Terror and democracy

Terror and democracy

October 2001

A friend died in the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It was a sadly ironic death because for years he had written and spoken about the dangers in United States policy towards the Middle East and linked it to a much longer history of western countries exploiting the area. He would have been appalled at the scale and wickedness of the destruction in New York and Washington, but not surprised. Neither should we.

In spite of what President Bush has said, this was not an attack on democracy and freedom. It was silly of him to threaten the world and say “Either you stand with us or you stand on the side of terrorism”. No-one except the perpetrators can condone what has been done, but to simplify the issues and cast people on either side of a line in the sand does nothing to address the causes. My friend, and all the other victims, deserve better than that.

Of course it is understandable that grief and outrage lead to calls for justice, and justice must be done. But justice without asking “Why did this happen” is in the end no justice at all. It may quiet some need for revenge in the United States for a little while, but it will surely breed greater resentment among those who trained and produced the attackers. The destruction that has been caused may have seemed a mindless violence, but it came from a mind-numbing history that goes back centuries, and it will surely happen again unless its causes are addressed.

Some time ago a commentator in this country noted that talk of colonisation was “trite trash”. Yet since 1492 when Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the Americas, colonisation has always been about the dispossession and exploitation of Indigenous Peoples by the States of Europe. The Middle East has been part of the exploited, with numerous European countries assuming that they had the right to take over its lands, destroy its governments, and more recently, demand unlimited access to its oil. The ideas that have always underpinned the process have ancient roots that precede even Columbus, and the Christian Crusades against the Muslims provided much of its impetus and its sense of righteousness. That all seems a long time ago, but colonisation has not ended, merely taken on a new form, and the attacks and their inevitable response are part of its terrible scenario.

For at its most basic level, the Middle East still lives out colonisation, and the horror of New York and Washington was an attack on the United States as the symbol of an ongoing process of dispossession. It was an act of terror, but the late Hawaiian writer Prejean Kawaipuna also once described colonisation as an “act of terror against people in their own lands by States from somewhere else who assumed a right to oppress the local people”. In the course of colonisation millions of people have died terrible deaths from wars fought to protect their lands, from introduced diseases, and from the poverty that flowed inevitably from the denial of access to their resources. Those costs can be placed on a time line that links the World Trade Centre to the slave trade in Africa, the near total destruction of great civilisations in Asia and the Americas, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their own land, and its current form as an often uncaring globalisation. They can be used also to illustrate its gross ironies today's terrorist organisations in Afghanistan were once America's heroes as they fought the colonising desires of the Soviet Union. When and if the West invades Afghanistan they will be met by Western weapons.

This country still struggles to deal with its own colonisation. What has happened here in the last 160 years sits on the timeline too. Different in scale and content but marked by the same terror and costs, in spite of the old myths that try to tell us it was somehow different. In recent years there have been some inadequate but genuine efforts to deal with a colonising past, if not its present. How sad then that so many people have so unquestioningly accepted the simplistic analysis of the situation in New York, and how sad that as a country we seem committed to a “Where America goes we go” scenario. The often halting attempts to deal with issues between Maori and the Crown have always required an investigation of causes as well as present day responses. Dealing with the aftermath of New York requires that we do the same. In terms of the Treaty relationship it surely requires more than a unilateral response by the Crown that it may send troops, when many of those troops will certainly be Maori.

My friend often used to say that the danger of not knowing history was not that we would repeat it but that we would make it worse. Confusing a “crusade” with justice runs that risk. A “war on terrorism” will never be won until the grievance that compels people to reasoned opposition or madness is dealt with.

Moana Jackson

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