrines are being not merely disingenuous, but dangerous.

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic is one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies, and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime, and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination — the zone of unquestioning certitude — sped by a common impetus that licenses each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted.The zealot is one who creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.

The stillborn dogmatism of I am right, you are wrong has circled back since the contest of ideologies and once again attained its apotheosis of I am right; you are dead. The monologue of unilateralism constantly aspires to the mantle of the Chosen and, of course, further dichotomizes the world, inviting us, on pain of consequences, to choose between “them” and “us.” We must, in other words, reject the conditions George Bush delivered so explicitly in that ultimatum You are either with us and against the terrorists, or you are on the side of the terrorists, and in We do not require the world’s approval since we are divinely guided, just as strongly as we repudiate Osama bin Laden’s The world is now clearly divided into two — the world of the followers of Islam against that of infidels and unbelievers. What does this mean for those billions of the world who are determinedly unbelievers? What does it mean for the world of Hindus, Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, the followers of Orisa, and a hundred other faiths that are routinely marginalized in the division of the world between two blood-stained behemoths of faith — the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian?

We, on the African continent, whose people were decimated, in a time of our own troubled peace, in Kenya and Tanzania, our soil violated by one of the earliest acts of aerial sabotage that scattered human limbs over the earth of Niger, have a special stake in this. The black freedom fighters of southern Sudan, locked in a brutal war of over three decades against an Islamic regime — a genocidal war that has claimed at least a hundred thousand times more lives and overseen a thousand times greater destruction of a people, an environment, and a culture than the conflicts in the Middle East — have not resorted to accusing the Islamic or Arab world of a conspiracy against the black race. They are focused on their quest for liberation from a specified, localized, theocratic, and often racist order, against which they have raised charges of an ongoing “ethnic cleansing” that remains largely ignored by the Western world. It has only belatedly, in very recent times, been acknowledged by the United Nations, through a warning from its secretary-general, as yet another Rwanda scenario in the making.We do not hear from the leaders of that struggle any proposition of the division of the world into the African world against All Others. The combatants have not moved to set the bazaars and monuments of Medina on fire or burn Japanese infants in their cribs. Not even the historic — still ongoing in places — denigration of African religions and cultures, or indeed the memory of both European and Arab enslavement of the African peoples, has elicited this inflammatory agenda.

Have we any lessons to offer the world from that same continent of a history of near-universal disdain? I can think of one. I dispense it at every opportunity. African religions do not proselytize, but let me break with that tradition yet again in the worthy cause of a global quest for harmonized coexistence, and offer the world a lesson from African spirituality, taken specifically from the religion of the Orisa, the pantheon of faith of the Yoruba people. This religion, one that is still pursued in Brazil and other parts of South America and the Caribbean, has never engaged in any equivalent of the crusade or the jihad in its own cause. The words infidel, unbeliever, kafiri are anathema to its scriptures; thus it does not recognize a spiritual division of the world. Despite its reticence, however, it has penetrated the globe and survived in the confident retention by the displaced and dispossessed slaves, its infectious hold extending even to their European violators. Its watchword is tolerance, a belief that there are many paths to truth and godhead, and that the world should not be set on fire to prove the supremacy of a belief or the righteousness of a cause.

What we have witnessed in the tearing out of the heart, liver, and tongue of the United States, the hideous conversion of captive human beings into battering rams for the destruction of other innocents, is an image of such diabolical horror that the imagination instinctively recoils from its full grasp, even after subsequent, seemingly competitive horrors. It will remain so for years. To accept it as a valid and appropriate response to injustices perpetrated by American governments against other people is to abdicate all capacity for moral revulsion. Those very voices that were raised in condemnation of the violation of a mosque in Jerusalem by an Israeli reservist who massacred dozens of worshippers in cold blood — those are the same voices that are now raised, among others, against the violation of humanity on September 11, 2001. And the passion of those voices must not be belittled, cowed, or isolated. And yes, even as the murder of Muslims in East Jerusalem, though it took place in a specific milieu, was a crime against our humane universe, even so must the outrage that was committed on American soil on September 11 be recognized and addressed for what it was — a crime against all of humanity, and one that deserves the sternest collective response of that same Community.

Could the United States have responded differently immediately after September 11? Perhaps not. Hindsight is a most unreliable judge of such decisions, and those circumstances were clearly unprecedented. Did that nation, however, have to continue along an avoidable path that led remorselessly into Iraq? More specifically, and with no complication of hindsight: why were the weapons inspectors of the United Nations ordered out of Iraq in submission to the will of one nation, most especially at a moment when Saddam Hussein had openly submitted himself to the authority of that very institution?

Let us turn to our present dateline. It is still the second millennium, the era of the so-called global village. Concretely, it is the era in which the world has attempted to put in place, after many blunders and derelictions of responsibilities, international courts and tribunals for crimes against humanity. It is an era in which former heads of state are being hauled in for crimes against their own peoples and against others — from Chile to Rwanda. It is the era of the strategy of near-globally upheld sanctions, not always successful, we know, and sometimes excruciatingly slow in their ability to produce the desired results. It is nevertheless the era of newly reinvigorated possibilities, a new global relevance for the organ called the United Nations. Indeed, perhaps it was stemming from this same consciousness, an attempt to impress upon the world the critical necessity of such an organ in the new millennium, that the Nobel establishment, in its centenary year, chose to honor that organization, and its secretary-general, with the Peace Prize.We cannot deny or gloss over some of its failures to live up to the world’s expectations, to its founding ideas, and to the needs of humanity. We are only too keenly aware of the costly consequences — in global trust, and in human lives — of some of these failures. Nevertheless, we are doomed to despair if we fail also to acknowledge its many achievements, and to accept the fact that it is the only organ in the world that has the authority of legitimate intervention in troubled spots.

Unilateral action, or the appropriation of a global duty of response, by any one nation serves only to diminish the United Nations. That the greatest culprit in this respect should be one of such powerful achievements as the United States, one that is also host to that organization, physically, on its own soil, only denotes an enervation of the global vision. That the United States has the capacity for technological, military, and economic leadership is not in dispute; what the United States lacks is philosophical leadership, despite its formidable reserves of original thinkers. Adopting a global view of a criminality on its soil, and primarily against its people, the U.S. had the option of placing its formidable capabilities under the moral authority of the United Nations, instilling in her own people the imperatives of a global approach to justice.

AMERICA STRIKES BACK! No, this resort to what we earlier identified as rhetorical hysteria was not what the world needed to see emblazoned on the screens of American television and its international arm, CNN, hour after hour, day after day, and week after week as the United States gathered its strength to avenge an acknowledged wrong. Such an orchestration of a people’s mood was bound to lead, sooner or later, to the quagmire of Iraq, and to make the nation lose all ethical mooring in the original cause and embark on an open-ended career of aggressive pursuit that would translate as America Strikes On — and On and… On… and On…, its lethal array of weaponry raised to shock and awe!

If certain acts against humanity appear to place their perpetrators beyond dialogue, we must still embrace interrogation — that is, self-interrogation. In what way, in turn, have we contributed to the making of such a moment? Failure thus to examine ourselves limits the long-term effectiveness of response, and brackets us with the mentality of the fanatic who, literally, never seeks to recover, indeed is incapable of recovering, a long-since receded moment of doubt, the zone of possible choices, the potential of the routes not taken. That quest is open, universal, and ahistorical. For once, the dubious doctrine of There are no innocents is grounded in durable matter. Has Marxism triumphed since the killing of Leon Trotsky? What nature of an environment enabled the stabbing of a creative mind, Naguib Mahfouz? Was peaceful coexistence promoted as a result of the demolition of the mosque in Uttar Pradesh? Has the assassination of Sheikh Yassin made the world any safer? What kind of morality of a liberation struggle deceives a fourteen-year-old child into becoming a walking bomb? Does a supposed wall of defense concretize hope or despair across the Middle East — and the world? Why is the woman writer Taslima Nasrin a fugitive from her home in Bangladesh?

Reaching back through time to the thread of my earlier intervention, “Climates of Art,” made twenty-five years ago, the last word deserves to be offered on behalf of that last, doubly endangered (on account of her gender) species, victim of intolerance and fanaticism, who barely escaped the fate of the Algerian Tahar Djaout and a host of others, standing in for the disdained of the world, seeking equity for all humanity: