On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

^{Chapter 6} The Revenge of History

Oliver Stone: You write in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, “There is a universal truth that pundit and politician need to acknowledge: slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters. Time and time again, in the upheavals that have marked the world since the days of the Roman Empire, a given combination of events has yielded a totally unexpected eruption. Why should it be any different in the twenty-first century?”

Tariq Ali: It won’t be any different, of that I am pretty sure. We can’t predict what these events will be or where they will happen, but they will surprise the world. It’s precisely because one knows what has happened in history before that one maintains a certain degree of optimism. The Latin American developments were not foreseen by anyone. No one expected that Venezuela, a country that was barely known in the world, would suddenly become part of the “axis of hope,” as I call it. Chávez put Venezuela on the world map. You know, the first time Chávez went to the Middle East, Al Jazeera interviewed him for one hour. Because Arab viewers hate subtitles, a very good actor read all his lines in Arabic. Chávez is anyway quite magnetic, but afterwards, the Al Jazeera producer who did this said to me, we had thousands and thousands of emails, more than we’d ever had. And 90 percent of these emails said, in one form or the other, when will the Arab world produce a Chávez?

Where could the next Chávez come from?

Well, it is difficult to predict exactly, but I think that South Asia and the Far East might throw some surprises at us, which we’re not ready for. We talk about China as an economic giant but we very rarely talk about what the effects of this system are in China. Peasant uprisings, working-class factory occupations, a restless, turbulent intelligentsia, all these things could happen.

And is there a potential wild card in an internal economic collapse of the empire? Some people have suggested we cannot afford all these troops, all these bases.

Well, I think a lot will depend on the economy. A lot will depend on what the American public will do if the economy continues to go down like this. If the American population comes out and rebels against all this, well, that’s the end for the empire. It can’t continue.

It’s very hard for the population to rebel against the military. That is always difficult historically.

Yes, but people might vote for someone who says, we’ve done too much abroad for too long, and the costs have been great for us, and now let’s use that same energy to transform the shape of our country at home. If a politician were to say that at the present time, I think such a person would get a lot of support. Obama had possibilities, but it’s obvious he’s not going to go down that route. He might if there was a big popular movement in the United States demanding that. There isn’t. But I think that is what is needed.

Another potential wild card that I would suggest is in the offing would be some large environmental crisis. That would shake everybody up fast.

Well, without any doubt. I mean, once that becomes obvious to most people. But, again, how do you then reorganize the world?

At that point it becomes necessary—

—essentially to work together, to plan, to have a planned economy.

There would be a plan right away?

There would be.

Would people be pulling out their Marxist textbooks on how to do it? Are there specifics?

Well, I don’t think there are any good textbooks to show how good planning can work, but at least we now know how not to do it. And we know that the plan needs to involve the population as a whole, which needs to offer some oversight from below.

What is the best planned state in the world? Is it Switzerland?

I think it probably is one of the smaller Scandinavian ones. The Norwegians are quite well planned. The Cubans are well planned in terms of their social infrastructure. They’ve done it, and they’ve shown how it could be done.

But this would be perhaps the biggest surprise of all because people do keep saying, yes, it’s going to happen, but they don’t expect it to happen tomorrow.

No, and because so many people like living in the present—and are encouraged to live in the present—they don’t want to think about tomorrow. They live for today.

You write that it’s as if history has become subversive. The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it’s best to forget it and start anew. But as everyone is discovering, you can’t do this to history. It refuses to go away. If you try to suppress it, it reemerges in a horrific fashion.

Precisely.

Do the particular origins of the US Empire make it in any way different, more prone to ignore or deny history?

When I think about the origins of the American Empire, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that the colonists began by destroying the native population they encountered, and this was linked to a religious fundamentalist belief in their own goodness and greatness. I mean, the fundamentalists who came here, the pilgrim fathers, had a way of thinking that wasn’t basically different from that of the Wahabis or Osama bin Laden. In fact, there are lots of similarities between Protestant fundamentalism and Wahabi fundamentalism, and you see that in how they treat women, all the campaigns.

The Salem Witch Trials?

Exactly. You know, women are possessed by the devil. Beat it out of them. So that was the origin. Then you have slavery, the basis for much of the wealth generated inside the United States. Then you have the violent expansion of the empire, which is something Cormac McCarthy describes very well in one of his finest novels, Blood Meridian. Then you have the Civil War, which we are told is about the liberation of slaves, and which is partially to do with that, but which is essentially an attempt to unify the United States by force. So all this created the modern United States as we know it. And from the First World War onward the United States grew in size and influence, and became a dominant power, which after the Cold War has become an ultra-imperialism, unchallenged, unchallengeable militarily, very strong, without rivals. This is the first time in human history that an empire has been without any rivals. The Romans sometimes used to think that they were, but that’s because they weren’t totally aware of the strength of the Persians or even the Chinese. They thought in terms of the Mediterranean world, not globally. So, this is the first time that this has happened. And it made the leaders of this empire extremely complacent, who took the consent of their people for granted.

But what happens if this consent is suddenly withdrawn? Now the big problems confronting the empire at the moment are economic, the state of the economy at home, and military overstretch. Iraq is a disastrous war. Afghanistan is turning out to be the same thing. The empire’s “backyard,” as it has traditionally been known since the time of the Monroe Doctrine, is totally out of control, with a wave of radical politicians, the Bolivarian politicians, led by Hugo Chávez, backed by Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, and the Cubans, and Bishop Lugo of Paraguay, and backed less strongly but also with the support of Lula in Brazil and Bachelet in Chile and Kirchner in Argentina, saying to the United States, we’re not going to let you isolate us any longer. We’re going to collaborate with each other. We won’t let you use a single country to destroy another, as we’ve done in the past. And the leaders of the United States are now being compelled to look at this new face of Latin America.

Now it’s a long way to go from here to say that this is going to break up the United States. I think people who talk about the automatic breakup of empires are wrong. It doesn’t happen automatically. But the economic crisis, if it carries on like this, if the billions given to save the banks fail, then I think you could have unpleasant surprises in store for the rulers. They may not be surprises that people on the left particularly like, but they will be surprises. There will be a new mood, which asks, why are we spending so much abroad? Why should we bolster up these regimes and countries? What has it got to do with us? Let’s improve our own country. And how such a movement develops remains to be seen. But I think one thing we have to say is that the triumphalism and euphoria that existed after the collapse of the Soviet Union has virtually gone. Everyone knows that it’s a more difficult world that they have to confront.

It’s not “the end of history”?

Far from the end of history, and far from simply being “the clash of civilizations.” I mean, I think even Francis Fukuyama has acknowledged that the world has changed beyond what he’d imagined, and Samuel Huntington, in his last public work, moved beyond the clash of civilizations to warning of a clash within Christianity, saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in the United States faced a real challenge from the Hispanics, who he said are threatening our way of life. These are sort of Catholic Christians from South America who are threatening our way of life. He was wrong in that sense, but he was indirectly right in that the size of the Hispanic population in the United States is now larger than it’s ever been. Their growth rates as a population in terms of demography are much, much higher than that of the non-Catholic sections of the population. And the new migrants from South America act as a bridge with South America. They’re concerned about what happens in Chiapas in Mexico. They’re concerned about Central America. They’re concerned about the Bolivarians, concerned in a good way in many cases. And the young generation of Cubans in Florida don’t want the United States to attack Cuba. So things are not the same as when Florida and other places were just nests of reaction, with old counterrevolutionaries coming to find a nice home. It’s moved a lot beyond that. The interesting question, which in my more utopian moods I sometimes ponder, is whether the changes in South America might travel across this bridge via the Hispanic populations in the United States to produce something that none of us can foresee. Certainly the hegemony of the English language is being challenged in many American towns in the south.

I’d love for you to talk about Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in World War I.

Kipling forced his young son to go and fight in the First World War. The boy couldn’t see properly. He couldn’t have passed any military board. But Kipling used his influence with the British government of the day, and the generals who knew him well, and said, my son is desperate to fight, you must take him into the army. So the boy went to fight in World War I, died fairly early on. And Kipling never really got over that. He wrote one poem in which said he said,

And in “A Dead Statesman,” he wrote,

And these beautiful lines are so applicable to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and to numerous other wars that are being fought in the twenty-first century, a hundred years after Kipling wrote those lines.

In your writings, you also cite Joseph Conrad, a Pole living in London.

Joseph Conrad was a great Polish writer who moved to London, learned English as a second language, and became one of its finest practitioners. He was very hostile to Belgian colonialism, and many European ones, but was very soft on the British because they had given him refuge. In his famous novel, Heart of Darkness, which is a description of King Leopold’s horrors in the Congo, he wrote:

And when you think about this, it really does apply to what has been going on in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And what Conrad and Kipling demonstrate is the continuities of history. You know, this is nothing new. It has been going on. And the more people that know that these mistakes were made by previous rulers, the better. They should be learned from—and not repeated. If politicians are only destined to repeat themselves historically, the world has a very sad fate ahead for it.

You quote an Iraqi poem, “On the Bird.”

The history of poetry in Iraq is very interesting. The major poets of Iraq happen to be communists. Most of them were exiled by Saddam Hussein when he first came to power. And then soon, just before the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein realized that the population was missing them, and he sent a message to all three of them, who were in different exiles, and said, why don’t you come and give one big poetry reading in Baghdad? There will be a million people to listen to you. The Iraqi ambassador went to London and said this to Saadi Youssef, the greatest amongst them. And Saadi Youssef asked, who will guarantee our lives? When the ambassador took the message back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein said, tell them the blood on my neck will guarantee their lives. But they said that’s not good enough, and didn’t go. One of them, Mudhafar al-Nawab, who lived in exile in Damascus, wrote this poem:

A powerful poem.

Yes.

And on that note, thank you so much, Tariq.