NADIA’S ANGUISH - AND AMERICA’S CHALLENGE

I first came in contact with the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at the time of the explosive outbreak of jihadi elements known as Islamic State (IS) in 2014 in Syria and Iraq. They had descended like ravening jackals on the Yazidi people of Sinjar in northern Iraq – a peaceable folk whose rather colourful interpretation of Islam was deemed apostate by the ultra-extremists. The Yazidi were accordingly brutalized and slaughtered indiscriminately, and their girls and women taken as sex slaves for the jihadi fighters. It was with a certain grim and ironic justice that the blockade of Sinjar by IS was finally broken by women fighters of the Kurdish YPJ battalions, before whom the addled jihadis fled in fear and confusion, having been told by their leaders that being killed by the bullet of a ‘filthy woman’ would compromise their martyrdom and exclude them from Paradise.

Out of this nightmare came an astonishing and deeply heartbreaking young woman named Nadia Murad. She had been held as a sex slave under IS rule, and was only able to make her escape during the confusion of the Kurdish onslaught. She determined then to alert the world in any way she could to the plight of her people and to the international community’s responsibility to quash this barbarity.

And so where did she come to make her plea? America – the bastion – the great and noble people. At the time I had been following this story through various news outlets and had stumbled upon a YouTube video of her speaking, through her protector and interpreter, before a crowd of young people at the HAC where she had been invited to speak. It was, it goes without saying, a profoundly compelling talk – painful almost beyond enduring to witness. She had been savaged and ravaged and broken, yet here she was telling her story and seeking help for her people from the citizens of the land ‘where such depravity could never happen’.

Since that time I have followed, somewhat loosely, the goings-on at the HAC and have come to greatly admire its determination to air difficult topics in a respectful and non-partisan manner at a period in history when disrespect and partisanship are otherwise in the ascendant. Of course, and I have to say, that whenever I see three or four sober intellectuals arrayed in comfy chairs up on a stage before an auditorium full of eager acolytes, I head for the door pronto because I know there is a high likelihood of several hours of ensuing grandiose bafflegab. Yet out of such convoluted airings can nonetheless come the kernels of ideas which can, in the proper hands, be translated and affected in practical ways in the public sphere. So long as the HAC can avoid the trap of being relegated to ‘think-tank’ status, and can rather ignite self-correcting and inquisitive pragmatism among the leaders of tomorrow, then such high-minded chitter-chatter can be said to not be idle.

But, hey – hit this link and let’s hear the unbridled slant on all that, a good tonic for any aspiring (or self-avowed) ‘Arendtians’ who might forget, or worse muddle, the roots of the profound rigour underlying Arendt’s worldview. She early on recognized the futility of philosophizing into thin air.

I freely admit to not having either the wits, the education, or the mental machinery to easily follow such thought processes and conversational fencing as can occur in the pieces in Arendt’s ‘Thinking Without a Banister’. But I do catch kernels, or pivot-points, and for this I am grateful. For, as she reminds us, it is thinking itself which constitutes the danger for those who would steal from us our patrimony of the liberation and liberty of the mind. Or as the sadly-lamented Christopher Hitchens would have had it – “The essence of the independent mind is found not in what it thinks, but rather in how it thinks.” And so from the extracted kernel of an idea or a concept, there comes the ability to grow such perhaps skeletal templates into fully-formed constructs upon which life’s actions might be undertaken. And let’s not forget that ‘liberation’ and ‘liberty’ are two quite different things. Liberation is the throwing off of the yoke of tyranny, whereas liberty is the freedom to operate unfettered within the civic realm – which is politics and the free exchange of ideas. If the latter does not follow the former, then the revolution that brought it about was a failure.

Ah, but now there is a big, ugly, buzzy fly in the ointment of the great and noble people. Or as Ginsberg might rather have hollered – “Waiter – there’s a turd in my soup!”. For the American Experiment is rattling and banging alarmingly down in the lab, and unsettling ghosts from the past are seen and heard up and down the land. It is sometimes useful to re-examine certain national icons, and to delve into the profit-motivated subterfuge that forms some of a nation’s self-image. In his excellent book ‘Humans’ by my countryman and esteemed historian Alvin Finkel, we can see the otherwise hidden but always persistent struggles of various populations of human beings against the forces of oppression and centralizing power among all peoples down through the millennia. Of particular interest to the United States, and a precedent-setter for the policy of Manifest Destiny, is the story of the betrayal of Indigenous Peoples in the Ohio Valley and southern Great Lakes region. Under the Royal Proclamation of 1763, all colonial advances into Native lands were to be undertaken through negotiation and treaty settlement. This arrangement resulted in the British Crown entering into alliances with those peoples against the increasing settlement pressures from the eastern colonists. However, following the American Revolution the British sought to strengthen trade ties with the new nation and so signed off on Jay’s Treaty of 1794 which ceded American control over the entire region, following which the Americans quickly launched a military incursion into the valley and crushed all ‘Indian’ resistance
with the ultimate defeat of the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh.

Now the pertinent point to be made from all this is that under the Proclamation of 1763, even though such lands could not be directly deeded to
non-Indigenous people without full and thorough negotiation, bureaucratic loopholes existed whereby land-holding options could nonetheless be secured. And whereas such ‘options’ were technically worthless under the Proclamation, as soon as Jay’s Treaty came into effect the values skyrocketed astronomically and the holders of those promissory notes immediately realized eye-watering profits. Land speculation writ spectacularly large. And just who might we find among such worthy investment notables? Ah, well – some familiar names. Yes, among others, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin themselves, successful burghers in their own right, had spotted a nice game and had invested handsomely, thus realizing a very pretty penny indeed after the expulsion of the rightful owners from their ancestral lands. One of these gentlemen seemingly pretty much invented electricity. The other – aka the Father of the Nation – was apparently so morally-bound that he was unable to
speak an untruth.

And there, it might be said, was the rub – the die was cast. Of such gleeful opportunism was a nation born. Tom Paine was rolling in his grave.

Flash forward to 2008 – the Great Monetary Crisis. Who now remembers Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), sub-prime mortgages and junk bonds? They were on the lips of many. Rampant greed, lax regulation, and much obtuse ‘book-keeping’ chicanery saw already hugely rich individuals and organizations launch into a feeding frenzy on the backs of millions of poor home-owners and would-be home-owners whose very financial insecurity was perversely ‘collateralized’ into grossly-inflated bottom lines which were then hastily traded on the stock market for vast profits – until suddenly the Emperor was noted to be stark naked with his flabby ass hanging out, and the whole shitteree went for a cacophonous bust. Oh, well, not quite. Yep, taxpayer to the rescue. White collars bailed out, blue collars shafted. Capitalism on the way up, socialism on the way down. Obscenity beyond words. The rich get richer – or as the social-Darwinist ‘pure’ existential capitalist would have it – the rich deserve their riches,
just as the poor deserve their poverty. “Too bad, sucker.”

And now a horrific turn. I note that Berkowitz offers a grim meditation on this in this week’s Amor Mundi. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is
gunned down in Manhattan. He appears to have been targeted for perceived rapacious practices on the part of his and other health insurers whereby too many people are denied coverage on the basis of an increasingly arcane set of disqualifications. This is spookily reminiscent of the spate of assassinations against various of the robber-baron types a hundred years ago and more. But this killer in Manhattan is no folk hero – he is a sick symptom of moral collapse and not anyone to celebrate. If we wish to avoid this type of home-style terrorism, which it certainly is, then social inequalities must be realized and addressed in some meaningful way. The fear is that when people get driven to the wall by the persisting unwillingness of the top 1% to pony up their share of the common weal, then desperate people turn to desperate means – if only for revenge. Or we can look back to the actual folk-hero status of the old train robbers and bank robbers of yesteryear – Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Bill Miner. They came to be seen as Robin Hoods at a time when ordinary folks were being robbed of their livelihoods and expelled from their farms by big money interests in distant offices and governmental agencies. It looked like nobody was watching the shop for the toiling masses. But these ‘heroes’ were only thieves – armed yes, but not wanton murderers.

Here’s the last verse of Woody Guthrie’s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ -
“Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.”

And now, oh dear – the great and noble people of America, in some desperate, weirded-out Hail Mary cop-out, have elected as their Paramount
Leader a liar and a bigot and a charlatan and a cheater and a vulgarian and a coward and a nihilistic, petty grifter who deploys talking points straight out of Joseph Goebbels’ sinister lexicon – ‘poisoning the blood’, ‘enemy of the people’, ‘vermin’, ‘rapists’ – and threatens pogroms against any and all perceived ‘undesirables’. Something deep has loosed its moorings here. Much blithe banter suggests that some amorphous elements referred to as ‘guardrails’ and ‘institutions’ will provide ultimate safety against calamity. But this demonstrates a poor grasp of the essential fragility of democratic process. For liberal democracy is finally an honour system wherein all the players agree to the power and precedence of the Rule of Law, and the absolute right of the People to manifest the appropriate chambers of representational governance within which the will of the People is made into a living framework of civil society. We have seen this fabric torn before – with appalling results.

And what of Nadia? She has survived and now heads ‘Nadia’s Initiative’ – a global organization dedicated to rescuing and helping girls and women who have fallen victim to slavery, rape and human trafficking. What must she now think of the impending installation in the White House, in the bastion nation, of a man whose regard for womankind can be brutally summed up in a simple twofold? – a woman is either ‘hot’, ‘datable’ or ‘very respectful’, or she is ‘low IQ’, ‘not my type’, or just plain ‘bitch’.

It’s wake-up time in the Great Republic. There is work to be done. We – the World – are watching and waiting on nervous tenterhooks. Because what happens in America definitely does not stay in America. There is no other viable global power to uphold whatever slim grasp we might have on the rule of law – however clumsily that might have been wielded in the past. Uncle Sam is, after all, no choir boy. But the People’s Work has been let slide now to the point of violence and mayhem. The boojwah elites have grown fat and lazy. Talk is cheap, sisters and brothers. And it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Yes, clearly there is work to be done. And for Hannah Arendt, there only ever was the Work.....and cigarettes.

December 8, 2024
Pincher Creek, Alberta