Yes.
I mean, it’s quite astonishing the way this has happened.
Has it hit Pakistan yet?
It’s not hit Pakistan, but then you sometimes feel that the whole of Pakistan is like a reality television show anyway.
But it’s hit India.
It has hit India in a big way, with disastrous effects on the Indian media. I mean, the Indian newspapers used to be among the best in the world. If you look at them now, they’re filled with trivia and trash. Pakistan’s television stations and newspapers and magazines are at the moment infinitely superior to India’s. They have not gone down that route. So you can see and hear debates on the independently owned private television networks and in Pakistani newspapers, that you don’t at all in India. It’s quite a worrying development.
You’ve written that the fate of the Jews, events in Palestine and Congo, are the responsibility of “bourgeois civilization.” I suppose that’s a Marxist term, right?
Right.
You blame bourgeois civilization?
Well, what I say is that, whatever way you want to describe it, it was European capitalist civilization that was responsible ultimately for the death of six million Jews, yes.
And the Congo?
And the Congo.
And World War I? There are a lot of people who died in World War II.
Yes, absolutely.
You think it’s the result of bourgeois civilization?
I think there is no other way to explain it. That and competitiveness between different strands of this civilization.
So the competition that I went through in boarding school, which was so cruel and is not the way out—we are told it makes you a better man, a stronger man, but at the same time—
—it’s very destructive. Yes, it’s also very destructive. With individuals, it can have certain negative effects on the psyche of the individual. But when states engage in competition, it leads to the loss of millions of lives.
But our state is created by people from Eden, Harrow, Choate, St. Paul’s, Andover, Exeter, Yale, Harvard. These are the people whom you call the state intellectuals.
These are people who run the state. This is absolutely true. In the case of the British Empire, the system of private schooling expanded phenomenally, and some schools were created explicitly to train imperial administrators. And this happens in the United States, too. Many, many people from the elite universities, Ivy League universities, used to go, and still go, into the foreign service, run the state department, and so on. The system and its administrators reproduce themselves through this elite educational system. But the question is: are they going to repeat past histories and fight each other to a standstill and, in the process, destroy the planet? That’s the big question now.
Chapter 5
Blowback
Oliver Stone: Could you talk about the concept of “blowback”?
Tariq Ali: A very honest, decent, strong-minded, truthful American scholar, Chalmers Johnson, who had worked as a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and came from an old naval family, wrote a book in 2000 called Blowback. The book offers a strong critique of US foreign policy. His basic argument was that, given what we have been doing to the rest of the world, it’s only a matter of time before some people take the law into their own hands and decide to hit us. And he developed this argument with great skill. When the book came out, it was either attacked by critics or ignored. He was astonished at the viciousness with which the book was received. I wasn’t, actually. But immediately after 9/11, the book, which had been ignored until then, took off by word of mouth. The book sold and sold and sold, and Chalmers became a world figure. It was translated everywhere.
The idea of “blowback” was about the American support of Arabic Jihadists in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Soviets.
Yes, and many people warned the United States that they were playing with fire, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski said, it’s a small price to pay for bringing down the Soviet Empire. No, the exact words he used were even cruder. He said what are a few “stirred-up Muslims” compared to bringing down the Soviet Empire? Well, we know how that story ends.
The “war on terror.”
I always found the “war on terror” an odd concept. The history of terrorism is real, it exists, and what it means usually is small groups of people, sometimes in the hundreds, sometimes a few thousand, who decide that the way to change the world is to hit strategic targets. The anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to try to kill presidents, heads of state, the tsar of Russia. Sometimes they succeeded, but usually they failed. In Paris, they would bomb bourgeois cafés, and say “we’re killing the bourgeoisie.” This sort of nonsense has happened for a long time. It never really changes anything, but it makes people who carry out these acts feel good. It was referred to as “propaganda of the deed.” We’re showing we hate X and Y by doing this, even though none of these people they were attacking crumbled as a result. Then you had a big wave of these politics in the 1960s. You had the Weather Underground in this country. They targeted installations, and sometimes they killed themselves by accident. And during this period you also had terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Japan. Then you had right-wing groups in the United States. I mean, the Oklahoma bombings were carried out by a guy who went hunting with the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist group. You had Cuban terrorists trying to destabilize the Cuban regime, backed in this case by the United States. The foundation of Israel is linked to terrorist groups, in particular the Irgun, which destroyed the King David Hotel. One of the members of the Irgun was Menachem Begin, later given the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. When Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, was asked for her comments, she said, I don’t know whether they deserved the Nobel Prize, but they certainly deserve an Oscar for acting.
The history of the world is littered with examples of terrorism. So why make this act of terror so different? The spectacle and scale of it doesn’t make the people who did it different from other terrorists. And we now know from the various books that have come out that immediately after 9/11, senior members of the Bush regime said, we must now use this attack to get our way. Everyone knows that their basic gut instinct was to attack Iraq, not Afghanistan. They wanted to punish Saddam Hussein for something he hadn’t done. So the war on terror essentially became a holdall for US foreign policy getting its own way wherever it wanted to, locking up people, and picking up people all over the world with the help of its allies in the name of this war on terror.
But why Iraq, of all the places on earth?
For two reasons. Some people within the Bush administration felt that Iraq was unfinished business since 1991. That, at the end of the Gulf War the United States should have toppled Saddam Hussein, but Bush, Senior’s advisers had said don’t do it—and, as we now know, for good reason. Bush, Junior. and his advisers wanted to complete what that administration hadn’t done, and what Clinton hadn’t done, even though Clinton had gone a long way in punishing Iraq, with his US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, defending the deaths of five hundred thousand children as a result of these sanctions.