my*gration

Society is violence

Getting to the heart of the matter - those of us concerned with the well-being of society (from the health of its body politic to the sustainability of its social and economic structures) ultimately confront a basic question of political philosophy: is society based on violence or peace? We draw our conclusions from a wide array of sources - media information, statistical research, anecdotal encounters. None of these sources is accurate or complete. How do we understand what the dominant framework of society is, when our assessment is so entrenched in our own psychological or emotional outlook for a given moment?

In policy schools, there is talk of "stakeholders", "the commons", "inefficiencies" and the ways of minimizing the violence of our existing systems through study and implementation of new practices. But it seems that all collective effort to minimize suffering is misconstrued. We don't have the benefit of future information, future ways of thinking. We seek to uplift one group by detracting from another, to serve the interests of the general at the expense of a few, to limit predatory behavior through punishment. Physical infrastructure (running water, electricity grids, roadways) must come at the cost of environmental degradation. British colonials thought they were civilizing the darkened world. The "white man's burden" they called it. But colonization enacted unspeakable violence on societies, land, and belief systems of the colonized. Was the "white man's burden" argument justification, self-delusion, or earnestly believed?

Is society violence or peace?

Political Correctness and the Perpetuation of Difference

So much dialogue stalls on political sensitivity. Right now, I'm facing quite a challenge on how to walk the fine line between empathy and distance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and, to a much lesser extent, on the illegal immigration debate. To highlight the challenge in terms of the most familiar conflict: depending on who you ask, the West Bank and Gaza are alternately known as "Occupied Territories" "Occupied Palestine" "Judea and Samaria" "the Palestinian territories" or "Palestine". Each of these "names" actually presupposes a particular legal and political history, even a certain moral ascendency. By this, I mean that each of these names represents a different account of who comprise the true native nation of that land, and who has the right (both legal and moral) to settle and govern the land.

Now, I don't say that these debates are inherently wrong, but I think they set us up for failure to: 1. get to the real issue, 2. resolve the real issue. I think the real issue at the heart of these conflicts is how to shift from seeing collective identities as essentially predicated on conflict, defined in opposition, and dependent on animosity towards another collective identity. Where an individual identifies with one particular group, he usually sees himself as NOT belonging to another group. Any attempt to resolve a conflict based on group identity can therefore become existential to a people and to individuals.

I would say a right to settle and govern a land comes with another moral obligation to do right by the land's ecology and long-term stability, and this requires a serious commitment to peaceful resolution of conflict with all parties residing on the land. And I would even go so far as to say that true peace can only be achieved if parties in a conflict stop seeing one another in terms a conflict, in terms of an essential difference, and start believing that they want the same things. This means that the two groups become partners in peace and therefore become part of one group. Political parties illustrate this point well - in the U.S., both the Republican and Democratic parties comprise wildly diverse collections of individuals. Yet political identity is one of the most defining identity categories in the U.S.   

I'd like to get past the political sensitivity issue and just get to the issue that interests me most - how can we bridge these differences (rather than catering to them or perpetuating them) through sympathy, love, and compassion? How can we be compassionate to both sides of a conflict? How can we strive for a shared, humane mission?

Parallel Society?

I can't believe this tripe actually made it into the New York Times Magazine. This is seriously flawed. "Our Turks" indeed. Germany has never made any effort to incorporate foreign people, and now they're blaming "Anatolian farmers" stuck in "time capsules" for their inability to integrate into the "tolerant" and progressive German society? Women and girls, feminism, human rights, moral outrage - just more reasons to alienate an entire group of people.

I just rediscovered this in my research files - the article is actually a year old. But I think it's a pretty sound indication of what is wrong with the international media portrayal on Muslim immigrants in Western society. Revisionist history - undermining the moral character of an entire community absolves the German government and society of its hand in keeping that community underserved, marginalized, and excluded. Positing German society as shocked and outraged that such inhumane and brutal practices can happen in its midst places German identity further up on the moral scale than Turkish (read:Muslim) identity. Confused at best, racist at worst. How did this make it past editorial review?

Elections and Pulpit Speeches

Some time during the theatrics of last week's State of the Union Address, amid brandished purple fingers, the embrace between an Iraqi and an American soldier's mother, boos from the Democrats, and Dick Cheney fidgeting over Bush's shoulder, I started thinking about perception, progress, and how we measure the success of a democracy. If the last couple of decades have taught us anything, it's that elections can have more symbolic importance than practical implication, that they can signal the beginning of profoundly unfree moments in history, and that they don't prove anything.

I understand that we can be allow ourselves to be impressed that so many Iraqis readied themselves in houses with no electricity and intermittent water supply, braved the threat of fatal violence, and went out to vote. But we must also bear in mind that violence gravely hindered campaigning and made it impossible for international election monitors to be present. I fear that overwhelming media skepticism in the runup to the election has just led to an overcorrection, and an unwarranted jubilation now. It seems to me that if Iraqi people would come out to vote now, they would have done it last month, last year, the year before that as well.

So what are we really celebrating - that the elections took place at all, and that people showed up to vote? Why is this any surprise? Organizing an election is difficult work, but it seems to be the easiest step in the process of democratization. The country's most powerful religious leader supports popular elections, but he might as easily have issued a fatwa that people should not vote in these elections. Early news reports noted that there was only a 10% voter turnout in Mosul - is this a thrilling turnout? People who have lived under an oppressive regime might turn out to vote, but that doesn't mean that democracy has been achieved and we can dub the mission successful. Let us remember that Milosevic was freely elected.

As in Afghanistan, elections may legitimize the Iraqi government and allow it to make mandated steps towards economic and physical rehabilitation of the country. Or, it may turn out that the new government will continue to struggle with the remains of war. We must be careful not to see the elections as the successful culmination of a carefully planned democratization process. The road to war and then to recovery has been long, fraught with mishaps and miscalculations, and incredibly difficult on Iraqi civilians. The elections may be a starting point for them to reclaim their country, but this war, the decade of sanctions, and the long years of oppression have left them a ravaged country to reclaim.

As many a scholar and expert have pointed out, democracy cannot really flourish in the absence of economic development. India and Indonesia are examples of thriving vibrant democracies struggling under the burden of poverty, corruption, and illiteracy. Is it really such a triumph to have corrupt elected leaders?

I think it's time for us to examine what we understand under successful democracy. Elections are very important, but voting is the most passive and indirect form of civic political engagement. This applies here, too. Our own secular democracy is experiencing crippling partisanship, and the increased infusion of religious ideology into statecraft. We have our own divides to overcome, and a higher voter participation in national elections have not seemed to help us overcome them.

Nonviolence, Power, and Empowered Victims

To keep this thought line going:

I don't think that nonviolence only works when the occupying power wants out, or when the unjust system is easy to change. In fact, I really do believe that active, nonviolent, civil nonparticipation can be a strong method for confronting injustice and bringing about real change, even in seemingly endless and hopeless situations. But it does require unity of purpose, and it does require a clear plan. It's got to figure out what future it wants, what kind of change will get it there (policy, economics, behavioral), and how to bring about that change (dialogue, awareness - more vs. targeted information, advocacy, or action).

Nowadays, I think it's easy to confuse the point of nonviolent protest. Public shaming and asserting moral ascendency over the unjust have been vital parts of successful nonviolent movements in the past, but they're not the whole point of the movement. The point, ultimately, is changing the situation, ending the occupation, righting the wrong. Feeling superior and victimized won't achieve that, and neither does shaming leaders who don't feel ashamed.

A nonviolent movement must make it inconvenient for the "oppressor" to continue occupying, exploiting, discriminating, and must make it impossible for the "oppressor" to retaliate. It must present a unified face (even though it represents a broad-based and diverse populace), and it must appear popular. Nonviolent movements take a long time to develop, undergo transformations, have many leaders and one figurehead, sometimes just don't come together.

One of the fundamental planks in nonviolent activism is "empowerment." Throughout the development, human rights, social reform and social justice lexica, you will find  that "victims of oppression" must be "empowered" to take control and "liberate themselves" from poverty, political marginalization, physical violence, discrimination, etc. In the absence of a broad-based, unified movement with strong leadership, target groups might end up with victim complexes and still no real motivation/tools to change their actual situation.

I don't believe that the same model of nonviolent activism can be applied in all cases of inequality or suffering. National liberation movements are different from development programs are different from social reform advocacy are different from crisis intervention. I think we may want to reexamine what methods should be applied where, and how. 

Nonviolence Today: Part 2

Gandhi promoted a form of civil disobedience that he called "active, nonviolent noncooperation." With uncanny insight and political acuity, he and his team were able to unleash a widespread, mass movement on a weakened British empire whose home government had already decided that it wanted out of India. British occupation of India ended in a confluence of several political and economic phenomena, mostly related to and resulting from WW2, which created a perfect storm.

Gandhian freedom fighters were not passive; they confronted the various manifestations of "injustice" in a series of calculated, political actions designed to inconvenience the empire and expose its injustice. In 1942, after nearly 2 decades of such actions, Gandhi and his crew in the Congress party launched their final campaign, "Quit India Movement". That same year, the British had sent the Cripps Mission with a proposal for British withdrawal from India, general elections in India, and Indian independence. The plan was scrapped on grounds of ambiguity, but the intent was clear - the Brits were ready to leave. They just wanted to do it with some measure of pomp and glory.

This makes me wonder how widely applicable this type of movement really can be. The US Civil Rights movement altered the definition of Gandhian nonviolence, simply because it was applying the ideology to a different context altogether. In both cases, mass engagement was used to expose a large-scale injustice (with many forms and manifestations). Both used public shaming as a tool for creating political will and the urgency of political change. And both happened at a time when other economic and political factors laid the groundwork for change.

In the Middle East, active nonviolent confrontation cannot really work to the same extent in getting the Israeli government to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories for a wide array of reasons - the size and (geographic, economic, political) characteristics of the total Palestinian population, the nature of Israeli exploitation of Palestinian natural resources, the political unwillingness of Israel to seriously disengage from the occupied territories, the lack of empowered, inspirational, and politically savvy Palestinian leadership that's seriously committed to nonviolent methods, and the perceived media glut of information on the Middle East. But also, let's bear in mind that the Intifada (1987-1993), while violent in nature, was organic, popular, non-militant civil disobedience on a large scale. It involved demonstrations, boycotts, strikes. Disillusionment with its policy/practical outcomes has trumped recognition of its successes.

BV - I agree with you that information from the region is largely Iraq-centric, but there is a ton of information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out there. Unfortunately, each article doesn't usually come with a thorough backgrounder, an unbiased perspective, and some good analysis. This usually leaves media consumers with the impression that the conflict's been raging on for decades at the same mind-numbing clip, with no real hope for positive change. In fact, this conflict is full of subtle variations that we don't often pick up on. For good speed-ups, I'd check out alternate information sources - like the International Crisis Group and Reuters Alertnet.

MY - I also agree with you that nonviolent protest here tends towards the theatrical, the ridiculous, and the politically lazy. There have been moments within the last few years - like pre-war demonstrations against the Iraq war and last Spring's March for Women's Lives in DC - where protests were broad-based and massive. Unfortunately, those did not translate into concerted political activity, and the country remained divided. As I see it, we have a political system that is perceived as inaccessible to the average citizen, a form of indirect democracy that Gandhi himself spoke against. The American public is not extremely informed about or involved in the political process, although Americans do express strong political opinions and concerns (see the PIPA site). More importantly, we also lack unified, critical, inspirational opposition leadership. On the critical side, we have hundreds of plaintive voices representing narrow platfroms of injustice, who have limited resources and limited appeal. We do not have any movement that captures the mass imagination, exposes large-scale injustice, and empowers people to correct that injustice. Part of the reason for this is that most Americans don't perceive themselves as oppressed, ignored, marginalized, or duped. Self interest and pride does figure heavily into successful mass movements. National liberation movements automatically have these factors, social reform movements have to think harder.

Thank you for your comments, guys.

Nonviolence Today

In Ramallah, I met a woman who told me that she doesn't believe that nonviolence is a successful way to address political injustice. It just isn't effective, she said. This was last Fall, as the international media failed to report on a nonviolent hunger strike protesting the West Bank separation barrier, which Israel claims is necessary to protect itself from suicide bombers and international human rights groups have denounced as an illegal apartheid measure and land confiscation scheme in violation of treaty agreements.  Around the same time, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson and founder/director of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, Arun Gandhi, had visited Ramallah, and called for Palestinians to rededicated themselves to active, nonviolent, civil disobedience as Mahatma Gandhi had described it decades before.

In today's society, the nature of the media, its role in political discourse, as well as the nature and scope of freedom struggles seem to have rendered nonviolent protest almost irrelevent. In the absence of traditional imperialism, and the unexamined, unabashed moral ascendency it afforded distant imperial nations, the impact of public shaming is diminished. Except for major US-related exceptions, today's national struggles are waged against local governments who exert internationally recognized territorial sovereignty over peoples with national ambitions, leaving their fate to local political will, or to a drastic expansion of international legal powers to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations they have ascertained to be "illegal" with punitive force. Not likely to happen.

Second, the media's voices are many and cacophonous, and its function in civil society is increasingly confused. Is media a form of entertainment, a tool to advertise and garner support for a government/administration's agenda, or a forum for serious political discourse? The last function seems isolated to grossly underconsumed media outlets. This makes its moral imperative, its dictums, the power of its stories less likely to effect any serious policy change at all.

Is nonviolence - as a concept, as a mobilization tool, as a movement - dead? I don't believe so. But it's aims and methods must be reexamined.

Fighting Words

On Thursday, just before my departure from Europe back to the US, I read an article in the prominent German weekly, "Die Zeit", declaring that Muslim communities in Germany were undermining the free, secular, democratic values of the German "Rechtsstaat" (rights-based state). This was the lead article of the week, "Tuecken der Toleranz", part of the most recent media fever of identity introspection which has broken out across Western Europe following the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a self-proclaimed Muslim radical. Leading the media charge against Muslim communities in Germany was the widely-circulated, pop-conservative news magazine, "Der Spiegel", in a cover story called "Allahs Rechtlose Tochter: Muslimische Frauen in Deutschland".

These articles (among others, at least one in every major German news daily, weekly, magazine and broadcast program around the week of Nov. 15) paint a dismal picture of Muslims' ability to live in the West without forcing the West to compromise its own values. Continues the argument line: in order to accomodate Muslim values, as required by their own values of promoting and accepting multiculturalism, they must create policies which compromise core womens' rights, social rights, and civil rights. In effect, by allowing Muslims to practice their own religious and cultural traditions, German society has allowed Muslims to threaten German peace, security, society and culture. I might expect fighting words like this from Spiegel, but Zeit was always more nuanced. Has the entire opinion set decided to fall back on easy stereotypes, decided to spread a campaign of misinformation and obfuscation? Apparently.

Here we are: Dutch police find a note with Koranic-cadenced verse cursing the West pinned to the shot and stabbed corpse of one provocative filmmaker in Holland (a country where discussions about immigrant integration and the future of the welfare state have inflamed social wounds and filled public debate forums for the last several years). Dutch officials and journalists begin reporting that the country's integration program and welfare policies have failed to address Islamic violence. Dutch political ideology sees itself resting on the belief that violence results from poverty and inequality, which should be reparable through thorough social welfare. "Islamic fundamentalists" are rich, goes the line of query, so clearly cultures of hate don't always originate in poverty. What to do? According to Dutch opinion makers: throw up your hands, throw in the towel and forget integration programs. "Muslims" have created a parallel society, have failed to integrate despite integration programs provided by the state since the early 1980s, have created safe havens for people with anti-Western and anti-State missions to meet and coordinate. No one is safe from them, so launch a campaign to purge them out.

Suddenly, countries with their own unique immigrant integration and welfare state issues have taken this one violent death (with its own backstory - Van Gogh was an open provocateur, according to reliable sources) as proof that radical Islam has not been sufficiently contained in their societies, that it is far more widespread and dangerous than they had thought, that they have been played the fool for promoting their honorable yet naive secularism and multiculturalism.

Germany really has no right to take this position.

Point 1: Germany's very first integration policy has yet to come into effect, and even this law (which will take effect in 2005) fixates integration on mandatory language instruction for all those applying for German citizenship. Germany's largest Muslim communities formed as guest workers entered the country in the 1960s (and kept on coming), and were met with a system that openly opposed their integration into society. As a result of 4 decades of an immigration reality rejected, despised and denied, the country has several large Muslim communities of different ethnic backgrounds and persuasions/schools with consistently below average education, employment, health and wealth indicators. This has long been seen as a social problem, not a national security problem.

Point 2: Germany has never seen itself nor promoted itself as a multicultural society. In Berlin, for example, there are several immigrant communities which function entirely outside of the public field of vision. Thriving Kurdish, Tamil, Arab, African (from countries in the West and Southeast of the continent), Haitian, Vietnamese communities, among others, are completely ignored in the immigration debate, which almost fetishizes Turks as the country's (and city's) immigrant face. These communities also have parallel cultures, which Germans know nothing about and see no need to explore.

Point 3: Muslim voices from the Turkish community, which are calling for girls to be exempt from physical and sexual/health education classes are part of a fringe Islamic lobby which is both powerful and feared in Turkey itself. This lobby does not address mainstream Turkish identity concerns. The German state should be able to distinguish between powerful minority Turkish voices and the complex and varied majority opinion, as well as between this one Muslim voice among the many complex and varied Muslim voices in Germany today.

Point 4: If Germany (and other Western European democracies - this debate has gained momentum in France, Belgium, Spain and the UK as well, following this one death) persists in seeing Muslims as one unified fundamentalist, anti-woman, anti-democratic, dangerous face, it will divert attention from its own failed integration policies, its own anti-woman policies, and its own infringements on democratic values. It will fail to take responsibility for addressing the problems and providing integration options for its largest immigrant communities, and will diminish economic and social growth opportunities available only through successful social integration policies.

Bowl of Noodles, Different Sauces

Last week, at this time, I (along with so much of the world) was nursing a stomach ache fed with disappointment. America had chosen to return a president to office who had openly mismanaged both a war and an economy, who had a torture and human rights scandal exposed during his presidency, and had allowed a biased and incompetent administration to introduce policies have greatly corroded civil liberties, public goods, governmental accountability. To be honest, I was more concerned about the accompanying band of appointees and administrators reentering office with Bush than the flawed figurehead himself. Certainly, all politicians (all people) have biases and preferred platforms, but I find the extreme narrowness of many administration officials difficult to digest.

And of course, the week before that, I had returned from the Palestinian territories. Everywhere, I heard from a people almost calm in their fatalism - no one wanted Arafat to remain their own flawed figurehead, but no one saw a quick way out of this reality. I can't imagine how many people must now be gagging on the irony of their own fulfilled prophesies ("We'll just have to wait for him to die," they all said, as if in some sort of staggered chorus, over Arabic coffee and Ramadan treats. "It can't be long now. Some more sweets?").

Today I am struck again by how incapable we really are of forecasting when and how change will happen. Ashcroft is resigning, and Arafat has been declared dead (then announced as still living, but I've already been invited to the three-day event of memorial and mourning scheduled for this weekend here in London). Even if we choose continuity, either actively (reelection) or passively (acceptance), things change.

This is an exciting time. Happy Eid, Diwali, Thanksgiving....

Democracy and Religion

Even as Najaf is torn apart by civil strife, the Reuel Marc Gerecht article in the latest Atlantic suggests that the only hope for Iraqi democracy has come at the call of Sistani, the country's leading Shiite cleric. Which raises the question of how democracy must come about in the Middle East. Unfortunately, this question is often linked with the question of whether Islam (in theory or practice) is compatible with democracy.

This second question skews the conversation away from any potentially useful end. After all, with an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world (according to CAIR), we can be sure that Muslims fall into a wide spectrum of social and political configurations. At this count, Muslims make up about 22% of the world's total population. Christians are estimated to make up about 33% of the total population.

Interesting aside - the fourth largest set of adherents fall into the secular/agnostic/atheist/non-religious category, with about 850 million people. This according to a study by Adherents.com, which you can read up on at http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html. In their ranking, 1. Christianity 2. Islam 3. Hinduism 4. No religion. I'm assuming that, in our previous argumentation string, we automatically see Christianity and Agnosticism as conducive to democracy. Of course, with predominantly Hindu India a democracy, perhaps we should see Hinduism as inherently conducive to democracy as well. This is all to point out that this way of thinking is logically flawed - although there may be a correlation between religious adherence, geographic region, and political system, there may not be any other real link between the two. In fact, neighboring countries sharing cultural and ethnic overlap, belonging to the same geographic region, may have sharply divergent political systems. IE: Iran and Iraq.

Which brings us back to the popular democracy espoused by Sistani in his June 29, 2003 fatwa:

"The Occupational Authority in no way has the authority to choose members for the drafting committee of a Basic Law. In no way does any authority exist for such a drafting committee to represent the lofty interests of the Iraqi people or to translate into law the wishes and basic identity of the Iraqi people, the pollars of which are the glorious faith of Islam and society's values. The current (American) plan discussed is fundamentally unacceptable.
Accordingly, popular elections are necessary so that each Iraqi who is of voting age can choose his representative for a constituent assembly. And then any Basic Law written by this assembly must be approved by a national referendum. It is incumbent upon all believers with their utmost commitment to demand this, and asserting the truth of this path is the best way that they can participate in this process."

More than religion, political will is necessary for democracy. Not just the political will of a current or would-be leadership, but also of the people who would take on the power to dictate the terms of their government.