The Epic Of Gilgamesh (essay)

This essay is published at Unlikely Stories 




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'Asia suffers from thanatomania; Europe knows la joie de vivre.'
That parallel cultures should not, through divergent historical experience, converge in their political institutions; and that such diversity of background should seek artistic expression appears to be an axiomatic abstraction. The devil, however, conceals himself in the details. In that universal particular of the East-West schism, divergence has ever been stigmatized as deviance. Increasingly, instead of a stereoscopic view of civilisations, there is recourse to stereotypes. The sun, it is claimed, for instance, rises over a people life-denying, other-worldly, to set over one life-affirming, this-worldly.
Two heroes, representative of their respective civilisations, are often nominated to battle on behalf of the thesis. Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian, ranks senior to Achilles, the Greek, by some 2,000 years!¹ Thus, the struggle dons a generational dimension as well — the youth of the world renouncing the lessons of age, or age catechising youth on the ways of the world.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of the odyssey of a king in quest of immortality. To humanise his tyrannical reign, the gods respond to the subjects' adjurations by creating Enkidu, a wild man, initially living among the desert animals,

With the gazelles he feeds on grass,
With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering places,
With the teeming creatures, his heart delights in water.²

later civilised into urban life, and finally befriended by the king. This epilogue introduces us to their swashbuckling and derring-do, such as the killing of Huwawa and the 'bull of heaven'. The latter had been sent by Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk and 'a woman scorned', to kill Gilgamesh for repudiating her fickle love with a set of unflattering similes:

"Thou art but a brazier which goes out in the cold,
A backdoor which does not keep out blast and windstorms,
A waterskin which soaks through its bearer,
A shoe which pinches the foot of its owner!'

From this pinnacle of brotherhood, juxtaposed against the habitual infidelity of the goddess, the twain are dashed by the gods to the depths of division. Their united actions recoil on their unity, as Enkidu dreams of the 'house of dust', falls ill and dies. The fact of death transmitted so intimately to Gilgamesh for the first time, the invincible hero doubles up under grief and terror, and begins his quest for eternal life.

"Fearing death I roam over the steppe;
The matter of my friend rests heavy upon me. How can I be silent? How can I be still?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Must I, too, like him, lay me down
Not to rise again for ever and ever?"

En route to meet Utnapishtim, the only mortal to attain immortality, he meets Siduri, 'the barmaid who dwells on the edge of the sea', who, notwithstanding her calling, gives him sober advice.

"Gilgamesh, fill your belly -
day and night make merry,
let days be full of joy,
dance and make music day and night
And wear fresh clothes,
And wash your head and bathe.
Look at the child that is holding your hand,
and let your wife delight in your embrace
These things alone are the concern of men."

Unsurprisingly, the content of a barmaid constitutes the despair of a king and a hero. Gilgamesh sails over the waters of death to confer with the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, who once played a role similar to his biblical counterpart, for which service to gods and creatures he received his boon, both event and gift not permitting replication. Yet Utnapishtim holds out one last, forlorn hope - a rejuvenating, underwater plant. Like a pearl-diver, Gilgamesh plunges for the priceless treasure of the deep; only to lose it to a serpent when he stops at a pool on the warm journey back to Uruk, having left it on the bank. Henceforth, snakes, rather than Gilgamesh, were to endure forever, sloughing off their bodies when old to renew youth. To Urshanabi, Utnapishtim's boatman who had piloted him over the Persian Gulf to find the plant of youth, he communicates his 'incommunicable woe'.

For whose sake, Urshanabi, have I strained my muscles?
For whose sake has my heart's blood been spent?
I brought no blessing on myself -
I did the serpent underground good service."

---

Notes:
¹ Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), p. 104
² E.A.Speiser, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J.B.Pritchard, (Princeton, N.J., 1950), passim

The oikoumene of the ancient Middle East embraced the regions from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula through the years 3000 to 330 BC. The word means the inhabited world and signifies a distinct historical and cultural continuum. From the dawn of civilisation the area constituted a far-flung house (oikos, house) until Alexander's empire replaced the intimacy of the ecumene. Architectural, ceramic, metallurgical and other products radiated from the first civilisations to their younger contemporaries. Just as the secular crafts were monopolised by professional guilds, so were other-worldly services concentrated in priest-guilds. The mobility of guilds disseminated ceramic as well as religious forms: sacrifice in Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece mimicked the Hebrews, its memory preserved to this day in ritual Jewish slaughter.¹ Merchants and priests were equally to be found rubbing shoulders in ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as in Israel or hobnobbing at the Mesopotamian gateway at Alalakh in what is now modern Turkey. The Greek world, in the late Bronze Age, thereby, drew on the inventory of the Middle East, material, cultural and spiritual, to stock its corresponding warehouses rendered virtually native, by such exchange, to the Levant.
Thus, the consecutive occupation of the divine throne by Uranus, Cronos and Zeus, in Hesiod's Theogony, appears to be the reflex of the successive theocracies of Anu, Kumarbi and the storm god in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. The court of Hattusa was the royal school of chariotry for Achaean princes, and the empire, no doubt, proved equally dexterous in the art of diplomacy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the status of a bestseller.² And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an attempt to suspend the hero's journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and report on the nothingness of death.
The analogies, however, dramatise the disanalogies. Gilgamesh's monomaniacal quest for immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri's advice, while Odysseus' uncompromising humanity spurns a goddess's gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend's fate, to avenge it.
Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the querying mind —the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The phenomenon thus compartmentalised, the tired mind rests from further labour. Henceforth, all subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: the Greek, heroic and the Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.
Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: "The Epic of Gilgamesh does not come to an harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there, as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable."³ (Italics not original.)⁴
And H.D.F. Kitto's acquires greater catholicity by moving further east: "There can be no romantic protest — for how can we protest against the first law of our being? — nor resigned acceptance — such as we find, for example, among the Chinese, to whom the individual is only an ancestor in the making, one crop of leaves on one tree in the forest. There is instead this passionate tension which is a spirit of tragedy." (Italics supplied.)⁵
These observations are condensed into modern aphorisms by Edith Hamilton. "A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to the mind as naturally as the other." And, so as not to overlook a large chunk of the orient, she stuffs India into the Grecian urn with: "As in Egypt, the priests saw their opportunity".⁶ One recognizes here the intellectual luggage of our latter-day psyche.
And last but not least, the Encyclopaedia Britannica pontificates: "The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing man's deep regret at not being immortal through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life".⁷ (Emphasis added.)
And politics provides the theory explaining the secular-religious split between East and West. Tyranny and hierocracy contrast with democracy, freedom from both kings and priests.

Subject they are not unto any man:
They say "slave" sorts not with "Athenian".⁸

Lydia's glebe, where gold abounds, and Phrygia have I [Dionysus] left behind; o'er Persia's sun-baked plains, by Bactria's walled towns and Media's wintry clime have I advanced through Arabia, land of promise; and Asia's length and breadth, outstretched along the brackish sea, with many a fair walled town, peopled with mingling race of Hellenes and barbarians; and this is the first city in Hellas I have reached.⁹

The average barbarian, therefore, is a religious sycophant.
The political development of Hellas and that of the 'barbarians', indeed, diverged sufficiently to constitute two schools. Their distinguishing characteristic was a 'break of study' in the former case, and an uninterrupted curriculum in the latter. From 3000 BC, Egypt experienced uninterrupted government down to the present day, and Mesopotamia for more than 3000 years until its terminal illness - the combined canker of the absence of national, and presence of alien, government (and peoples). Their slightly younger contemporary, the Minoan, and its mainland successor, the Mycenaean, civilisations of Greece were as monarchical as their eastern sisters.¹⁰ Thus, around 1400 BC, the ecumene exhibited a sorority of monarchical states, urban or unified. The barbarian Greeks (an adjective that cannot be qualified with the use of inverted commas) descended in several waves; the first arrived in the north around 2,000 BC, descended south over hundreds of years and, inspired by Crete, engendered, in conjunction with their predecessors, the Mycenean civilisation; but the second wave - the Dorian invaders - inundated the reservoir and began the Dark Age of Greece from 1100 BC to 750 BC¹¹ — a period of absolute anarchy unfamiliar to the East, constituting antithetical syllabi for the two schools. (The Cretan capital at Knossos was sacked and destroyed in 1400 BC for unknown reasons, though the Cretan civilisation survived, albeit as an outpost of the Mycenaean Greeks).¹²
How did the Greek pupil learn to look at life during this lacuna of government? The effect of government or non-government on the world-view of a people may strike modern readers, ensconced in the safety of the state, as fancied or absurd causality. We'll let the Greek, with his greater experience of anarchy, support or discredit the association, if any. He learned to value freedom above everything, setting a premium on it as a rational response to the absence of security. But he went one step further: vigilance became a habit. Eternal vigilance, it has been said, wrongly, is the price of liberty; on the contrary, liberty is the price of vigilance. And a high premium on freedom meant an equally high discount on kingship. Where every man, must, perforce, 'pack a rod', so to speak, he would be loath to relinquish the gun to another. Homer belongs to this period.
The shield of Achilles is apt symbolism for the Dark Age. Hephaestus, the 'thin-lipped armourer', saves us a thousand words by fashioning one scene (which we focus on among several, as our theory directs our gaze).

A crowd was in the market-place, where a dispute was going on. Two men disputed over the blood-price of a man who had been killed: the other refused to accept anything; but both were willing to appeal to an umpire for decision.¹³

Throughout later (post-Mycenaean) Greek history, the umpire was never a king. The Greek, gradually, reluctantly, out of a sense of anangke (necessity), surrendered a sufficient moiety of his sovereignty to render Hephaestus' handiwork passé; but until Alexander wrested the remainder with brute force, he preserved a limpet hold on his individuality, making him, according to Thucydides, well-nigh ungovernable.

Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude —in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.¹⁴

Unlike the Mycenaean rulers, the power of the Homeric kings was girt by the council of nobles and the assembly of commoners. The council could debate in parliamentary fashion, but the assembly could only listen and consent or dissent by acclamation, as in a modern referendum. Unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, the Greeks practiced some form of limited constitutional government.¹⁵ Indeed, they recognized degrees of kingship, and while Achilles addresses Agamemnon as 'most kingly', he does not restrain his tongue from the liberal use of expletives: "You drunkard, with eyes like a bitch and heart like a fawn!" Rude language, admittedly, but not subversive!
The Greeks, then, at least in Homer, hold kingship and death in contempt. The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, are in awe of both king and death. They value life and government. What does the Greek value? Freedom, as we have seen. And what does he dread? The opposite of freedom, slavery, for Homer tells us that

Zeus takes away from a man half of his manhood if the day of enslavement lays hold of him.

And of womanhood? We're not told what percentage accrues to Zeus, but from Hector's speech to Andromache we can infer, darkly, that the ratio was quite considerable.

But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba herself, nor for Priam the king, nor for my many noble brothers, who will be slain by the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when one of the bronze-clad Achaeans will carry you away in tears, and end your days of freedom.

And yet Homer, unlike another, later, blind poet who juxtaposes servitude in heaven with dominion in hell (a preference eloquent of an acquired, elder penchant for old-fashioned oriental dominus), affirms that

It is better to be a slave on earth than a king of Hades.

---

Notes:
¹ Cyrus H. Gordon, Ancient Middle Eastern Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15^th Edition, pp. 60-61
² Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 107
³ H. & H.A.Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 227
⁴ Disagreement with Jacobsen over interpretation originates, in part, from his dating of the epic (page 223), which he places in the second millenium, when the state waxed mightier and juster than before; hence, Gilgamesh rebels against the ultimate injustice, death! While admitting the epic to be based on older material, he disappoints by not explaining the basis of the original. Gerard Roux places the epic fragments in the 'Heroic Age of Mesopotamia', the Early Dynastic Period (c.2700 – 2400 BC). Furthermore, the former author betrays a greater fondness for his own cultural roots by discerning a Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia, a view rejected by the latter - as well as by S.E.Finer , The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111-112.
⁵ H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1952), p. 61
⁶ Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilisation, (New York: Mentor, 1960), pp. 17, 21
⁷ Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 108
⁸ Aeschylus, The Persians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 239-240
⁹ Euripides, The Bacchantes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1-41
¹⁰ Herman Aubin, Europe, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 692
¹¹ S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 176-178
¹² S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 319 - 320
¹³ Homer, The Iliad, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, (New York: Mentor), passim
¹⁴ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65
¹⁵ J.B.Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980), pp. 51-53




The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary gives the historical meaning of 'slave' as "someone owned by and acting as servant to another, with no personal freedom"¹. Presumably, the description is meant to fit the Sumerian, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the American and the Spanish slave. In fact, there is no word for slave in the Sumerian or the Hebrew languages. The Greek word for slave was "doulos" — the word erected a clear linguistic boundary between slaves and free men No such boundary existed in the East. In the Sumerian cuneiform sign for slave, the word means "a man from the mountains", that is, a captive from an alien land. This vagueness infects the Egyptian word 'b'k'. The Hebrew word 'ebed' denotes anyone from 'slave', 'servant of the lord' in the phrase 'ebed Jahwe' to 'ebed al malek', the servant of the king.²
There is as much history in the meaning of a word as there is culture. Contrast Justice Taney's famous observation that Negroes had "no rights which any white man was bound to respect" (March 6, 1857),³ with the fact that the Iberian slave had access to the courts. The Anglo-Saxon 'slave' was a thing, not a person. The Spanish slave was a person without liberty. The laws and customs relating to slavery were codified in centralised Portugal and Spain as early as 1263-5. The Las Siete Partidas del Roy Alfonso specifies the rights of a slave in detail. For instance: 'If married slaves owned by separate masters could not live together because of distance, the church should persuade one or the other to sell his slave. If neither of the masters could be persuaded, the church was to buy one of them so that the married slaves could live together'.⁴
What, then, of the antonym of 'slavery' — 'freedom'? The meaning of this word too must be inextricably connected to the historical experience of the people. Thus, freedom and democracy mean little in the Iberian world — Spain and Portugal were both dictatorships until the other day, and Latin America has the perpetual caudillo — whereas some form of participatory government and the associated idea of liberty persisted throughout Greek, Republican Roman and Western European history as the reflex of slavery and exclusion. Centralised, absolutist states are more 'free' than democratic, decentralised polities. Where you cannot lose your freedom, the concept cannot arise. And a strong, 'despotic' state precludes slavery for it would entail loyalty of slaves to private persons, rather than, as observed, to the 'despot'.
According to W. V. Quine, nothing can count as the unique meaning of a word or expression; meaning is indeterminate. Why? Because meaning is inextricably connected with behaviour, which in turn is connected to a world-view. Thus, words acquire meaning only in relation to their place in the language and the world-view. "...people feel drawn to a mentalistic account of language, despite the conspicuous fact that language is a social enterprise...."⁵ Thus we cannot translate the English words slave or free into other languages: the differing world-views, that is, historical experiences, would not permit such translation.
The same conclusion is reached via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgenstein's stress on the connection between linguistic activity and a 'way of life'.⁶

---

Notes:
¹ 'slave', The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary (New Delhi: Allied Publishers (India) Ltd, 2000)
² William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 43
³ 'Dred Scott decision', Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.4, p. 218
⁴ Eric Dunning, 'Race Relations', in Geoffrey Hurd (ed.), Human Societies, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 158, 165 - 166
⁵ W.V. Quine, "Mind and Verbal Dispositions", Meaning and Reference, p. 81
⁶ 'translation', A Dictionary Of Philosophy, ed. Antony Flew (London: Pan Books, 1979)



Every culture has its antipodes, and for the Greeks it was freedom-unfreedom, for the Near East, government-anarchy, where slavery was insignificant.¹ The ratio of slaves to free citizens, in the wealthiest period and part of Greece, Periclean Athens, was 3:2,² and yet her wealth paled next to the oriental states. The very meaning of freedom derived from its antithesis — slavery. In Asia, large-scale slavery had never been practiced.³ Egypt had no concept of slavery and slaves, in any recognisable form, never appeared until the Egyptian Empire — yet were still a minuscule part of the labour force⁴; household slaves were easily assimilated⁵. In China, slaves comprised only 1% of the total population and had a very different status from that of Greco-Roman slaves!⁶ The corresponding ratio for Attica around 431 BC is between 25-33%.⁷ However, in Greece, too, Hellenistic despotism entailed the disappearance of slavery⁸ — and its re-emergence with the Roman Republic and, again, its disappearance with the Empire⁹. Freedom has no meaning unless the possibility of losing it is real. A monarchy, or centralized state, tolerates only a minimum of slaves, being jealous of their loyalty, which, if it is directed at all, will be directed towards the master. Likewise, it will set a high premium on stability, and a high discount on freedom, as the Greeks knew it ('eleutheron'),¹⁰ being habituated to government, unlike the Greeks, and unused to anarchy.
Homer, by rendering anarchy romantic, rendered death beautiful; Gilgamesh, by assuming government, achieved the reverse. Both affirm life. The Greek affirms life through the Other, as togetherness, the Mesopotamian through the Third, the state, as separateness. The Greek other may be free or a slave, necessarily, for Otherness implies either equality or subordination. The obsessive pursuit of 'glory', also, betrays the Other taking notes: 'arete', excellence, resides as much in the self as the non-self. The earthly immortality of fame, the life-in-death, contrasts with slavery, the death-in-life. Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel, not only over a slave-girl, but over a prize: the Iliad commences with the conflict between life-in-death, the prize, and death-in-life, the slave. With the Ego and the non-Ego so inextricated, without the extricating Third, the Iliad becomes a monument to the ideas of moira (fate) and hybris (excess). A man should stay within his moira, the kingdom of his self, and not transgress it through hybris, where the non-egos reside: though Ate (Folly, personified as a goddess) inveigle him thither, yet will he be visited by divine vengeance, personified as Nemesis.
The Third, in Gilgamesh, appears as the tyrannical king, who meets his alter ego, a wild man civilised. The humanised brute remonstrates with the dehumanised king, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become one, the best of friends. When Enkidu gets into a funk before the terrible Huwawa, it is the other's turn to remonstrate.

"Mere man - his days are numbered,
whatever he may do, he is but wind.
You are - already now - afraid of death.
Where is the fine strength of your courage?
Let me lead,
and you (tarrying) call out to me : 'Close in, fear not!'
And if I fall, I shall have founded fame.
'Gilgamesh fell (they will say) in combat with terrible Huwawa'."

As expected, the reversal of Agamemnon and Achilles' roles as inextricated egos appears as the love of Gilgamesh for Enkidu. The non-ego does not threaten the ego, because both egos reside in the Third, Gilgamesh. Whereas Achilles retains his identity, moira and all, Gilgamesh relinquishes his individuality to become a relationship: king-and-friend. The demise of the non-ego buries hopes of immortality through fame, an exposé of its counterfeit existence, life-in-death. Death, in Gilgamesh, appears, not as the end of existence alone, but the end of a relationship. He'd been more than willing to brave it when the Other had been alive, to live on in the Other. The Third extricates egos so completely, as to leave no hope for immortality. In the Iliad, the Other has been thoroughly internalised, so that Achilles appears as his own spectator, choosing death, as much for himself, as for Others-in-him. Odysseus, rejecting immortality,¹¹ affirms life, through the Other (his wife), by refusing to relinquish their common, extricated humanity, their togetherness. Gilgamesh finds no Other within him. The enjoyment of life was inextricably connected with the enjoyment of Others, not in-him, but in-the-state, outside him. Yet he is the state, and as the very principle of Otherness incarnate, must, since anarchy is intolerable, wish to continue ad infinitum, as immortality denied externally, that humanity may be affirmed internally, for one never witnesses one's own death, only others do. Thus life is affirmed through the Third, as separateness, not through the Other, as togetherness.
But orientalists must sorely be missing the priest-ridden society amidst this scene of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They must, I am afraid, content themselves with the initial piety of the drama. Weary, not of this world, but of a king's misrule, his subjects raise their voices in prayer, and the gods are not deaf to their plea.

"Gilgamesh leaves not the son to his father;
Day and night are unbridled his arrogance.
Yet this is Gilgamesh, the shepherd of Uruk.
He should be our shepherd: strong, stately and wise!
Gilgamesh leaves not the maid to her mother..."

The oriental dichotomy of government-anarchy appears as life-death, while the Greek antithesis freedom-unfreedom assumes the form of life-in-death, death-in-life — he becomes otherworldly only when he's disappointed in the Third, the Greek being both-worldly at the same time. The Epic belongs to the Early Dynastic Period, between 2700 — 2400 BC, the Heroic Age of Mesopotamian literature, just as Homer (800 BC) belongs to the Late Dark Age, the Heroic Age of Greece. In both cases, a process of secularisation was taking place, to culminate soon in city-states, but in the one instance to be ruled by kings (such as Gilgamesh of Uruk), in the other to be 'ruled' by the many. The passing of the sceptre from the gods to their temporal potentates occurs at the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, a turning away from the other world.¹²
To satisfy, and silence, the clamorous demand for priests, once and for all, we shall adduce the Egyptian example, the hierocracy par excellence. The absence of hardly any evidence of personal religion during the Old Kingdom disappoints expectation. The moment anarchy reigns in the Pharaoh's stead, in the First Intermediate Period, the worst suspicions regarding the thanatomania of the East are confirmed. The universalisation of posthumous identification with Osiris, hitherto only a pharaonic prerogative, coupled with the vulgarisation of the Pyramid Texts on common coffins, signals the dispersion of sovereignty among the populace.
The Dispute of a Man, Weary of Life, a poem born of anarchic conditions, betrays a terribly disappointed reliance on the Third. It is an internal debate regarding suicide, 'to be or not to be'.

To whom can I speak today?
The gentle man has perished,
The violent man has access to everybody.

To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.

. . .     . . .     . . .

Death stands before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going outdoors again after being confined.

Death stands before me today
As a man longs to see his house,
After he has spent many years held in captivity.

. . .     . . .     . . .

Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a living god,
Inflicting punishment upon the doer of evil.

Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a man of wisdom,
Not stopped from appealing to Re when he speaks.¹³

Other variations harp on the same theme, being of the same age, The First Intermediate Period:

Men shall fashion arrows of copper, that they may beg for bread with blood. Men laugh with a laughter of disease.¹⁴

The fact that Hellas had been schooled in anarchy must not tempt us to infer an insouciant disregard for political unrest. During the Dark Ages, anarchy in the political sphere found a complementary anarchy in the spiritual, the pre-Homeric orgiastic cult of Dionysus.¹⁵ To regard the Homeric epics as a civilising passage to more settled times strains our credulity today, but they were a penultimate progression towards a secular view of existence.¹⁶ The deus ex machine of the Delphic oracle and the Eleusinian mysteries were psychic poultice during the revolt of the underprivileged against the nobles. Tellingly, it was the coincidental tyrannies¹⁷ which, as auxiliary to the aphoristic endeavours of the oracle enjoining one to 'Know thyself' and 'Be moderate', succeeded in mending the fracture sociale — the nearest approximation of Hellas to oriental despotism and piety.¹⁸ More telling was the ultimate secularisation of society under the Athenian Empire, when the gods were perceived as otiose at best, and inimical at worst.

There is no Zeus.
Young vortex reigns, and he has turned out Zeus. —(Aristophanes)

The execution of the epitome of rationality, Socrates, for impiety, startles us into recognition of the subterranean existence of religious feeling,¹⁹ proclaiming that Greece and the Near East share a dual view of life and death, without monopoly over this-worldliness or other-worldliness. A political chasm indeed there was, which contributed, and still contributes, through a belief in the superiority or inferiority of one system over another, to viewing civilisations across the gulf as decadent or dignified.

---

Notes:
¹ Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 21
² Ibid., p. 22
³ Ibid., P. 21
⁴ William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 47
⁵ John R. Baines, Egypt, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 146
⁶ S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p. 502; Jacque Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, trans. J.R.Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 150
⁷ William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9
⁸ Ibid., pp 39-41
⁹ Ibid., pp. 63, 101 – 102, 113 - 117
¹⁰ .E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 323 – 324: Two centuries divide Homer and the innovation of chattel slavery; yet, the political conditions of the Homeric period were fecund with hints of the coming bondage of the masses. Indeed, this article's central argument is that political conditions caused the psychological preparedness for the coexistence of democracy and slavery.
¹¹ The Odyssey, Book V, trans. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive
¹² V.Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, (London: Watts & Co., 1956), p. 154
¹³ Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), pp. 141-144
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 86
¹⁵ J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 194
¹⁶ John Richard Thornhill Pollard, Ancient European Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 912
¹⁷ J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 113
¹⁸ Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5^th ed. (New York: Random House, 1931), p. 116-121
¹⁹ Russell Meiggs, Classical Greco-Roman Civilisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 274

The Wicked Civilization (essay)

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View Ratings | Rate It The Wicked Civilisation By Iftekhar Sayeed (about the author)     Permalink       (Page 1 of 5 pages) OpEdNews Op Eds 5/4/2007 at 07:13:36

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The demonization of the Soviet Union came to an abrupt stop with the disappearance of the alleged demon. New allegations were immediately raised against the Muslim world, large parts of which had been partners of the west against the former Mephistopheles. Only the Muslim world posed any threat to the west – especially to America – and that, too, for good reasons, as the West knew well.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict had been there for decades, and now that the common enemy had departed, it was time for Muslims to settle old scores. So, it was not surprising that the London-based Economist newspaper devoted an entire survey to "Islam and the West" in August, 1994. "One of the commonest prophecies of the mid-1990s," opined the newspaper, "is that the Muslim world is heading for a fight with other parts of the world." No points for guessing which other parts they might be.

Why did the Economist think that Islam might go to war with the West? Not because of Israel, or the Gulf War, or the treatment meted out to the Algerian Islamists who won elections there – no, not by a long shot; but because Muslims "feel ashamed of the past few centuries" when they were humiliated by the West. That is to say, Muslims have an irrational chip on their shoulder, not any valid grounds for complaint. After all, India and China had also been humiliated, but they weren't griping against western civilization (of course, this line of reasoning undermines the Economist's thesis, but never mind).

Then comes the demonization, and on two fronts: democracy and women. This article will deal mostly with propaganda centred around the second: and the question it will raise is this – why don't western concern for women and lack of democracy extend to other civilizations?

"It is perfectly true that the condition of most Muslim women is not good," observes the newspaper. Let us concede the point that it is "perfectly true" (despite the figures I quoted from a World Bank report on health care (1993) – page 217 - in my article "The Perils of Cultural Absolutism" to the effect that Muslim women are the safest in the world, not only from others, but also from themselves: see http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_iftekhar_070320_the_perils_of_cultur.htm).

The Indian Woman

I have never read anywhere any statement of the kind that "It is perfectly true that the condition of most Indian women is not good", for instance. This may be because the condition of most Indian women is, in fact, good, or, for that matter, very good. Let's look at the facts.

The Economist quotes – inevitably – chapter and verse from the Koran: chapter 4, verse 34 ("On women"). "The hard-nosed version of verse 34 has God saying that men "have authority" over women, and that if the women cause trouble they should be beaten." Ergo, Muslim women are beaten black and blue by their men-folk.

The Economist's logic is interesting. It rests on the major premise "All people abide by the precepts of their holy books". Jesus Christ said to his followers: diligite inimicos vestros (love your enemies); ergo, all Christians have loved their enemies and never  - perish the thought – gone out of their way to make enemies. QED.

Homicide and violence take a toll of only 3.6 hundred thousand disability-adjusted life-years (compared to 4.3 for women in market economies), Chapter 4, Verse 34 notwithstanding; and the most surprising figure is that related to self-inflicted violence: women in mature economies lose 4.9 hundred thousand DALYs compared to women in the Middle East, who inflict wounds on themselves measuring up to 2.7! Indian women are safer than women in market-economies (only 2.8 hundred thousand DALYs lost), but suffer 10.8 on that scale when it comes to self-inflicted wounds. Why are Indian women so lacking in self-esteem and so depressed?

Tavleen Singh, a columnist for India Today observed (June 19, 2000, page 18): "There are other things we do not see or choose not to….So, it took an American current affairs program, Sixty Minutes, to bring out the full horror of the status of women in Indian society….I watched it in an American living room and saw, as if for the first time, the ultra-sound clinics that provide the new, scientific tools of female infanticide. No longer is it necessary, except in some remote villages, to kill new born girls by burying them alive or poisoning them because they can be killed even before they are born….More than 95% of abortions in India are of female fetuses. We accept this unquestioningly because that is the way things are in our country, just as we accept the fact that thousands of young women are burned to death every year because they do not bring enough dowry….It is again hard to blame our poverty for the ultra-sound clinics since it is mainly middle-class women who patronize them."

Of course, that is progress: from infanticide to foeticide aided by modern technology. But two questions loom: why don't the western media focus on this Indian issue? And why doesn't this happen in Muslim countries?

Female infanticide in Arabia was common when the Prophet Mohammed lived: it was the Koran that put an end to the practice, and it is still because of the Koran, modern technology notwithstanding, that female foeticide does not take place in Muslim societies. The Economist never quoted these lines:

"When the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall and the mountains are blown away; when camels big with young are left untended, and the wild beasts are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men's souls are reunited; when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain…." (81:1)

"When the birth of a girl is announced to any of them, his countenance darkens and he is filled with gloom. On account of the bad news he hides himself from men: should he put up with the shame or bury her in the earth? How ill they judge!" (16:57)  

Why India's Dalits hate Gandhi

 As for the first question, the answer is simple. There is no need to demonize India, and, indeed, every reason to applaud the country for its democracy, to which the Muslim world seems impervious. According to the Economist, the Muslim world resists democracy because – wait for it – there is no concept of Original Sin in the Koran. "The eating of the fruit is just the breaking of a rule; God ticks Adam off, and that is that. There is no Original Sin, and no acquisition of the power to tell right from wrong. But many people would argue that that power is the basis of free will….And from the concept of free will comes the idea of individual responsibility; and from that, through the curlicues of history, the practice of democracy." (Similar arguments have been made against Islam by Larry Siedentop in his book Democracy in Europe. )

When you are out to demonize a civilization, you have to make mince-meat of logic – as well as history. It was news to me that the democratic Greeks were aware of Original Sin; and the Romans until they lost that notion with the onset of Empire. As for the non-Christian democracies of the world – India, Taiwan, South Korea – they all rest on the solid foundation of Original Sin. Well, well!

Now, let us turn to the subject of democracy in India. Democracy, claims The Economist, accepts the individual as the unit of society. Does Indian democracy? No.

Consider caste struggle – the name of an article in Newsweek (July 3^rd, 2000, pages 18- 22). According to the article, "every hour, two Dalits [as untouchables are nowadays called] are assaulted, three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered and two Dalit houses are burned".  The article notes: "Unlike racial apartheid in Africa or gender discrimination in the Muslim world, casteism hasn't captured the West's attention – yet".

That "yet" was printed a long time ago. Casteism still hasn't caught the West's attention, and since apartheid has been dismantled, the West is obsessed with a supposedly misogynistic Islam.

On 21 May 2002, a high-caste family in Thinniam branded two dalits with hot iron rods and forced them to feed dried human excreta to each other. The mainstream media in India, which has almost no dalit members, ignored it, according to Siriyavan Anand in Himal, November 2000 (http://www.himalmag.com/2002/november/perspective_2.htm).

The author continues: "In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any impression on the government, media, civil society or the mainstream intelligentsia. Most newspapers and television channels did not report it and those that did, like The Hindu, ran shy of seeming scatological and referred to it as simply “a heinous incident”. This neglect led to another Thinniam." This time Sankan, a dalit, while drinking tea with a friend at a shop was attacked by six caste Hindus. He was verbally abused and beaten up, after which an off-duty constable urinated in his mouth. Why? Because he had dared to pursue his right to a piece of land of which he had been cheated.

The author recounts other episodes. "In 2001, at Prichatur, 75 km from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, caste-Hindu men paraded a dalit youth, Murugesh, in a procession and forced him to drink his own urine for 'the crime of relieving himself in the presence of the upper castes' (Deccan Chronicle 30 August 2001). Also in 2001, caste Hindu landlords from Chanaiyan-bandh village in West Champaran, Bihar, tied Dasai Manjhi, a dalit, to a pole, shaved his head and urinated in his mouth. But it was the dalit who landed in jail 'for felling the timber of his landlord' (The Times of India 11 July 2001). Lalit Yadav, a minister in the Bihar state government, held a truck driver Deenanath Baitha and cleaner Karoo Ram, dalits both, captive for over a month in June-July 2000. The minister and his cousin removed the fingernails of the driver and made him drink urine. Lalit Yadav was dropped from the ministry but remains a free man today. Again in Bihar, in September 2000, Saraswati Devi, a dalit woman was paraded naked on charges of witchcraft in Pakri-Pakohi, Karja block, Muzaffarpur district. A dozen persons tortured her and forced her to swallow human excreta. After Devi lodged a complaint, police visited the village but failed to ‘nab’ the accused."

The killing of women suspected of being witches is a frequent phenomenon in parts of eastern and central India.  In 2002, five women were killed by tribesmen, apparently on the instructions of their priest, believing they were witches. The priest told them the "witches" had caused a spate of recent deaths in the area from malaria and diarrhoea. However, women's' rights groups say that local priests, tribal chiefs or greedy relatives declare widows or divorcees witches so they can take control of their property (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2166856.stm).

And yet the man who wrote the Indian constitution was a Dalit - BR Ambedkar. In his article "Why do India's Dalits hate Gandhi?", Thomas C. Mountain makes this acrid observation: "In India, supposedly the world's largest democracy, the leadership of the rapidly growing Dalit movement have nothing good to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi. To be honest, Gandhi is actually one of the most hated Indian leaders in the hierarchy of those considered enemies of India's Dalits or "untouchables" by the leadership of India's Dalits."

Why? First of all, Gandhi was a high-caste Hindu. "High castes represent a small minority in India, some 10-15 percent of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems."

Secondly, and this is much more significant, because Gandhi opposed the idea that Dalits should have the right to elect their own leaders, as was stated in the draft constitution. He used his usual tactic to have the clause removed – the famous (in this case, infamous) Gandhian fast-unto-death: tens of  thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and it was obvious that if Gandhi died, the violence started by the apostle of nonviolence would soar. Ambedkar backed down. On his death bed, he bitterly regretted this backsliding, and said that that had been the biggest mistake of his life. "To this day, most Indians still believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalit's only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated in a high caste."

In India, therefore, the vote is not an individual, but a collective act. According to Stanley J. Tambiah: “Ethnic equalisation, rather than freedom and equality of the individual, is the principal charter of participatory democracy in many of the plural and multi-ethnic societies of our time. It has been the experience in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia....”

A biographical approach best illustrates the complex tangles of Indian politics and Indian crime. In 1981, Phoolan Devi, a Dalit woman, and her cohorts were accused of slaughtering 22 upper-caste men, who, she claimed, had gang-raped her, in the hamlet of Behmai in Uttar Pradesh. She denied the accusations, but agreed to surrender to the police in 1983 by agreeing to the 70 different counts of extortion, kidnapping and murder outstanding on condition that she spend only 8 years in jail. In the event, she spent 11 – then the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh dropped the charges, and took her into his party! She went on to become MP. According to the police, of the 85 MPs from Uttar Pradesh, at least 28 had criminal records or serious charges against them in 1997. Indira Gandhi introduced goons to politics to get votes; since then, they have gone into politics for themselves. Phoolan Devi, despite becoming MP, was brutally murdered.

Though the film that Shekhar Kapoor made on the life of Phoolan Devi – Bandit Queen – found a receptive audience in Western cultural capitals, such as Cannes, "casteism hasn't captured the West's attention – yet", to quote the earlier Newsweek article.  

In the same article, we read about how "untouchables" become "touchable" when they are dedicated to temple prostitution. Around 15,000 girls in rural areas are dedicated to divinity every year. "Somebody has to be dedicated or the goddess will be angry," explains Sister Bridget Pailey. The girls are married to god before puberty, and, after their first menstrual period, become sexual servants to the villages' upper-caste men. It's a form of sex-slavery that "hasn't captured the West's attention – yet".

Phineas Fogg and The Widow - Again

"India is set to adopt tough new laws to prevent the practice of sati, or the self-immolation by a widow on her husband's funeral pyre…." This was an Associated Press announcement that appeared in the Bangladesh Observer on 28^th January, 2006. One would have thought that such laws would be redundant today. Not so.

"While rare," continues the report, "the practice still per­sists in some areas of the country, especially in deeply traditional rural regions where widows are often shunned because of a belief they will bring had luck and trag­edy to the community." The report omitted the fact that those who commit sati – or are forced to do so by relatives and priests – become objects of veneration.

On September 4, 1987 in Deorala, a village in Rajasthan, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar burned to death on the pyre of her husband Maal Singh. Dressed in bridal finery, Roop Kanwar walked at the head of the funeral procession to the centre of the village and ascended the pyre. The family lit the pyre, aware that she was sitting on it, alive, with hundreds of onlookers watching the proceedings. Relatives fed a thousand people in honour of 'Sati Mata'.

On January 31, 2004, all the accused in four criminal cases of glorification of sati were acquitted.  They included a former minister, a former IAS officer, an advocate and the president of the Rajput Maha Sabha (http://www.countercurrents.org/gen-shukla190304.htm ).

In August 2002, Kuttu Bai, 65, burned to death on her husband's funeral pyre in a village in central India Fifteen people were arrested over the incident, which took place in Madhya Pradesh state. They faced charges of murder and conspiracy and included the woman's two grown-up sons, who apparently did nothing to stop her.

The 65-year-old woman sat calmly on the blazing pyre as 1,000 villagers, shouting their support, watched her burn. Policemen who tried to stop the ceremony say they were forced back by the angry crowd. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2180380.stm)

Twenty-five sati incidents occurred in the Bundelkand region of Uttar Pradesh in as many years. One of the cases was that of 18-year-old Javitri Devi of Jaari, a small village in Banda district. A temple to her memory was built in 1979 from the money collected in the impoverished village which, according to India Today (November 29, pages 43 - 45), "did not even have a dispensary". The temple's priest claimed that on the average around fifteen people came to pay respects, but during Navrati thousands poured in. "Several such sati mandirs and chabutaras dot the region's landscape…." After Rajasthan, it would appear that Bundelkand has the highest number of sati incidents, with three districts alone accounting for more than a dozen.

"All this is a part of our tradition and customs," observed Anil Upadhaya,  former principal of a degree college and local historian. He defended sati, and berated the government for interfering in "voluntary sati". The educated appear to find nothing repugnant in the act. The people of the area are proud to have had so many satimatas.

Politicians cash in on the practice's popularity. With an eye on the Dalit vote, a local politician demanded that people be allowed to worship the place where Charanshah died and asked the police to "stop interfering in religious faith of the people".

On November 11, 1999, Charanshah, 50, "circumambulated the lit pyre four times, folded her hands and then climbed on to it without screaming or shouting. Before we could rush to rescue her, she was burnt to ashes," said her son, Shishupal. The village turned into a scene of riotous merriment.

In August 2006, a widow, Janakrani, burnt to death on the funeral pyre of her husband Prem Narayan in Sagar district in Tuslipar village in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Senior Madhya Pradesh police official Shahid Absar told the BBC that early investigations had revealed that she had not been coerced  into performing the act (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5273336.stm).

A Different Kind Of Parental Love

In Taiwan, Lin Wen-piao mixed pesticide with yoghurt and milk, and fed the concotion to his two children before taking it himself; he had been diagnosed with cancer three days earlier. Though appalled, the Taiwanese sympathized with the 52-year-old unemployed construction worker in the southern city of Kaohsiung. This was in 2003.

"Yet some health experts viewed the deaths as part of a trend. While Taiwan is seeing a rise in family suicide-homicides, such tragedies stopped being oddities long ago in other parts of Asia, notably Japan," notes Associated Press reporter Annie Huang  (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/08/world/main587450.shtml).  

Between 1993 and 2003, 78 family suicides were reported in Taiwan. Mental illness plays a role, but more important are long-held East Asian beliefs about parental roles and duties.

In September 2001, a wealthy couple in the central county of Changhua had a large incinerator installed in their villa. They removed their slippers, arranging them neatly outside the incinerator door; they left a note complaining about Taiwan's political instability and expressing a wish to "leave this ugly world behind". Police found ashes and bone fragments from the couple's three children, ages 19 to 24, next to the incinerator. The badly burned bodies of the parents were found inside the furnace.

"Many of our parents consider children their own property or subordinates," says Wang Yu-min, an executive at Taiwan's Children Welfare Association. "They will live and die together with the children. It is a different way of showing parental love than in the West."

Mafumi Usui, professor of psychology at Niigata Seiryo University in Japan, notes that Japan has a long history of family suicides, and they are too frequent to make major headlines. So frequent, indeed, that Japan has phrases for them: "Ikka shinju" is when an entire family commits suicide; when a parent kills the children before killing himself, it's called "muri shinju."

Despite democracy appearing in many Asian countries, family suicides are persistent remnants of age-old traditions that required absolute obedience to parents or superiors.

"In Taiwan, adults have learned to fight for their self-interests when their own rights are invaded, but few children stand up to confront their abusive parents," said Wang.

Through Western Eyes

So far, we have seen that the Koran is not the cause of lack of democratic practice or disregard for the individual or of wife-beating. Other cultures – admittedly without any concept of Original Sin – have values and practices that the West should find, to put it mildly, bizarre. But we have seen that these practices haven't "captured the West's attention – yet".

But what about the West? How does the western world regard women and democratic practice in the West itself?  And while answering these questions, we must keep in mind the incontestable fact that we are talking about people endowed with the ability to tell right from wrong, unlike the rest of mankind, people who have known Original Sin.

The first thing to note is that western women do not suffer any harm through war – they are at the delivering, not the receiving, end of the missile.

A UNIFEM report has it that " The economic cost of violence against women is considerable — a 2003 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceed US$5.8 billion per year: US$4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care services, while productivity losses account for nearly US$1.8 billion."

In peaceful Geneva, Switzerland, a randomly selected study of nearly 1,200 ninth-grade students revealed that 20 per cent of girls had experienced at least one incident of physical sexual abuse (http://www.unifem.org/gender_issues/violence_against_women/facts_figures.php).  

According to The Care Center (www.teencarecenter.org ):

• Of rape victims who reported the offense to law enforcement, about 40% were

under the age of 18, and 15% were younger than 12.

• Of 1,000 representative female students at a large urban university, over half

had experienced some form of unwanted sex. Twelve percent of these acts

were perpetrated by casual dates and 43% by steady dating partners.

• Female adolescents are frequent victims of sexual assault and rape. The

incidence of rape in the United States peaks among young women 16 to 19

years of age. The reported incidence of rape and sexual assault reflects a

fraction of the actual frequency of this crime. The National Victim Center

estimates that almost 700,000 women are raped each year, and that 61% of the

victims are under the age of 18.

• Female adolescents are at high risk for becoming victims of acquaintance rape

or “date rape.” Studies have shown that the highest incidence of acquaintance

rape occurred in grade 12 and during the freshman year of college. Of the

25% of college women surveyed who reported having had unwanted sexual

intercourse, 84% knew their assailant, 57% of the episodes occurred on dates,

and 41% of the women stated that they were virgins at the time of the assault.

Again, this is probably an underestimation of the true incidence of date rape

Alcohol a factor:

• It is estimated that approximately one-half of assault cases involve alcohol

consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Moreover, while alcohol

consumption and sexual assault frequently co-occur, this phenomenon does

not prove that alcohol use causes sexual assault. Rather, alcohol contributes to

sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating existing risk

factors. For example, the desire to commit sexual violence may actually cause

alcohol consumption in that a male perpetrator drinks alcohol before

committing a sexual assault in order to justify his behavior. Whereas, among

college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual

exploitation of women.

Date rape drugs:

• Date rape drugs or drug-facilitated sexual assault causes sedation and amnesia

to the extent that a potential victim cannot resist or may not be aware of the

assault. In fact, about 25% of the women who contacted the Canadian Sexual

Assault Center reported that drugs were a factor in a rape. The most

commonly reported drugs in addition to alcohol to facilitate sexual assault are

flunitrazepam and gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), which is now touted as

a new recreational ‘club drug’.

Long term effects:

• Victims of marital or date rape are 11 times more likely to be clinically depressed, and 6 times more likely to experience social phobia than are non-victims. Psychological problems are still evident in cases as long as 15 years after the assault.

That's not a pretty picture for any society, especially one that claims to be the universal conscience, with the ability to tell right from wrong. Why should a society that respects women as individuals, unlike (remember) Muslim society, why should such a society present such awful statistics?

I will let Andrea Dworkin speak on the subject of western man's perception of western woman.

"The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-supremacist society, the skin of white women is supposed to indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then, does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want. The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin. She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her price a little higher. (http://www.voxygen.net/cpa/speeches/dworkintxt.htm)"

What Andrea Dworkin had to say about women being objectified in western society cannot be easily denied: and one does not have to go as far as pornography to see it. Advertisements routinely use women; there are women's pageants still; the diversity of lingerie that western, consumer society has dreamt up – and which is almost totally missing in a place like Bangladesh – can leave little room for doubt that women are meant to be gazed on – consumed - by men; I may not agree entirely with Andrea Dworkin, but she, and others like her, have a way of looking at western society in terms of which The Economist would thoroughly disapprove.

And, above all, her thesis explains the violence against women we have seen itemised by the Teen Care Center:  "….among college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual exploitation of women." The large number of women raped on the campuses of American universities should give pause for thought as to what values are transmitted to young people, especially given the fact that most of the rapes are not reported; almost as if, there is an expectation of rape.

The Not-So-Great Republic

As for democratic practice, that fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a second expert opinion is all I shall offer in this lengthy article: that of Howard Zinn.

“We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

“We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

“And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Indeed, seven paragraphs in his article are devoted to articulating how president after president lied to the nation about going to war. (http://progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806)."

It has been estimated that the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945 (index.php-context=viewArticle&code=WAD20070128&articleId=4610).

Today, it is easy to explain why the West obsesses over the demonization of the Muslim world – even where other civilizations exhibit the pathologies that are supposed to be peculiar (if they are at all real) to Islam. That no criticism of Indian democracy will be undertaken by the western media in its usual blitz of propaganda can be taken for a certainty now that India is America's ally; but this blindness to the shortcomings of Indian society and civilization, as measured by a western yardstick, antedates the recent love affair with India.

After the Cold War, and well before 9/11, the West knew that the Muslim world would now turn its attention to domestic concerns. The propaganda machine began to work overtime – and one result of this frenzied activity was the incoherent survey of Islam and the West served up, for instance, by the Economist. Propaganda, as all good propagandists know, need not be coherent: just persuasive and repetitive.

And Socrates has long ago told us that democracies are better at rhetoric than logic.