I, too, have been engaged in a skirmish with a latter-day Zeus, though his thunderbolts have thus far missed their mark. Many others—in Algeria and Egypt as well as Iran—have been less fortunate. Those of us engaged in this battle have long understood what it’s about. It’s about the right of human beings, their thoughts, their works of art, their lives, to survive those thunderbolts—to prevail over the whimsical autocracy of whatever Olympus may presently be in vogue. It’s about the right to make moral, intellectual, and artistic judgments, without worrying about Judgment Day.
The Greek myths are Europe’s southern roots. At the continent’s other end, the old Norse creation-legends also bring news of the supplanting of the gods by the human race. The final battle between the Norse gods and their terrible enemies has already taken place. The gods have slain their foes and been slain by them. Now, we are told, it is time for us to take over. There are no more gods to help us. We’re on our own. Or, to put it another way (for gods are tyrants, too): we’re free. The loss of the divine places us at the center of the stage, to build our own morality, our own communities; to make our own choices; to make our own way. Once again, in the earliest ideas of Europe, we find an emphasis on what is human over and above what is, at one moment or another, held to be divine. Gods may come and gods may go, but we, with any luck, go on forever. This humanist emphasis is, to my mind, one of the most attractive aspects of European thought. It’s easy, of course, to argue that Europe has also stood, during its long history, for conquest, pillage, exterminations, and inquisitions. But now that we are being asked to join in the creation of a new Europe, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of the best meanings of that resonant word. Because there is a Europe that many, if not most, of its citizens care about. This is not a Europe of money, or bureaucracy. Since the word “culture” has been debased by over-use, I’d prefer not to use it. The Europe that is worth talking about, worth re-creating, is anyhow something broader than a “culture.” It is a civilization.
Today, I am listening to the melancholy echoes of one small, intellectually impoverished, pathetically violent assault on the values of that civilization. I refer, I’m sorry to say, to the Khomeini fatwa, whose eighth anniversary this is, and to the latest barbaric noises about “bounty money” emerging from the Iranian government’s front organization, the 15 Khordad Foundation. I’m also sorry to say that the EU’s response to such threats has been little more than tokenist. It has achieved nothing. The Europe for which Europeans care would have done more than merely state that it found such an assault unacceptable. It would have placed maximum pressure on Iran while removing as much pressure as possible from the lives of those threatened. What has happened is the exact opposite. Iran is under very little (I would even say no) pressure on this matter. But for eight years, some of us have been under a fair amount of stress.
During these eight years, I have come to understand the equivocations at the heart of the new Europe. I have heard Germany’s foreign minister say, with a shrug, that “there is a limit” to what the EU is prepared to do for human rights. I have heard Belgium’s foreign minister tell me that the EU knows all about Iran’s terrorist activities against its own dissidents on European soil. But as to action? Just a world-weary smile; just another shrug. In Holland, I actually found myself obliged to explain to Foreign Ministry officials why it would not be a good idea for the EU to accept the fatwa’s validity on religious grounds!
This new Europe has looked to me like not a civilization but an altogether more cynical enterprise. EU leaders pay lip service to the Enlightenment ideals—free expression, human rights, the right to dissent, the importance of the separation of Church and State. But when these ideals come up against the powerful banalities of what is called “reality”—trade, money, guns, power—then it’s freedom that takes a dive. Speaking as a committed European: it’s enough to make a Euro-skeptic of you.
Like so many of my fellow-Britons, I hope there will soon be a New Labour government. I have been urging that government-in-waiting to understand the importance of the arts in conveying the sense of national renewal which Labour must seek swiftly to create. I have also asked Mr. Blair to bring a new spirit of urgency to the fight against the Zeus of Iran and his attempt to kidnap our freedoms and, by doing so, to show New Labour’s commitment to the true spirit of Europe—not just to an economic community, or monetary union, but to European civilization itself.
Tony Blair’s New Labour government duly took office, winning a landslide victory on May 1, 1997. On Thursday, September 24, 1998, during the UN General Assembly in New York, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and Iran issued the joint statement that has effectively brought the story of the fatwa to an end: not immediately [see February 1999 in “Columns”] but gradually. As they say in the movies:
(Slow fade.)
PART III
Columns
DECEMBER 1998: THREE LEADERS
Man is by nature a political animal, said Aristotle, and so the public life of a “good” society must reflect the nature of its members. Many of the great Macedonian’s assertions—that the slave is “naturally” inferior to his master, the female to the male, the “barbarian” to the Greek—now sound archaic. And yet Aristotle’s basic proposition still rings true. The travails of three leading political figures—Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, and Augusto Pinochet—reveal how deeply we believe in natural justice.
President Clinton’s probable escape from his domestic pursuers can be ascribed in part to his foes’ astonishing folly. He has been lucky in his enemies: the sex-crazed, mealymouthed Kenneth Starr and his backers on the Christian Right, who remind us that “fundamentalism” is a term born in the USA; Newt Gingrich, who overplayed a winning hand and lost his shirt; and Linda Tripp, the wicked witch of the wire, who, like Nixon, didn’t understand that by bugging herself she would only prove her own villainy, even with the expletives deleted. When an ancient force, puritanical fanaticism, combines with the contemporary tabloid dogma that public figures have no right to privacy, and when the Washington political and media elites work themselves up into a mighty pompous froth, even the president rocks on his throne. But Clinton survives, because he has human nature on his side. Human nature distinguishes between sexual dalliance and political misconduct. It can be brutal; the word on Monica and Paula is that Americans just don’t care about them. They have come to know Bill Clinton far more intimately than they normally know their leaders, and he, of course, has always known them better than any other politician. Clinton is winning his fight because he is like his people; because, you could say, he’s a natural.
In the matter of Iraq, however, the U.S. administration’s understanding of human nature has been deficient, to say the least. The hypothesis that bombing raids might provoke a coup against Saddam was always flawed. On the whole, people do not see as allies those who are dropping quantities of high explosives on them from the sky. Like Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, they take the bombs personally.
Apparently some Iraqis seriously believe that Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky were pawns in an international Zionist conspiracy designed to make Clinton bomb Baghdad. The recent aborted American-British attack has the merit of demonstrating the two ladies’ declining international influence but otherwise plays right into Saddam’s hands. Threatening to bomb and then not bombing has the advantage of killing fewer people but the disadvantage of making oneself look silly.
Those voices advocating a rapid end to sanctions, and a subsequent opening up of the Iraqi market to Western goods and ideas, may not find much favor with America’s military analysts, but an Iraq freed from the privations of the embargo and the threat of aerial attack is more likely to think of the West as a friend. The best way to topple Saddam Hussein may be to help bring into being an Iraq in which his tyrannies are not only hateful but anachronistic.
The case of the month’s other tyrant ought to be getting easier. Pinochet, after all, has earned the right to be called the m
ost evil man presently alive on earth. (Sorry, Saddam.) The British law lords have decreed that he isn’t immune from extradition. The crucial principle of universal accountability has thus been upheld. Atrocity is not to be excused by the occupancy of high office.
Why then has the British home secretary asked for extra time to decide Pinochet’s future? The ex-tyrant was well enough to hang out with Lady Thatcher just the other day but now claims that the pressure he’s under has provoked a stress-related mental ailment. The families of the dead must be disgusted by this ruse. Pinochet must not escape on such flimsy “compassionate” grounds. Jack Straw should confirm at once that for the mass murderers of the world, there can be no compassion.
“Human nature exists, and it is both deep and highly structured,” writes Edward O. Wilson, the biologist and writer whom Tom Wolfe calls “a new Darwin.” If it did not, let us be clear, then the idea of universals—human rights, moral principles, international law—would have no legitimacy.
It is the fact of our common humanity that allows most of us to forgive Bill Clinton his faults. It is why so few people think that bombing innocent Iraqis is the right way to punish Saddam Hussein. And it is why we want to see Pinochet brought to justice. A world that hounded Clinton but turned a blind eye to Pinochet would indeed be a world turned upside down.
JANUARY 1999: THE MILLENNIUM
If it’s January, it must be the Year of the Millennium. Except that it isn’t, because at the end of 1999 we’ll have had, er, exactly 999 years since the last millennium. This year’s millennium fever is like applauding a cricketer’s century, or Mark McGwire’s home-run record, at the beginning rather than the end of the crucial run.
We’re also celebrating the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, as Catholic cardinals and British Domemakers and believers of all stripes continually remind us. Never mind that this puts Jesus in the odd position of having two birthdays in the space of a week (Christmas Day as well as the Millennial Instant), or that all serious scholars and even church leaders now agree that he wasn’t actually born on either of them. Faux-Millennium or not, it’s the only one we’re going to get.
But will the faux-Millennium turn out to be a dark celebration of what one might call faux-Christianity? The year already boasts some striking examples of faux-Christian behavior, for instance General Pinochet attending Midnight Mass—which brings up the interesting question of the role of his confessor. Many of us would be very interested to hear the general’s confession. But one man presumably already has. The issue of penance is therefore worth a moment’s thought. Exactly how many mea culpas and Hail Marys was the general asked to say to atone for his crimes?
Hard-line but essentially counterfeit Christian “values” have been the driving force behind the rabidly partisan attack by U.S. Republicans on their sexually deplorable president. To an observer whose admiration for American democracy was born at the time of the Watergate hearings, those grave, scrupulous, bipartisan deliberations over an earlier president’s genuinely high crimes, the tawdry Clinton impeachment debate has been a disillusioning spectacle. Down into the dirt we tumble, in the name of the gentle Christ. But one of the Christian soldiers, Speaker-elect Robert Livingston, is already hoist on his own sanctimonious petard. Now the pornographer Larry Flynt’s exposés may skewer several more, and no less a moral authority than the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker has been seen on CNN, attacking his own Christian cohorts for their un-Christian uninterest in forgiveness and healing. How low can we go?
There’s another name for the American Right’s fork-tongued Christianity: hypocrisy. And Washington, that ugly School for Scandal full of Sneerwells, Backbites, and Snakes, has been for months in the grip of a kind of hypocrite fundamentalism. If the Senate now brings the sorry saga to a close, it will be because sober considerations of state have finally gained the ascendancy over mad-dog godliness; because worldly-wise politicians have put the faux-Christians back in their kennels at last.
President Clinton, who reportedly prayed with his spiritual advisers while the impeachment vote was being taken, is no slouch in the faux department himself. Of course his present, astonishing popularity rating is in part a reaction to the Starr troopers’ sheer vileness, but it is also due to the popularity in America of his decision to bomb Iraq. Did Clinton discuss that with his spiritual advisers, too? Did his equally devout British ally, Prime Minister Blair, agree that those essentially pointless strikes were the moral, Christian way to go?
I well know that faux-religion isn’t an exclusively Western vice. Believe me (to coin a phrase) I know something of the hypocritical fervor with which the militants of other faiths—Muslims, Hindus, Jews—invoke their god or gods to justify tyranny and injustice. No amount of Western hypocrisy can come close to Saddam Hussein’s faux-Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Yet religious zealots have the nerve to accuse god-free secularists of lacking moral principles!
For an ungodly person like myself, the overarching issue in this millennium year is not any of the stuff on the god squads’ agendas. It’s the so-called Debt, the multi-trillions of owed dollars that keep the poorest countries of the world in hock to, and under the thumb of, the richest. Even in the most fiscally conservative circles, there is a growing consensus that the Debt must be wiped out, unless we want a third millennium marked by the resentment, violence, fanaticism, and despotism that must be the inevitable effects of this global injustice. Why not, then, make the cancellation of the Debt the human race’s millennium gift to itself? Now, that could make 1999 a real milestone in human history. It’s an idea in which our interests and principles coincide, wherever we come from, rich North or poor South, whoever we are, friend or faux. It’s a policy that would erase the memory of 1998’s shabby lewinskyings, and put Clinton’s presidency into the history books for a genuinely high moral reason.
Cancel the Debt for the Millennium! It’s even the Christian thing to do.
FEBRUARY 1999: TEN YEARS OF THE FATWA
Yes, all right, on February 14 it will be ten years since I received my unfunny Valentine. I admit to a dilemma. Ignore the politics (which I’d love to do), and my silence must look enforced or fearful. Speak, and I risk deafening the world to those other utterances, my books, written in my true language, the language of literature. I risk helping to conceal the real Salman behind the smoky, sulfurous Rushdie of the Affair. I have led two lives: one blighted by hatred and caught up in this dire business, which I’m trying to leave behind, and the life of a free man, freely doing his work. Two lives, but none I can afford to lose, for one loss would end both.
So I’ll have my say, and because everybody loves an anniversary, no doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I’ll speak of bookish things.
When asked about the effect on my writing of the ten-year-long assault upon it, I’ve answered lightheartedly that I’ve become more interested in happy endings; and that, as I’ve been told that my recent books are my funniest, the attacks have evidently improved my sense of humor. These answers, true enough in their way, are designed to deflect deeper inquiry. For how can I explain to strangers my sense of violation? It’s as if men wielding clubs were to burst loudly into your home and lay it waste. They arrive when you’re making love, or standing naked in the shower, or sitting on the toilet, or staring in deep inward silence at the lines you’ve scrawled on a page. Never again will you kiss or bathe or shit or write without remembering this intrusion. And yet, to do these things pleasurably and well, you must shut out the memory.
And how to describe the damage? As, perhaps, a heaviness. As something remembered from boarding-school childhood: I wake and, lying in bed, find I can’t move. My arms, legs, and head have grown impossibly weighty. Nobody believes me, of course, and all the children laugh.
“I can’t go on,” says Beckett’s Unnamable. “I’ll go on.” A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow h
is sweetest, most startling dreams.
Amid the cacophony of the professionally opinionated and the professionally offended, may a voice still be heard celebrating literature, highest of arts, its passionate, dispassionate inquiry into life on earth, its naked journey across the frontierless human terrain, its fierce-minded rebuke to dogma and power, and its trespassers’ fearless daring? In these years I’ve met and been inspired by some of the world’s bravest fighters for literary freedom. I recently helped set up a house for refugee writers in Mexico City (more than twenty cities already belong to this refuge-city scheme) and was proud to be doing a little to ease the struggles of others in danger from intolerance. But as well as fighting the fight, which I will surely go on doing, I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammeled, uncowed books. So, beyond grief, bewilderment, and despair, I have rededicated myself to our high calling.
I am conscious of shifts in my writing. There was always a tug-of-war in me between “there” and “here,” the pull of roots and of the road. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I’ve come down on the side of those who by preference, nature, or circumstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging—I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East—is my artistic country now. Wherever my books find themselves, by a favored armchair, near a hot bath, on a beach, or in a late-night pool of bedside light: that’s my only home.
Life can be harsh, and for a decade St. Valentine’s Day has reminded me of that harshness. But these dark anniversaries of the appalling Valentine I was sent in 1989 have also been times to reflect upon the countervailing value of love. Love feels more and more like the only subject.