Tragedy and Farce:
Reflections Upon an Unjust War

by Prakash Kona

At the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx says: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The first Gulf war of 1991 was a tragedy. The second one was a farce. George Bush senior was the protagonist of a tragedy that turned into a farce while his son the Jr. George Bush was the hero of the very farce attempting to give it tragic overtones. What brings together the tragedy and the farce is that they are two faces of a multi-faceted discourse of colonialism and, in consequencem, capitalism and patriarchy.

While the British empire of the 19th and early 20th century was a tragedy, American attempts to colonize the world are a farce. It was a tragedy when Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, devastated Baghdad with “rivers of blood” flowing in the streets. The Gulf wars that turned aerial bombardment into a strategy of murder with the minimal human loss to the murderers are so to speak a farce.

To Marx, Napoleon Ist fell into the discourse of tragedy, while Louis Napoleon of the Eighteenth Brumaire was a farce. From this perspective George Bush (senior and junior) are farce taken to another level, because they are neither Hulagu Khan nor the Napoleons.

The father George Bush Sr. is thrice removed from reality, while the son is anything but real. While the father in the first Gulf War attempts to give colonialism an international character under the dubious label of “allied forces” that might as well have been allied crooks or thieves, the son turns colonialism into an end in itself, terming it a coalition that is in essence a coalition of deceivers (Edward Herman), invaders and occupiers with an army of mercenaries. Or a Coalition of snakes with a king cobra and a viper at the behest.

The point of this article is that the nation-states of the West are in essence colonial states. The occupations of Palestine and Iraq, along with the recent Gulf wars, are instances of colonialism in one form or another that combined with the oppression of the working classes continue to pay for the technological superiority of the west and its hegemony.

The Iraq war has made one thing clear even to liberals who see without perceiving: that unspeakable Third World and working-class suffering funds the gross consumerist appetites and energy requirements of the bourgeoisie in the West and their mirror image — the upper-class elites of the non-Western states. Like all discourses of oppression, Western civilization was invented to justify colonialism. Back in the year 1935, Lord Macaulay in his “Minute on Education 1835” says: “I have never found one among them [the colonized intellectuals] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Further, in the same Minute he adds: “We must at present do our best to form a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions and morals, and in intellect.”

In the 19th century it was the British embarking on this civilizing mission. Now it is the Americans. But the underlying sense of superiority of the West in relation to the East and the mission to create a “class of interpreters” or, in other words, colonized intellectuals whose job it is to perpetuate the notion of Western superiority in the Third World countries. The other name for this civilization these days is “globalization” or “Americanism” or “McDonaldism,” “Coke-ism” or “Nike-ism” or the history of a king called burger who wants to bugger the world with the ruthlessness of Napoleon the usurping pig in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

In his book The Poetics of Imperialism, Eric Cheyfitz rightly points out:

“Thus, those of us who live within the privilege of Western patriarchy live in an increasingly narrow psychic and social space. For we cannot afford to enter most of the social spaces of the world; they have become dangerous to us, filled with the violence of the people we oppress, our own violence in alien forms that we refuse to recognize. And we can afford less and less to think of these social spaces, to imagine the languages of their protest, for such imagining would keep us in continual conflict, in continual contradiction with ourselves, where we are increasingly locked away in our comfort. Terrorizing the world with our wealth and power, we live in a world of terror, afraid to venture out, afraid to think openly. Difference and dialogue are impossible here. We talk to ourselves about ourselves, believing in a grand hallucination that we are talking with others.”

This “grand hallucination” of “talking with others” is reproduced in panel discussions on Third World and working-class issues that we see on official channels on television and hear on the radio, which is repeated by experts and parroted by so-called professionals, journalists and scholars at conferences in universities. The grand hallucination continues. We are talking to ourselves about ourselves. Ironically we persist in imagining that we are talking with others.

Anyone who has read Freud knows that hallucinations are not without histories. Stereotypes perpetuate hallucinations and in turn are perpetuated by them. The Arab-Moslem is locked in this stereotype that the West has created as an essential aspect of Orientalism. In other words the hallucination is institutionalized and serves to function as the basis of what Althusser terms the ideological state apparatus. In this hallucination there is no space for either difference or dialogue.

The larger agenda of the war is global policing of society especially in the non-Western parts of the world to make sure that the masses are kept stupid while their masters continue their exploitation. The Sanskrit word “Matsya Nyaya” or ‘’the justice of the fish’ means a social order where the big fish eat the small fish. Call it Americanization or globalization: it stands for this predatory discourse — an ironic justice where the small fish have to be consumed in order that the big fish may continue to appropriate the surplus of the majority.

Supermarkets that eat away small businesses are one example of this justice of the fish. Morally the most degenerate of human beings is the pimp. In making war look decent, the corporate oil pimps have glamorized pimping joined by the media such as CNN, Fox and the BBC, who played the role of the pharaoh’s eunuchs to the eunuch pharaohs George Bush Jr. and Tony Blair.

The children and innocent civilians of Iraq and occupied Palestinian territories who died and continue to do so thanks to the two wars, the embargo and the colonization will always be remembered as martyrs to the cause of resisting Western imperialism. This includes the human bombers as well, despite their extraordinarily misplaced focus and simply unacceptable means that only brings to the fore a vulnerability that borders on innocence. As far as their Israeli, American and British exterminators are concerned, as Marx puts it at the end of his essay on the Paris commune: “History has already nailed them to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”

The left is right and the right is wrong. Discourses by their very nature are characterized by ambivalence and multiplicity both of which are lost in the absence of criticism. Given this assertion, I identify with Walter Benjamin as the ‘right’ any discourse that fails to see the existing status quo of “property relations” as the basis of a fascist society. As Ali Shariati, the Iranian Marxist thinker points out:

“The point is that ownership is the only foundation [of the social order], whether in its exclusive or social (joint/common) form.

Thus, I believe in history there have always been no more than two foundations; the period in which the resources, tools, and consumer goods have been accessible to everyone; and second, the period in which the commodities have been monopolized.

In the “social” foundation the material resources (like the spiritual resources) are available to everyone. While in a “class” foundation, resources are monopolized and, as a result, the society is polarized. Once polarized, the relationship between the two poles will also change.

Suppose yesterday I was a slave and a master owned me. And today I am a serf and the same master is over me; tomorrow I will be a farmer and still the same man bosses me. Which one has changed, the bottom or the top? Obviously the top. However, whenever there is a change in the bottom there is a concomitant change in our class statuses as well as our relationships. This is not by any means a superficial change that protects the status quo and characteristics of the existing polarities, rather it is a fundamental change.”

Tradition, whether derived from religion or social practices over a period of time in itself, does not have the weapons to analyze capitalism. If the intellectuals of the Arab masses and the people themselves must preserve something of their cultural identity and religion in the face of the military and cultural onslaught of feudal ruling classes supported by their Western counterparts, it is imperative for them to take a detached view of the situation and acquire the means of dissecting the social order through learning from left-leaning discourses practiced by dissenting groups in other parts of the world. This is the antithesis of globalization. Using the very elements of a dangerously oppressive order to destroy the basis of that order.

Western individualism disconnects the self from the other. The whole metaphysics is geared to prove the existence of a self without the other. Ideology is used to disguise the lifeline that connects the hunger of the other with the gluttony of the self. In consequence, Western democracy is a sham, because it grants certain kinds of personal freedom, for instance sexual freedom and speech without making fundamental changes as far as property relations are concerned. You are free to speak, but that does not mean that you will be heard. It does not really grant the freedom to find alternatives to the existing status quo. The alternatives are what are given from above. This sham of a democracy when exported to other countries only brings untold suffering and divisions among local populations.

At the end of his essay: “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin says: “Communism responds by politicizing art.” To begin with, communism responds to fascism by politicizing life. Communism is older than Marxism. Communism speaks of a way of life that rejects ownership and private property as the basis of social existence. Communism is particularly good as an antidote to globalization that promotes unbridled individualism because of its emphasis on the idea of a community. Marxism is one interpretation of political economy and its relation to civil society.

My view of resistance is that it must challenge the deadly triad: capitalism, patriarchy and neocolonialism. The connections are obvious. Capitalism thrives in a male-dominated world whose existence can be traced to the labor of Third World people and the working classes. Simple though these generalizations may seem it is impossible to miss the point that colonialism (or neocolonialism) is what makes western civilization a reality.

Back in 1979 Ali Shariati pointed out in his book The Machine in Captivity of Machinism, “Never before in the history of mankind has there been so much distance between the East and the West. The unmeasureable and unprecedented fissure is widening every day to such an extent that by the year 2000 the income of a European will be up 100%, while that of an Easterner will rise a meager 3%.” The dollar and its counterpart the Euro create their logical victims in the Third World.

The notion of the “West” is the ideological basis of the victimization. It comes from a desire to superimpose a form of life that is fundamentally inimical to the local cultures of the East. Shariati calls this “machinism” where technology is an end in itself. “Machinism is an experience that Western man is well familiar with. We must not repeat the same mistakes in the East. As Fanon believes, we must not try to make a second Europe out of Africa and Asia, as America was made. America has both machine and machinism. Is it ideal to make a third America out of Africa, and a fourth Europe out of Asia? Do we want to create two more Americas? Which freethinker likes to cherish such an ideal?”

At the core of this machinism are private property and the illusory need of security. The insecurity of the west comes from a fear of those spaces oppressed for centuries. The almost real danger that the other can strip the self of its illusions. The need for those illusions in the isolated consciousness of the self. As the Lebanese poet Adonis points out:

“Consciousness of the other assumes a realization on our part that the opposition between the Arab-Islamic East and the European-American West is not of an intellectual or poetic nature, but is political and ideological, originally a result of Western imperialism... The West contains many ‘Wests’ more decadent than any Arab decadence, and the Arab East has many ‘Easts’ more advanced than the most advanced of these Wests.”

This would imply as Adonis further points out that “the progress of a society is not represented merely by economic and social renewal, but more fundamentally by the liberation of man himself, and the liberation of the suppressed elements beneath and beyond the socio-economic structure, in such a way that human beings at their freest and most responsive become both the pivot and the goal.”

The liberation that Adonis speaks of can only happen through dissent. The dissenter is no exile but one who keeps returning. Like in the poem of Al-Bayyati the Communist Iraqi poet that died in exile, the exile is born and reborn in other places and other lands. He is an artist and a revolutionary. He lives in the Third World spaces of the first world and among the working classes of the Third World.

At the gate of Hell stood Picasso, and the guitar player from Madrid
Raised the curtain for the ravished theater queens,
Restored to the clown his virginity,
Hid weapons and seeds in the earth until another resurrection.
He died in a café in exile, his eyes turned towards his distant land,
Gazing through clouds of smoke and the newspaper,
His hand tracing in the air
A mysterious sign pointing to the weapons and seeds.
The guitar player from Madrid dies
In order that he may be born again,
Under the suns of other cities and in different masks,
And search for the kingdom of rhythm and color,
And for its essence which activated a poem,
Live through the revolutions of the ages of Faith and Rebirth,
Waiting, fighting, migrating with the seasons,
Returning to mother earth with those wearing a crown of torturing light,
The dissenters and the builders of creative cities
In the bottom of the sea of rhythm and color.

The idea behind the poem is that revolution and revolutionaries will come into the world as long as there is oppression and oppressors. Exile and return are the basis of the revolutionary aesthetic. The liberation of Palestine and Iraq are connected to the liberation of the Third World, the working classes and the eventual overthrow of a capitalist state and its patriarchal mindset.

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona