Gotham Diary:
Apology
6 September 2013
Everything changes; as Lampedusa puts it, in The Leopard, everything has to change, so that everything can remain the same. This paradox is much on my mind these days, as pundits and politicians blather on about Syria. What. To. Do. About Syria.
How about this: why don’t we — and by “we” here, I mean the parties that prevailed at the “peace” conference that followed World War I — why don’t we apologize to Turkey for having insulted its sovereignty, and hand everything back. Syria. Lebanon. Iraq. Jordan. Israel, even. Just to show how sorry we really are, we’ll throw in Egypt and North Sudan. We’ll even give the restored Caliph a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
We’ll admit that colonialism is wrong, that mandates are wrong, that nation-building is wrong. None of our business!
Which is, sadly, why we can do none of the above.
How about this: why don’t we — and by “we” here, I mean us and our old friends the Russians — heat up the Cold War. Nothing has really worked since the Cold War came to an end. American foreign policy has behaved like a dog with a dead master. Not only would a renewal of the Cold War restore Syria’s status as “Russia’s problem,” but it would jam the Euro crisis, too. Hellzapoppin!
These reactionary suggestions, of course, reflect the mad mortal longing for nothing to change, never ever. Let’s just go back to the way things were — when we couldn’t wait to make changes. Because, in those days, we got to decide when to make changes and what changes to make. We had a big say in it, anyway. Nowadays, not so much. The nations of the Middle East — well, let’s start right there. The “nations” of the Middle East are all confections, fantasies of Western diplomats. Mere lines in the sand.
Once upon a time, there were two powers in the Middle East, Turkey and Persia, the latter now known as Iran. These non-Arab powers ruled the Arab population. Between them ran an expanse of desert that served as a viable frontier. Most Arabs lived on the Turkish side of this desert, but some — the Iraqis — lived on the other. The Sunni sect prevailed in the west, the Shi’ite in the East. If it hadn’t been for Western rapaciousness, for resources and for colonial security, this old Middle East might have gone on indefinitely, as a sort of Muddle East, occasionally stormy but largely stable; eventually — everything must change! — it would have evolved into something else. The point to bear in mind is that this was a world without nations.
We in the West regarded this lack of nationhood as “backward.” Are we sorry yet?
As we have had ample opportunity to learn, nations have a structural flaw. It’s something to do with their self-consciousness. Being a nation is like being a dreamer who fancies himself naked on a stage. Except that nations are awake, and armed. Shoot the audience, and quick!
Destroy the dissidents, with poison gas if necessary.
***
That is my second sermon for today: poison gas. The use of poison gas may be obscene, but surely it is less obscene than the fine discrimination that makes its use an unacceptable, “inhuman” way of disposing of civilians, while other methods remain merely regrettable. All civilian deaths are equally horrible; you don’t get a status upgrade as a martyr or downgrade as a monster simply by the introduction of poison gas into the scenario.
But surely you do? It is only human nature to feel that some ways of dying are more horrible than others. It is difficult not to feel a frisson of relief upon learning that Anne Frank died of typhus, not in a gas chamber — even if the disease ravaged her for days and days of misery. But these feelings have no place in the counsels of war. It is wrong that Anne Frank died, along with millions of others, and their are no degrees of death. How they died it is impertinent to judge. How to have prevented their death remains a conundrum. One thing seems clear: as part of our ideas about nations, we have exported genocide to the rest of the world.
I don’t make these remarks in a mood of anti-Western crankiness. You don’t have to scratch me very deep to read “West is the Best.” But I am grievously annoyed by strutting Western leaders who scold confused people to whom they stand in relation as abusive parents to abused children, and whom they then threaten with yet another beating!