The Age of Looting

The Age of Looting
A friend of mine, Amal Alayan, sent out an email about (can we do anything about Iraqs looted museum treasures?) which triggered in my head the following responses, and which i like to share with you. I wrote:

you (i.e. Amal) are always after some worthy cause to tackle, where you put your energy. It is beautiful! The world would have collapsed without people looking for what needs to be done outside personal or money gain.

Reading your email made my imagination wonder few centuries back. If you think about it, what characterized the past 500 years (the age of progress and later development) was looting. We can even refer to it as the age of looting and stealing. It started by stealing and looting three continents, wiping out almost totally their indigenous populations, and stealing totally their resources. Stealing resources and land, however, is not effective if not accompanied by stealing the history and the memory of those whose resources and lands were stolen. The occasion of stealing both the lands and the histories is still celebrated in these three continents as acts of independence, democracy and freedom! In many places, hardly any trace is left of the previous peoples and civilizations. And where they could not be wiped out totally, physically and psychologically, they were portrayed as savage and barbaric to justify the crimes. Within this perspective, showing some lunatics stealing the museum in Baghdad (probably were even encouraged to do so) is very important for the invaders. I remember in 1967, the fourth or fifth day of occupation, how some Israeli soldiers brought some kids and pulled the door open by a military tank of a watch seller (Jildeh Shop on the main street in Ramallah, across from where we lived). and took pictures of them stealing!!

Stealing resources and histories has been the dominant pattern since Columbus. Protecting the Oil Ministry while allowing the looting of the history museum exemplifies, very strikingly, this pattern: stealing resources and history at the same time, in complementary fashion!

Stealing land and history was not enough. People from another continent were stolen and transferred to work as slaves. In addition, peoples of two continents were colonized and their resources were stolen. They still are. Trucks daily carrying logs of precious trees in the Cameroon to be shipped to Europe and the US are one example of continuing this looting.

The looting went on to take the form of stealing treasures from other countries with the claim that locals cant take care of them. Visit the British museum and think of Egypt, for example! After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, stealing of treasures from all kinds of places has never stopped. The case of Jifna, near Ramallah, is just one example.

In the 20th century, stealing was extended to reach the future of children. A statement entitled Fifty Years Are Enough issued in 1995 by All Africa Council of Churches (on the occasion of fifty years for the establishment of the World Bank and IMF). exemplifies this very well: Every child in Africa is born with financial burden which a lifetimes work can not repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as viscous as the slave trade.. The stealing trend was extended further to reach even children in the developed world. Children in the US are being robbed of their childhood through being perceived as consumers, mainly of junk everything, but also through competing for symbols created by institutions and professionals for the sole benefit of those institutions and professionals. Winning, control, and greed have no limit and no regard for anyone, even for ones own children.

I think what you are trying to do, Amal, is noble and needs to be done. What I am trying to say here is try to put it within the bigger picture of the logic that have been dominating the world for a long time, and which will continue if we keep tackling the symptoms. The challenges is: How do we tackle the deeper issues: the dominant logic, values, and style of living?

For me, a most crucial question is: where and how do I, in my daily living, embody the logic, values and style of living that i see as the basis of the catastrophic trends we witness today? It is self-defeating to criticize the dominant logic in others and fail to heal from it in my daily dealing with others. A fundamental challenge today is to relate to others constructively and to keep the dialogue going with other people, especially with our enemies, because nothing less than our humanity and its survival are at stake. This requires living with logics and values that are different from dominant ones and that are more respectful of human beings and of nature.

Adopting the logic of control, winning, greed and moving along one path (claimed to be the universal path for progress and development) is what we need to heal from. Unplugging ourselves from the patterns of consumption, mainly of junk (whether it takes the form of food, entertainment, or education) is crucial in this healing. If we demonstrate in the streets only against injustice and oppression and war, but fail to demonstrate how we can live and relate to one another according to different logics and values, we go on being the carriers of the disease we claim to be fighting against.

Stealing the memory of peoples is probably the most serious and also the one that can do something about. The way Milan Kundera put it, The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. It is crucial in regaining our humanity and reversing the logic that seems to have programmed the world for destruction. Thus, what we witnessed in terms of what tanks and warplanes have done is nothing compared to the harm that is being designed and which is about to be implemented in the name of development and reconstruction, to be executed mainly by professionals and institutions in various fields: education, health, finance and development. It is disgusting to watch professionals and groups lining up competing over money. Living as parasites on the misery of others is incomprehensible! To realize what institutions can do in wiping out cultures and histories, one has just to remember the residential schools, where the various institutions - political, educational, religious, financial, and the police/ military (whenever it was necessary) - collaborated in the US, Canada and Australia in order to wipe out what was left of the cultures, histories and memories of the indigenous peoples.

If we focus on trying to retrieve the contents of the museum of history in Baghdad without trying to retrieve our memory about what has been happening during the past 500 years, we will continue to witness looting peoples resources, treasures and memories. To see the looting in Baghdad but fail to see the looting of five continents (and more recently the dumping of nuclear and chemical waste in three of them) is self-defeating. This does not mean doing nothing.

We can differ about what really happened but we are sure at least about two major and opposing trends in the world today: the amazing level and sophistication of deception which institutions have reached and are capable of and, on the other hand, the level of awareness that peoples around the world have also reached. For millions of people to go out on the same day into the streets in more than 600 major cities around the world, not in support of a charismatic leader or an inspiring ideology but rather to say enough, bas, or basta, to the logic of destruction that will benefit no one but greedy corporations, marks a new and very hopeful phase in human history.


Munir Fasheh
Director, Arab Education Forum