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 May  2004
www.globalresearch.ca     13 May  2004

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/405A.html


Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 21:23:15 -0400 From: Luciana Bohne <[email protected]> Subject: Submission: "The Six Morons Who Lost the War..." To: [email protected] X-Mailer: Office-Logic InterChange 3.01 X-Forwarded-By: [email protected]

Dear Editor,

You published two of my pieces, "Learning to Be Stupid" and "Cognitive Dissonance at the White House Palace." Would you care to consider this one?

Many thanks,

Luciana Bohne

Title: "The Six Morons Who Lost the War," or How We Failed to Respect Muslims!

Author: Luciana Bohne

I don't know about you, but I deeply distrust this twaddle about how "the six morons who lost the war" (the Pentagon's insiders' apt and contemptuous joke; see "Army Times") have deeply offended Muslim sensibilities with their S&M stunts at Abu Ghraib. We are told that nudity is deeply shaming to Muslim sensibilities. This is undoubtedly true, but it is also irrelevant and hypocritical.

Have you ever seen photographs or films of European Jews, running naked to their awaiting mass graves under the order of Nazi rifles or standing naked waiting for their fate in death-camp yards? That nakedness suggests pre-annihilation gratuitous humiliation, vulnerability, helplessness, de-individuation, objectification, and reduction of the human person to a haunted animal. Does one have to be a Muslim to understand that?

At Abu Ghraib the offense was against human dignity--a human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (1948). The sexual tortures (for that is what they were), voyeurism, and exhibitionism under coercion are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions IV (1949), which prohibits writing "rapeist [sic]" on a detainee's leg and indeed tatooing, undressing, or violating in any way the moral and physical integrity of persons under detention by occupying powers.

Let's be absolutely clear about what was violated at Abu Ghraib's theatre of cruelty: international law and human rights. The victims were human beings-- before they were Muslims! And, by the way, what gives us the right to assume that all Iraqis are Muslim believers? Some may be completely secular--like most West-Europeans. Were they not, too, violated in their human dignity? Just because people in the United States are in the throes of fundamentalism or cling to religious faiths and 60% of them believe in angels, it doesn't mean that their religious views correctly mirror the world. We have no right to project our world-views and assumptions on other peoples--not even on the culturally Muslim world.

Iraq was pretty secular until 1991, although Islam traversed it at vital cultural nerves. Today, we had best refrain from dragging a complex society into an exclusively religious discourse. Or do nineteen Muslim fundamentalist (if that is what they were; we still don't know) terrorists on 9/11 reduce the people of cultural Islam to a single identity of fundamentalist jihadists, religious fanatics, or devout believers? There are always others. Are they not human beings?

Today, Iraq is manifesting opposition to Anglo-American occupation through religious leadership, identity, and political affirmation, but that is their right and, at any rate, they have no other organization capable of fielding their resistance. It may well be that Muslim fundamentalism will emerge as the ruling political order of liberated Iraq, but it will not be with the consent of many liberal, secular, and democracy-oriented Iraqis.

The idea of explaining the horrors of Abu Ghraib as an anthropological faux pas reeks of hypocrisy. It suggests that Muslims are somehow more sensitive to coerced nudity than the rest of human beings. If that were so, it wouldn't have been implicitly forbidden by Geneva Conventions. The imperialist arrogance that divides the world into "us" and "them" is pernicious enough; the cultural relativism that appeals to sympathy via radical differences is equally insulting!

This invidious cultural mea culpa distracts attention from legal culpability, which is the use of nakedness as a condition of ridicule and threat--which it clearly was. I have had life-long recurrent nightmares, from my childhood of war, in which I find myself walking naked in city streets. I wake up in a sweat. And, I'm neither a prude nor a Muslim!

Couched in the hypocrisy is a sly condescension toward "their" repressive versus "our" more liberal sexual customs regarding covering the body. I should like to remind ourselves that the celebrated western permissiveness may be the expression of intense repression. Just because we are inveterate exhibitionists doesn't mean we are liberated. It may quite equally mean we are out of touch with our sensuality and are desperately seeking to fulfill it in hyper-neurotic expressions of excess and self-proclamation. Maybe we can get no satisfaction, as the song goes. So we display ourselves in self-triumphalist infantilisms, since intimacy and pleasure are elusive--and quite possibly stygmatized in a culture that tells us simultaneously to strip for our pleasure and cover up for our morals!

We are telling our young people that abstinence is a prescription leading to sexual fulfillment in marriage. Feels like a life-long sentence to a legally-enforced sexual slavery with an equally oppressed and unfortunate partner! Nor is the triumphalist sexuality of the market--movies, videos, advertising, pornography--proof of a maturely human and rewarding sexuality. In our culture, market sexuality is a commodity not an achievement of the body's right to express trust and love. So let's not congratulate ourselves on the status of our senses in the West! Just because "our" women don't have to wear the burkha doesn't mean our individual sexuality is permitted. Just ask the sanctity-of-hetero-sexual-marriage folks in the US Congress!

No, that hypocritical charade of feeling sorry for violating Muslim sexual sensibilities must be unmasked for what it is, a ruse to avoid acknowledging a more damning responsibility toward upholding the law. If only these victims hadn't been Muslims, those "abuses" wouldn't have been so bad. We meant well; we just forgot to be a little nice toward these childishly primitive, culturally inferior, naively prurient people! As though human modesty, dignity, and respect went out of style with the invention of X-rated films!

This lopsided apology is, of course, confected for the consumption of liberals. The reactionaries are content with dismissing the horrors as a bit of "hazing" or "blowing off steam"--which speaks volumes for the legendary sexual liberation of a considerable portion of the "enlightened" West!

[email protected]

 

 


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