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KurdistanObserver.com
The Question of Justice for
Saddam
Dr. Sabah A. Salih
14 July 2004
The Italian mother who fired
five shots into the body of Benito Mussolini knew exactly what she was doing:
avenging the death of her five sons. The late anti-totalitarian British writer
George Orwell wondered how much satisfaction this mother “got out of those five
shots.”
Orwell risked his life
fighting Fascism. He was a courageous opponent of political oppression. And he
had no use for language that failed to cut the crap and tell it like it was.
But here Orwell misses an important point, just as advocates of justice for
Saddam Hussein do.
Orwell was writing these
words in London shortly after the Second World War. He didn’t speak Italian.
He had never met this Italian mother. He had never experienced anything like
what this mother had gone through.
In other words, what was real
for this mother was for Orwell a mere event, coming to him not through a friend
or a relative of the mother but through the printed page, the account written in
a matter-of-fact style by a distant observer.
Unlike Orwell, the mother was
reacting to a series of events she had experienced, not through words, but in
the form of body parts and corpses—realities that by their very intimacy had
made the distinction for her between the past, the present, and the future
impossible, turning them all into one continuous cycle of pain and horrors.
What this little anecdote
shows is that events do not really become events through words alone. Words
simply cannot register their full impact. As brilliant a writer as Orwell was,
in this particular case lack of what the American philosopher Richard Rorty has
called “sentimental education” made it impossible for him to gain access to the
mother’s pain.
Sentimental education is the
willingness to imagine oneself in the shoes of the oppressed, the despised, and
the marginalized. But for that to happen, one has to be willing first to
surrender oneself to whatever the story is, and, second, withholding any
judgment until one has gained the requisite political and cultural knowledge
regarding the issue.
Since his dramatic capture on
December 13, many (including UN’s Kofi Anan who, incidentally, described Saddam
in 1998 as a man “he could do business with!”) have called for a vigorous
defense for Saddam.
In doing so, such voices
engage, not as they claim in promoting justice for justice’s sake, but rather in
exercising old style revenge politics. It matters little to them that this is
the story of a tyrant, one in which thousands upon thousands have forever ceased
to speak for themselves, one in which thousands more continue to receive the
cold shoulder for their suffering from an indifferent world.
What matters, instead, is how
to use the Saddam story in ways that can support ideas and positions such people
have always had. Preservers of tyranny in Iraq, you may recall, were many and
diverse: Islamic fundamentalists and their so-called holy war on thinking, Arab
nationalists and their stubborn refusal to understand the depth of the Iraqi
problem, anti-globalization activists and their simplistic solutions to the
world’s complex problems, gays and lesbians and their jaded obsession with
identity politics, so-called post-colonialists and their deep-rooted conviction
that America cannot be anything but a force for evil, peace activists and their
unquestionable devotion to peace-at-any price solution.
In the months leading to the
war, these groups tried to impose upon Iraq a narrative of their own in order to
insure the tyranny’s survival; that narrative’s purpose was and (still is) to
de-legitimize the Iraqi people’s brutal suffering under Saddam. What each now is
doing with the Saddam story is to twist it to his/her own political purposes.
In sum, cries of Justice for
Saddam are not selfless efforts at serving justice; they are ideological
self-indulgences aimed at viewing an issue within some kind of framework while
insisting to be telling the whole truth, as many Arab journalists and lawyers
from London to Paris, Damascus to Amman, Cairo to Tunis have been noisily doing
recently over the air waves. In this case, the idea of justice is used like a
mask of aggression against certain truths some don’t want to agree with, just as
Muslim fundamentalists do these days with the hijab. The issue is really not
about the hijab itself. It is about aggression against a European way of life
that grants women—and men, for that matter—far more rights and privileges than
Islam does.
Dr. Sabah A. Salih is
Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. <Ssalih@bloomu.edu> |
