6. A Confrontation with the Native Europeans

A Confrontation with the Native Europeans

01 01 09

(This piece is in the form of two letters, that need a brief foreword. I have stayed in UK for about two decades and was associated with SOAS all along first as PhD student and then as a research associate. In March 2007 I was invited to teach in the department of philosophy at my alma Mater, now GC University, which I was happy to accept. But my family is still based in London. I have three daughters and a son, Nirvan, the youngest one, now 18 is doing his A Levels. Meera is his older sister who has just graduated.

What happened is that my family planned to visit New York this year (they got there the new year day). Nirvan, who has been very keen of this visit, however, opted out for his school work and other things. I then wrote to him that he might go to Obama's America in June. His response rather surprised me and triggered a response of my own. Both are attached for your reading. Hope you would enjoy it and I would love to hear your comments)



31 012 08

Dad,Yeah i will try and visit one day, maybe with friends, although I'm not sure at the moment. Also would it be different with Obama there? I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama. I believe he is a strong symbol, especially for black Americans, although what are his policies of change he brags about? Meera is currently put -off by Obama as apparently he supports the Israelis, rather than Palestinian people. She thinks it's an anti- Muslim view maybe.Also Good luck with your course, wasn't there a book by the same title. Also it sounds quiet broad, but Philosophy always is i suppose.Happy New Year, to you also, currently we are 2 and a half hours away from the countdown.Love,Nirvan.

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01 01 09

Dear Nirvava

Salaam

I must say that I was a pleased as I was surprised to read your email. Your writing was mature, perhaps a different genre from what you used to write few years ago. You really sound like an A Level student who is ready to go to the university.

You brief note about Obama and his America was very succinct, while both critical and appreciative. This sentence f yours, 'I think people are slightly getting ahead of themselves at the moment with Obama,' said a whole lot of things and I was much pleased with this expression. May be one day you become a pretty good columnist of a paper, if you ever turn to it.

Being of a non-European origin while being born in Europe gives you an edge that your reference to Meera beautifully indicates. You can see from the other perspective that a native European cannot. No one in modern lexicon has used this phrase, namely, native European. As if natives just live outside Europe. But the truth is that there is the large minority of people of non-Western ethnic origin in the West, born and raised in the Western system of education though, of which you and Meera are the two specimens, for instance, in relation to whom the ethnic Europeans become natives.

So there are two Western perspectives: one of ethnic or native Europeans who believe in the Israeli side of the narrative as absolute narrative and see the world system from that narrative.

The other perspective is of course yours, the non-natives’ of the West, who have to demonstrate that the above narrative is deeply Eurocentric, and it is constructed not by the Israelis but the native Europeans. So any rarely coming apologies for this blatant imbalance are rather mute. The most humanists among them say that they have no power to reign in the Israelis. They are the victim of the situation.

The problem is it is the European natives themselves who are the victim of the situation, who cannot reign in themselves, that is, their imperial legacy. On what grounds the colonialism that created Israel has been given legitimacy while the rest part of it is now deligitimized?

Laughingly, the grounds are religious for a system that seeks its identification and legitimacy from science, the anti-thesis of religion, is a contradiction that a native European cannot see. So in this case the native is really handicapped, though in this instance it happens to be the European itself. (Laughter)

To seek justification for the monolith Jewish Israel from history of religion for a civilization that roots itself firmly in the history of science is an interesting phenomenon that only a non-European can enjoy. Hugely funny but not funny at all for the natives.

Obama is as firmly rooted in the native tradition as is the American and Western democracy at large. It’s a huge limitation of modern Western democracy that is increasingly making it so weak. The construction or appearance of Guantanamo Bay is a clear symptom of this weakness. The native shudders to think that it could ever degenerate to fascism as it earlier did in the 1930s due to internal and external pressures. But it has no safety system, to be honest, and the appearance of Guantanamo Bay, a surreal construction, as if taken out of some futuristic fiction, is a clear proof of that. This ‘lawless space’ suggests that it has potential of spreading. And in the current war on terror, George Bush, who masterminded this torture camp, made no qualms about that.

So it is not just Israel that is going to test Obama’s rhetoric. On Camp Delta too he is going to face the trial of his life. And I wonder he is ready for it or has even thought to it. He happens to be professionally a lawyer, so let him prepare his own case.

Rhetoric, you know, those trained in classics know too, is a form of persuasive logical argument invented by the ancient Greeks. Generally, Perecles is cited as one of the masters of rhetoric. Perhaps he was the one who made this form of speech so popular in Greece and particularly in Athens’ city life. It was instrumental in generating the great movement in Greek thought, namely, Sophism. This movement finally created Socrates who turned it upside down and laid the seeds for Plato in Greek soil.

I won’t go much further on this point. Rather would just cite the opening sentence of Socrates’ defence that he presented during his trial. It refers to the masterful rhetoric of his accusers that almost carried away even Socrates himself, his biting irony notwithstanding.

The suggestion that native European is the modern descendent of the Sophists would hurt them a lot. But lets for the moment turn to what’s going to hurt them in the immediate present. For Obama will have to clarify his rhetoric, is it that of the Sophists, the great ancestors of modern man, the white native, or that of Socrates. The latter lost his life though, but he won his case and routed the Sophists so comprehensively that their work disappeared from the Greek horizon. They met the worst humiliation that any intellectual movement can imagine, namely, to survive through its adversaries. (Laughter) So Socrates opened his defence with these words:

I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.

For Obama it would not be enough at all just to close the Guantanamo Bay down and wash it off from the face of history. He would have to order an independent tribunal to establish how this crime against humanity, crime against the black human was committed in the first decade of the twenty first century by the most advanced democratic state. Who masterminded it? Whose idea was it? Obviously Bush and his immediate associates would have to answer. The journey from White House to trial room might not be that long.

Finally the moment has come to bring Socrates’ accusers to the trial, for wrongful death sentence because he did not belong to the same system of belief.