The Point

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Steps


DID YOU KNOW THAT I PAINT SOMETIMES?

I've started trying to learn Persian, a heady task on top of Mandarin and bits and pieces of other things. There is an intoxication to learning a new language, especially when your conduits to it are passionate and fierce about the culture and the wisdom that come with it. I love the conventions of Persian I've picked up so far... like del, heart or belly... it's sweet, it's sincere, you have del-e-dard, you have a tummyache, you have dard in your del, you have pain in your heart.

This painting I was working on is taken right from the English translation of the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám. Edmund Dulac, a French artist most famous around the beginning of the 20th century, painted it; he was, I gather, best known for his storybook illustrations. There are some amazing plates he made for an edition of the Arabian Nights you should check out, but these paintings, taken straight from Khayyám's poetry, swoon with love and beauty. What I love about Edward Fitzgerald's translations in this book is that he found things in this writing, these poems written way back in 11th-century Persia, that has a place too among the Romantic canon being swirled around in Europe at the time. The cups of wine, the dome of the sky... all these images that entranced Byron and Shelley and Keats, Fitzgerald found resonance with in Khayyám's words, and almost single-handedly brought them to the forefront of the Western imagination, albeit almost a millenium belatedly. I thank him for that.

You've heard of Michael Ignatieff, right? Public academic, human rights professor, newly elected Member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore in Toronto, current frontrunner (by a hair) for the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party, etc, etc. I've been trying to figure out just who this guy is for the past year and a half or so, ever since I read an editorial by Rex Murphy predicting his imminent return to Canada, after thirty years of travelling around the world and teaching and broadcasting, to swoop into Canadian politics and ignite new fire into the ailing Liberal Party's fortunes after former Prime Minister Paul Martin's unremarkable (and ultimately disastrous) term as chef du gouvernement canadien. I'd never even heard of him before, and was a little bit sceptical about Murphy's speculations, if you can something so eerily accurate in hindsight speculation, but lo and behold, so far the man has followed Rex's prophecising to the T.

Michael Ignatieff essentially has no profile in Canada yet, although apparently he's more well-known in Britain and the US, but he has been writing for a long time. Besides being a Massey lecturer here in Canada six years ago, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. It is those lectures that form the core of a book that really should have Canadians' interests piqued, The Lesser Evil. I'm only halfway through, so I won't pretend to be an expert on Ignatieff's theories here on public policy and political choices when democracies are confronted with terrorism, but it raises rather interesting questions about what he himself might do if, as Murphy mused, he becomes our PM one day.

The central debate in defining a liberal democracy, he argues, is whether its chief purpose is to serve the interests of the majority of its citizens, or whether it is to protect the rights of its most vulnerable. He is unequivocal in condemning terrorism as both an act and an ideology, but addresses what he believes to be its misjudgement in rationelle when it is employed in defense of causes that could otherwise be argued to be justifiable outrages. In cases of oppression of ethnic or linguistic minorities, he argues, use of terrorist acts may be seen as a consequence of belief that all peaceful methods of conflict resolution and addressing grievances with the state are either exhausted or non-existent.

'The logic of terrorism,' Ignatieff reasons, is aptly described as la politique du pire, the politics of the worst--'to make things worse so that they cannot become better.' Marxist revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, he argues, were the first to employ this strategy, '[understanding] that where mass popular support for revolution was lacking, the pace of change could be accelerated by acts of indiscriminate violence designed to provoke the constitutional system to "throw off the mask of bourgeois legality" and reveal itself to the peasants and workers as a system of organized violence.'

Modern use of terrorism, he says, relies on the same logic. By provoking states like the United States, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka into committing 'indiscriminate acts of oppression,' those who employ terrorism believe they can undermine their legitimacy and draw new recruits rushing into their arms. Since it will always be too strong to be defeated on equal terms of combat by a small group of individuals, the state, he argues, 'must defeat itself.' I have to admit, I had never considered this side of the coin before, so I was intrigued by his futher explanation that the chief power of terrorism is in drawing the state into a protracted and arbitrary campaign of violence and oppression on its own part, drawing it into a battle whose terms are dictated chiefly by the terrorists themselves. This, he goes on, is precisely where the 'war on terror' being conducted by the United States and its allies has gone awry.

I was somewhat dismayed to read his belief that those who believe in human rights as a trumping card for their value are doomed to be in a desperate minority. The vast majority of citizens, he argues, are more likely to value their own security over the rights of a relatively tiny minority, whose dignity and respect as instrinsic human rights may be compromised in quests for that security. That being said, he argues persuasively that 'terrorism harms democracy... primarily by making a majority of citizens believe that their liberties are a source of weakness rather than strength.' When people are unwilling even to defend their own rights and freedoms, he argues, it is laughable to suggest they would be willing, when their security seems threatened, to defend the rights of a small number of their fellow citizens who may be unjustly and abritrarily targetted in the quest for that security.

He can't be completely off the mark on that point. Beyond the crushing lack of enthusiasm for politics among your average Canadians (that I know, anyway, although I am admittedly odd in multidimensional ways), there has, I think, been an absence of sufficient furor over the detention, extradition, and torture of Maher Arar, even after his judicial vindication last month from Justice Dennis O'Connor. It is entirely possible that RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli was under no duress from the government to keep his mouth shut about O'Connor's report until appearing before the House National Security Committee last week, but unacceptable that, for the time beng, it appears no one will be held accountable for the serious physical and emotional trauma experienced by Arar and his family.

How do we create a culture that values rights of all of its citizens intrinsically, where injustices experienced by one are considered an affront to all? Are these ideals even worth pursuing? Last week, both the US Senate and House of Representatives passed legislation authorising President Bush's policies on detaining persons suspected of committing or being party to terrorist acts, or 'enemy combatants.' The legislative branch has, in essence, authorised the executive office's dismissal of judicial protections and freedoms for prisoners. Most alarming of the rights which have been revoked is that of habeas corpus, the right to challenge one's detention before the body responsible for one's arrest.

Let's put aside the issue of whether most--or any--of the detainees in question have any connection to terrorist groups like al Qaeda for a moment. Habeas corpus is a fundamental institution of law that prevents states from becoming party to unaccountable, arbitrary arrests and suspensions of freedoms. The nationality of the detainees is, on the one hand immaterial because of the serious affront to international law that this poses in a universal sense, but on the other hand extremely important in light of the objectives of terrorism to turn the state into the morally unethical aggressor, the oppressor: to undermine democracy's legitimacy as guarantor of freedms and protections. He qualifies this assertion by stating that 'the specific civil and political rights to be found in liberal democratic constitutions are not just a revocable privelege of citizenship, but reflect a constitutional commitment to respect the particular and equal moral status of human beings.'

The stakes are high here, and Ignatieff is unequivocal on this point, too. He explains human rights' recent historical emergence--as crucial protections in peacetime against encroachments and injustices in times of war--as a moral response to the nightmare of the Holocaust, when popular assent for judicial suspensions of basic respect for human dignity translated into unspeakable horror for millions. Human rights, he explains, are a series of protections guaranteed to all people regardless, and especially in the case of, emergencies, to 'provide citizens with an independent moral standard that would enable them, when the law of their country went mad, to say: this may be legal, but it is not right.'

This is not to suggest I in any way endorse Ignatieff's conclusions from these assumptions, or his chances among Liberal party delegates meeting to elect a new leader in December. But this is a serious conversation Canadians should be engaged in on a public level, and considering Ignatieff's support among Liberal party members so far, I know I'm going to be spending more time figuring out what might lie ahead for a man somewhere between politician (with all its pragmatisms) and hopelessly-absorbed-academic/professor.

He writes,
'Oppression by majorities comes at little direct cost to their own liberties and rights. As Ronald Dworkin has pointed out, the trade-off is not between our liberty and our security, but between our security and their liberty, by which he means the freedoms of small suspect groups, like adult male Muslims and particular the subsect in violation of immigration regulations. These abridgements of the rights of a few are easy to justify politically when the threat of terrorism appears to endanger the many.'
But one wonders about Ignatieff's own political ambitions in his explanation of the 'lesser evil' approach which forms the core of this book. While apparently committed to a person's fundamental right to protections and respect before the law, he seems willing to give ground to semi-secretive detention of terrorist suspects and methods of interrogation which may not qualify under international conventions as 'torture,' but which 'remain a violation of their dignity,' if necessity dictates employing them to serve a greater good. There is a reasonable point to be made that under an accountable, judicially mandated and temporary series of provisions, one person's rights may have to be compromised (or as he so delicately puts it, 'abridged') to save the lives of others, but one wonders how far he is willing to go.

Read The Lesser Evil. You won't regret it.

Unless you fall asleep. He's no Rohinton Mistry.

PS I got halfway through What We All Long For and I couldn't stand it. Nothing happened! I'm sure Dionne Brand is a magnificent poet, but she seems to lack any ability whatsoever to throw together a coherent plot.

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posted by Christopher at 1:11 a.m.

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