Calling a spade a spade

I was listening to an older podcast of WNY's Radiolab (an excellent show, BTW, that I highly recommend) yesterday that featured a segment about how about 16 million men in the world today can claim direct descent from Genghis Khan.  To really get a sense of how crazy that number is, it was noted on the show that statistically speaking, a man who lived around the time of Genghis Khan could expect to have about 800 male descendants today.  That's 800 vs. 16 million.  The sheer disparity here boggles the mind.  
But there was something else about that segment that struck me.  Something about the tone of the show that struck me as terribly dissonant.  Throughout the segment, the hosts and the scientists talked about this discovery as "thrilling"; that basically, Genghis Khan is probably the most successful biological father in human history.  The show featured people who enthusiastically talked about wanting to know if they could trace their descent to Genghis Khan; and even a restaurant in England that had a drawing in which the winners could be tested for that characteristic Y-chromosome (it costs around $300 to do).  There was something markedly celebratory about the whole thing, and this disturbed me.  
Yes, scientifically speaking, I found the whole thing fascinating.  But what was with all this hip! hip! hurrah!-ing of Genghis Khan's loins?  Because, really, however you want to spin this, what we're saying here is that Genghis Khan managed to rape more women than any other man we know of.  Rape. That's the word.  And that's the word that was missing from this conversation.  
This got me curious.  I wondered if this avoidance of the reality of what this data meant was more wide-spread.  Turns out that this celebratory tone is pretty much what's out there.  A google search of 'Genghis Khan' and 'genes' popped up tons of reportage on Genghis Khan and his 16 million descendants -- about half a million hits, actually.  And most of them were in same vein as the Radiolab segment.  I next plugged in 'Genghis Khan', 'genes' and the added criterion of 'rape' and I got close to half the number of hits than the previous search.  And this is when things got really disturbing.  
Here were articles that acknowledged the "rape and pillage" of the Mongol hordes, that acknowledge that access to women was part of the "spoils of war".  But the acknowledgement of these facts did not prevent these articles from lionizing Genghis Khan for his sexual conquests.  Many of these articles were from popular mainstream news media. Like the Guardian article with the headline:  We owe it all to Superstud Genshis Khan, which talks about how Genghis Khan "claimed" women during his "merciless conquest", but then follows it up with talk of Khan's " enthusiastic mating habits"; or this priceless headline from the The Daily Mail: Genghis Khan: The Daddy of all Lovers. Or this from The Times: Genghis Super-Y -- the gene for a true alpha male.  National Geographic does not disappoint either: Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies.  
I found only a few science blogs that tackled this story with purely scientific interest and did not comment, either positively or negatively, about Genghis Khan's sexual appetite.  And only a few that called Genghis Khan a rapist (but the comment threads to these posts made me want to curl up in a ball and disappear).  
When we look at the vast majority of the stories out there, these are not conversations about the science of tracking the Y-chromosome, or articles that talk about rape as evolutionarily adaptive behaviour.  These discussions talk about how amazing it is that one man is ancestor to so many millions; yes, it's rape at a grand scale, but come on! the dude was a "superstud", an "alpha-male", a "prolific lover"! 
Forgive me if I'm not so thrilled.  

[Of related interest: Chauvinism in reporting. ]    

Men in suits

A couple of weeks ago I watched (with a smirk, I'll admit) CNN's Wolf Blitzer reveal to his presumedly shocked audience that Qaddafi's youngest sons had been interning with a corporation in the United States till very recently.  Blitzer, in his characteristically sleep-inducing cadence, informed us that Khamis Qaddafi had been a high-level intern with AECOM, an engineering firm.  The central idea that was being sold as a shocking revelation was that a man associated with such brutality (Khamis Qaddafi heads the feared Khamis Brigade, an elite unit of the Libyan armed forces) had till recently been hobnobbing with the corporate elite in the United States.
Though I found this disbelief to be utterly bizarre, I was glad this story was receiving some reportage.  For a while now, folks in the United States have been given to believe that the bad-guys, the much talked-about "enemies of freedom", are men in flowing robes, head scarves or turbans, sporting decidedly un-fashionable beards; men who think up their diabolical plans in desert caves, and execute them with the words "Allah hu akbar" [God is great]!  All of this played quite well into the 'us-vs.-them' narrative of Euro-American governments, in which the 'us' were the freedom-loving people of the West, and the 'them' were the afore-mentioned troglodytes.
But since January, the face of "evil" has been dramatically altered in current mainstream reportage.  And I dearly hope that those in America watching the recent events of the Middle East have taken note of this.  It started quietly enough with President Ben Ali of Tunisia being ousted; but by all accounts, Ben Ali was the mildest of the lot and left without too much fuss.  Egypt came next, and with Hosni Mubarak, the image of a stoic, clean-shaven man with brilliantined hair and an immaculately tailored suit entered the Euro-American public consciousness.  But the image that perhaps chilled us to the bone was that which followed in Libya.  In Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's first appearance on television in the early days of the troubles in Libya, he is cool and detached.  His rimless glasses, his smart tie and crisp suit add a bureaucratic detachment to the scene as he casually threatens that blood will flow in the streets of Libya. And now we have rumblings in Syria and what promises to be a brutal suppression of dissent at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad, another man in a suit.
Brutality, tyranny and suppression meted out by men who would look quite at home in corporate boardrooms and martini lounges has been a reality the world over for a while, but we're seeing it on full view after a long time.  These men, often educated at elite Western academic institutions, who live lavish life-styles complete with yachts and parties on Greek islets, cannot so easily be relegated to an Other-ness, to a world-view far removed from our own experiences.  These men are visibly modern. Their excesses and their repression cannot be dismissed as the products of some obscure alchemical processes.  They represent regimes that have long been political and economic allies of Euro-America.  And they are what they are not in spite of these alliances, but because of them.  I hope that these images and the accompanying coverage by the mainstream media will add complexity and nuance to a picture that has been painted for too long in primary colours. 

An update

Several weeks ago I posted about how responsible the Egyptian military had been while the Revolution of Tehrir Square played out.  Well, over the past couple of weeks we have been witnessing a very different, and at times diametrically opposite, face of the Egyptian military.
Mubarak has been ousted, but he has been replaced by a military regime.  Though the military government purports to be merely transitional, the Egyptian people have quite naturally been less than sanguine about the regime and the intentions of its constituent members.  And so, to ensure that this transitional government does not forget its mandate, crowds of protestors have continued to gather every Friday at Tahrir Square.  And as these protests continue with unabated intensity, reports have been pouring in of dissidents being imprisoned and tortured, journalists being obstructed and suppressed, and just today, we hear news of an Egyptian blogger being sentenced to prison by a military court.
So I fear that I spoke too soon, and was too readily wooed by the men in khaki.  The Egyptian military's supposedly-transitional government is now, by all accounts, a junta.
Vive le revolucion...

Mixed signals?

A few days ago, we were confronted with two pieces of news that were seemingly at odds with each other.  First, we heard that the Arab League had endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya.  Second, we heard that many Gulf States (Saudi Arabia and the UAE included) were sending troops to Bahrain to help the ruling family put down civilian protests. My first reaction to this was to think that surely we had here two incompatible stances. On the one hand, the Arab League was acquiescing to foreign intervention to aid rebels in their bid to oust the leader of an Arab state; and on the other hand, they were actively providing military support to an Arab regime to quash unarmed rebellion within its territory.  Mixed messages?
On further reflection, I realized that there was a huge difference in the way these countries perceived Libya and its leadership (for want of a better term), and the way they perceived Bahrain and its ruling family.  And the word 'family' is one of the keys to this conundrum.
Libya is certainly like the Gulf States in that its politics and society is shaped in many ways (perhaps even dominated) by issues of clan/tribe membership, and Qaddafi's loyalties to his al-Qaddafa tribe speak to this matter.  However, the origins and the sources of Qaddafi's power are markedly different.  A colonel in the army of Libya's King Irdis, Qaddafi staged a successful coup in 1969, abolished monarchy and established a republic. His power is based on an anti-monarchical stance, and is entirely contemporary in origin.
Contrasted to this are the ruling families of the Gulf States.  The ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the various city-states of the United Arab Emirates trace their power to authority that has been inherited, and not usurped.  Though the domination of such families as al-Saud, al-Nahyan, and  al-Khalifa can be traced back only a few generations, these families most likely see their rule as an entitlement, rather than a consequence of various fairly-recent geo-political forces (such as colonialism, the discovery of oil and various bargains made with the religious elite).  In this view, while the ouster of the upstart Qaddafi is a worthy cause, the dethroning of the al-Khalifa family is not at all an option.  The power vested in the al-Khalifa family is too much like the power they possess.  Theirs is power taken for granted as a consequence of their birth; Qaddafi's power comes from its seizure, and can therefore be seized away from him just as surely.
The presence of a large Shia population ruled by a Sunni ruling family in many of these Gulf States has also a role to play in this drama. But that may have to be the topic of another post.

The world changed ever so slightly

I was listening to NPR the other day, and the panel of commentators and experts were discussing the labour and union-related protests in Wisconsin.  And as the discussion wound down, one of the panelists said something that gave me pause.  She said that the intensity of the protests in Wisconsin may not let up as soon as one might imagine, and that some of that endurance and resilience could be a direct result of the events in Egypt.  That the power of the masses was tested and proven half a world away in Egypt, and the people in Wisconsin drew strength from this.


Had I heard the mainstream media in America ever speak of events in the Middle East in such terms before?  Arabs had flexed their democratic muscle and how refreshingly odd it was to hear of Americans drawing inspiration from this.  I had become so accustomed to hearing of freedom and democracy as America's primary exports to the world.  But here the current of ideas and ideologies seemed to have changed direction in a way that I would not have predicted as possible a mere month ago.


Perhaps this is a temporary reversal of roles, and perhaps American presumptions about the rest of the world shall in the long term remain unaltered.  But the optimist in me would like to believe that something has changed for good, if ever so slightly.  For once, our gaze in America looks farther away than the limits of red, white and blue.  For once, there is an acknowledgement that the freedom of another people is not being won at the end of American gun-barrels; that the rage of a mass of bearded men is a just rage; that veiled women are women with will and women with voices that can and are heard; and that we who have been lulled into complacence by the warm and fuzzy ideal of 'inalienable rights' have been awakened from our stupor by the voices of men and women we presumed to be mute.


How can we go back to the way we were after all this? 

Egypt, 2011: The military amid the protesters

Protesters graffiti-ed tanks with anti-government slogans; the 

military did not stop them. This tank says, "Down with Mubarak"

and "No to Mubarak". 

The events of the past two weeks in Egypt have been breathtaking to say the least. Images of tens of thousands of people gathering in Cairo's Tahrir Square, insisting that their voices be heard, have left us inspired, concerned, jubilant and hopeful.  This is the metaphorical public square reified.
But in all of this, I have been left stunned by the maturity shown by Egypt's military.  As the protests began some thirteen days ago, the one issue I was most curious and concerned about was what the response of the military would be to the situation .  Who would they side with? Would we see a brutal and bloody repression of the largely peaceful protests at the hands of the Egyptian armed forces?  If it were so, it would not have been the first time in the history of the modern world when the military had come to the aid of a regime that found itself in a precarious position.  
I certainly breathed a sigh of relief the day that I woke to the news that the Egyptian army had announced it would not fire on protesters.  How easy it would have been for the army to decide that these protests were disrupting a stable political, economic and social environment (which they are), and thus had to be repressed.  How uncomplicated it would have been for it to side with the powers that be.  But in all of this, the Egyptian military has not taken the easy and uncomplicated way out.  It has decided that its job is not to defend the Egyptian regime, but the Egyptian people; that it is a neutral entity when it comes to political stances and changes, and it is not for the military to decide which way the socio-political sands shall be allowed to shift.  

Over the past two weeks we have seen them act as arbiters of order, without ever attempting to muffle the voices of dissent in a sham of orderliness.  They have acted as a bedrock of strength amidst the throngs of protesters, without ever actively flexing its military muscle. There were moments when the seemingly miraculous balance achieved seemed to tip in the direction of violence - all it would have taken was one bullet fired by a uniformed soldier.  But the Egyptian military's promise to the Egyptian people has held.  
I can only hope that this maturity and foresight holds strong in the weeks, months and years ahead, as Egypt and its people undoubtedly face turbulent and uncertain times ahead.  I will watch, with baited breath, to see if the Egyptian military continues to respect its mandate as a defender of the nation's people, and not the brokers of power and authority.