War as destruction: a British soldier stands in the ruins of a French town during World War I. Photo by National Library of Scotland via Flickr.

In 1997 Martin Amis wrote in the New York Times that the end of the Cold War was likely to inaugurate “uninteresting times”. I myself have heard this assertion on a number of occasions from peers and elders alike. It suggests we have passed into a period of historical stasis without precedent. Of course, there are problems with this analysis. Who can say with any confidence that world history has come to any sort of “end”? Further, how has the world’s present condition led people to even consider such an absurd claim as legitimate?

A major dilemma facing modern societies is not that we are lacking in historical events, but that we often feel remote from them. Television and the Internet confront us with a constant stream of information that conflates the significant with the mundane, giving the unsteady course of history the appearance of a spectator sport, commonly euphemised as “current events”.

One cannot avoid the omnipresence of war in human history. War and the preparation for it has often been the basis for extremely influential changes in social organisation. The Napoleonic Wars for instance, pushed millions of conscripts across the plains of Europe to foreign lands where they suddenly found themselves in a position to decide the fate of their homeland in small ways that became significant on a wide scale. War provided an opportunity to find one’s place in History, to join the quests for national and personal self-realisation.

In observing the Napoleonic Wars, Carl von Clausewitz remarked that when states permitted themselves to engage in scorched earth campaigns, they risked exposing themselves to total destruction by a retaliating enemy. For violence to be “productive” it had to be contained. This concept can be traced in the changing status of war throughout the twentieth century.

The changing status of war

While we can debate whether or not atomic bombs alone brought an end to the Second World War, we can be sure that they were responsible for starting the next one. Nevertheless, this war would be as unprecedented as the weapons released above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1948, American President Harry S. Truman gathered his advisers to discuss the moral and political implications of atomic weaponry. “We have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that”, he said, asking that his advisers recognise that the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could someday be those of any American city.

Meanwhile, a concerned Stalin had ordered the creation of a Soviet bomb. Although he displayed a disturbingly cavalier attitude in interviews, Stalin secretly worried the Russian people would chase him from power if he involved the Soviet Union in another conflict, adding that atomic weapons “can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world”. He knew that the atomic bomb was practically unusable.

Even after Truman’s departure from office and Stalin’s death, neither side lost sight of the possibility of mutual destruction. The closest they would come to attacking one another would be during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It forced all involved to acknowledge the apocalyptic consequences of war between the United States and the Soviet Union.  The conflict was thus named the Cold War, for both sides would never meet in direct combat. Instead they relied on the creation of spheres of influence from which they engaged one another in psychological warfare and proxy conflicts.

By the time the threat of nuclear annihilation began to disappear from the public consciousness in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, wars had a completely different character. America’s war in Vietnam was fought primarily by soldiers who belonged to working class or minority backgrounds. Although the involvement of the upper classes wars had always been more “comfortable” in comparison to that of their less fortunate compatriots, it was becoming clear that their place would have even less to do with leading at the front and more with the tricky, often bureaucratic business of slaughter management.

War as slaughter management

Did war become invisible? Not exactly – you could now watch it on television. Yet on-screen violence, protected from critical evaluation by that devious alliance of plastic and distance, has a way of becoming as dull and innocuous as the pale blue light that carries it.

This gradual disappearance and sterilisation of violence was not without its detractors. There were those who claimed to stand for action, progress, and revolution. While many hoped to achieve these peacefully, others did not. Enter the terrorist. Mao Zedong once argued that there are only two kinds of death, that which is light as a feather and that which is as heavy as a mountain; only by dying for a people or a cause could death, and thus life, have any meaning.

It was with this same conviction that terrorist groups sprung to action. The terrorist opposes himself to what he perceives as the conformity and complacency of the mainstream. An eternal chameleon, he imbibes the angst of his age, its ideas, its methods, its technologies, only to turn them against each other. He lives by a messianic creed, believing that an end to history lies just over the horizon, that his violence will be absolved by God’s love or the advent of a utopian future.

The idea that we are living in uninteresting times is a dangerous one, for it equates historical significance with violent conflict. It neglects peaceful struggles for economic, gender, and racial equality as well as the never-ending – probably doomed – quest for psychological fulfillment on a mass and individual scale. The struggle for peace is without end, and it is for that reason that we will always be living in “interesting” or significant times. Boredom is surrender.

The red city of Bologna, Italy. Photo by Curious Expeditions via Flickr.

Parallel universes have always fascinated me. They exist all around us, as the potential for another world, another possible future. On a cold March evening I stumble across yet another one at a bar in central Bologna. There is not enough room inside so we sit outside with a group of local students. They begin to tell stories about their parents’ lives, and soon some of the older regulars begin to elbow their way into the conversation. The focus quickly shifts from stories of harmless pranks to epic decade-long political dramas. Bologna – I am told – is the “Red City”, the centre of Italy’s leftist student movement. How much of this is true, I cannot be sure, but their account is convincing.

Bologna’s Piazza di Porta Ravegnana: once the centre of an upheaval. Photo by bibliothequedetoulouse via Flickr.

One young man begins to tell me the story of Francesco Lorusso, who was only 25 years old when he was shot dead in the midst of a student demonstration in 1977. The two days following his death were marked by violent clashes between students and Italian security forces, featuring Molotov cocktail assaults by the former and tank blockades by the latter.

Another student interrupts this story to tell me about one of his professors. The professor in question claims to have been a member of a radical leftist “brotherhood” in his twenties. They shared everything; money, clothes, food, even lovers. “What does he think of all that now?” I ask, careful not to show any hint of wistfulness. “He’s put it all behind him,” the student says regretfully. “He knows why things went wrong, that failure was inevitable. Still,” adds the student almost immediately, “you know he wishes he was still in those times; he gets that look in his eyes like he’s still back there facing the cops with stones in his hands.”

The world in which these ideals of unity and liberation were possible never ends. It persists invisibly, parallel to our present, in monuments and stories dedicated to fallen heroes and defeated monsters, as well as our own imaginations.

Walking back to a friend’s apartment later that night I make a brief stop under one of Bologna’s ubiquitous porticos to leaf through my copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the first few pages Kundera asks his reader to reflect on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return, in which the universe and everything in it is finite. Consequently, every moment of our lives has already occurred, and will occur again ad infinitum. It is in this manner that our lives, or being, acquire weight. Kundera comes to take an opposing stance: that each person has only one life to live and will only live it once. In this way our lives possesses a fundamental “lightness”, and only by accepting the absurdity of life can we begin to approach happiness.

Convinced as I am by Kundera’s contention that every moment is unique and experienced only once, the night’s conversations make me wonder if there might not be another kind of heaviness, one that does not render all our endeavours absurd and meaningless. This question spurs me to reread another book: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Dick’s novel imagines a world in which the Axis powers have won World War II: the Nazis control the East Coast of America, while the Japanese occupy the West. In the neutral territory between these two regions lives a reclusive writer whose latest work describes a completely different world in which the Allies have won the war. Late in the book, it is revealed that this may in fact be the true reality, and that the Axis-dominated world is nothing but a fiction. This revelation is doubly disruptive, first because it means that the novel’s characters have lived their lives in accordance with a delusion, and second because they must contend with the moral implications of conforming to such a fiction. Only when the better world, the world without Nazi or Japanese occupation, is determined to be real, are they forced to grapple with their responsibility in accepting the conditions of fascist domination.

Dick’s novel suggests to us how events can possess an infinite potential. In this vein I would argue that while each event may occur only once, rather than recurring eternally, there remain parallel universes for every moment. There are worlds beyond ours in which our better instincts are applied more fruitfully and others where they are reduced to ashes. We must not take this to mean that we should resurrect now-defunct twentieth-century ideologies that once enticed young people with promises of worldwide liberation and equality. It simply means that we must remain conscious of the historical, political, and philosophical meaning with which our surroundings are will forever be imbued.

Pauline Fredrick as Potiphar’s Wife Over A Crystal Ball: just because she can see it doesn’t mean she understands it. Photo by The Library of Congress via Flickr.

Welcome to the Happiness Factory 

We are in the Shanghai Coca-Cola factory. The woman is wearing a beige suit. After correcting some wrinkles around the lapels she takes her place behind a red podium. Everything comes down to numbers. She tells us how many millions live in Shanghai, how many millions have cell phones, and finally, how many million consume Coca-Cola products. Millions, millions, millions.

There are Coca-Cola banners everywhere, reminding us that we are in one of the world’s “happiness factories”. Happiness: the theme is ubiquitous. It can be found, we are told, at the bottom of one of these glass bottles. I grew up to see Coke as the symbol of gross overconsumption. Here, however, all appears simple, clean, and efficient. One sip and your thirst is quenched.

The woman in the beige suit begins to talk to us about China’s changing economic situation. Within five minutes she is telling us about the end of China’s Five-Year plan. “We operate in a community. Only the community can survive, to keep the companies alive. What about our consumer? 80% of consumers care about environmental issues. 83% are willing to pay higher prices. We must also empower the community to grow so that we may grow as well. For instance, Coke will empower women with opportunities, so they can become a major force in the country.” Is this the humanitarianism of the future, obviously and unapologetically motivated by the thirst for profit?

Anatomy of the prophet

We can learn much about the society we inhabit from its utopian fantasies. These are often the offspring of theories concocted by philosophers who wish to improve the world so that it may better accommodate their ideals. Nonetheless, this is not enough for one to become the “prophet” of an age. In biblical times, a prophet was thought to have been drawn into contact with the divine to do more than promote a vision of salvation. They were sent to speak the truth about mankind, as unpopular as it may be. Some spoke a truth so resonant that it would stay relevant for generations, even centuries to come. Of all those who could be considered prophets of our age, Henri de Saint-Simon exhibits a formidable prescience.

Although Saint-Simon was born to family of French aristocrats, his name would come to signify a school of thought far removed from the feudal system and military values his ancestors stood for. Rather, he would devote his life to the promotion of a technocracy sustained by a strict meritocracy; it was not enough to reform society from the inside, for we needed a completely different society. Having been imprisoned for counter-revolutionary activities during the French Revolution, Saint-Simon also knew the risks posed by violent revolution. His revolution would not be accomplished by the guillotine but by industrialisation and science.

Saint-Simon and his followers did not perceive “petit” capitalists as exploiters of labour, owners of capital, or accumulators of profit on a continuous rise through the ranks of the bourgeoisie.  Much to the contrary, it was the aristocracy that exploited both workers and small capitalists with rent payments and interest, hindering productivity and perpetuating widespread deprivation and suffering amongst both classes. Hence, according to Saint-Simon, the small capitalists and workers shared an interest in the expansion of credit and association, permitting workers to open their own cooperative workshops while the industrialists increased their production.

All this, believed Saint-Simon, could be done in a system governed by a creative and industrious elite. Like the businesswoman in the Coca Cola factory, Saint-Simon believed that society should be organised around the interests of industrialists and scientists, whose drive for efficiency and technological progress would eventually eliminate poverty and suffering. This philosophy would come to be known as “technocracy”.

The Present

With the fall of Communism came a new chapter in the history of politics, one that redefined the very nature of governance. The privatisation of numerous national industries during the 1980s and 1990s, the deregulation of the financial sector during the 1990s and early 2000s, the hope invested in scientific solutions for climate change, the generalised faith in the infallibility of the free market only recently shaken – but not completely broken – by the 2008 financial crisis, and the immense trust currently vested in doctors and scientists all point to a technocratisation of Western political systems.

Reform is expected to come from the top, whether by lobbying government elites, or through the advocacy and activism of intellectuals and journalists. When mass movements like the Occupy Wall Street protests do occur they rarely invoke the need for violent revolution or complete social upheaval. Governance has become synonymous with management. Moreover, the failure of popular protest campaigns like the Occupy Movement and its allies – even in the midst of an unprecedented growth in income inequality –  demonstrates the continued power of private over public interests.

A Prophecy Reconsidered

Yet, if a prophet’s purpose is to describe the truth of the human experience, he must possess a full understanding of its flaws. Despite the insights of his philosophy, Saint-Simon does not. Technocracy does not bring about social harmony or ensure moral integrity any more than the dictatorship of the proletariat. In its strict scientific approach to History, technocracy, like Marxism, assumes that human life can be led to a point at which moral dilemmas become obsolete. The ultimate aim is to produce a society so inherently efficient and virtuous that we are released from moral responsibility. Saint-Simon pined for freedom without understanding it. We cannot achieve emancipation.  We can only pursue it. Only responsibility propels us forward.

With past in the forefront of our minds, can violence be reconciled? Photo by sarihuella via Flickr.

The poor are nothing if not an imposition. A beggar’s cries are a reckoning that confronts those around him with their own hypocrisy and impotence. One might wish they would simply vanish from the face of the Earth, for all the trouble they cause. For what is one to do about poverty and suffering? First of all, how much can we say that the mere sight of poverty disturbs us? In the age of 24-hour news, scenes of unbearable suffering have become commonplace, accompanying our family dinners and internet searches the way smooth jazz used to compliment one’s ride in the lift up to work. Speaking to a poor person and seeing one are two different things. The latter is simply a mundane component of any downtown stroll. Speaking to one, on the other hand, means looking the sum total of our moral failures in the face.

The poor are not the only group that can have this effect. The dispossessed and trod-upon of History also present a burden for the conscience. What is most dangerous is when this guilt becomes resentment. Christos Tsiolkas provides a clear portrait of this phenomenon in his novel Dead Europe. At first the novel is centered on Isaac, the Australian-born son of Greek immigrants, now returning to Europe for an exhibition of his photography. A secondary plot is suddenly introduced. Narrated in the third person, it takes place in Isaac’s ancestral village, where members of his family perpetrate a terrible crime against a Jewish boy. The two narratives are doomed to intersect. Without knowing about these events, Isaac seems to both anticipate and fear this inevitable confrontation. He considers himself a liberal, proud never to have lapsed back into the anti-Semitic prejudices once voiced by his mother and father. Yet, the further he travels, the more hatred he begins to direct at Jews and their history. Their memories pose a threat; they are a reminder of what he might share with his family’s bigotry and its cruel subtext. This internal conflict comes to a head when Isaac goes to visit the Jewish Museum of Venice. Forbidden to take photographs by the museum’s mutilated caretaker, Isaac hears himself shouting an anti-Semitic cry that he had been longing to let out “since the beginning of time”.

How can we avoid giving way to bigoted resentment when it comes to remembering the victims of oppression? I am reminded of a story told by Pierre Sergent at the end of Je Ne Regrette Rien, his history of a French Foreign Legion regiment and its participation in the wars in Indochina and Algeria. At the end, one of its members awaits execution in a French prison for his participation in an anti-government insurrection. Wondering what the man’s last thoughts may have been, Sergent decides it is best to leave it a secret:

“It was a man’s secret, and men are rare. Families, nations, civilizations, and even regiments can die. They come, they go, and none of this has any real importance. But to see a man die, that is always tragic.”

I am convinced that his words grasped another fundamental truth. Few live with the honour and dignity they once imagined they would possess, and to see those individuals with truly heroic qualities fall victim to the inexorable ebb and flow of the societies that created them is truly tragic.

Perhaps the search for heroic figures is the best place to begin a rehabilitation of historical memory. For instance, while the woes visited upon Africa and Africans by Western imperialism are very real, it is imperative that we do not reduce the black experience to one of inescapable victimhood. Doing so means relegating Africa, Africans and all the members of the African Diaspora to the backburner of history. In the words of Aimé Césaire we need to find a form of discourse that will free the world of the “European habit… of denying [Africans] the right of initiative that is the fundamental right of having [their] own personality”.

Instead of identifying one group as victims and another as oppressors, we can begin to conceive of History as an inherently tragic affair, in which every civilisation is founded upon the abuse of some by others. We should thus celebrate the individuals who rebel against it, successfully and less so. Individuals are not completely defined by their being Jewish, black, gay, or right or left wing. They are all involved in their own personal struggles, and as such possess a singular value.

We must look to individual destinies, not just as something we need to remember for its own sake, but as models of virtuous action, the kind that can and should be emulated in moments of historical crisis, no matter whom they befall. Simone Weil is the epitome of such a model. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Paris, Weil quickly garnered a reputation for her altruistic tendencies. In an oft-cited anecdote she once gave up sugar at age six because she heard soldiers were going without it on the front of World War I. As an adult Weil became a political activist for workers’ groups, once leaving her comfortable post as a teacher to work incognito in factories as a means of expressing solidarity with workers facing unemployment and wage cuts. She then went to fight in the Spanish Civil War as a member of an anarchist militia.

Yet Weil is most remembered for the way she died.

Living in exile in Britain during World War II, Weil resolved only to eat as much as the occupying Germans allowed her French compatriots. Her health deteriorated and she died in August 1943 in Ashford, Kent.

In studying the life of Simone Weil and others like her, the point is not to lament her passing as another life wasted by the onslaught of extremism and intolerance. Rather, we should seek to emulate her virtues. The point is not to absorb guilt because we are told we should. We must take responsibility for our actions to preserve our own freedom and to endow our feeling for the oppressed with an authenticity only an alert conscience can provide.

A gacaca court in process. Photo by Elisa Finocchiaro via Flickr.

A traditional medium for dispute resolution, gacaca courts have become one of the principal means of prosecuting the 40,000 prisoners accused of taking part in the massacre of Tutsis over the course of one hundred days in 1994. Instead of being moderated by judges, these courts are presided over by elected community members with basic judicial training. Today, there exist at least 12,000 gacaca courts, employing 250,000 judges, or Inyangamugayo.

A deep-seated yearning for closure is one of the central motivating factors behind the gacaca initiative. Unable to determine how, where or by whom their loved ones where killed, many Rwandans find it difficult to move on. Meeting about once a week, these courts are intended to act as forums for reconciliation rather than revenge. According to the Rwandan government, gacaca courts fulfil three functions: “The collection of information relating to the genocide, the categorization of persons prosecuted for having committed genocide or having played a role in different genocidal crimes, and the trial of cases falling under their competence.”

To facilitate this process, gacaca courts abide by a very specific set of procedures. Firstly, those convicted by the gacaca courts are convicted of crimes against humanity. Proceedings take place in public and the defendant can choose either to confess his crimes or contend that he is innocent. Moreover, community members who knew the defendants’ victims or survived his aggressions can choose to confront him in court. Others can also provide evidence in favour of the defendant if they feel that the charges are false or exaggerated. Although gacaca courts cannot sentence someone to death, they have the power to condemn defendants to a life sentence.

Many aid organisations have praised the gacaca system’s ability to speed up court cases and reduce prison congestion. Thanks to the gacaca system, the Rwandan government has now released over 1,400 prisoners, requiring them to do community service in lieu of jail time. Perhaps the most important component of the local gacacas is public participation in adjudication efforts. By encouraging frank public dialogue about the genocide between neighbours, the system promotes the standardisation of moral codes and principles of justice and punishment at a grassroots level.

Yet the success of gacaca courts in achieving both their practical and political aims remains controversial. Many human rights groups, like Human Rights Watch, are concerned about the absence of lawyers in gacaca courts. After all, according to The Guardian’s Jeevan Vasagar, 20% of those tried in gacaca courts have been acquitted, implying that many cases are based on groundless accusations. The risk of an unfair trial is only accentuated by the unreliability of memory in conjunction with the lack of legal representation.

Worse, those who partake in the gacaca system either as witnesses or in an official capacity can become targets of violence. According to a report by a Rwandan human rights organisation, at least 40 gacaca witnesses were victims of murder or attempted murder in the second half of 2006, demonstrating a severe rise in reprisals over the years; there is also evidence that many of these attacks go unreported. In some cases, entire communities have refused to testify for fear of putting themselves and their loved ones in danger. Overall, public participation in the gacaca system has been on the decline, due to various factors including the growing perception that gacaca judges are corrupt and the fact that many gacaca judges were implicated in the genocide themselves.

Most crucially, gacaca courts have failed to provide reconciliation for the people of Rwanda. Many Hutus have begun to question the effectiveness of gacaca courts due to the Rwandan government’s unwillingness to investigate crimes committed by the RPA against Hutu civilians; contrary to a nuanced re-evaluation of a traumatic event, this suggests a projection of collective guilt onto the Hutu population. Thus the gacaca system has facilitated the creation of two absolute archetypes, that of the victim and the criminal. In one document released by the National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions justifying the use of gacaca courts, the Rwandan government posits their purpose as providing an avenue through which Rwandans can “work together in order to judge those who participated in the genocide, identify the victims and rehabilitate the innocent”. At first glance, this may seem benign. But when analysed in conjunction with the obfuscation of RPA war crimes, such a statement may appear to Hutus as an empty promise, or, at worst, a euphemism for the ascription of collective blame.

We must ask ourselves a difficult question: is it responsible to encourage the institution of collective memory? From the streets of Jerusalem to the schoolyards of Belfast, from the icy forests of Bosnia to the humid hills of Rwanda, the past has become the most dangerous of weapons. Of course, the past never leaves us. It is the foundation of the present and the cast of our future. Nevertheless, assertions of collective memory are fundamentally baseless. People remember events as individuals, through the hazy lens of their own steadily decaying memories. Therefore, any analysis of history, legal or otherwise, requires a thorough and balanced investigation, endowed with significant checks on the subjective thirst for vengeance.

Still, it is not clear whether there is an alternative to the gacaca system. For this reason, the Rwandan government should concede the importance of mourning and local participation in the adjudication process without endorsing a particular narrative of remembrance; they could begin, for instance, by allowing gacaca courts to investigate RPA war crimes. Though noble in theory, the sanctification of a particular historical narrative may only result in the attribution of guilt to one portion of society, culminating in the perpetuation of social division and conflict.

Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”: the epitome of Norman Mailer’s hipster. Photo by twm1340 via Flickr.

Though victorious, the Americans who had survived the Second World War entered the 1950s a traumatised generation. They fled the cities for suburban houses bought on credit, flanked by big red cars, the symbol of a new order in which all their desires and aspirations were, or soon would be, within reach.

One of the most interesting dissections of this process is Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro”, published in the Summer 1957 issue of Dissent Magazine. The essay presents a genealogy of conformity in American society, followed by a detailed description of its antithesis: the “hipster” or “white Negro”.

An era of conformity

The essay begins where William Faulkner’s acceptance speech at the 1950 Nobel Prize Banquet left off. How could one live freely and creatively in a world where any ‘problems of the spirit’ had been displaced by the more visceral fear of mass destruction?

The twentieth century’s struggles between nations and ideas reduced individuals to their most basic, statistical form, leaving them to die in dank trenches, concentration camps, and irradiated cities.

Hence Mailer’s argument that although the Allied victory in the Second World War should have preserved individual liberty in the Western world, it in fact ushered in a new era of extreme conformity. The world wars confronted people with the notion that distinguishing oneself from the masses meant putting a price on one’s head. For the most part, the remnants of radical elites quietly melted back into mainstream society.

Portrait of the Hipster as an Outlaw

The hipster, as understood by Mailer in the mid-twentieth century, refuses submission to these anxieties. In fact, he can only function on the fringes of society, for he defines himself in opposition to any notion of collective responsibility. He is “rarely an artist,” and “never a writer”, but more likely “a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village”. He is his only engagement.

This lifestyle is only new to the white hipster, a persona which emerged in the West after the world wars. For America’s blacks, the vigorous pursuit of personal meaning meant risking one’s life. Yet Mailer’s white hipsters would adopt the vernacular and tastes of black Americans, jazz being the most notable of these, thereby initiating a radical detachment from conventional society; hence the “white Negro”.

Liberation Through Violence

Perhaps most controversially, Mailer defines the hipster as a psychopath. However, it is important to note the simple distinction between a psychotic and a psychopath: a psychotic is legally insane, whereas the psychopath is not. His psychopathy articulates itself in the quest for instant gratification, notably regards to sex and violence.

A hipster lives for the orgasm, and spends his time attempting to achieve the next, most intense one imaginable. Mailer argues that this pursuit can translate itself into a penchant for violence, his ultimate clash with American society.

If a hipster murders, contends Mailer, it is to convince himself of his own courage and vitality. Any reasonable reader would likely condemn this assertion as absurd. Mailer explains himself by providing the example of an old store clerk’s murder by two youths. While he concedes that the murder itself is senseless and does not require any great physical effort on the part of the culprits, it requires some form of courage because one murders not only an old clerk but the presumed sanctity of private property, propelling oneself into conflict with the police and society’s conception of justice.

Nevertheless, for all Mailer’s attempts at situating the hipster within the context of post-world war trauma, this persona exists across socio-historical boundaries. There will always be individuals ready to seek liberation and self-gratification through violence rather than submit to rigid societal mores. However, all this aggression can only ever serve to reveal a larger, systematic cycle of violence.

Take, for instance, the increasing number of “rage killings” in the United States since the 1980s. A staggering number of these were staged under the pretence of rebellion against a conformist, intolerant society. When Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris massacred their classmates at Columbine High School in 1999, it was an entire culture they sought to defy and expose for its inherent violence and superficiality.

Whether those targeted are truly guilty of intolerance and violence or not, aggressive action against them by alienated individuals like Klebold and Harris never really detaches itself from the system it deplores. Instead, it reinforces it by demonstrating the derangement of its opponents, who unfairly condemn their neighbours to mutilation or death. We can never achieve true liberation from the tyranny of bigoted conventions at the expense of our fellows.

The Hipster Tamed

Despite its chequered history, the word “hipster” today denotes little more than an eccentric bourgeois consumer. Those who share more than just the hipster’s penchant for rejecting convention are now more likely to do so in the context of global commerce and marketing.

While Mailer once imagined the rise of a hipster elite of 100,000 “politicians, professional soldiers, newspaper columnists, entertainers, artists, jazz musicians, promiscuous homosexuals, and half the executives of Hollywood, television, and advertising”, challenging societal conventions through the rebellion of the psychopathic white negro, such a class is nowhere to be found.

Few of today’s intellectuals seriously consider the possibility of a future beyond globalised capitalism. As for direct action to undermine the current state of affairs, it is limited in scope and largely unsustainable, or ignored by the elites – as demonstrated by the failure of the Occupy Movement. Bold aesthetics have taken the place of substantive action, while a generalised obsession with careers slowly eats away at our courage to oppose prejudice and conformity, whether for others or ourselves.

Dedan Kimathi Waciuri’s Statue, Kimathi Street, Nairobi. Photo by Pompeychucks via Flickr.

Following the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, a newly independent Kenya, led by its “founding father” Jomo Kenyatta, wrestled with the question of how best to foster a sense of Kenyan identity. Kenyatta’s government, chaffing under the pressure of its economic and diplomatic needs, took care not to offend the sensibilities of Britain and the white settlers who remained within its borders. The official Kenyan account of the Mau Mau rebellion depicted Mau Mau veterans as “hooligans” who had no place in Kenyan politics. Consequently, the many Kenyans who identified themselves with the struggle for freedom from imperial rule embodied by the Mau Mau found themselves disenfranchised, without a satisfactory historical narrative to endow their lives with meaning.

Reacting against this climate of despondency fostered by the West’s monopoly on historical truth in regards to the Mau Mau rebellion, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae-Mugo wrote The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. Drawn from historical material and filtered through their imaginations, the play seeks to illustrate and extol the virtues of Kenya’s collective will. For this reason, one cannot analyse the play’s effectiveness in terms of accuracy. Rather, one must understand this, and all other historical narratives, as agents of power.

Kenya’s historians, politicians, and writers were “too busy spewing out, elaborating, and trying to document the same old colonial myths,” writes wa Thiong’o; “why not a play on these neglected heroes and heroines of the Kenyan masses?” As their subject, the authors chose Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi, leader of the Mau Mau, whose trial and execution in 1957 caused a sensation on both sides. By crafting a story granting the Kenyan people a definitive narrative of resistance, wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo would produce an alternative to the state-sanctioned memory. The play would imaginatively reconstruct the history of the Mau Mau uprising, “envisioning the world of the Mau Mau and Kimathi in terms of the peasants’ and workers’ struggle”. The play aimed to serve as an “interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan workers and peasants”.

How could a “creative reimagining” of history, wishing to interpret the collective will of “the people” claim to provide a historically correct account of a complex political conflict? A successful play, he says in the preface, lays the whole truth before the audience, including the mistakes and weaknesses of its protagonists. Nonetheless, it will inevitably side with “the people” and their cause. Therefore, in the words of wa Thiong’o, an accurate depiction of any historical event means depicting the masses “positively, heroically and as the true makers of history”.

In a number of scenes, the authors expose their audience to the darker side of the Mau Mau insurrection. When Kimathi’s forces capture a group of soldiers belonging to the King’s African Rifles, he shows them no mercy; Kimathi orders that they be shot in the forest as an example to other potential traitors. Later, during Kimathi’s trial, an enraged white settler confronts Kimathi about the suffering inflicted on him by the Mau Mau. “I had a wife and daughter, where are they now?” asks the settler in a sardonic growl; “killed, burned, maimed,” is his horrifying answer.

Still, wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo justify these exhibitions of Mau Mau cruelty as historical necessities. After so many years of exploitation at the hands of imperialism, resistance could only end in violence. In the words of Dedan Kimathi, “when the hunted has truly learnt to hunt the hunter, then the hunting game will be no more”.

Finally, it is important to recognize that historical accuracy has little relevance to the play’s objectives. wa Thiong’o and Githae-Mugo understand that knowledge is never impartial, always influenced by the needs of those in power.

The sublimation of the Mau Mau in post-independence Kenyan society is a prime example of this phenomenon; by bombarding the Kenyan people with an anti-Mau Mau perspective, Kenyatta’s government successfully marginalized Mau Mau sympathizers. Only a radical shift can undermine this power structure. Colonized people could only achieve true freedom with the birth of an entirely new world order, one in which they were no longer the subjects of empires, but citizens of their own nations. This utopian desire for absolute freedom from the past requires total revolution against the source of colonial oppression, a process marked less by compromise than violence.

It is precisely this kind of revolution that we see enacted by the Mau Mau. Parallel to this historical event, wa Thiong’o initiates a quieter revolution, one imbued with its own implicit violence. At first, a revolution fought with paper and ink may appear as an ineffective –perhaps, even cowardly- imitation of real social change. Yet, one cannot ignore the power of knowledge. By endowing the peasants with their own narrative, wa Thiong’o’s play acts as a bulwark against the political marginalization of Mau Mau sympathizers. In the preface to the play, wa Thiong’o explains that writing The Trial of Dedan Kimathi caused him to realize that Dedan Kimathi “was still a hero of the Kenyan masses”.  Here, wa Thiong’o follows the same logic applied by Howard Zinn in his A People’s History of the United States. People, according to Zinn, should not accept the conditions of official state histories. States will never be more than artificial communities, whose official histories conceal barbarism in the name of strategic interests. Like Zinn, wa Thiong’o chooses to lift this veil. Less a balanced account of a historical event than an exercise in populist myth-making, wa Thiong’o offers a total rejection of the then-dominant historical narrative.

Kikuyu tribal man. Photo by Retnaw Snellac via Flickr

Few films spur the level of ferocious historical, political, and philosophical debate elicited by the 1966 Italian “shockumentary” Africa Addio. Africa Addio depicts scenes of brutal violence among “primitive” peoples, both real and staged, under the pretense of legitimate ethnographic study. Preposterous as this may sound, the film anchors itself in conventional assumptions of its time. Passing itself off as a dispassionate examination of postcolonial African malaise, the film begins by showing the viewer an independence ceremony in an unnamed African country. What follows is little else than a morbid catalogue of massacres and tortures; this is the real Africa, shouts the film’s notorious tagline, where “black is beautiful, black is ugly, black is brutal!”

Unfortunately, this sort of patronizing discourse remains ingrained in the minds of many Westerners. Western views of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion stand as a testament to the terrible consequences of this mentality. Framed by both sides of the conflict as a struggle for peace and security, it led to some of the worst human rights abuses of the twentieth century. Although it set the stage for Kenya’s independence in 1963, the conflict divided native Kenyans and left thousands killed, maimed and traumatized. However, many war crimes perpetrated during the conflict were neither resolved nor avenged. The conflict also never underwent a thorough examination, leaving harrowing memories to fester in the minds of survivors for years to come.  

Instead of Africans acquiring greater agency by way of constitutional change, Kenya’s European settlers continued to dominate the country economically and politically well into the 1950s. In the 1950s rural violence escalated and eventually consolidated into the Mau Mau movement. Most Mau Mau fighters belonged to the impoverished Kikuyu ethnic group. The Mau Mau then launched a redoubtable guerrilla campaign that terrorized their opponents, and a ruthless British counterinsurgency campaign ensued. Entire communities soon found themselves besieged by indiscriminate search-and-arrest tactics that often resulted in death, imprisonment, and torture.

Only time can wash away the scars of civil war. Nevertheless, the victims of the Mau Mau conflict continue to seek peace. Viktor Frankl, a world-renowned psychologist and Holocaust survivor, proposed that the last –and most fundamental- of the human freedoms is the ability “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. Choosing one’s own attitude is first and foremost a question of narrative; therein lies the essence of dignity.

Kenyans siding with the Mau Mau could not express their own narrative. Part of the problem laid with the Mau Mau themselves. Firstly, the Mau Mau did not actively seek diplomatic contacts outside of Kenya, allowing the British to dominate the conflict’s news coverage and later its historiography. For this reason, the outside world perceived the Mau Mau as atavistic terrorists, driven mad with bloodlust. In the eyes of the West, the Mau Mau were less a revolutionary movement to be understood and negotiated with than a disease to be eradicated.  The ruthlessness of Mau Mau guerilla tactics compounded this problem by providing more than enough fuel for the British government’s Manichean discourse, in which they described Mau Mau members torturing and mutilating civilians.

In the eyes of most people, no cause can justify such ghastly violence. How could the British stand idly by as Africans subjected each other to the worst excesses of human cruelty? The truth, however, was much more complicated. Both sides carried out acts of unspeakable violence; civilians of all races suffered immensely until the conflict’s termination in 1960. It would be just as obscene to rank the suffering of these groups as to suggest that the carnage sown by the Mau Mau invalidates its supporters’ wish for a more even-handed representation in history. Their wish remained ungratified until 2010 when Kenya finally recognized members of the Mau Mau as freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives for an independent Kenya. Prior to this, the Kenyan government refused to acknowledge the Mau Mau’s contribution to independence. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s “founding father”, began this policy of forgetfulness. The Mau Mau were, by his account, a disease “which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again”.

One can understand Kenyatta’s attitude better by considering Kenya at the time of his election. Kenyatta’s goal as leader was, first and foremost, to prevent Kenya from succumbing to civil unrest. In a speech made less than a year after independence, Kenyatta implored his countrymen to “never refer to the past,” so that Kenyans might unite in all their “utterances and activities, in concern for the reconstruction of our country and the vitality of Kenya’s future”. 

At that time, Kenya was in a precarious situation. Former Mau Mau lived next door to loyalist Kenyans who, in some cases, had been personally involved in the conflict. Those Kenyans who had been loyal to the British reaped the benefits, living in comparative luxury next to their former adversaries. Furthermore, many British remained in Kenya after independence, where they continued to lead privileged lives.Demands for vengeance abounded, and only Kenyatta, having once faced imprisonment for anticolonial activities, possessed the moral legitimacy to contain the anger.

Kenyatta’s decision to remain a political moderate posed another problem for the construction of a Mau Mau historiography. Even during the conflict, Kenyatta presented himself in opposition to the Mau Mau movement, deeming their guerilla tactics objectionable. After independence, Kenyatta sought to marginalize Mau Mau sympathizers. For instance, when Mau Mau veterans demanded that the Kenyan government return the land that the British had confiscated from them during the conflict, Kenyatta refused, telling them “nothing is free”. Later, Kenyatta would go on to criticize calls for compensation from former Mau Mau as illegitimate. “We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya,” proclaimed Kenyatta while addressing a crowd in the town of Kiambu. Those ex-Mau Mau who continued to speak out were eventually imprisoned.

Kenyatta wanted more than just the creation of a firm Kenyan national identity. In order to win their political and economic support he needed to dispel the fears of the British and the white settler population.. Shortly before decolonization, Kenyatta addressed his toughest audience: the fiercely anti-independence white settler population. “I have suffered imprisonment and detention, but that is gone and I am not going to remember it,” he began, to the relief of his apprehensive white audience. “We want you to stay and farm well in this country: that is the policy of this government,” he concluded. When Kenyatta reached the end of his speech, the whites joined him in chanting his favorite slogan: “Let’s All Pull Together.” Thus a collective amnesia was born that would take years to undo. Yet, some Kenyans continued to fight for the ability to publicly articulate their own narrative, wielding language and memory rather than guns.

The Negative Confession. Photo by Martin de Bourmont.

Two events marked August 24, 2012 as a day worth remembering. The first is the sentencing of Anders Breivik by a Norwegian court. The second was the release of a short book in praise of Breivik’s hostility towards “extra-European” immigration by the French novelist Richard Millet.

I had first seen Millet on television, explaining with characteristic haughtiness his discomfort at being the only white male in a Parisian metro car. When I discovered his status as a celebrated writer I decided to see exactly what kind of work such a paranoid mind could produce.

To my great surprise, I found many of his books rather stimulating. Although most dissect the decline of Siom, his native village, Millet has written many books on other subjects, including travel, war, and the troubled French education system. The novel that most piqued my interest was The Negative Confession. Oozing with a grandiloquent fury common only to the loneliest of men, it tells of the year Millet spent fighting alongside the Christian Phalangists during the Lebanese Civil War. What most intrigued me was a blunt excerpt from the back cover:

“I had to kill men back then, as well as women, the elderly, and maybe children.”

Millet’s words become even bolder as one enters deeper into the text:

“I loved the explosion of violence, the moment of infinite silence before it begins, the moment when things take hold…”

“What honesty!” I told myself. Who else would be so quick to admit not only their solidarity with the “wrong side of history,” but their fondness for days amongst despicable people, even if their presence required indiscriminate murder among other inconveniences. Another admirable feature of Millet’s book is his candour in regards to his motivations. In one excerpt he notes that he knew absolutely nothing of the war prior to his arrival in Lebanon:

“I was not interested in any cause, not even the one of which I seemed to be a partisan.”

Nor does he pretend to care very much for the war’s historical and political origins:

“I cared little for the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Israelis, the Muslims, and the Druze; if something enthralled me it was the sound of weapons, as I was persuaded that war and writing were sisters.”

He wanted an adventure, to gather material for a novel.  At no point did I detect any indication of moral purpose. Despite my appreciation for Millet’s impenitent nihilism, I had another goal in mind when I finally decided to buy the book. I wanted to see how a man like Millet, so unapologetic in his racism and xenophobia, behaves in among people of different cultures.

Perhaps I will be disappointed. After all, Millet goes to Lebanon to fight beside other Christians.  Even so, I told myself, there must be one passage where we interacts with Muslims or some other vastly foreign group. If so, did he treat them with grudging respect? Or does he show nothing but contempt? Or will there be something more natural; perhaps a spontaneous friendship facilitated by a few drinks, a jolly meal, or, at the very least, a humorous exchange of pornographic magazines.

I think something deeper, more complex than racism inhabits men like Millet. At one point, he begins to elucidate his opinion of Palestinians:

“Laying my life down meant nothing under these circumstances; I had as little respect for the Palestinians as I did for the Romas or the Native Americans, but I did not hate them; that is why I could kill them. I was born into this distance, this resentment, and what I saw in Beirut did little to convince me that things could change; on the contrary, my indifference towards these vanquished peoples originated less in my childhood than in my disgust for humanity as a whole. In the end, I abhorred all peoples. Killing was simultaneously banal and exalting, in short, fastidious; we participated backward in a universal beauty made of sound and fury, especially at night.”

What should we make of this passage? Are these words nothing more than the musings of an adolescent psychopath? Maybe. As horrifying as this text may be, it becomes quite enlightening in context. They key to understanding Millet’s odd mentality finally arrives in another provocative paragraph:

“Different races must stay where they belong; their blending will, at least on a large scale, be an abomination or a suicide. The entire world cannot become America,’ used to say Mme Malrieu, one of the wisest people I have had the luck of meeting, someone who loved humanity, who respected different races and religions, but who would have been horrified to see Europe invaded by what she would have called the new barbarians only thirty years after her death, to see these indigenous people become conquering barbarians themselves, to see mosques and Buddhist temples and other sectarian buildings rise up in the cities of Christian countries.”

Based on these two paragraphs, I believe that Millet’s attempt to distance himself from the assumptions of his childhood is deeply misguided. What are Mme Malrieu’s views but the purest embodiment of the kind of “distance” that defined Millet’s childhood? This signifies a point of view far removed from typical expressions of racism. In fact, I am tempted to suggest that this might not have been racism at all. I emphasize the “have been” for an important reason. Racism evolves just like any other ideology. What was once unworthy of such a qualification suddenly becomes so as a result of historical change. We must remember that people once lived in a closed world, one locked up and gated away not only by borders, but by the tyranny of monolingualism, the high cost of airfare, and finally, the drapes of a seemingly unshakable Iron Curtain. Moreover, the world was still recovering from two world wars and the violent last throes of colonialism, all of which demonstrated the bloody consequences of culture clash. Thus, it is conceivable that many people – like Mme Malrieu- were fascinated by the diversity of the world around them, without wishing to confront it face to face.

Needless to say, we live in a very different world. It was only fifteen years ago that my brand of cosmopolitanism –that of the globe-trotting dual citizen, and therefore, the perpetual foreigner- became so mundane. With the advent of globalization, people were expected –and needed- to accept foreigners with open arms. This was the inevitable, as well as the most desirable turn of events. Yet, this demand for tolerance has grown increasingly controversial in the context of widespread financial decline and global terrorism. Even so, I would argue that Westerners are much more understanding of foreigners than ever before.

Millet belongs to a dying breed, one which can simultaneously claim to respect, or remain indifferent, to other cultures while expressing a visceral disgust at the very thought of large-scale immigration. This is precisely where one can find the source of Millet’s bombast. Like many of those unfortunate to enough to be the last of their kind, Millet considers his solitude a sign of righteousness.