INTELLECTUALS AND ‘PATRIOTS’
Hazem Saghieh Al-Hayat
Dar Al-Hayat, Lebanon
Oct 18 2006
When Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988,
many Egyptian and Arab voices contested and cast doubt on the
announcement. For them, the prize was for Mahfouz’s positive position
toward peace with Israel. It is, therefore, not a reward for Egypt and
the Arabs, but rather for their surrender. It was also offered as an
encouragement for more Arab surrender. A few years later, some were
affected by those critics and, consequently, the respected novelist
was stabbed with a knife.
Recently, Nobel Prize winner novelist Orhan Pamuk was subjected to
a similar defamation campaign in Turkey . The aim, in the eyes of
critics, was to humiliate Turkey through the prize, and depict its
identity as a mixture of confusion and juxtapositions. The irrefutable
evidence was Pamuk’s outspoken objection to the history of his country
toward the Armenians and its policy toward the Kurds.
Also, taking into account the difference between the two situations,
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi is one of the critics
of Iranian under the Ayatollahs, whose latest victim was Ramin
Jahanbegloo, the intellectual who was coerced to apologize in court for
the kindness of his heart and for falling for ‘Great Satan’s’ tricks.
Between the killing of journalists and intellectuals in Algeria during
the civil war, and the arrest and gagging of their colleagues in Syria,
the fundamentalist terrorism and the Baathist-military ‘modernity’
converged on a position toward these accursed professions, which
deals with knowledge, creativity and criticism.
The hostility toward culture and intellectuals, and the press and
journalists is almost equivalent to the hostility toward the West.
Both complete each other. So long as the cultural and freedom of press
is Western by origin and practice, and so long as the Nobel Foundation
‘implements’ a US colonial agenda, the resistance to culture and
intellectuals, and the press and journalists has become part of
‘patriotism’.
This also occurs in a country such as Russia, where journalist
Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated a few days ago. She was famous
for exposing her country’s brutal policies in Chechnya. As known,
the problem of Russia with the West, before, during and after the
Bolshevik Revolution, strongly related to the Russian Slavic Patriotism
of which Putin has become its latest hero.
Indeed, the tendency to liken these accursed professions to the
Western ‘enemy’ is not something new. Every instance of the tensed-up
nationalistic awakenings in the 20th century has been expressed
in the form of silencing the press and arresting or exiling the
intellectuals. When nationalism was coupled with statist tendencies,
through extensive nationalization; education (not only the culture
and the press) paid dearly.
However, with Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah and Hamas (and Kim Jong Il),
we reach an unprecedented degree of estrangement between what is
‘patriotic’ and cultural. The current political and ideological mood
derives rightness and knowledge from demography and numbers. As it
attempts to widen the gap with the West, it detaches itself from
anything related to it in order to maintain its own original and
‘pure’ identity. Equivalent to this inclination is the growing desire
of the intellectuals and journalists, including those who were once
‘patriotics’, to abandon these populist movements.
Ultimately, it is a perpetual impoverishment in which the sheer
number, the rise in oil prices, or heroism on the battleground
cannot compensate for the mind. That being the case, victory, when
achieved, becomes much worse than a defeat like the Republican one
in the Spanish civil war, which was coupled with ideas, creativity
and cultural mobility.
Such defeat is ultimately turned into an actual victory when Spain
was democratized after the death of Franco. On the contrary, ignorant
victories can, at any moment, turn into defeat.
It may be said, and quite rightly, that George Bush suffers from the
same flaws that we found in these ‘patriotic’ leaders. However, he,
unlike them, is forced to tolerate people like Bob Woodward, while
the Iranian and Syrian Bob Woodwards spend their days and nights in
their prisons.