KurdistanObserver.com

Leftist Fundamentalism: Tariq Ali-Style

27 January 2006

By: Sabah Salih

Fundamentalism of the Left is no less dreadful than fundamentalism of the Right.  Both are taken much by, what Fredric Jameson calls in another context,  “the buzzing confusion of immediacy.”  This not only makes them see the world from a very narrow standpoint but also leads them to believe that their narrow standpoint is actually a universal truth. 

In that respect both fundamentalisms follow closely in the footsteps of colonialism.  Ruling over a people, making statements about them, refusing to hear their side of the story, denying them the power of narration and self-definition:  that is what old colonialism was about.  These fundamentalisms, likewise, refuse to be listeners, let alone learners, or questioners.  Like colonialism, they rule by totalities, subordinating whole nations, complex histories and situations to the whims of ideology; whether this ideology is religious or secular makes no difference.  Both are hegemonic. Both, as Terry Eagleton writes in another context, “foreclose the possibility of historical explanation” (Holy Terror, Oxford UP, 2005, p. 116).

Such is the case of British leftist fundamentalist writer Tariq Ali. In his hugely lopsided book, titled in the cheap style of political exhibition Bush in Babylon, Ali brushes aside historical explanation in favor of a pro-Ba’thist rhetorical thuggery. He does not even acknowledge that the idea of Iraq as a nation state was in the first place the handiwork of British imperialism, and that its current undoing will help eventually reverse that injustice. Instead, he positions himself within the very same oppressive discourse that successive Sunni Arab tyrannies have used to justify their brutality against anyone opposing them, using concepts like nationalism, occupation, and liberation to, on the one hand, discredit liberation from a gruesome Arab tyranny and, on the other, legitimatize the work of homicide bombers and trained saboteurs. The book is thoroughly devoid of scholarship; like Bin Laden’s diatribes, it is sustained by heavy doses of anti-Americanism.  Even the already converted would find the book distasteful: anti-Bushism, or, for that matter, anti-Americanism, is too superficial, partial, and limited as an impression to be made the basis of reasonable commentary on a complex situation as Iraq. Those who do so, as Ali does, end up invariably talking more about themselves than about the issue at hand.  In the end, as Ali’s example demonstrates, such writers become the agents of their own undoing; because they remain trapped in the prison house of their own raw and unexamined feelings, their writings lack staying power. 

Mr. Ali’s recent babblings about Kurdistan in Counterpuch.com prove my point even further.  When the Kurdish people look at their history, they see a series of bloody nightmares from which at long last they have an opportunity for a partial escape and recovery.  As a people kept under for so long, they are now in a position to reclaim some of the lands and resources taken from them by colonial robbers and regional aggressors. They are also rewriting the history that was imposed on them.  They are now defining nationalism and patriotism not within a falsehood called Iraq, as Ali and Ba’thists do, but within the Kurdistan they are rebuilding.  In other words, the Kurds are engaged in the process of de-colonization.  Therefore, their actions cannot be called treachery, as Ali breezily asserts.  It is liberation through and through.  The fact that it takes place within the context of the American intervention makes no difference.  What the Kurds are doing is no different from what other nations have done. History shows that every nation’s first priority is to use an evolving political and military situation to further its interests. By portraying the Kurdish effort as an act of aggression against the so-called Iraq’s territorial integrity, Mr. Ali allies himself with the colonial law-breaker and land-grabber of yesterday and with the sadistic butchers of today.  By accusing the Kurds of so-called “ethnic cleansing of Arabs and other non-Kurds in Kirkuk,” despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Ali goes for a fascist lie.   And by asserting that “Oppressed minorities in one epoch can rapidly become oppressors in another,” Ali seems to endorse this high-minded but flimsy piece of postmodernist rhetoric which essentially makes no distinction between the victim and the aggressor.

What is more, this vulgar Marxist is quite comfortable going for other equally misused terms, including those coming straight from the storehouse of Ba’thist and Turkish racism.  The word “tribal” has been used by both Ba’thists and Kemalists to denigrate Kurdish nationalism.  The idea is that to be a Turk or an Arab is to be the child of Enlightenment: open-minded, educated, secular, modern, and forward-looking, while to be a Kurd is to be the opposite.   Ali, amazingly, buys into this coarse racism, pinning conspicuously the word tribal on the Kurdish leadership. Here a little history is in order.  It took capitalism well over three centuries to turn a largely feudal and tribal Europe into a bourgeois society, and another century to bring capitalism to its current global phase, what Fredric Jameson aptly called the logic of late capitalism.  But while debunking the old tribal structure, capitalism has at the same time created newer forms of tribalism, in the shape of corporations and their logos, products, services, amusement parks, television networks, etc.  So a degree of tribalism continues to be the feature of all modern capitalist societies. The fact that old tribalism still has a role to play in older societies, like Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish, does not mean that those societies are inferior to capitalist societies. It only means that such societies are at a different stage of development. Both kinds of societies are good in some ways and not-so good in other ways.   Tribalism, therefore, cannot be reduced to a fault, as Ali so brashly does.

Today, traditional tribalism performs an important function in many developing societies.  The family, the clan, the tribe, and the local my not mean much in a modern bourgeois society centered around individualism, materialism, and corporations, but in more traditional societies they are still the building blocks of personal and national identities. That is why Ali’s description of the Kurdish leadership as tribal to mean something negative and backward and misguided is nothing more than an example of cultural bigotry produced by dogmatic thinking.  Furthermore, anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Kurdish nationalism knows that tribalism is only one aspect of Kurdish politics, and in a lot of cases it is not even the defining aspect. Many in leadership positions are quite urbane and worldly figures, and what animates them is certainly not the tribe but the best interests of their people. Besides, tribal affiliation alone does make a person any less intellectual than a person with, say, a college degree, for intellectualism is really not a matter of cramming knowledge into one’s head; it is rather a matter of being able to subject a society’s problems to debate—something an ordinary shopkeeper and laborer and grocer, or what Antonio Gramsci calls organic intellectuals, is just as capable of doing as any hoary PhD. Kurdish politics may suffer from cronyism and corruption, as is the case with all politics at a comparable and even later stage of development, but that does not make it any less effective in looking after a nation’s strategic interests.

Puppet is another such term in Mr. Ali’s arsenal.  Here, too, Ali is not after the truth; his purpose is to defame, using a word despotic regimes often call upon to justify their oppression and call into question legitimate resistance against it.  To be a puppet is to be opinionless, to be controlled and dictated to by others, and to swear allegiance to them in all matters.  When applied politically, the term can only draw attention to who uses it and against whom; that is, rather than revealing some truth about its target, the term in such cases can only tell us where its user is coming from ideologically. In embracing a term so widely used by Saddam’s fascism against Kurdish nationalism, Mr. Ali allows himself to become a devotee of that cruelty, its comrade in arms, if you will.  To conclude so nonchalantly from such a term that Kurdish politics is essentially up for sale to the highest bidder, as Ali implies, is to bypass historical explanation, jump on the bandwagon of political bigotry, and operate with a closed language.

Kurdish politics, no doubt, has its own share of conflicts and tensions and competing interests.  But that does not change the fact that what this politics is engaged in now in the wake of the American intervention in the region is a national effort to reverse injustice. In asserting otherwise, Tariq Ali puts his leftism at the service of Arab fascism and global jihadism.

Dr. Sabah Salih is a Professor of English at Bloomsburg University.