Endorsement by Rejection
Iraqi-German author Najem Wali accuses the Arab Writers Union of moral bankruptcy, hypocrisy, anti-democratic stances and bigotry for snubbing of the post-Saddam Iraqi writer union and failure to act for oppressed Arab writers elsewhere. Sight and Sign:
What the union of writers does not know: literature comes into being not in pamphlets and conferences but in life itself. And it can only blossom in freedom.
But if everything Wali says about the Arab Writers Union is true, being rejected by it would be preferable to being embraced by it.
Topics: Europe, media, middle east
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:04 am on Saturday, February 3, 2007
2 Responses to “Endorsement by Rejection”
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February 3rd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Heh, the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
February 3rd, 2007 at 4:39 pm
We have become so inured to collectivist-speak that we’ve forgotten that it is always the individual who must be protected from the mob. Frankly, I could care less for that disembodied abstraction, the Iraqi people, or the Muslim people, or the Arab people. The individuals like this writer, or Iraq the Model, or the couple who wants to glory in their love and live their lives together without facing being murdered by their own families, are the ones worth saving. The Sunni and Shiite mobs slaughtering each other deserve their own deaths.
If we are not fighting for the right of the individual to own his life–fighting as the defender of our own right, and as the defender of that principle everywhere–what are we fighting for? What are we trying to build and why? Leaving these people with the same mind-set that got them into this mess makes the whole thing an exercise in futility. We speak glibly about defending freedom, but we never define what we mean, beyond people voting. But voting is an end product based on a particular political system. Voting by itself is just more mob rule–and as such, we’ve ended up with competing mobs trying to rule, with the predictable results.
Perhaps it is this that we can no longer articulate, and the cause of our struggle to define the values we are fighting for in this war. We have forgotten the single most important value that made us great in the first place–the right of the individual to his own life. Every other right flows from that, and without it, the right to speak one’s mind, and all the rest, hasn’t a leg to stand on.
Sorry, I went off on a tangent again. When I read about someone who wrote an article, or spoke their mind, in an appeal to the reasoning mind of other men, who suffer or are murdered for the attempt at the hands of some mindless brute(s), I think about these things. Attention ought to be paid to the single voice of reason rising above the screaming mob.
Thanks for paying attention, Jules.