Never put your head in a paper tiger's mouth
May 2, 2006
History has taught us that revolutionaries should be taken seriously, writes Gerard Henderson.
SOME Englishmen still go out in the midday sun. Others just do lunch. It seems that the English-born journalist and author Robert Fisk had elected to take the second option when he was interviewed live from Beirut on ABC TV's Lateline last Wednesday. At the conclusion of the program, presenter Tony Jones described the interview as "rather unusual". You can say that again.
Fisk's considered position on the West and the Middle East is set out at length in a 1300-page book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Fourth Estate, 2005). Yet those who saw Fisk's 11-minute interview with Jones may have got a clearer sense of his essential thesis compared with those who have waded through his recent tome. It was as if the commentator was somewhat relaxed on the job (so to speak) and, consequently, spoke with greater candour than would usually be expected from The Independent's man in Beirut.
Fisk began by saying that the likes of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, and the al-Qaeda in Iraq supremo, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, "don't actually matter". According to his view, they are "part of the bestialisation of those people we want to hate". He said "the organisation which bin Laden has created exists, so the individuals per se don't really matter much anymore".
One of the lessons of history is that revolutionaries should be taken seriously, since they usually do, or attempt to do, what they say they intend to do. This is true of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and more besides.
Bin Laden said he would attack the West, and has done so on many occasions. Zarqawi said he would wage an insurgency against the UN-approved government in Iraq and its Western allies (including the US, Britain and Australia). At present, Zarqawi and his fellow terrorists are waging war on soldiers and civilians in Iraq.
Yet, Fisk maintains, neither man actually matters anymore. Why? Well, according to this view, bin Laden and Zarqawi are essentially creations of, wait for it, the West. They are mere figures "to be hated and to be bestialised in front of the television screens" and depicted by Western TV producers as "the latest mad lunatic, the latest fanatic, the latest terrorist whom we have to be concerned about". It was as if bin Laden and Zarqawi had not chosen to send out their own video and audio revolutionary messages with the expressed intention they be reported on Western TV. But they have.
When Jones implied that Fisk might be underestimating the significance of Zarqawi's most recent revolutionary message, Fisk responded by positing the suggestion that "these people [are] being put out before us as caricatures to hate" by George Bush. So it's all Bush's fault, apparently. When Jones suggested that bin Laden was a problem, Fisk responded: "It's a problem for you, isn't it?" The response was in the affirmative. Whereupon Fisk quickly backtracked and acknowledged that it was a problem for him as well.
A similar confusion emerged when Fisk maintained the West is "helping to create the creatures of evil". Fisk gesticulated inverted commas when saying the word "evil" - implying that he did not necessarily believe the murderer Zarqawi was necessarily evil. Zarqawi's Iraqi civilian victims, and their families, would hold a different view, no doubt. When Jones argued that the West just could not ignore al-Qaeda in Iraq, Fisk again backtracked, declaring: "No; absolutely not; you're right."
There followed a Fisk "look, look, look, look" interjection and it was soon good night from Jones. And it was still lunch time in Lebanon. The acclaimed author of The Great War for Civilisation signed off by implying that the "injustice in the Muslim world" is due primarily to "Westerners".
In his recent book, Fisk describes war as "the total failure of the human spirit" and comments that he knows of an editor "who has wearied of hearing" him say this. The author then asks: "How many editors have first-hand experience of war?" Fair enough. But how many journalists have first-hand experience of government? For example, the fact is Britain and its allies had few options in 1939. It's difficult to see how a determination to stand up to Hitler can be equated with a total failure of the human spirit.
Fisk's position is much the same about World War I, in which his father took part. He argues that William Fisk fought "in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he'd never heard of called Sarajevo". This is simplistic at best. William Fisk found himself in a trench on the Western Front because Germany invaded Belgium and France. The elected politicians of the day had to make a decision whether to resist German aggression or not. Journalists are not required to make such decisions.
Fisk stands in the tradition of the alienated Western intellectual. He has many fellow-travellers. The playwright Harold Pinter used the occasion of his 2005 Nobel Prize for literature address to question whether the West ever has any "moral sensibility". Pinter's discomfort with the US and Britain is so intense that he went so far as to support Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.
Then there is John Pilger, who told the Green Left Weekly (November 3, 2004) that "while we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice but to support the resistance".
There is a plausible case against the US/Britain/Australia policy in the Middle East in general - and Iraq in particular. But blaming the West for virtually all the problems and injustices in the Middle East is a cop-out. Especially since Arabs, Muslim and Christian alike are the principal victims of the attacks by radical Islamists. In ignoring this in his rather unusual, albeit brutally honest Lateline interview, Fisk demonstrated that he was, well, out to lunch.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute. |
