Author: Jeremy Seabrook
Publication: The Sunday Statesman
Date: March 11, 2001
An affront to civilisation. An outrage
against human cultures. An act of gratuitous vandalism. An exhibition of
extreme intolerance. By their destruction of the giant Buddha statues in
Bamiyan, the Taliban have shown themselves in their true -- and lurid --
colours.
Few recent events have united the
countries of the world so completely; although it has to be said, a Taliban
controlled Afghanistan -has already placed itself among the "rogue states"
of the world, by its hospitality to Osama bin Laden, by its notorious denial
of education to women, by its aversion to anything that savours of humane
and pleasurable consolations of poor people's lives.
A regime on which sanctions have
already been imposed by an "international community" is unlikely to listen
very attentively to the representations of that community's envoys and
representatives when they urge moderation and tolerance.
There is nothing to be said in favour
of the Taliban's action; but there is much to reflect on in the response
to it by the rest of the world.
First of all, a number of American
museums offered to give space to the repudiated monuments from a past which
pre-dated Islam, and which cannot therefore, by any stretch of the imagination
be said to be an "offence" to a religion that did not then exist.
For the United States, it is fitting
that such treasures should find their way into museums, since all cultures
and civilisations that preceded the supreme achievement of its own are
only archaic curiosities which serve to light the way to the supremacy
of the present over the past, which is a form of temporal colonialism.
The emblems and artefacts of culture,
especially of cultures dead and buried, can be securely locked behind glass,
to be looked at by bands of yawning tourists: their modern incarnations
scarcely threaten a world made safe for Pepsi and McDonald's.
When the European ministers of culture
express their revulsion against the actions of the Taliban, they, too,
are on shaky ground. For, the cultural vandalism of Europe over half a
millennium has been so breathtaking as to make the iconoclasm of the Taliban
appear as a minor act of destructiveness compared to the elegant European
art of laying waste of civilisations: after all, statues are statues.
The extinguishing, not only of cultural
artefacts, but also of the living flesh and blood that created them, was
the great expertise in which Europe had no rival; exterminism of the lesser
breeds of humanity, the evacuation of the vast spaces of the Americas and
of Australia of ancient cultures, was merely a regrettable necessity to
accommodate the impatient overflowing populations of the Old World. As
to the British occupation of India, the destruction of its industry, its
artesanal skills, its agriculture and forest-cultures, the manipulation
of famine as an instrument of high policy -- none of this gives confidence
that the Europeans are the secure custodians of cultural diversity.
Their idea of cultural preservation
is on conspicuous display in such institutions as the British museum, the
largest repository of stolen goods in the world.
India, too, was universally praised
for its offer to give refuge to the threatened statuary. But alas, in faithful
imitation of its sometime colonial occupiers, India, too, has been compelled
(by the logic of the post-imperial era, in which it, too, is now a bit-player
in the new world order) to exercise the same levels of tolerance to the
cultures of peoples on its periphery which the British once extended to
the country as a whole.
Self-determination of its own captive
peoples is also a cultural issue; as is perpetuation of artefacts, customs,
traditions and, beliefs are also the essence of culture. Respect for these
is not strongly in evidence in contemporary India. When those who would
reclaim cultural autonomy, independence and indigenous forms of self-reliance
take action, they are called subversives, terrorists, insurgents and worse.
I was struck by a remark made in
the pages of the Standard in 1883, where a British resident of Calcutta
solemnly asserted, "There are no works of high mental culture in the Bengali
language." An identical attitude links these sentiments to those of the
dominant Indian cultures towards peoples, ethnicities, tribes, animists,
Adivasis struggling for survival on the outposts of its own smaller, though
not significantly different, imperium.
It seems that countries are like
individuals: destined to play out in perpetuity the cruelties they themselves
have experienced. Abused children become abusers, victims become executioners,
and if the formerly oppressed know so well how to exercise tyranny, this
is because they have observed the effectiveness of this particular mode
of government from the receiving end.
None of this is intended to minimise
the vengeful self-righteousness of the Taliban; although it should not
be forgotten that the same people were armed and encouraged by the West
in their hatred of and desire to bring down the Soviet Union.
Then, the possibility of Islamic
fundamentalism appeared a mild threat compared to the godless creed of
a socialist dystopia; and they acted accordingly. The monster they armed
and nourished now poses a threat on an altogether different scale from
when it was employed in the defeat and humiliation of a former enemy.
And the anger and outrage provoked
by the sacrilegious vandalism of the Taliban can scarcely be because this
is abhorrent to today's imperial powers: it is precisely because the threats
of the Taliban, the breaking of exhibits in the national museum in Kabul,
exemplify, make concrete, embody in the most stark and material way, the
present business of the dominant powers in the world -- which is also the
more subtle, but systematic demolition of cultures.
Everything must go down before their
idols, their images, their totems. All over the world, languages are becoming
extinct, human cultures are being driven to the edge of survival, cultural
practice and tradition are being wiped out in the name of a global business
culture which melts down all the wonders of the world, all the riches of
civilisation into things to be driven to market, so that the heritage of
humankind becomes commodities like cattle, wristwatches or plastic buckets.
So when the Taliban train their
guns and their shells on the sandstone Buddhas of Bamiyan, let us by all
means call these things by their proper name, which is an assault upon
the patrimony of humanity.
But do not let those who carry out
by subterfuge, by stealth, by manipulation precisely the same forms of
demolition, become the heroic representatives of virtue and the upholders
of a cultural diversity which they aim to snuff out as completely as the
Taliban wishes to finish off all evidence that there was life in the world
before Islam.
(The author lives in Britain. He
has written plays for stage, television and radio, made TV documentaries,
published more than 30 books and contributes to leading journals around
the world.)
