Is civilization skin deep?
Firat Demir
graduate student
"These are hard times," said one "analyst" from the TV screen referring to the people of Iraq from her comfortable air-conditioned studio in Qatar. Then came the pictures of a group of angry and hungry looters breaking into a small shop in the downtown (if there is anything left to be referred as downtown, of course) Baghdad. The pictures of dead bodies of small children, say for instance, of Fatima, were omitted from the show as usual. Then I read the racist and worse still, ignorant, populist piece of John Litle, Mr. to-be-William Safire Jr. in the Observer on Friday. A feeling of hopelessness filled my mind, asking to myself, how can so much ignorance be possible in the technologically most advanced country on Earth?
Martin Bernal, after a couple of seconds of hesitation, gave the answer reminding me that the rise of racism in the Western Hemisphere has always been linked to imperialism and the sense of national solidarity that was built up against the barbarous non-European "natives" starting from early 18th century. Once Europe and North America gained complete control of the world after the 1800s, and once the indigenous peoples of Africa and Australia had been largely exterminated and those of Africa and Asia were totally subdued and humiliated, there was no reason for "the White Man" to take them into any political account.
What a coincidence that at exactly around this time the image of the East started to be redrawn from a refined and enlightened civilization to one of a society filled with drugs, dirt, corruption, oppression and torture. The need to justify the increasing Euro-American expansion into other continents and maltreatment (and humiliation) of their peoples revealed itself in both cultural (academia) and political spheres. The mass scale racism towards the East (as well as the South) comes from the deeply rooted claim, or better to say, belief that the West (which means the European or Aryan) have, (and always will have) the capacity to conquer (and civilize) all other peoples and to create advanced, dynamic civilizations — as opposed to static and undeveloped societies ruled by Asians or Africans.
The myth of the "Master Race," hence, is neither something new nor an old distasteful memory in the history of human civilization. As a last remark, I just want to ask you all a simple question: Why do you think that the Coalition forces did nothing to protect Iraqis' National Museum in Baghdad? They failed to protect invaluable human artistic creations left from Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and watched the destruction of the evidence of this nation's thousands of years of civilization by the looters.
The museum was not the only one visited by these mobs; it was preceded by the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information, all of which have been sacked and then burnt. The Coalition forces, however, did indeed use all their might to protect two ministries, the Ministry of Interior, with its vast wealth of classified intelligence information on Iraq and, yes you guessed right: the Ministry of Oil.
Firat Demir
graduate student
Department of economics
April 14
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, April 15, 2003
