| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
Rather than dwell, however, upon the Muslim experience of colonialism, it is fair to seek, as Slavoj Zizek has done, insights into western values by looking at western values at home. Perhaps one example will suffice—America's prison system within her own borders. More than 2.1 million Americans are currently locked up in US prisons, which is itself a worrying statistic because it actually represents 2.1 million examples of ‘un-American’ behaviour. Any society does, of course, have its deviants, but what is noteworthy is that America has the highest prison population in the world, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the total population. The conditions in these prisons would give an indication of the conditions that Iraqis could expect when they are subject to the same ethos. Human rights organisations regularly condemn the overcrowding, brutality and sexual abuse that are rampant in US prisons. David Matlin, novelist, poet and essayist who teaches literature and creative writing at San Diego State University, wrote about the widespread abuses within prisons inside the US on Newsday.com on 9th May:
‘I find myself in near despair writing this article because these images are the images of ourselves that we have, at now unimaginable costs, either ignored or tragically embraced inside our own society for decades.
The pictures of our young men and women "loosening up" prisoners are part of the secret ransoms of our daily lives we have chosen to place at the most conveniently distant moral boundaries.’
Without wishing to tarnish all the people of the west there is, it seems, a darker side to western society than the high sounding abstract ideals that have been shamed by the goings on in Abu Ghraib.
The evident hypocrisy of the west, in initiating a war based upon the lie of non-existent weapons of mass destruction is multiplied by the slogans of equality and freedom that Britain and America claim to be building in a new Iraq. These ideals that Americans especially hold so dearly, and sing so warmly, were written by Thomas Jefferson in the declaration of independence, and yet he, like the west today, was unable to reconcile these ideals with a deeper secular philosophy about life. Consider his attitude toward slavery, which he believed to be wrong while keeping slaves himself. The contradiction is obvious, but the 3rd President of the United States and chief drafter of the Declaration of Independence lacked the moral rigidity needed to face the issue effectually—a weakness bequeathed to the nation he helped to found. It troubled him greatly, and the torment of his mind is evident in a letter he wrote about the emancipation of black slaves to Representative John Holmes of Massachusetts in 1820:
‘I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation is on the other.’
| |
| |
| |
| |
« First < 1 2 3 4 5 >
Page 3 of 5 pages
| |
|
|
