Eastern hypocrisy

I love how we pretend we are puppets and America makes our hands move in whatever direction it likes.

“This user is against the war in Syria,” says the new profile picture of a Facebook friend. A civil war in Syria, over two years old. Over 100,000 dead. Two million refugees. But my social media timelines start bleeding for Syrian children only with the thought of American missiles killing them.

My annoyance with this hypocrisy is all the more because I agree with all that anti-imperialists are saying: who is the US to be big brother and worry about Syria? Why can’t the UN be made stronger and more autonomous for stuff like this? What about the use of conventional weapons that have killed far more than chemical weapons? What about the US’s own record of human rights around the world?

I hear you, but my ears have been feeling numbed by reading the phrase ‘Western hypocrisy’ day in and day out. For a change, tell me about eastern hypocrisy? But to talk about eastern hypocrisy would be Orientalist. What do you mean by eastern hypocrisy?

Eastern hypocrisy is when 25 leftist organisations in Delhi decide to protest outside the US embassy against the US’s “cynical adventurism” in Syria. To be held tomorrow (Saturday), the advance statement for the protest reads, “We join peace loving people from across the world in opposing war and calling for a just and peaceful resolution to the tragedy in Syria. We also demand that the government of India join with other southern countries in pressing for a political dialogue and immediate ceasefire in Syria.”

Hello, if you want a peaceful resolution and an immediate ceasefire in Syria, should you not be demonstrating outside the Syrian embassy? But how can Indian leftists protest against fellow easterners, the good jolly Arabs, victims of American hunger for oil. What is it about anti-imperialism that it makes sexier than all other causes, all other victimhood? I think one reason is our inability to think without binaries. Most people look for the good and the bad side in a conflict, when in truth, there are more than two sides and nobody is good. The methods of the Syrian rebels show us as much.

Internalising the binary of poor Syrians and predator Americans is to accept the terms and conditions laid down for us by George Bush Jr: you are either with us or against us. And so, a lot of people seem to have decided that they are either going to be Tariq Ali (who thinks the Taliban is a legit resistance movement) or Tarek Fatah (who sees nothing but jihad, jihad, jihad everywhere). Sorry, I refuse to go mad in either direction.

The problem with waking up to a civil war in Syria only when the US plans air strikes is that your noises about human rights and international law no longer have any credibility. You sound every bit as opportunist as the US. Perhaps, you are deliberately this opportunist about it, because your anti-imperialism is actually a cover for eastern hypocrisy.

A classic case of this is the strange problems some have with Malala Yousufzai. The anti-Malala ranting has come to be known as “Well played, Malala” after the title of one such rant. Even as Pakistani right-wingers were complaining about the West using Malala to cover its own sins such as drone strikes, a pedigreed peace-loving conservative who cycles around Delhi to spread love was asking, “Why didn’t Malala speak against occupation?” Well, maybe because her land is not occupied by the US and is in danger of Taliban occupation!

But precisely because you don’t want to hear bad things about the Taliban, you’d rather shift the focus away to ‘Western hypocrisy’. We will, of course, be told how the Taliban themselves are a creation of the West and how the US has supported despots of all kinds in its lust for oil.

I love it how we pretend we don’t have any agency, we are puppets and America makes our hands move in whatever direction it likes. Which might as well be true if you see our anti-imperialists.

I oppose US intervention in Syria but I won’t join my friends outside the US embassy tomorrow.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2013.

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