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.
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.
