The Other Side – Opposition: Tracing lineaments of dissent

manheruThe March 28 issue of Time Magazine’s endnote is, as per tradition, a question-and-answer transcription with a chosen global opinion driver. At least in the eyes of its Western-centric editorial team. The chosen one this time is one Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She won it for her role as a “human rights lawyer”, the West’s euphemism for inciting Third World citizens against their governments and quite often, their societies too. I am still to know of a non-western Nobel Laureate who is in sync with their government or their society, or who remain so soon after the award.

There is a definitional anti-establishment and ethos-battering iconoclasm built into Alfred Nobel’s thing. This is why the whole prize which Alfred Nobel founded so many years ago, has become an institution of incitement in the non-western world, a clear statement of past, present and futuristic condemnation of non-western governments, a condemning verdict that humanity cannot be helped or benefit from them, their structures or personages, both in the present and forever. Indeed it has to be so definitionally, for the Nobel Prize is about instigating subversive change, about challenging status quo that do not cohere with the West’s global agenda.

Rewarded dissent

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky


But a challenge only to non-Western statuses quo. Never to Western statuses quo. I fail to grasp why and how a person like Noam Chomsky has not won the Prize. I fail to grasp why Edward Said, the late Palestinian-born American citizen, could not merit a Nobel Prize ever at all. Maybe I do understand. Both represent or represented dissident thought vis-a-vis mainstream thinking.

They were expansive in their research, vast in their iconoclastic scholarship which spanned disciplines. They dared question the empire. Questioned the Western empire in more dramatic ways, in more influential ways, than Shirin can ever hope to do in a double lifetime. Frankly, until a few days ago, I did not know Shirin. And did not care. She was some old flower withering in the Iranian desert, one among many. She barely left Iran, much as she now lives in exile in the West. Barely left Iran as an influential idea fated to drive global thinking.

I wonder if she should not be grateful to Ahmadinejad, America’s made-monster that needed a Shirin Ebadi to reinvent it as an out and out threat, both at home and abroad. But Chomsky and Said exist in the world, will exist long after their lives on this planet. They have influenced a generation, are set to influence a century.

Indeed have made a mark in hallways of knowledge, including those of the establishments which reject them. Great scholars denied imprimatur by officialdom. How does a person who rises against a mere country, a mere government, a mere theocracy, beat two persons who each rise against continents, who each enjoy support across continents, to win the much vaunted global Prize ran from Sweden? Two people who never left their “countries” in spite of rejection and revilement, in spite of their human rights struggles for millions in the Third World and inside America, a duo that stuck it out against all manner of blandishments?

Dissent and NGO
Typically, Shirin lives in exile. In the West. Hers is a sob tale which upholds and justifies the West’s stereotype of the non-western world: a world inherently tyrannical, anti-freethinkers, and deserving of endless changes until a Karzai or San Suu Kyi — a Western-interned leader — is found and ascended to power, willy-nilly vis-a-vis the sovereign voter.

It matters little that the systems that are impliedly condemned by such awards may themselves have come about as a reaction to the excesses of such a pro-West breed of ruling gorgons. Such as Shah in Shirin’s Iran. Batista in Cuba. Typically, Shirin bemoans the close-down and arrest of her non-governmental organisation, NGO. And that is the point. You can’t be a Nobel Laureate and be governmental. You have to be non-governmental for the simple reason that your award repudiates government as a positive force in Third World or non-Western human affairs. You must be a counter State, but one propped by outside State.

A State in miniature challenging the real, governing one. But there is a chink in her armour. Her inspired dissent is not appreciated by her hubby who wants her to leave her Nobel ways, come back home and work like any other lawyer in Iran, like any other housewife in an Iranian home. And as with the State, so the Nobel Prize must be in the home: a call to rebellion. ‘’He (Shirin’s husband) said my work was ruining our family life. And it was not going to result in bringing democracy to Iran, so how long did I want to continue doing it?

My response was that this is the path I have chosen and I’m not going backwards”. You hear an invisible yet loud cheer, all of it western. But flying fragments from a broken marriage, an orphaned home. Again typical of traits of all those in such a career: educated rejects on the fringes; bed-hopping single parents; maritally exogamous, or simply bitter divorcees.

Give us an elected Ayatollah
Shirin has to remain current. Great changes have happened, changes between Iran and the West, much of it traceable to President Rouhani of Iran, and Barack Obama, the US president. While not on an even keel, the relationship is now at least workable. And with Putin having intervened decisively in Syria, Iran’s perceived threat to US interests in the Middle East (read Israel), a threat enacted through Iranian combat support for the Syrian government, and of course through support to battle-hardened Hezbollah of Lebanon, has largely lessened.

Helped by the current stalemate in Yemen where the Sunni-led campaign against Shiite influence in the Middle East seems to be going nowhere, whether forwards or backwards. How to deal with this positive re-admission of the current Iranian leadership so as to remain deserving of the Nobel pin, that seems to be Shirin’s challenge. One which she handles with admirable simplicity, if not humour tinged with frivolity. About the current Iranian government, she says: “Nothing has changed.

The President has very limited power. All the power rests with the Supreme Leader, who is there for life. Rouhani is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, except he’s a little better-looking and he smiles more!” She has no problem with Popes or Archbishops in the West. With the British Queen even, a political figure. She wants or implies an electoral Ayatollah!

Challenging a cosmos
She cannot endorse what has happened in Iran without abridging her career as a Nobel Laureate. The beautiful ones can’t and shouldn’t be born, ever, lest her appeal diminishes, lest her career is abridged. Such apostasy befits a Laureate, forever Camus’ outsider. And by dismissing Rouhani as a handsome effete, and by locating all power in the Supreme Leader, she has widened the remit of the attack, thereby assuring herself of a life-long struggle challenge and goal. Even the Iranian President needs to be liberated by her, liberated from the stranglehold of a theocracy. She aims for the pith of the Iranian society, and that way she does not lose currency.

After all, her children must deserve the Nobel Prize as her bequest to the broken family. Or win new Nobel Prizes. Not in the sense you read me to mean, gentle reader. Rather in the sense that her younger daughter — a PhD in human rights — symbolises her search for continuity beyond her prize, person, time and career. Dissent has to be sustainably cultivated in our societies, and the surest way of doing that is to challenge the pillars of a civilisation, to challenge a cosmos.

The weapon Obama never needed

Barack Obama

Barack Obama

A key, all-weather grievance Barack Obama carried to Havana at the beginning of his visit marking an end to decades of mutual ostracism was that of imprisonment of human rights dissenters by the Government of that small, great island of Jose Marti, the legendary poet-nationalist of the Americas. Obama needed this both as a weapon and as a salve.

A salve to free his conscience from the charge that he had sacrificed principle to expediency by re-engaging an unrepentant Cuba without an accompanying positive scorecard on its human rights record. Gentle reader, don’t forget it is America — not Cubans — who over decades of mutual ostracism raised the human rights charge against Cuba. A charge which another western nation nearer the Americas — Canada — never saw or echoed. In fact subverted by retaining and even expanding relations with Cuba under both Castros.

An all-weather grievance Obama needed as a weapon with which to beat domestic dissent against his landmark policy to re-engage Cuba after inveterate animosities traceable to the 1959 defeat of America’s dictator Batista by the revolution which the Castros led from the Sierra Maestra. With the defeat of Cruz by Trump in Florida, a Cruz who attacked Obama’s change of policy towards Cuba in the hope of improving his appeal among Cuban-Americans hugely concentrated in Florida, one gets the sense Obama did not really need the weapon, much as he might have wanted it. There has been a massive shift in Cuban-American attitudes towards their homeland, a shift for the positive.

All the media are American

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

One then assumes it was a weapon Barack needed to ensure the Cuban government is not too comfortable in this new tango. Cuba might have mastered the steps in the dance; but its shoes had to be torn, had to show poking toes in order to subdue its ego, in order to diminish the mastery. And quite high on the agenda was a human rights line of questioning by a well-primed White House press corps which Obama propped when Raul sought to rebuff it at a joint press conference.

Gentle reader, you have to understand the cosy relationship between this privileged press corps and the American establishment, to grasp how American power pans out at home and abroad. It takes a lot to be a White House correspondent, not professionally. Also quite high on the agenda was Obama’s meeting with Shirin Ebadi’s Cuban brothers and sisters in the other hemisphere, Cuban dissidents.

Interestingly, none walked to the venue of the meeting straight from Cuban prisons! They all came from society, walked from home to the venue of the meeting with the American president. How so, given an inspired question that demanded that Castro frees imprisoned human rights activists languishing in Cuban jails? You mean it’s possible to love America in Cuba, possible for one to be critical of Castro and still be at home? Possible to meet with Obama, without having to be airlifted to Florida soon after?

And those said to be in Cuban prisons after whom American journalists asked, of whom Castro demanded a list for immediate release, are they there? What were they convicted of in the first place, assuming they are political prisoners? And with the Cuban Five still in American prisons, are crimes against the State only a prerogative of American jurisprudence and statute books? Or was there an expectation that Cuba must run empty jails to deserve to host a US president whose prisons carry blacks in industrial quantities? Of course all these were questions which the coached, American-led global media would not be allowed to raise, all consolidate a preferred narrative, all to suppress an inconvenient counter-narrative. Indeed as Tunstall (a media researcher) would write, all the media are American!

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