Edward Said, Orientalism and Failure-Conspiracies

Recently there was an Edward Said-related anniversary. I thought it for forty years of the publication of his book Orientalism in the UK, but I could have been wrong. Said’s career-defining book argued that the Western view of Oriental, and especially Arabic and Muslim, cultures served an imperialist agenda, creating inaccurate images of the mysterious East that justified the Western treatment of those cultures: Here’s a quote from Said:

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

(Said was talking about Palestine, not Iraq.)

To the contrary. While the artists, writers and historians may have created the myth that Said describes, the politicians had an altogether more practical view. Western foreign policy up to the disastrous First Iraqi War showed a shrewd understanding that Arab countries, with their simmering religious feuds, corruption and gangsterism, were best left to dictators or despots maintaining order with varying and regrettable levels of brutality. The events since then have only confirmed this. It has nothing to do with culture, religion or the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life (Said’s phrase), and everything to do with the underlying gangsterism, and, of course, who gets the kickbacks from the oil supply.

In the previous decades, Europeans were forced into this situation time and time again. People complained and protested about Imperial rule, the Europeans walked away, and after the first independent government, the country promptly fell apart. Quick, name any country that has done better since their Imperial rulers walked away(*). What happened to farming in Zimbabwe and is happening in South Africa should make anyone who "cares about the planet" weep. For that matter, name any country that lost its dictator and didn’t sink into gangsterism (**).

The process is something like this:

1) Group A complains that they are not getting as much of the good stuff they could if they weren’t oppressed, discriminated against; or otherwise disadvantaged by Group B

2) Group B stops doing whatever it is or at least passes a law to make it illegal...

3) … and it all goes well until there’s a change of leadership, or the torch passes to another generation, when...

4) ...the whole show falls into the chaos of internecine strife, or someone notices that only a small proportion of Group A’s are getting the ‘good stuff’...

5) …when academics and activists create conspiracy theories to explain the failure, e.g. the patriarchy, white privilege, Group A’s specific culture and values, years of oppression, cultural hegemony, toxic culture, and on and on.

The purpose of the conspiracy theory is not to help redress whatever wrong continues to be done to Group A. It is to provide the leaders of the failed movement with an excuse, and to help their useful-idiot western sympathisers deal with the horrendous cognitive dissonance created by their adoption of, and continued support for, a spectacularly failed policy(***).

Said’s book was one of the first that blamed Western cultural theories for the behaviour of a non-Western government (the Palestinian Authority). Behind a smoke-screen that Said contributed to, Yassir Araft diverted hundreds of millions of external aid into what was euphemistically called the Chairman’s Fund and away from improving the lives of Palestinians. Did Said realise he was being played?

So, contra Said, the Orient is not the victim of some nefarious myth-making by obscure academics - they aren’t that important or influential. The Orient is how it is because it is hot, has poor agriculture, and is ruled by corrupt theocratic governments which insist that the population learns nothing except one book, and that by rote. Some of it is geography, and a lot of it is a political decision. A decision Said's own book helped disguise.

(*) Vietnam. But not until the North Vietnamese lost their Imperial backers as well.

(**) Estonia, Lithuania and Poland don’t count, since they never had dictators like Albania and Romania did. The Czechs and Slovaks sorted themselves out eventually. What the Serbs and Bosnians did to each other was appalling. If you think Russia isn’t a gangster state, you aren’t paying attention.

(***) Any time it occurs to you that feminism fits this pattern...