During the research for my latest book Imperial Designs: War, Humiliation and the Making of History (Potomac Books – the University of Nebraska Press, 2013) I came across something the Czech writer Milan Kundera said in his novel Immortality about shame. He was twice expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave his homeland to go to live in France seven years after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, then stripped of his Czech citizenship. “The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours,” he said, “but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.” Another work which influenced my writing was the 1978 literary masterpiece Orientalism of the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said. In his book, Said examined the set of beliefs behind the Western ideology known as Orientalism, that is, the tendency of colonial administrators, philosophers, and writers to treat the East as alien, exotic, and inferior. For several centuries, this ideology emphasized the difference between the European and Asiatic parts of the world, as if each were a distinct and single entity. Said described Orientalism as “fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient.” --:--------------- I had suggested in the two previous books that among the factors contributing to the events of September 11, 2001, was a sense of humiliation felt in the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East. It made me think further about war and humiliation in international politics, and how war, humiliation and manipulation have historically affected the behavior of the humiliated and the humiliator. My focus in Imperial Designs was the Greater Middle East. For oil, geopolitics and imperial rivalries between Britain, Russia and the United States had been among my interests. The history of Arabs and Persians is rich and interesting. They have both fought numerous wars over the centuries. The history of external actors’ meddling in the region, by the Ottomans, then the British, the Russians and the Americans is intriguing. The consequences have been profound and far-reaching. In Imperial Designs, I examine the Ottoman Empire’s collapse around the First World War in the early twentieth century; the discovery of oil in the region and the division of lands between Britain and France; the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War and its meaning for Palestinians and Arabs; and further conflicts. In Iran, the early democracy movement; the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in an Anglo-American intelligence plot; and subsequent events over a quarter century until the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1979 revolution. Examination of events such as these is relevant in any study of the role of humiliation and the shaping of the contemporary Middle East. palestinechronicle/imperial-designs-the-roots-of-the-middle-east-conflict/#.UdfM5DyoXbU
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 08:00:16 +0000
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