Though I have long sought his journalism, I just began reading something longer by him. He is now the author of at least 4 lengthy tomes, though the book I picked up today is, I think, the longest of his texts: it is a newly published (in 2006), 1,000 pp. tome on the modern history of the Middle East and of the largely negative impact that the West has had in the making of that history that is entitled, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
In the preface, he is as crafty and quotable as he is in his journalism, so I hope the rest of the text will prove as excellent; here are some lines I liked just from the preface:
"I don't like the definition 'war correspondent.' It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism; it has too much the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering. . ."
Yet consider all those excited Giraldoes embedded for a stimulating ride. . .
"If the soldiers I watched decided to leave the battlefield, they would--many of them--be shot for dissertion, or at least court-martialled. The civilians among whom I was to live and work were forced to stay on under bombarments, their families decimated by shellfire and air raids. As citizens of pariah nations, there would be no visas for them. But if I want to quite, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could pack my bag and fly home. . .[there would be] no counselling for the poor and huddled masses that were left to Iraq's gas, Iran's rockets, the cruelty of Serbia's militias, the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the computerised death suffered by Iraqis during America's 2003 invasion of their counntry."
"I went to war as a witness rather than a combatant, an ever more infuriated bystander to be true, but at least I was not one of the impassioned, angry, sometimes demented men who made war."
"Yet innocence, if we can keep it, protects a journalist's integrity. You have to fight to keep it."Tariq Ali is another writer/activist whose shorter works--in this case, his essays and speeches--have been of great interest to me, but whose longer works I have never read. So I have cut my teeth on his highly readable Clash of Fundamentalisms which was partially concieved as response critical of the eminent Harvard poli sci prof, Samuel Huntington's ridiculously simplistic and reductionistic Clash of Civilizations thesis.
Here is one quote that I find relevant in the context of all the recent hoopla over the difference between contemporary Islamic society and the West that was triggered by cartoons:
"We have to understand the despair, but also the lethal exaltation, that drives people to sacrifice their own lives. If Western politicians remain ignorant of the causes and carry on as before, there will be repetitions. Moral outrage has some therapeutic value, but as a political strategy it is useless. Lightly disguised wars of revenge waged in the heat of the moment are not much better. To fight tyranny and oppression using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningul democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence."Tariq Ali is originally from Pakistan, has childhood memories of the horrors of the partition, studied at Oxford, has been engaged in political activism for years, was a Trotskyite for a while and opponent of Mao and of the Soviet crackdown of '68 (though I'm not sure what he would call himself today, these things are very important to me. . .). I appreciate his passionate way of writing, though I am a bit critical of the almost total lack of any spiritual sensibility in his writings and for what seems to me a bit too dogmatic atheism (I don't believe in a creator-and-manipulator-and/or-clock-maker God, either, but I am a practicing Zen Buddhist). Nonetheless, he has a healthy outrage a la Fisk or a la any normal human being unwilling to count body bags for progress, and is an incredible public speaker who once made a statement that has become very much so a political mantra for me:
"If the Bush administration were actually serious about Iraqi freedoms, it would support the indigenous, Iraqi pro-democracy movement instead of invading."He was speaking on a tour of the US before the start of Gulf War II (of Junior's 100th or So Misadventure), in effort to do his part to try and prevent more body bags being piled up in the name of progress and from being spoken about clinically as the "collatoral damage" that is the inevitable side-effect of "precision bombing."
And oh, to conclude by comparing the work of both Fisk and Ali to that of the NYTimes' little darling (and fellow Minneapolis-St. Paul area native) Thomas Friedman:
1) I am pretty sure that Fisk's history of the Middle East will be a major improvement to Friedman's (who is a globalization/New World Order apologist and neoliberal or Milton Friedmanite thinker) recently published one much in the same way that Ali's book is an improvement over Huntington's. Over the years, Friedman has been at times equivocal about war and at other times a total hawk. He fully supported the Bush war in Iraq, though he has now turned critical of its handling, though belatedly, since opponents of the war predicted how miserably it would go well before it began. Thus he has been most vehemently critical of Donald Rumsfeld's conduct of the war, rather than of the ideology and conduct of the whole Bush administration, whose belief in America's altruistic mission in the world is a foundation of Friedman's own remarkably simplistic view of the world. (His view is remarkably simplistic for a man of his education and experience with travel; however, given that he interviews CEOs of multinationals and not workers in the trenches of sweat-shop labor for source info, the overly simplistic nature of his views is not surprising).
In short he often suggests in so many words that war is part and parcel of the market's freehand and of growing prosperity; or, to put it the way that the greatest philosophical apologist for war in the history of Western letters did, it's all just part of History's cunning.
Thus a criticism of Friedman by the astute Thomas Frank rings quite true, to the effect that Friedman's thinking is basically 19th century pro-imperialist, White Man's Burden liberalism dressed up in langauge reflecting postmodernity and globalization.
In contrast, Fisk as a correspondent in the Middle East and elsewhere, has remained a fiercely unequivocal voice against war who has fought for and kept his innocence.
This purity of view derived of innocence is something that both Friedman and the Nation's Christopher Hitchens should contemplate. Hitchens is the leading contender in competition with Friedman for the award of best writer among self-proclaimed progressives apologetic of war and imperialism. However, Hitchen's stubbornness may make it so that his pact with the Devil will go too deep for redemption (he was once part of the anti-war Left), while Friedman may still one day decide to have the NYTimes pay for his business class plane ticket to India or Palestine-Israel, but this time with the purpose of going to live the life of a factory-floor worker of a sweatshop or that of a typical Palestinian in the Gaza strip for a year. Such an adventure for Mr. Friedman would provide him with the fertile grounds for a new, groundbreaking piece of investigative journalism during which he could test his theories about growing prosperity in the globalized world order and the necessary evil of war. . .
2) Friedman views the conflict between the Western world and Islam today as neither a clash of civilizations, nor a clash of fundamentalisms, but a clash within a civilization--within Muslim society. The wicked governments of the Muslim world are, according to Friedman, the ones solely responsible for the conflict within the Muslim world and for the conflict with the West; they have, often in collusion with Islamic fundamentalists, duped the multiude of the Muslim world to blame not them, the responsible ones, but the West and most especially America. Of course, underlying this position is acceptance of the notion that the West and the Muslim world are engaged in a conflict between civilizations; however, for Friedman it is a conflict that is driven solely by the civil war that indeed rages in the heart of Muslim society--just never mind the role the West has played throughout the adventures of modernity in the making of that war. And as is his parlance, Friedman completely absolves the processes of (neoliberal) globalization and its architects of any and all responsibility for continuing and intensifying that Civil War. Fisk's and Ali's books in this case once again provide an excellent antidote to such drivel that apologizes for war and imperialism and that absolves the elites (and consumptive habits) of the West for their role in the making of the current situation.
And one more thing: Friedman claims that he is a representative of Minnesota's best progressive but centrist traditions. That's an oxymoron. He is an example of the Clinton-inspired drift of much of this state's left-of-center toward center or even right-of-center politics; he has never been a progressive. However, his newest pet topic--that of the imperative facing capitalism to develop alternative and renewable energy sources--might lead him down a path to redemption, but only if his new crusade wakes him up to the social as well ecological injustices of global capitalism which he now excuses as the price paid for progress.
For it will most likely be liberals who push for and conservatives who will succeed in making capitalism green in the future, especially since greening capitalism does not have to necessarily lead to limiting the profit-motive to other non-market values as well. Friedman will probably remain an apologist, never crossing over to the realm of the progressive he fancies himself to be.
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