[Reader-list] Politics of American Un-civilization

[sunil sahasrabudhe]

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  Dear Avinash,

                       We have not read your English rendering of the Lokavidya Samvad piece on Abu Gharib but we have read your reply to Vivek and Shudha and Shudha's long comment on the original piece. This is not an attempt at any comprehensive response but this is to focus on some connected issues apparently not covered in this debate so far. 

                       There is a concept of ' political significance' which acts as a major source of criteria for making a choice from the set of available options whether for development of a practical program or for making an abstract philosophical point, including the entire space in between. American strategy for rule over the world is a matter of great political significance , much more so than the terror of the Indian State in Manipur or Iranian State's blood thirstiness against any dissent. This is obviously not to underestimate the significance of the  latter two but to emphasise that all these are not autonomous or parallel events but constitute  parts of a structured whole. One can argue that it is the war- mongering  America's (popularisation of the ) strategy of terror which enables the Modis to do what they did in Gujrat. The justification that America is constructing and popularising for a tactics of terror  by the  'democratic ' states globally creates political spaces for smaller states to act in the same way. Indain state and the rise of BJP are a case in point. I am not suggesting that there are any linear causal relationships but I am surely suggesting  a logic in which cause and effect have an important place. The case of Iran is different. It will take us into a discussion of revolution and counter- revolution, state- repression and people's violent resistance , aggresive violence and that in self-defense and so on . Refering to vivid pictures and descriptions may not exactly be the fair way to make a point  in a discussion. It only simulates the linguistic rhetoric.Violence by the Iranian State  and by Baathist regime in Iraq are no doubt condemnable, but when and with what purpose? It makes no sense to compare American violence the world over  for building a new Empire with any other kind of contemporary violence that I am aware of.
               Further should I say that the concept of 'political significance' is not a political concept. It only tells us that human sensitivities are not amorphous, they are not completely unstructured. Even when we wish that they be not determined by any authority or criteria, political or otherwise, leave alone any supreme principle of governance, we could also not wish that they be 'thoughtless'. Human feelings are worthy of being called so when they are inseperable from a yearning   to act and this is the bed from where the idea of significance rises. We could call it social significance but it still remains far too amorphous. I am against politics, for  it necessarily involves a central authority. But names , words and their meanings belong to the public domain. I can not have 'my' idiom and I cannot have 'my' language. So the use of  'political significance'.
                 I do not think personally that the strategy of terror is any new American strategy. American state embodies terror in its purest form. American society is a political society, much more so than any other.If the students on Berkeley Campus called America a police state in 1968 , they were underlininig a reality which the distant had seen as a propensity. Terror as propensity to terror as reality is a transition under  'compulsions' of times, the strategy remains a terror strategy.May be that the Chinese state is also building a purely political society in China and may be this will lead too to  a long term strategy of terror on their part. I know people who feel very strongly about it. However it is surely not necessary to talk about it today in the same breath while discussing the present day strategy of terror of the American stat
                 The challenge , I think , lies in imagining a way of life-a society which is not governed by the modern Euro-American values , beliefs and epistemic imperatives and which is not imaginary, utopian. How do we construct the path to such an imagination? Discussions on lokavidya and from a lokavidya standpoint are  a starting point that we are pursuing.Our political backgrounds do interfere and I think heavily both for good and for bad but has neutrality ever been a virtue ?

      Sunil Sahasrabudhey