Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
INAES (Institute for North American and European Studies), University of Tehran
15-16 November 2005
Abstract
John Walker Lindh and Salam Pax: The Blur in the Polarized Picture
Suman Gupta
Open University, UK
S.Gupta@open.ac.ukSuman Gupta teaches literature at the Open University, UK. He is also Principal Coordinator of the international collaborative Globalization, Identity Politics and Social Conflict (GIPSC) Project, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow of Roehampton University. Gupta is the author of six books, including recently Corporate Capitalism and Political Philosophy, The Replication of Violence, and (forthcoming in 2006) The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case Study in Iraq. He is also co-editor of five books, and has published numerous scholarly papers in literature and political theory.
In Democracy and Complexity (1992) Danilo Zolo argues that political elites deal with growing social, political and economic complexity by simplification and the reduction of choice. According to him, these are the means through which the current social and institutional arrangements which are usually denoted as democratic operate. Arguably, this applies to all existing social and institutional arrangements, however denoted, to greater or lesser degrees. It seems to me, that this is now occurring everywhere to a greater rather than lesser degree, in the context of post-11 September 2001 anxieties and conflicts. Political debates and media reportage/analysis of these constantly resolve enormously complex social processes and relations into simplified polarities, and encourage the development of public perceptions (continuously manifested in opinion polling, for instance, and propagandist rhetoric) along these lines. In this context, sweeping simplifications about religion and geopolitical culture constantly struggle to contain the complexity of social relations in ways that both reassure and trouble, usually simultaneously.
Generally, the discourse that enables simplistic and polarized containment of complexity is successful, in that it becomes normativized. Even those who are troubled by such manoeuvres presume and express themselves in relation to the given terminology. The discourse becomes ever more deeply embedded in the media through which conflicts and anxieties are sieved for mass reception, consumption and response. Occasionally, however, events of public interest do emerge which are simply uncontainable in the usual simplified and polarized frames; which, even in their presentation through the usual media, question the assumptions on which those media habitually operate. In entirely different ways, this has occurred with regard to the “stories” of John Walker Lindh and the pseudonymous Salam Pax’s blogs in the post 11-September context. John Walker Lindh, it may be recalled, is the white American Taliban fighter who was arrested in the US military action in Afghanistan and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2002. Salam Pax, possibly the most famous blogger of our time, came to the limelight for maintaining a blog in Baghdad through the US-UK led invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 – the blog was subsequently published by Guardian books in 2004.
This paper examines some of the debates and discussions of these “stories” to explore the complexities that arise therein, and the manner in which they undermine prevailing presumptions about religion and geopolitical culture.