HomeOld_PostsCutting through the nexus of terror, deprivation and escape

Cutting through the nexus of terror, deprivation and escape

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

TERROR is the clear face of imperialism and its mass media in the 21st century. From the destruction of former Yugoslavia to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; from the sponsorship of terrorists in Syria and Israel in Gaza; from the many illegal regime change projects to US President Barack Obama’s deployment of killer drones in non-European countries — the ubiquitous face of imperialism in the 21st century is that of terror.As I stated in the last instalment, terror is the tactic; deprivation is usually the result of the devastation; and escape or permanent displacement is the predetermined ‘only way out’ which is routinely offered to the surviving targets of terror, making it difficult for them to ever to come home again.
In response to the cultural fall-out from the carpet-bombing of Vietnam by the United States, Philip Slater published The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point.
In the book, Slater identified three aspects of homecoming which US citizens yearned for, but which the structures of their society and psyche made impossible. As the society of uprooted invaders described by Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted, the United States made it impossible for its people to come home because home was always going to be someone else’s land and accepting that would mean letting someone else show the way.
Slater wrote:
“I would like to suggest three human desires that are deeply and uniquely frustrated by (North) American culture:(1)The desire for community – – the wish to live in trust and fraternal cooperation with one’s fellows in a total and visible collective entity. (2)The desire for engagement — the wish to come directly to grips with social and interpersonal problems and to confront on equal terms an environment which is not composed of ego-extensions.(3)The desire for dependence (or interdependence) — the wish to share responsibility for the control of one’s impulse and direction of one’s life.”
While Slater defined these three frustrations in personal terms and at a personal level, their historical, political and international dimensions are easy to tell.
The people whom Oscar Handlin described as The Uprooted in a book of that title continue to project their refusal to come home, refusal to go home on a global scale.
First, it is important to note that at the time of the publication of The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970), the gadgets and platforms now misnamed ‘social media’ were not known and not available.
The misnaming of these anti-pungwe gadgets and platforms as ‘social media’ confirms the frustrated North American desires described by Slater.
‘Social media’ are not only anti-social and anti-pungwe; they turn the concept of and desire for intimacy inside-out and up-side-down: they are characterised by persistent and instant erasure; they require ignoring present company in exchange for ‘engagement’, ‘interaction’ and ‘intimacy’ with those who are far away, those who are ‘known’ only through the cold click of a lit button.
Therefore ‘intimacy’ and ‘interactivity’ really means disengagement, retreat and withdrawal from present company and present society in favour of the distant unknown and unmet, therefore confirming the prophecy of David Cooper’s Death of Family that the Western “bourgeois nuclear family unit has become, in this century, the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting”.
It is a ‘family’ of parents and children who have never really met, never really engaged, one another.But how do we in Zimbabwe and in the South and the East experience this nexus of terror, deprivation and escape which Slater called ‘The Pursuit of Loneliness’, Cooper called ‘Death of the Family’ and Peggy Noonan called ‘The Culture of Death’?
These are some of the global features of this nexus which make our homecoming difficult:The propensity to impose reckless and illegal sanctions on any nation which develops and shows really autonomous leadership: Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Russia, Syria are recent targets of reckless and illegal sanctions.
The propensity to perfect deniability as a substitute for responsibility. The US and the West are not paragons of human rights, transparency and good governance. Rather they have perfected and they represent the deniability of genocide after slavery, after Nazism and Apartheid, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after Iraq, Libya and Vietnam.
The use of rampant and indiscriminate spying on a global scale and on supposed allies and friends as well as on declared enemies. The indiscriminate uses of Verizon Business Network Services and PRISM by the US Government are clear examples of reliance on secret surveillance as a substitute for global engagement.
The wide use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), appropriately called Predator Drones, to assassinate leaders of foreign movements and organisations viewed as enemies of the US. It is remarkable that these killer machines are not used on white people in Europe or North America. They are apartheid weapons aimed at dark-skin leaders in the South and the East. It is also important to point out that according to Russia Today, more than 222 people killed in Pakistan, out of 1 500 since 2009, have been non-combat civilians and 60 percent of all drone strikes have been targeted at homes and not bases. Moreover, the framing of Obama’s drone war as a leadership assassination programme brings out the importance of looking at terror, deprivation and escape as a nexus. The issue is not how many combatants as opposed to civilians killed. The issue from the perspective of the terror-deprivation-escape nexus is the terror inflicted on the entire population and the clear and deliberate elimination of other people’s leaders, whether or not they are combatants or civilians.After illegal sanctions and terror against a people, imperialism is not satisfied with just engaging in criminal humanitarianism, donating food, blankets and medicines which the people could have easily made or bought for themselves if there were no sanctions and terror organised against them. No. Imperialism uses terror and sanctions to erase the stubborn people’s memory; and, having erased or scrambled that memory, to donate leaders, to donate heroines and heroes to fill the presumed blanks created through violence, terror and sanctions.
In that scenario, one who donates leaders to others stands out as a ‘world leader’.Zimbabweans remember clearly how Britain and the US in 2010 donated a fully funded gallery of so-called ‘African elders’ to replace former South African President, Cde Thabo Mbeki in mediating between ZANU PF and the MDC formations. The African leaders included some Africans, but they were to be led by former US President Jimmy Carter and to be financed by the very same forces who were trying to wrest Chiadzwa diamonds from our control.

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