Remembering September 11 - Lessons still unlearnt

The Twin Towers in New York

Sim Kwang Yang

(Hornbill Unleashed) - The hullabaloo about the 911 anniversary is not yet over on the global media. As I write, we are still bombarded with all manners of the sound and fury about the threat of terror to humanity from “Islamic Jihadist extremists”.

Apparently, the War on Terror has just warmed up, to gather more momentum in the years and decades ahead I am sure.

There is only one problem for me. I always thought that a country can only declare war on another sovereign nation. A war declared on terror, or drugs, or corruption, or poverty, is a moral declaration of intent with the term “war” taken in a very metaphorical sense.

Unfortunately, in this dangerous age we live in, the world of meaning has suffered from a slow death by implosion. The line between the metaphorical allusion and the literal meaning of the term has been blurred.

What we have witnessed in the past five years has been a great deal of military mobilisation all over the world by very rich countries, incurring spending that far exceeds all the debts owed by all the poor countries put together. My immediate naïve response is: how nice would it be if all those debts were written off, and the billions or perhaps trillions of USD were spent to alleviate poverty and eradicate diseases in the poorer regions of the world.

That kind of wishful thinking can only spring forth from my lingering childlike simplicity. My ageing cynicism tells me that wars must be manufactured to keep the military-industrial complexes of the rich nations in business. It is to their vested interest to continue generating this fear of nameless terror from faceless enemies.

And like a real war in the literal sense, a great deal of real estate has changed hands in the past five years, as sovereign territories have been invaded, conquered, occupied, and ravaged by foreign forces. Like in a real war too, soldiers have died, and even more innocent civilians have become “collateral damage’, or made homeless on their very homeland.

The thing that is so scary is the thought that it could have been you or me who become the victims of this War on Terror. We have been spared this global carnage only by the merely accidental event of our birth and choice of country of residence.

Tempting to take sides

This business of harbouring a noble sense of ultimate concern engendered by philosophers I have studied is a personal misfortune. When one’s sphere of concern far outstrips one’s area of influence, it makes for very painful living, to watch from the sideline helplessly this senseless mass murder on all sides in too many killing fields on this good earth.

When this conflict is declared to be one of Good versus Evil, as it is done by those with all the power and money to monopolise all avenues of making declarations, as well as those who think that they monopolise all interpretation of sacred texts, it is then tempting to take side.

In Malaysia, it is also fashionable and politically correct to be anti-American. It is always much easier to be anti-something or anti-somebody. I am as literate as the next person, and have in my arsenal of rhetoric, a whole store of anti-American clichés and slogans.

But then, the American civilisation is a very complex phenomenon, just as there are all shades and hues of humanity among their population of over 240 million people. Likewise, there are all kinds and creeds of Islamic believers, spread out in all corners of the world, with numerous sects among them, and they seem to be busily at war in one way or another among themselves.

To take side would have gratified Samuel Huntington, because it would have made his prediction of a clash of civilisations a self-fulfilling prophecy. From there, all those think tank organisations with names like so-and-so institute of strategic studies can go on and work out a worse case scenario of a third world war ignited by a military conflict between China and the US.

Therefore, one must have at one’s mental disposal some powerful antidotes against this infectious instinct to take side in this protean War on Terror. For God’s sake, we are not watching a football match!

One antidote of mine is to regard with grave suspicion every time somebody with impressive titles talk about “national interests” and “national security”. Perhaps they have some justification for doing so. More often then not, these deified terms are bandied about to rally a whole nation to war, and using the upsurge of patriotism born out of primal fear to suppress internal dissent. Substitute the term “tribal” for “national”, and I am cured of being convinced by warmongers.

Another antidote that I would use sparingly in this sea of warring propaganda is to reserve judgement on any charismatic leader – especially charismatic religious leader – who displays a copious supply of piety publicly. It does not matter which god he worships. If he calls people to arms in the name of God, then he demeans his god.

You may mistakenly think that I am talking only about “Islamic Jihadist extremists” Listen to the American President carefully, and you will find his key words laced heavily with religious connotations. The Devil too is very adept at quoting the Bible.

The media keeps reminding a global audience that 911 is an event that changed the world. It has not changed my world.

My corner of the world is still insular in thinking, as if time has stood still since the Middle Ages. Mine is a beautiful country with very bad politics. It is a rapidly changing society. The cities are swelling to overflowing, and the villages are emptied. This mass exodus into urban centres in search of the Malaysian version of the Good Life has created new generations of culturally displaced Malaysians. They are certainly more affluent and more mobile. But I am not sure if they are happier than their forebears.

Good neighbourliness

Of course there are always that current of racial and religion tension underneath our veneer of social harmony and political stability. Most of the time, this sort of tension is kept alive by politicians. Otherwise, many citizens will tell you that Malaysia is a good place to call home – especially compared to many of our Asian neighbours.

Here, there is little threat of violence from “Islamic Jihadist extremists”. Many would think of PAS as such a group of extremists and accusations of their being so surface during the general elections. But at least, PAS believes in the democratic way of furthering the objectives of their political Islam, rather than firing AK47s down Bukit Bintang.

In their daily life, the ordinary Malaysian is bound to fear snatch thieves, road-bullies, rapists, robbers, gangsters and corrupt traffic cops than a highjacked MAS 747 crashing into the Twin Towers. People riding on our Monorail or LRT trains are more worried about a thunderstorm that brings out the mandatory flash flood in KL, than explosives planted under their passenger seats.

There is rumbling trouble brewing across the border to the north. All is not well there. It could develop into one of those international flash points that draw in the foreign fighters, as it did in Iraq. But so far, our Malaysian government has followed the protocol of good neighbourliness in handling this hot potato, and that short border is not as porous as elsewhere.

In my larger world, the worst crimes against humanity have not been affected or changed much by the 911 event either.

Genocide still goes on unchecked in Africa, and in other places where CNN has not sent their star journalists. We are told that one third of the world’s population still live in less than one US Dollar a day, that about that many do not have clean water to drink, and they certainly do not enjoy toilet facilities.

There are four or five million AIDS victim in South Africa alone, and this terminal disease is threatening to explode into unmanageable epidemics in Asia, notably China and India. Millions of the world’s children still die from preventable and curable diseases like TB and malaria.

This is a world hidden from the global media most of the time, probably because this poor world is not a good market for the media industry. Their governments, if they exist, are too remote and too much lacking in international influence to merit “global” coverage.

I do not think this other invisible world of poverty, disease, ignorance, and wasted human lives worry about terrorism. Terror for them is perhaps finding the next meal, or the next small dosage of medicine.