thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 9:16 am Post subject: The West as the other |
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MOSCOW � A few weeks ago, Muscovites awoke to find a strange swarm of red-jacketed activists filling their streets, visibly agitated, handing out phone cards to anyone who passed.
They were members of Nashi (�ours�), a pro-Kremlin youth group endorsed by President Vladimir Putin. The special phone cards, 10,000 of them, enabled anyone with a cellphone to send an urgent text message to the Kremlin, where a special Kalashnikov-armed Nashi squad is standing ready to take action against any sign of an impending wave of democracy.
Or � as they prefer to describe the democracy threat in places like Russia these days � an impending wave of �Westernization.� When oil-fed autocrats set up anti-democratic hit squads, shut down newspapers and TV stations or imprison dissidents now, they inevitably justify it by holding aloft a bloated cartoon character known as �the West.�
Tatyana Matiash, a 22-year-old Nashi activist, told reporters Anna Nemtasova and Owen Matthews how the phone cards were meant to be used. �We explained to Muscovites that we should all be prepared for the pro-Western revolution, funded by America,� she said during her group's rally. �People must know what to do to save their motherland in case their radio and TV stop working.�
We've been hearing quite a lot about that �pro-Western revolution, funded by America.� When I visited Iran this year, I was warned by one experienced diplomat that the worst thing I could possibly do, unless I wanted to end up in an Iranian prison, was to create the impression that I worked for a think tank.
Never mind being taken for a spy. Today, the threat that lands people in jail, and gets countless Iranians barred from leaving their country and blacklisted from employment, is the idea that you might be working for a group that endorses human rights, democracy, real elections, fair trials or open economies. These concepts are part of the �Western invasion.�
Dozens of leaders, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chavez, warn their citizens that they must be protected aggressively from the poisons of �the West.�
What is happening here? There is nothing �Western� about these concepts. They are a blend of qualities present everywhere in the world, but are being attributed to someone else, someone foreign and little understood, so they can be banished.
What is happening in Moscow, and in other oil-rich autocracies today, is the construction of a rhetorical chimera, a mythic and sinister Other, which allows the regime to define itself, and the subjects to see themselves, as something else entirely.
Nikolai Zlobin, a Russian scholar and editor of the journal Demokratizatsiya, described this ideology, especially as it applies to the United States, in an excellent recent paper titled, �The special Russian way.�
�The objective elements of perceiving America deal with fundamental Russian values rather than with America proper,� he wrote, �and are therefore turned inward rather than outward. The United States is a mirror into which Russia constantly gazes.�
Such mirrors are profoundly useful to people like Mr. Putin, who uses them to build a proud Russian resistance. What's being resisted is, in fact, just what Russians have spent decades striving for. But now that it's defined as �the West,� it can be cleansed.
Does this sound familiar? In 1978, the late scholar Edward Said coined the term �Orientalism� to describe the practices of scholars and politicians in imperial centres of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a way of discussing the diverse and ever-changing cultures of the Eastern Hemisphere as a single, unchanging and inferior entity known as �the East� or �the Orient.�
He argued that this form of language and thought was used by imperial cultures to maintain the subjection of this Other.
Not all descriptions of �eastern� cultures were Orientalist, he wrote, but the method could be easily detected: �How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the �other')?�
The empires of the West have largely disappeared, and the understanding of �the East,� even among most citizens, has (with a few ugly exceptions) become more multifarious and sophisticated, in part because we're more deeply intertwined with one another.
Today, the great monolithic powers are no longer the empires of the West. Instead, they are the oil giants of the East and the South. And their rhetoric and public thought pass Edward Said's test.
In Russia, it has been very convenient to wrap so many things in the banner of �Western.� Mr. Putin's attack on the Pentagon's missile-defence system in eastern Europe this week aimed at an easy target: The Pentagon, by failing to include its nominal ally Russia in its plans, has given the whole thing the feel of a Cold War plot. It deserves criticism.
But as Mr. Zlobin notes, Russian citizens have developed a blind spot: They can't see the West, and the U.S. in particular, as anything but a unified force � the idea of cultures that speak with multiple voices is alien.
So if things are sour with the Pentagon and President George W. Bush is unpopular, it's impossible to see the more benign Western forces, in particular the agencies and foundations that support democracy and progressive values, as anything other than branches of the same, singular, fearsome Other.
�The fact that, today, not only America but the entire civilized world lives with democracy and free markets,� writes Mr. Zlobin, �does not prevent Russians from focusing all their suspicions upon the United States.�
The altruistic institutions of the West therefore become easy to banish. Just listen to how it's done, in the words of Mr. Putin's right-hand man, Vladislav Surkov: �When they talk to us about democracy, they're thinking about our hydrocarbon resources.�
If you want to keep the one, he implies, you'd better stop listening to the other. |
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