Said on Conrad- part 2

In his book 'Culture & Imperialism', Edward Said wrote-  

Conrad is the precursor of the Western views of the Third World

Western views, like Eastern views, were and are shaped by newspapers, newsreels, magazine articles and, to a lesser extent, popular fiction & light entertainment.  The term "third world" was coined by a  French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy in 1952. It referred to the growth of a non-aligned group of countries- some of which were ex-colonies or territories soon to become independent- in the context of the Cold War- something not envisaged in Conrad's fiction. 

One might say that Kipling's Kim- showing Afghans & Bengalis & British officers cooperating against a Russian threat- was a precursor of 'great game' Cold War espionage with a backdrop of vast deserts or forests or mountains. Conrad's 'the Secret Agent' could be seen as a precursor to the Counter-intelligence novel set in the dingier districts of the metropole. What was lacking in either was the notion that the first and second 'Worlds' would find it worthwhile to offer Aid, rather than exact tribute, from the countries of Asia, Africa, or- stretching things a little- Latin America. 

I suppose real world developments in the run-up to the Great War were reflected in John Buchan's novels & Maugham's Ashenden stories which highlight the need to combat an enemy Superpower's foreign network of secret agents who coordinate seemingly spontaneous 'indigenous' uprisings for some sinister purpose. Maugham was an intelligence operative during the Great War. In the interwar years, there was in fact a Comintern conspiracy as well as 'White' networks seeking to undermine the Soviet Union and to combat the influence of its sympathizers and fellow travellers. The outbreak of the Second World War meant that the previously isolationist United States started to acquire considerable knowledge of different theatres- India, Indo-China, the MENA etc- but the approach to knowledge acquisition involved statistical analysis & strategies based on 'Structural Causal Models'. The people doing this did not draw upon stereotypes in popular fiction or the manner in which they were modified in texts of a more self-consciously literary or 'modernist' type. However, some money was spent on tracking the views of indigenous intelligentsias. But this was an exercise in Sociology & Political Science. It had nothing to do with reading Conrad to understand Congo or reading Joyce so as to glean insights into the aetiology of the decline of leprechaun influence within the ranks of Sinn Fein. 

which one finds in the work of novelists as different as Graham Greene,

Greene was profoundly influenced by Conrad, who died five years before Greene's first novel was published, though he had no 'views on the Third World'. Conrad may have started off with the belief that Whites would inevitably rule over Darkies. Then, in 1905, Japan defeated Russia. Britain had ended its 'splendid isolation' by allying with Japan 3 years earlier. Why? The Royal Navy was overstretched. During the Great War, Japan had taken over a lot of the functions of the Royal Navy- even in the Mediterranean. Conrad, as a sailor, knew that if the 'West' lost naval hegemony, then there could be no Imperialism in Africa or Asia. Greene took this as axiomatic. He has zero interest in preserving a zombie Empire. 

By the time Conrad died, Egypt, Ireland & Afghanistan were independent. Would the Labour Party (which had come to power in 1924) honour its manifesto commitment re. India? No. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered two years previously. Indian politicians had participated in the General Election & taken their seats in the Legislature.  The Brits would dictate the pace & scope of the transfer of power because Indians could not agree among themselves. The same problem reappeared in the Arab lands. Africa too needed a further spell of 'State-building' before tribal loyalties were replaced by something more favourable to national self-determination.

 The League of Nations had made it clear that the eventual goal was full independence for all territory taken from defeated Empires. The Colonial powers held temporary 'mandates'- nothing more. Imperialism was dead in the water because the age of Emperors had passed, never to return- though the Japs may have thought differently for a few years before being nuked into submission. 

V. S. Naipaul,

whose politics were the opposite of Greene's. He liked Thatcher, Greene hated her. Naipaul's attitude to the Third World is like that of Nirad Chaudhuri. However, as a novelist, he was influenced by Conrad because his themes were social isolation, disillusionment & the fact that everything had gone to the dogs or wogs or whatever. 

and Robert Stone,

a light weight.  

of theoreticians of imperialism like Hannah Arendt,

not a theoretician. She knew nothing of the subject & was, in any case, as stupid as shit.  

and of travel writers, filmmakers, and polemicists whose specialty is to deliver the non-European world either for analysis and judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences.

Brothels & opium dens? Neither feature in Conrad. He was a sailor at a time when the Brits were still very interested in the Sea.  

For if it is true that Conrad ironically sees the imperialism of the San Tome silver mine's British and American owners as ·doomed by its own pretentious and impossible ambitions,

Nonsense! The country has been independent for three generations. The mine-owner is of English descent and supports the current Dictator. Sadly, there is the danger of a military coup conducted by some other General. It may lead to the secession of one or more Province.  The mine-owner plans to ship away all the silver and blow up the mine so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. This shows he was a deeply silly man. Conrad had sufficient literary artistry to make the character credible- at least to such of his readers as neither knew, nor cared, about how business is actually conducted. 

it is also true that he writes as a man whose Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations.

The mine-owner may be of English descent but he is a citizen of an independent Republic. Is Colombia 'Western' or not? Its elite looked & acted like 'pure blooded' gentlemen. Some may have had some 'native' blood- but this was also true of members of the British aristocracy. The current Prince of Wales had an Indian maternal ancestor from about five or six generations ago. On the other hand, he is also descended from Count Dracula- which is super cool. 

All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West,

He can't see that because he was actually there and it wasn't. The place was politically unstable because its people were volatile. I suppose you could say the secession of Panama had something to do with the US but that isn't Conrad's theme.  

in which every opposition to the West only confirms the West's wicked power.

Either the place is part of the West or the West was absent from that place. The Spanish had been thrown out three or four generations previously.  

What Conrad cannot see is an alternative to this cruel tautology.

Like what? The country deciding to stop being Hispanic and start being Tibetan? 

He could neither understand that India, Africa, and South America also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the gringo imperialists

There are no gringo imperialists in Conrad. On the other hand, it is true that Viceroy Curzon was actually Billy the Kid. The Kabaka of Buganda, on the other hand, was Annie Oakley. Said's father was brutally raped by Doc Holliday- Sheriff of Jerusalem- and was impressed into the American army to go conquer Germany for the gringos.  

and reformers of this world, nor allow himself to believe that anti-imperialist independence movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of the puppet masters in London or Washington.

There was some German money available for the Indian Independence movement at a later date. Washington, at that time, was small and provincial. The Federal budget was paltry. The American Foreign Service was only created in 1924.

As for London, it didn't want 'independence movements' anywhere- even the Continent- because of Balance of Power concerns. 

Said is an utterly ignorant shithead.  

These crucial limitations in vision are as much a part of Nostromo as its characters and plot.

Nostromo is a working class Italian immigrant. We wonder whether he might not have achieved great things in a more egalitarian setup. Conrad disillusions us. The guy is just as much a crook as the aristos.  

Conrad's novel embodies the same paternalistic arrogance of imperialism that it mocks in characters like Gould and Holroyd.

Holroyd is not paternal. He is distant- a calculating machine. Gould is a romantic idealist but understands that the country will only prosper if 'material interests' dictate policy- not paranoid notions of returning to the purity of some previous revolution or the other. Neither are 'imperialist'. There is no point fighting rebels or bandits in the interior. You can always do a deal with whichever revolutionary or liberal or conservative shithead happens to grab in power. 

Conrad seems to be saying, "We Westerners will decide who is a good native or a bad, because all natives. have sufficient existence by virtue of our recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think, and when they rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters."

If this were the case, Conrad could point to a good or a bad native. But he doesn't do so. Gould was born in the country. Is he a native? Nostromo is an Italian expat. Is the good? No. Is the story any good? Not really. The thing is silly. Businessmen should hedge risks. They shouldn't do stupid shit- e.g. think of blowing up a mine or trust some I-talian dude with a shitload of Silver. Conrad gets away with this shite because maybe he is being philosophical or psychological in some profound manner connected to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or some other such unclean Continental poof, poseur or pervert. 

This is in effect' what Americans have felt about their southern neighbors: that independence is to be wished for them so long as it is the kind of independence we approve of.

It is what everybody feels about their wishes for everybody else. We hope they get what they want provided it is the sort of thing we approve of.  

Anything else 'is unacceptable and, worse, unthinkable.

Says a guy who can't fucking think because he studied and taught worthless shite.  

It is no paradox, therefore, that Conrad was both anti-imperialist and imperialist,

as well as being a cat and a dog and a golliwog 

progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary when it came to conceding that Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or culture, which the imperialists violently· disturbed but by which they were ultimately defeated.

Conrad, like Greene, preferred the backdrop to be seedy, if not shitty, so as dwell upon the seediness, or shittiness, of the protagonist.  

Yet lest we think patronizingly of Conrad as the creature of his own time, we had better note that recent attitudes in Washington and. among most Western policymakers and intellectuals show little advance over his views.

The good thing about America is that Washington & 'intellectuals' don't matter. Will the Hunt brothers corner the silver market? Would this entail some privately funded shenanigans in a key 'swing' silver producing country? That's the sort of thing smart people make good money finding out. 'Material interests' do matter. In between saying 'boo to Fascism!' or 'Fuck you, Whitey!' we have bills to pay.  

What Conrad discerned as the futility latent in imperialist philanthropy

because if London sends wheat to starving Ireland or rice to starving Bengal, that would be totes futile right?  

- whose intentions include such ideas as "making the world safe for democracy''-

Like defeating Hitler? That was futile- right? The French would have preferred being ruled by the Gestapo.  

the United States government is still unable to perceive, as it tries to  implement its wishes all over the globe, especially in the Middle East.

Clinton should have let Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. He was wrong to try to make them give up East Jerusalem & the West Bank.  

At least Conrad had the courage to see that no such schemes ever succeed

The Brits won the Boer War & gained much profit & geopolitical advantage from the place for the next sixty years.  

because they trap the planners in more illusions of omnipotence and misleading self-satisfaction (as in Vietnam),

if you have a stupid plan you do stupid shit till the cost becomes unbearable.  

and because by their very nature they falsify the evidence.

You can't falsify a fiscal deficit.  

All this is worth bearing in mind if Nostromo is to be read with some attention to its massive strengths and inherent limitations.

It is a novel which people at the time thought rather good.  

The newly independent state of Sulaco that emerges at the end of the novel is only a smaller, more tightly controlled and intolerant version of the larger state from which it has seceded and has now come to displace in wealth and importance.

This could be said of the Dutch Republic or, indeed, the United States. But why bother saying it? You may say, 'but disabled Lesbians of colour did not marry goats in either Amsterdam or New York! Is that not a fundamental betrayal of some shite or the other?'  But, the riposte is that the scotomization of the catachresis of sodomized subalterns in Singur re-problematises the merging of hermeneutic horizons posited by the very deconstruction of the catachresis of its own mise en abyme as differance.  Either that or the other way round. 

Conrad allows the reader to see that imperialism is a system.

British readers knew that Imperialism was the system overseen by the Secretary of State for India & the Colonial Office. Conrad had nothing to do with either.  

Life in one subordinate realm of experience is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant realm.

Nonsense! Writers about the Empire- Kipling, Buchan etc- showed that there was only a very tenuous connection between the two. Conrad too shows that stuff believed by blue-stockings in London or New York, bore no relation to reality anywhere. Similarly, Said's vapourings were unconnected to anything happening on the 'Arab street'. The exception was his 'faux bond' with Derrida which led directly to the third Intifada.  

But the reverse is true, too, as experience in the dominant society comes to depend uncritically on natives and their territories perceived as in need of Ia mission civiJisatn'ce.

Very true. Oscar Wilde's experience of the rectum of a Cockney rent-boy depended uncritically on the British mission to the Cannibal Isles (modern day Fiji). It was a mistake to put Lord Sandwich in charge. A better choice would have been Lord Marmite. That stuff tastes like shit. 

However it is read, Nostromo offers a profoundly unforgiving view, and it has quite literally enabled the equally severe view of Western imperialist illusions in Graham Greene's The Quiet American

Greene was a Catholic & thus would have supported the Dictator who took power in the year his book came out. In a sense, he was prescient. Kennedy bumped off that Catholic fanatic to placate the Buddhist majority. 

or V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the. River,

Which is about how fucking horrible Africans are. Naipaul, as a rural Indian Trinidadian, resented the more urbane Afro-Caribbeans.  

novels with very different agendas.

Which had nothing to do with Imperialism. Greene was aware that his people were fighting the Commies in Malaya at that time.  

Few readers today, after Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, would disagree that it is precisely the fervent innocence of Greene's Pyle

He isn't innocent at all. He is a CIA agent handing out plastic explosives for car bombs- an excuse for a coup. What Greene doesn't seem to have grasped was that the Catholic PM had American support but was hated by the French. That's why he was able to take power (once the Americans made it clear they would not financially support a pro-French general) after the departing French overplayed their hand. 

I suppose Said hadn't read Greene's book. He had seen the film where the American turns out to be wholly innocent. The Brit had believed otherwise so as to get rid of a rival in love.

or Naipaul's Father Huismans, men for whom the native can be educated into "our" civilization, that turns out to produce the murder, subversion, and endless instability of" primitive" societies.

Naipaul had been educated into the same fucking civilization as Said. His mother tongue was Hindi as Said's was Arabic.  

A similar anger pervades films like Oliver Stone's Salvador, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Constantin Costa-Gavras's Missing, in which unscrupulous CIA operatives and power mad officers manipulate natives and well-intentioned Americans alike.

Greene was a direct ancestor of that stripe of shite. Lots of his books- including 'Quiet American' (though with the denouement reversed) were Naipaul had nothing to do with it.  

Yet all these works, which are so indebted to Conrad's anti-imperialist irony in Nostromo;

There is no Imperialism in it. One might say that Somerset Maugham's Ashenden influenced Greene & that Greene influenced le Carre. It must be said, Greene's 'The Human Factor' is the cream of that particular crop.

Imperialist espionage is John Buchan & Lawrence van der Post & so forth. 

argue that the source of the world's significant action and life is in the West, whose representatives seem at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon a mind-deadened Third World.

Its academics may do so. Its representatives have to be more careful. The first US Foreign Service  to be killed while on active duty was Robert Whitney Imbrie. He was killed, probably on orders of the man who would become the first Shah, in 1924 in Teheran. The excuse was that the mob thought he was a Ba'hai! American diplomacy in Iran has now come full circle. Trump has taken out the Supreme Guide and a lot of his henchmen. 

In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history, or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.

Nobody holds this view save some ignorant academics from Cairo or Delhi or Teheran.  

And when there is something to be described it is, following Conrad, unutterably corrupt,

like Tammany Hall? 

degenerate, irredeemable.

Chinatown- starring Jack Nicholson.  

But whereas Conrad wrote Nostromo during a period of Europe's largely uncontested imperialist enthusiasm,

Because of the Monroe doctrine, there was no fucking enthusiasm for adventures in Latin America.  

contemporary novelists and filmmakers who have learned his ironies so well have done their work after decolonization, after the massive intellectual, moral, and imaginative overhaul and deconstruction of Western representation of the non-Western world, after the work of Frantz Fanon,

whose native Martinique chose to remain with France. Since he didn't know Arabic, he could say nothing of Algeria.  

Amflcar Cabral,

who may have been read by some Portuguese people. He was irrelevant because the Portuguese Empire- like Portugal itself- was utterly shit.  

C.L.R. James,

okay on cricket but otherwise silly. Minty Alley was a fucking embarrassment. Say what you like about VS Nightfall, Biswas has a decent enough house.  

Walter Rodney,

 killed by his own people. Everyone's a fucking critic. 

after the -novels and plays of Chinua Achebe,

novels. Wole Soyinka wrote the plays. 

Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garda Marquez,

Shoba De, Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh 

and many others. Thus Conrad has passed along his residual imperialist propensities,

he had none. The guy was against the Tzarist Empire though he understood that the Kaisers & Hapsburgs had to go too if Poland was to be independent. By the time he died, he understood that Communism too was a threat.  

although his heirs scarcely have an excuse to justify the often subtle and unreflecting bias of their work.

Rushdie keeps trying to annex Nigeria. Wole Soyinka retaliates by attacking Baluchistan.  

This is not just a matter of Westerners who do not have enough sympathy for or comprehension of foreign cultures-- since there are, after all, some artists and intellectuals who have, in effect, crossed to the other side- Jean Genet,

Homosexuality was legal in France. If he crossed over to the other side, he might become subject to Sharia law.  

Basil Davidson,

well liked by journalistic circles in Africa. Was he a spy? Perhaps. But for which side? 

Alben Memmi,

a Zionist. Maybe Said didn't know this. He didn't actually read very much. It made his brain hurt.  

Juan Goytisolo,

a major figure. He doesn't belong with the others. If you really want a critique of Western Imperialism, this is a guy you could start with.  

and others.

Said himself?

What is perhaps more relevant is the political willingness to take seriously the alternatives to imperialism, among them the existence of other cultures and societies.

Why take imaginary alternatives seriously? True, Mrs Thatcher could have raped General Galtieri & then rented out his rectum to Arthur Scargil and Ayatollah Khomeini, but how relevant to our current predicament is the political willingness to take seriously the possibility that the Supreme Guide of Iran might now be safely alive inside the colon of an elderly Argentine military officer?  

Whether one believes that Conrad's extraordinary fiction confirms habitual Western suspicions about Latin America, Africa, and Asia,

Only a fool would believe a fiction confirms a belief already established by facts- e.g. the ones Conrad observed when he worked in that region.  

or ·whether one sees in novels like Nostromo and Great Expectations the lineaments of an astonishingly durable imperial worldview,

 Only a cretin would so. There is no Imperialism in either. Pip gets a windfall. Who is it from? A pirate or a convict or some other such disreputable person. What matters is that it isn't from the Prince of Persia or the Japanese Mikado or some other glamorous or romantic source.  

capable of warping the perspectives of reader and author equally: both those ways of reading the real alternatives seem outdated. The world today does not exist as a spectacle about which we can be either pessimistic or optimistic, about which our "texts" can be either ingenious or boring.

Nonsense! There are good books about people from different classes or countries coming together to create new technologies which can create 'abundance' & reverse climate change etc.  

All such attitudes involve the deployment of power and interests.

None do. You can have any attitude you like. Mine is that of a teen-age Vampire Slayer. 

To the extent that we see Conrad both criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time,

He didn't know it & certainly didn't try to criticize it.  

to that extent we can characterize our own present attitudes: the projection, or the refusal, of the wish to dominate, the capacity to damn, or the energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions, histories.

In other words, we can't do shit because Conrad didn't do the thing Said said he did.  

The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans,

Very true. I recall bumping into Mrs Thatcher at the Finchley Road Marks & Spencer in 1977. She was very alarmed that Work Houses no longer existed. I suggested she become Prime Minister & revive that admirable institution. She phoned me five tears later. Was it true, she asked, that sailing ships no longer cross the Atlantic to Argentina. I confirmed this was the case. The world has changed since the days of Joseph Conrad, Prime Minister. She was greatly surprised and alarmed. That is why she sank the Belgrano.  

who now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard.

Sadly, Enoch Powell's tales of White ladies being terrorized by jiggaboos had fallen on deaf ears. Still, we all laughed heartily when Rushdie's 'narratives' caused Pakistanis in England to bay for his blood.  

The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time,

making money not teaching worthless shite 

thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to

make money not teach worthless shite 

miss what is essential about the world in the past century.

if you miss out on making money you know nothing about what is essential in the real world. 

Edward Said wrong on Joseph Conrad- part 1

What happens to men when they live away from women? If they do so on board ships regulated by the Law of the Sea- which, after all, is Mother before it is Mistress- you are safe enough. But what happens if you become a land pirate and reap the fruit of your inequity far away from Davy Jones' locker? That were, indeed, a horror of horrors. 

Still, horror may be preferable to an insufferable routine yielding diminishing returns & ever narrowing socio-political horizons. Gender dimorphism militates for some men to remain without women & some maiden aunts to, as the price of their 'independence', maintain inheritable capital or conserve  generational wealth while subscribing to illusions of an Ecumenical or Utilitarian type.

Conrad, in 'Heart of Darkness' provides Marlow with an aunt who gets him a job with the Belgian Congo Company. Startlingly, its front office is manned by two tricoteuses female knitters (like Madam Defarge) who, it is said, relished watching the guillotine chop the heads off aristocrats. Perhaps the two knitters also stand for the weavers of fate or some other such grand guignol shite. What is certain is that Kurtz wouldn't have gone off his rocker if he had gotten married and had wifey with him to keep him on the straight and narrow. True, he might have ended up in the Bankruptcy Court or might have done a spell of porridge for fraud. But plenty of other entrepreneurs had had their ups and downs. Still, there was a notion that the proverbial 'black sheep' couldn't fall too foul of the law in the dark Continent. He was more likely to die of malaria instead. 

 Conrad points to the need women back home had to think their nephews or fiancees were going out on 'civilizing missions' rather than expeditions of piracy or extortion. Such were the delusions necessary to preserve petit bourgeois pieties. 

The Congo Free State was a private, profit making enterprise which was granted territory previously divided up between various competing African kingdoms or confederacies. The King of Belgium was the absolute monarch of the territory which, however, would go to France if his private wealth was not enough to cover costs. The idea was that the territory would be run profitably on up to date and humanitarian lines. It is like the notion of 'Charter Cities', or territories run by Private Corporations.

 Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' isn't a satire of Imperialism of the British, French, Spanish or any other type. It was a satire on late nineteenth century private enterprise adopting the mask of Free Trade. Open Competition, & Humanitarian concern with eliminating the Slave Trade and so forth. The one endearing thing about the book is that it shows British Naval hegemony as granting a sort of ersatz Englishry to even a crazy Russian who, however, worships a British book on mathematical navigation as his Bible. Conrad may not have been 'one of us', but he curried favour with us well enough.

I may mention, the Republic of Liberia- ruled by the descendants of freed American slaves- extracted wealth from the indigenous people in a comparable manner to King Leopold. Edmund Blyden, the father of Pan-Africanism, is an example of a Black writer critical of Black rulers who exploit the indigenous population. He would have preferred Liberia to have a British administration like Sierra Leone. I imagine that Conrad & Casement & Conan Doyle's Congo books confirmed Brits in the belief that Africa could stride towards prosperity & self-determination if, as in Sierra Leone, the Brits served as Guardians.

Incidentally, there were Black Sea Captains operating in the area at the same time as Conrad & his ilk. The Merchant Navy was racially mixed. It wasn't 'Imperial' or elitist. It was commercial & people from different continents rubbed along with each other well enough within it. Conrad himself is an example of the civilizing effect of service in the British Merchant Marine. He might be a Pole but he wasn't a polecat. The only mention of handsome Negresses in 'Heart' dwells on the 'demon lover', not the dynamite vagina, Romantic trope. 

Marlow says of his Aunt (the one who got him this shitty job with a bunch of Continental spivs)-

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

Late Victorian women may have been stupid & ignorant and deluded as to how the world worked. But late Twentieth Century Professors of Literature were stupider & more ignorant yet. Edward Said was a case in point. He thought Marlow & Kurtz were Colonial Civil Servants, rather than employees of private concerns, and that the Free State was an Imperial project, as opposed to a commercial venture. 

Said also seems to be unaware that there were African Empires- e.g. that of Ethiopia which defeated Italy in 1896- and Republics like Liberia. Sadly, the great Ashanti Empire was conquered in 1901 while the Kingdom of Kongo had gone under around 1860. 

Edward Said, “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness”

Culture and Imperialism, (1993) pp. 22-31

This imperial attitude is, I believe, beautifully captured in the complicated and rich narrative form of Conrad's great novella Heart of Darkness, written between 1898 and 1899.

The Imperial attitude, for the Brits, involved setting up courts and appointing Chiefs & recruiting and training and sending out District officers who had passed competitive examinations or had graduated from prestigious universities. Under no circumstances would such an official have any involvement in commercial activity. 

On the one hand, the narrator Marlow acknowledges the tragic predicament of all speech-that "it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's
existence-that which makes its truth, its meaning- its subtle and penetrating essence . . ..
We live, as we dream-alone" -

This could be said of anyone at any time.  It has nothing to do with Imperialism or Capitalism or anything else. 

yet still manages to convey the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience

the thing was shabby. It was 'sharp practice'. In the short run, there is a windfall. Medium to long-term, you destroy the market.  

through his own overmastering narrative

it isn't overmastering. It is impressionistic. Marlow is depicted a Buddha like figure, still 'following the Sea' (i.e. he is a failure- unlike the Company Director & the Lawyer & the Accountant who have found good berths in the City), who appears entirely ignorant of English history. He thinks the Roman colonists had simply 'squeezed' the natives. They hadn't. They had created a highly efficient administration which greatly raised productivity & created a Romanized land-owning class who lived in well built villas with central heating and plunge pools & imported luxuries from the East. 

Conrad, of course, came from Poland- which had never known Roman civilization- but his readers were English. Thus Conrad is careful to present Marlow not as a shrewd enough old salt, but an addle pated  Buddha. Perhaps he'd spent too much time with the lascars smoking opium. Or maybe he was just stupid. The narrator says 'to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside'. This is the Marxist doctrine as understood in Harcourt's England where everybody was a 'Socialist' in the sense that stories- like that of Dick Whittington- were no longer self-contained. They refered outside themselves- like Oliver Twist- to some 'collective action problem' Society needs to solve. 

Marlow, not, evidently, a man of much educations asks his better bred (or merely more successful)  comrades to imagine 'a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

Why is this silly?  The Brits were Celts just like the Gauls. The had been familiar to the Romans for centuries. Indeed, this decent young citizen might have had a Celtic wet nurse if he was not a Romanized Celt himself. Everything in England was comprehensible thanks to Caesar whose raid preceded Claudian colonization by a century. 

My point is, Marlow's narrative isn't 'overmastering'. It is idiosyncratic save in so far as it is merely idiotic. 

of his voyage into the African interior toward Kurtz.

a series of misadventures. We get that the Free State is the opposite of 'efficient'. 

 Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower—“Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. 

No Englishman would. London had never been 'one of the dark places of the world'. Even if our Druids did sacrifice kiddies, that was best practice at the time. Look at Abraham. 

What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. 

Fuck off! Efficiency was the slogan of the 'Progressive Movement' in the US in the 1890s. It had nothing to do with the City of London or the British Merchant Navy which had evolved ways of 'muddling through' well enough. You might say, the British management style involved 'satisficing' & 'regret minimization' rather than optimization or profit maximization. 

I suppose, for Conrad's generation, the Congo was associated with, the explorer, Stanley whom they may have thought off as an American journalist concerned with success, self-promotion & 'efficiency'. 

 Actually Stanley was from a very poor Welsh family who had only gone to the US after coming of age. He was a journalist & explorer of genius. His mistake was to trust in the integrity of the Queen's cousin. 

But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect.

Claudius's conquest of England was rapid. It wasn't a 'squeeze'. It lasted 400 years. 

 They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Nope. Rome had sound finances. If you can hire the strong, you aren't weak. But for that you need money. 

 They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.

Thanks to the Board School, even the factory worker knew that the Romans hadn't simply beaten and robbed the natives. It wasn't till 1980, that you had a play staged at the National Theatre where 'the Romans in Britain' are shown as sodomizing Druids. This was meant as an allegory of England's illegal occupation of Northern Ireland, where trillions of IRA Druids were being buggered senseless by Lord Mountbatten. Needless to say, the occupation of Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, Kilburn, Brixton & Islamabad (Bethnal Green) is equally illegal & features incessant anal rape of disabled Lesbians of colour. 

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

The Boer War involved killing White people. But it was the German resistance in Africa during the Great War which pointed to why and how Congo could suffer yet more under African war-lords- provided valuable minerals were discovered there. 

 What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....”

This was not the British view. The Navy kept the home islands safe. But Navies cost money. Thus the Navy needed to pay for itself through trans-oceanic commerce. Empire was the, if necessary, forcible export of an 'invisible'- a tangible service rather than an idea. Any fucker can have an idea. Patriots, provided they are paid enough, can provide services which help keep the home island safe. Sadly, this might involve dying of dysentery in Delhi or of malaria in Malawi or cholera in Chile. 

This narrative in turn is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of Europe's mission in the dark world.

No. The narrative isn't overmastering. Casement's narrative was. Conrad wasn't in the business of providing atrocity literature. There is some nameless horror in Conrad just as there is in Henry James. The Congo isn't different from the Cheltenham. There is a heart of darkness everywhere where hearts are. 

Whatever is lost or elided or even simply made up in Marlow's immensely compelling
recitation is compensated for in the narrative's sheer historical momentum, the temporal
forward movement-with digressions, descriptions, exciting encounters, and all.

Marlow isn't Sindbad the fucking Sailor. He pretty much reveals the whole plot when he mentions that he got the job in the Congo because his predecessor there had beaten an elderly Chieftain.  The son of that old man had stuck a spear in the Viking's back. Apparently the man had been a perfect baa-lamb but two years working for the Company had taken their toll. In plain terms- this was a fucking Mafia operation underneath all the 'mission statement' bumf.  Touch pitch & you will be defiled. 

Within the narrative of how he journeyed to Kurtz's Inner Station, whose source and authority he now becomes,

Kurtz suspects that he is being recalled to face charges. Such is not the case. The truth is the whole enterprise if a shambles.  

Marlow moves backward and forward materially in small and large spirals, very much the way episodes in the course of his journey up-river are then
incorporated by the principal forward trajectory into what he renders as "the heart of
Africa."

Jerome K Jerome does a better job in 'three men & a boat'.  The passage on Runnymede, the source from which our liberties spring, is quite lyrical. The 'heart of Africa'- for me  is intimately connected with reading 'three men in a boat' in Kisumu when I was 11 years old. 

Thus Marlow's encounter with the improbably white-suited clerk

Accountant  

in the middle of the jungle furnishes him with several digressive paragraphs,

No. There is 'foreshadowing'. There's something a bit 'off' about the accountant. He says Kurtz might be taken into the 'administration'. The chaps in Europe have heard about him. But, we suspect, they have also heard about the Accountant. There's something wrong with both of them. That's why the Accountant doesn't want to put any message of his own to Kurtz in writing.  

as does his meeting after with the semi-crazed, harlequin-like Russian who has been so affected by Kurtz's gifts.

Some talents are from the Devil.  

Yet underlying Marlow's inconclusiveness, his evasions, his arabesque meditations on his feelings and ideas, is the unrelenting course of the journey itself, which, despite all the many obstacles, is sustained through the jungle, through time, through hardship, to the heart of it all, Kurtz's ivory-trading empire.

He is an agent, not a principal. He sends a lot of ivory down river. But how does he get it? It is banal to say he beats niggers till their families fetch him what he wants. The suggestion is that he is engaging in some sort of Satanic Mass which might appeal to these savages. Does it involve cannibalism? Or is he is a Vampire- like Count Dracula?  

Conrad wants us to see how Kurtz's great looting adventure, Marlow's journey up the river, and the narrative itself all share a common theme: Europeans performing acts of imperial mastery and will in (or about) Africa.

Arabs or Africans could do it just as well. This wasn't 'imperial mastery'. It was laissez faire 'primitive accumulation' which people of all colours can go in for. 

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his
contemporaries is that,

he wasn't a Colonial writer. He was a merchant seaman who wrote about stuff blokes got up to on boats.  

for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system,

he was no such thing. He worked for different shipping companies- some French, some British, some Belgian.  

he was so self-conscious about what he did.

He knew he wasn't a Colonial Civil Servant or an officer in the Royal Navy. He was a naturalized British citizen but he never served the Crown.  

Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow's adventures:

because he was an artist 

it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions,

No. He sailed on various different seas and oceans. He didn't wander in any colony whatsoever. Congo was a Free State not a Belgian Colony.  

telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place.

Because he was a naturalized Briton & lived in Britain where his books were published.  

That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad's way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890s the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business.

Fuck off! Americans were sailing in the same oceans but wanted no colonies. Before there were maritime Empires, there were merchant adventurers. Conrad served in the Merchant Navy- not the Royal Navy- and thus meets business people not colonial soldiers or administrators.  

(Coincidentally we should note that at about the same time Halford Mackinder,

an academic who was one of the first Directors of the LSE 

an explorer,

Not a distinguished one though he did climb Mt. Kenya. But, by then the great age of Stanley & Livingstone was over. Mackinder raised up the discipline of Geography and introduced the term geopolitics.  

geographer, and Liberal Imperialist gave a series of lectures on imperialism at the London Institute of Bankers perhaps Conrad knew about this.)

No. Mackinder was part of Haldane's 'Coefficients' circle. HG Wells knew him. Older men like James & Conrad had zero interest in that shite. 

Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow's narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism,

Nonsense! If the darkies get their act together they can chuck out Whitey. Ethiopia defeated Italy in 1896. Then came the Second Boer War. It revealed that if a bunch of Africans or Asians got access to something with high value-to-weight- e.g. if they find gold or diamonds- then they could buy superior guns to those supplied to Colonial Armies. Sailors, like Conrad, weren't stupid. They could see there were smart lascars who could easily get up to speed in the use of any type of technology. Once it became more profitable for the natives to get rid of the colonist, that is exactly what would happen. The alternative was a system of subsidies to native Chiefs. There would have to be a more equitable distribution of the gains from trade. But, in that case, how would 'public goods' be paid for- e.g. freedom of the Seas & suppression of internecine tribal or communal violence? 

and that it has the power of a system representing as well as peaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

What Marlow does is register the bad working conditions in the place & lend plausibility to the revelations he makes. The sad part is a distinguished British soldier had been the first governor of that shithole. 

Yet neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz, Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of
the Nellie~, and Conrad.

These guys aren't soldiers or statesmen. They are lower middle class merchant seamen & accountants & commercial agents.  

By that I mean that Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist,

No. An Imperial politics & aesthetic would focus on the Governor & his relations with various native Chieftains. Prominent roles would be given to handsome soldiers & saintly missionaries & the beautiful daughter of the visiting Royal Duke.  

which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable.

Only to this cretin. There is no Imperialism in Henry James or Joseph Conrad. They were foreigners who chose to settle in England.  

For if we cannot truly understand someone else's experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle

Mosquito comes to bite Kurtz. He says 'fuck off! I'm white'. The Mosquito apologises and flies away. The same thing happens when a lion or a hippo tries to eat him.  

or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator,

black people were not allowed to narrate things.  

there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable.

Said couldn't think. He was too stupid.  

The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Imperialism means Kings under an Emperor & Dukes & Counts & Barons under those Kings. In the Congo, about 90 percent of the land was declared the private property of the Belgian King in his private capacity. He leased it out to private companies who forcibly extracted resources. This brutal system was 'mentally assailable' by journalists, politicians (e.g. Herbert Samuel), Colonial officials (e.g. Roger Casement) and travellers and writers of any description. Indeed, the Free State was so vigorously assailed that it was scrapped. The Belgian Government had to take the place over & turn it into a proper colony. 

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow's tale in a narrative moment

a tale is a narrative is a story is an account. This is the case whether you are self-conscious or unconscious.  

that he  allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history,

Imperialism maintains its chronicles from which Imperial history is written. It neither swallows it up or shits on it.  

was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history,

a tale is a narrative & history is part of larger history.  

one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie.

These guys were travelling all over the place. There was no tight circle.  

As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

No. He says that when he was young there was a lot of blank space in the map of Africa because explorers & cartographers hadn't penetrated that far. Then Livingstone & Stanley & Speake & so forth filled the thing out. 

Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than an
imperialist world-view,

He represented no such thing. He didn't write about colonies but about Free States or Native States or Latin American Republics  

given what was available for either Conrad or Marlow to see of the non-European at the time.

They could see plenty of African ruled or Indian ruled or Arab ruled or Latin American ruled places.  

Independence was for whites

Black Ethiopians kicked Italy's ass in the 1890s. White Boers didn't get independence. They were defeated.  

and Europeans; the lesser or subject peoples were to be ruled;

Subjects are ruled regardless of colour.  

science, learning, history emanated from the West.

The West was ahead in Science but plenty of its scholars were studying the languages & history of the East. The reverse was even more true. 

True, Conrad scrupulously recorded the differences between the disgraces of Belgian and
British colonial attitudes, but he could only imagine the world carved up into one or
another Western sphere of dominion.

No. Ethiopia had won. How soon before other African potentates acquired modern weapons?  

But because Conrad also had an extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality,

he was a gloomy Guss- no question. But in the Merchant Navy, you had all sorts. 

he quite carefully (some would say maddeningly) qualified Marlow's narrative with the provisionality that came from standing at the very juncture of this world with another, unspecified but different.

Davy Jones's fucking locker. Marlowe was a man of the sea. The Sea has its mysteries.  

Conrad was certainly not a great imperialist entrepreneur like Cecil Rhodes or Frederick Lugard,

nor was he the great White Queen 

even though he understood perfectly how for each of them, in Hannah Arendt's words, to enter "the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion, he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement.")

Fuck off! Rhodes was a business man. Lugard was a soldier who went to work for a trading company in Africa. Sadly he failed to make headway against Swahili traders in the Karonga War.  He was given a job with a Chartered Company- i.e. a precursor to proper Colonial government- in East Africa. He wasn't a businessman. He started off as a second rate hired gun but proved effective & rose in public esteem. But Uganda or Nigeria were run in a very different way from Rhodesia. 

Conrad's realization is that if, like narrative, imperialism has monopolized the entice system of representation-

In India, Imperialism was quite long established. There were plenty of alternative 'systems of representation' in various languages and for various purposes. Within Britain, anti-Imperialist narratives dated back to the Chartists & even earlier.  The scramble for Africa was recent.  

which in the case of Heart of Darkness allowed it to speak for Africans as well as for Kurtz and the Other adventurers, including Marlow and his audience-your self-consciousness as an outsider can allow you actively to comprehend how the machine works, given that you and it arc fundamentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence.

Gibberish! In the Free State, private enterprise was beating and killing natives so as to extract valuable raw materials- ivory, rubber, etc. King Leopold had perpetrated a fraud upon the Council of Europe. True, 'Arab' slave traders, or native potentates, may have been just as evil and rapacious, but they had not been granted the territory by the Berlin Congress. Anyone at all, irrespective of race or gender, could see that a fraud had been perpetrated.  

Never the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman, Conrad therefore preserved an ironic distance in each of his works.

No. Marlow is English. He reports on what he saw. This was a commercial operation which was ab ovo fraudulent in that no humanitarian and philanthropic work was being done. Instead profit was being extracted in an unconscionable manner. This wasn't really free trade or a level playing field. Other African ventures were placed at a disadvantage because they had to play by stricter rules. 

The form of Conrad's narrative has thus made it possible to derive two possible
arguments, two visions, in the post-colonial world that succeeded his.

Liberia & Sierra Leone were ruled by people of American slave descent. There was similar malpractice in their territory as was pointed out by an early Pan-Africanist. There was only one 'post-colonial' vision- viz. Africans would rise by their own hard-work, enterprise & possession of raw materials. Sadly, Africans could be as greedy and callous as King Leopold. There were always going to be commercial enterprises willing to use harsh measures so as to boost their bottom line. 

One argument allows the old imperial enterprise full scope to play itself out conventionally, to render the world as official European or Western imperialism saw it, and to consolidate itself after World War Two.

Arguments were insufficient. Blood & Treasure had to be expended to that end.  

Westerners may have physically left their old colonies in Africa
and Asia, but

they are still sodomizing the natives using invisible dicks. This is because Neoliberalism is very evil.  

they retained them not only as markets

as did the Japanese & Chinese & Indians & so forth.  

but as locales on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually.

No. Post-colonial societies retained the anti-Imperialist ideologies of the leaders of their Freedom Struggle.  

"Show me the Zulu Tolstoy," as one American intellectual has recently put it.

Where is the American or British Tolstoy? Disparaging others doesn't mean you have ideological hegemony over them.  

The assertive sovereign inclusiveness of this argument courses through the words of those who speak today for the West

where Said chose to live. Basically, he is miffed that it wasn't his ancestors who killed off the First Nations. Why is Arabic, not English, the language of the US? Is it because America is actually colonising Arabia & saying mean things about Arab peeps? I suppose so.  

and for what the West did, as well as for wha1 the rest of the world is, was, and may be.

If the West says Said is real smart- a Professor no less!- he must be smart, right? But Said isn't smart. Similarly, even if the West says the East is shit, it doesn't become shit just because the West said so.  

The assertions of this discourse exclude what has been represented as "lost" by arguing that the colonial world was in some ways ontologically speaking lost to begin with, irredeemable, irrecusably inferior.

Maybe Arabs are shit because ontology says so. Fuck you ontology! Fuck you very much!

Moreover, it focuses not on what was shared in the colonial experience, but on what must never be shared, namely the authority and rectitude that come with greater power and development

Like Germany with respect to Poland?  

Rhetorically, its terms arc the organization of political passions, to borrow from Julien Benda's critique of modern intellectuals, terms which, he was~ sensible enough to know, lead inevitably to mass slaughter, and if not to literal mass slaughter then certainly to rhetorical slaughter.

Like Iranians shouting 'Death to America!'?  

The second argument is considerably less objectionable. It sees itself as Conrad saw his
own narratives, local to a time and place, neither unconditionally true nor unqualifiedly
certain. As I have said, Conrad does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully
realized alternative to imperialism the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia, or America
were incapable of independence,

Yet that is what they were in Sierra Leone, Liberia & Ethiopia. Even after the end of the 'scramble for Africa', there was a lot of indirect Government or autonomous Kingdoms which were Protectorates not Colonies.  

and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to at end.

Yes he did. He was a sailor. He knew there were West African Ship Captains just like himself. Some operated out of Sierra Leone or Liberia which were ruled by African-American elites. The most famous was  James Pinson Labulo Davies, formerly of the Royal Navy, who was captained commercial vessels from about 1852 onward. 

But come to an end it would, if only because -like all human effort, like speech itself- it
would have its moment, then it would have to pass.

Things might get worse.  

Since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo),

set in a South American Republic not a fucking Colony. How ignorant was Said.  

he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be.

Conrad really didn't have any great knowledge or interest in the matter. Neither did his readers.  

To return to the first line out of Conrad, the discourse of resurgent empire

Mobute's real name is Maugham. Nyerere's real name is Naylor-Smythe. The only black leader in Africa is Botha.  

proves that the nineteenth-century imperial encounter continues today to draw lines and defend barriers.

Because King Leopold turned into a Zombie.  

Strangely, it persists also in the enormously complex and quietly interesting interchange
between former colonial partners, say between Britain and India,

Boring shite 

or between France and the Francophone countries of Africa.

Boring French shite.  

But these exchanges tend to be overshadowed by the loud antagonisms of the polarized debate of pro- and anti-imperialists,

There are no pro-imperialists. That game was not worth the candle. One might as well demand the return of the Spanish Inquisition.  

Said appears to understand that once Algeria became independent, anti-Imperialism became just as meaningless for France as for the English speaking world.  However, with increasing immigration from Turd World ex-colonies, people like Rushdie might point a way forward. Indeed, the British Pakistanis might make him their Messiah.

Said quotes the following passage from an essay by Rushdie- 

'We see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep. Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (e.g., Zia's Pakistan) both at once. Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success. Outside the whale is the world of Samuel Beckett's famous formula: I can't go on, I'll go on

Rushdie did indeed go on and on. Nobody has yet been able to collect the price the Ayatollahs put on his head. 

The terms of Rushdie's description, while they borrow from Orwell, seem to me to
resonate even more interestingly with Conrad. For here is the second consequence, the
second line leading out of Conrad's narrative form; in its explicit references to the
outside, it points to a perspective outside the basically imperialist representations
provided by Marlow and his listeners.

But Marlow & his listeners knew very well that you could have 'indirect rule'- this would involve sending the sons of Chiefs to a 'Chieftan's College'-  or even independent Republics in Africa using West Indians or African Americans or whatever. This was the direction in which British protectorates were moving.   

It is a profoundly secular perspective, and it is beholden neither to notions about historical destiny and the essentialism that destiny always seems to entail, nor to historical indifference and resignation. Being on the inside shuts out the full experience of imperialism, edits it and subordinates it to the dominance of one Eurocentric and totalizing view; this other perspective suggests the presence of a field without special historical privileges for one party.

Conrad went to Africa in 1890 a little before the fall of Dahomey & Ashanti. He knew what the alternative was. It was with that alternative that the Europeans and Arabs had been trading for the previous four centuries. In the Eighties, the question for African leaders was whether to seek to stamp out tribalism or whether to revive traditional Kingdoms & Chiefdoms. Museveni is an example of a Leftist who reversed course- much to Mamdani's disapproval. Still, it must be said, leaders who were the sons of Chieftains tended to do better than crazy Marxists or sociopathic Military officers. 

I don't want to overinterpret Rushdie, or put ideas in his prose that he may not have
intended. In this controversy with the local British media (before The Satanic Verses sent
him into hiding), he claimed that he could not recognize the truth of his own experience
in the popular media representations of India.

Tariq Ali's 'Tandoori nights' was broadcast in 1985. It was shit. On the other hand, I easily recognised the truth of my own experiences in 'it aint half hot, Mum'.  

The truth is, TV could reflect any shite well enough but at the end of the day it had to be entertaining. 

Let us return to Conrad and to what I have been referring to as the second, less
imperialistically assertive possibility offered by Heart of Darkness. Recall once again
that Conrad sets the Story on the deck of a boat anchored in the Thames as Marlow tells
his story the sunsets, and by the end of the narrative the heart of darkness has reappeared
in England; outside the group of Marlow's listeners lies an undefined and unclear world.

Marlow went to meet Kurtz's fiancee. She wants to know what his last words were. Marlow says it was her name. Actually it was 'the horror, the horror!'. The narrator concludes that the great Seas that lie down river lead into the heart of an immense darkness. But this, as Hemingway saw, was a story about 'Men without women' or 'Commerce without Civilization' or 'Efficiency without Oikieosis'. The solution was to have married officers, accompanied by their wives, hold command. Women have a civilizing effect. Making money without making babies is indeed a horror and an abomination.  

Conrad some times seems to want to fold that world into the imperial metropolitan
discourse represented by

Kipling in 'When William came'. The Madras famine is the backdrop for a marriage between a 'Punjab Civilian' and the sister of another such.  

Marlow,

is a merchant seaman who had operated in waters where there were older, more senior, richer, Naval Captains who were purely African

but by virtue of his own dislocated subjectivity

He is an Englishman who hasn't done particularly well for himself. The suggestion is that his Aunty is of superior class. At any rate, it is she who gets him the Congo gig.  

he resists the effort and succeeds in so doing, I have always believed, largely through formal devices.

i.e. being a bit stupid yet a keeper of the unwritten code. You don't tell a bloke's fiancee that he was paying hefty niggers to bugger him senseless. You pretend he was above that sort of thing. 

Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms draw attention to themselves
as artificial constructions,

he was permitted this artifice because he was after all a furriner who had faithfully served in the British Merchant Marine. Still, he was a gloomy Gus. A lot of them furriners are you know. I think it's because they eat garlic.  

encouraging us to sense the potential of a reality that seemed inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control, and that only well after Conrad's death in 1914

1924.  

acquired a substantial presence.

No. Conrad lived to see the end of the great multi-ethnic Empires. Egypt, Afghanistan & Ireland became independent in 1922. Had Gandhi not unilaterally surrendered, the first Labour Govt. would have devised something cosmetic of that sort for India in 1924.  

This needs more explanation. Despite their European names and mannerisms, Conrad's
narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism.

In Africa, they were its advance guard. They knew the Company they worked for might go bankrupt. If the Government takes it over, they become Civil Servants & will get pensions. That's what they really wanted.  

They do not simply accept what goes on in the name of the imperial idea: they think about it a lot, they worry about it, they are actually quite anxious about whether they can make it seem like a routine thing.

Fuck that! They want financial security and the assured social position which comes from Government employment. Conrad, it must be said, got a Civil List pension.  

But it never is.

If it works, it becomes so. That's how bureaucracies go about their business.  

Conrad's way of demonstrating this discrepancy between the orthodox and his own views of empire is to keep drawing attention to how ideas and values are constructed (and deconstructed) through dislocations in the narrator's language.

Nonsense! None of the people involved have much in the way of ideas or values. They are cogs in a machine- nothing more.  

In addition, the recitations are meticulously staged: the narrator is a speaker
whose audience and the reason for their being together, the quality of whose voice, the
effect of what he says-are all important and even insistent aspects of the story he tells.

Conrad was a friend of Casement. He knew there was a good story to be told. He doesn't do it very well but the effect is Jamesian.  

Marlow, for example, is never straightforward. He alternates between garrulity and
stunning eloquence, and rarely resists making peculiar things seem more peculiar by
surprisingly misstating them, or rendering them vague and contradictory. Thus, he says, a
French warship fires "into a continent";

He means that the port in question doesn't have a fortress or Customs House etc. But the natives get the message. Their lack of fortifications & coastal artillery makes them all the more vulnerable. They need to do a deal to keep transacting business at that place. 

Kurtz's eloquence is enlightening as well as fraudulent; and so on- his speech so full of these odd discrepancies (well discussed by Ian Wan as "delayed decoding") that the net effect is to leave his immediate audience as well as the reader with the acute sense that what he is presenting is not quite as it should be or appears to be.

The Narrator describes him as being like a Buddha. We understand that he isn't super-smart but at least he is smarter than the crazy Russian he meets. Briefly, Kurtz was a 'purchasing agent' who either by coercion, chicanery or charisma, sent back much more ivory than the Company had trade goods to pay for. This meant that a 'big bust' (i.e. collapsed supply chain) was in the offing. The trouble with robbing natives is that Russians or other such people might plausibly claim that they too had been robbed. In other words, either you have to pay off a host of such pests or risk your licence being cancelled.

Marlow buries the lead- viz. that Kurtz had put decapitated heads on the posts of his fence- but does so in a manner which adds verisimilitude-

“I am not disclosing any trade secrets.

This is commercial caution, not satire.  

In fact, the manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district.

For the reason I had mentioned. Smart ivory suppliers would avoid the station. Trade goods would have to be bartered away at a discount.  

I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there.

Marlow isn't a lawyer or accountant or director of a company. But the people he was talking to where precisely these things. They know that for a trading station to flourish it should appeal to prudent men of business- not guys who like looking at severed heads.  

They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.

What might strike some Russian delinquent, or Marlow himself, as eloquence would not be recognised as any such thing by the City of London.  

Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.... 

Not of hollow men can enterprises- commercial or Colonial- be constructed. Marlow chooses to believe that the Manager has no moral objection to Kurtz's methods but merely feels that 'the time was not ripe' as if, when properly managed, the Trading Post will be ornamented with a more splendid profusion of heads on pikes. Marlow's audience knows better. You can do purchasing on a large scale 'on tick' provided there are discounting facilities- i.e. Lebanese or Indian traders who will supply some goods in return for a portion of the claim. Chopping off heads simply isn't good business practice anywhere or at any time. 

Yet the whole point of what Kurtz and Marlow talk about is in fact imperial mastery,

No. Kurtz is a megalomaniac. His is a Satanic non serviam, not the creed of loyalty to the Emperor & the desire to extend its boundaries. The result is that he can serve nobody- not even himself. As for his great eloquence & visionary plans- what do they cash out as? Dale Carnegie's 'how to win friends & influence people'.  'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,’ he would say. ‘Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.’

What is odd is that neither Marlow nor Kurtz dwell on race, colour, or the supposed backwardness of the Congolese people. There is the suggestion that they are desperate to appease a power they can't comprehend but it fails for the same reason Marlow's suggestion that Romans in Claudian Britain would have felt themselves to be marooned amongst savages- rather than a people greatly similar to the Gaulish soldiers who predominated numerically in the invading legions. 

white European over black Africans, and their ivory, civilization over' the primitive dark
continent.

Kurtz couldn't marry his sweetheart because he didn't have enough money. That's why he had 'big plans'. At any rate, that is Marlow's charitable conclusion. What is appealing is that he keeps to the 'unwritten code'. Kurtz may or may not have been a man of talent. But he did want to be a success & people would prefer to have been associated with a success rather than a mediocrity like themselves. Had Kurtz gone to the Klondike & found gold, perhaps he'd have been a philanthropist and a bonus paterfamilias. He went into the heart of Africa without enough trading goods & did his Company a disservice by the manner in which he acquired fossil ivory. He gained not wealth but death & his legacy was horror. 

By accentuating the discrepancy between the political idea of empire

i.e. the Emperor sending out a Viceroy who receives tribute from various indigenous princes & chieftains

and the remarkably disorienting actuality of Africa,

Something like this was implemented where fiscally viable. No great disorientation occurred save for those who went down with cerebral malaria.  

Marlow unsettles the reader's sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself.

No. There are no fairies at the bottom of the garden. Nor are we the dream of a ghost.  

For if Conrad can show that all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention,

He was a sailor. The Sea can be pretty fucking unstable. You can't control it by talking to it. But a good Captain can ride out the storm by saying things like 'shorten the mizzen boom!' or 'splice the mainbrace'.  

the same is true of empire,

you can control the Imperial Army & Administration by issuing clear orders 

of venerating  the idea,

this can be done without words 

and so forth.

With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time. What appears stable and secure--the policeman at the corner, for instance-

is completely stable and secure. 

-is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle,

men in the jungle- black or white- are not secure unless that is where they habitually live or else they have sufficient armaments, equipment & training to make their way out of it. 

and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness,

Fuck off! The Sun comes up every fucking day. There is the Moon and there are street lamps and torches and electric fucking lighting 

which by the end of the tale is shown to be the same in London and in Africa.

Very true. The Queen, Gor bless 'er- had lots of decapitated heads planted atop the railings of Bucking Palace.  

Conrad's genius allowed him to realize that the ever-present darkness could be colonized
or illuminated-

We illuminate darkness- i.e. turn the lights on. Said would try to colonise it. Sadly Darkness is populated by Zionists. They would beat and sodomize Said till he desisted and fucked off back to Yankee Doodle-land.  

Heart of Darkness is full of references to the mission civilisatrice,

Because that is what King Leopold claimed to hold dear. 

to benevolent as well as cruel schemes to bring light to the dark places and peoples of this
world by acts of will and deployments of power-

Trade. You give us ivory. We give you nice shiny things.  

but that it also had to be acknowledged as independent.

No. You didn't have to acknowledge that the Mission to Civilize was independent and could choose to fuck off to the Andromeda Galaxy.  

Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge the darkness,

Which is sin. Its wages is death.  

the former as he is dying, the latter as he reflects retrospectively on the meaning of Kurtz's final words.

Which, in context, are clear enough. Kurtz gonna burn in Hell for sure! 

They (and of course Conrad) are ahead of their time in understanding that what they call "the darkness" has an autonomy of its own, and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism had taken for its own.

How fucking racist was Said? Is Nigeria becoming independent really a case of darkness triumphing?  

 Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time

both could have taken service with the Emperor of Ethiopia or the Sultan of Zanzibar or some other such dusky potentate.

and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European "darkness" was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness.

He never says that. The question was whether pre-existing African polities could reorganize themselves the way the Japanese had done? This was an ideographic question. At one time it looked as though the Kabaka could knit together the Buganda the way the Ethiopian Negus had done. This would have had a 'mimetic' effect on Central Africa.  

Conrad's tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that "natives" could lead lives free from European domination.

Nobody could conclude that. Even if the Europeans fucked off, the Egyptians or the Zanzibaris or whatever wouldn't have done.  

As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom,

nor could he take it away from the black dudes who ruled Liberia & Sierra Leone & Ethiopia & Swaziland & so forth.  

despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.

None of his books feature an Imperial power. In the Congo, there was a commercial enterprise- not a fucking Viceroy.  

The cultural and ideological evidence that Conrad was wrong in his Eurocentric way is

non-existent. Conrad was actually European. That is why he was European in his ways. Also, having had to give up the Sea because of his ill health, he actually lived in Europe for the greater part of his life.  

both impressive and rich. A whole movement, literature, and theory of resistance and
response to empire exists-it is the subject of Chapter Three of this book-and in greatly
disparate post-colonial regions one sees tremendously energetic efforts to engage with the
metropolitan world in equal debate so as to testify to the diversity and differences of the
non-European world and to its own agendas, priorities, and history.

Why debate those you have thrown out or those who decided the game was not worth the candle? You don't see the Brits debating the Romans as part of their resistance to some fucking Caesar.  

The purpose of this testimony is to inscribe, reinterpret, and expand the areas of engagement as well as the terrain contested with Europe.

That is not purpose. It is futility.  

Some of this activity-for example, the work of two important and active Iranian

Iran was never a colony. It had its own Emperors till it became an Islamic Republic 

intellectuals, Ali Sharia, i and Jalal Ali i-Ahmed, who by means of speeches, books, tapes, and pamphlets prepared the way for the Islamic Revolution interprets colonialism by asserting the absolute opposition of the native culture: the West is an enemy, a disease, an evil.

But the Shah wasn't from the West. He was Iranian.  

What of Said? Was he the victim of Imperialism? No. True, there was a 'veiled protectorate' over Egypt from about 1882- and this is what enabled his family to prosper there till the 1952 riots- and, also true, Palestine was a League of Nations mandated territory entrusted to Britain between 1918-48, but it was British withdrawal which was the calamity for his people. 

It seems it is Said, not Conrad, who hates darkies & who thinks only Europeans can rescue him from the horrors of the heart of darkness that is non-European rule.

A couplet of Bedil

This is a couplet of Bedil-

Zi khūd bih yād-i nigāhī ki mīravī, Bīdil

Ki az ghubār-i tū būy-i Firang mī-āyad

From yourself, to the memory of that glance, O Heartless!

Departing pay thanks

Such that from your grave dust arises, artless,

the fragrance of the Franks.

The Sufi gives thanks to God or the Spiritual preceptor at the time of death. Musk, associated with desire, is the scent associated with the Franks (Europe).

Edward Said on Netanyahu & Terrorism.

Terrorism works if those it is directed at surrender, run away, or retaliate so asymmetrically as to prevent sensible deals being done thus making 'pay-for-slay' a lucrative profession. It goes without saying that moral inversion ensures that virtue signallers will end up celebrating the homicidal maniacs. This in turn ensures that the silent majority will side with those in the counter-terrorism 'mowing the lawn' business. 

A separate subject is random violence to signal preference intensity- e.g. shooting up the local kindergarten to protest J.K Rowling. 

Professional terrorism quickly morphs into organized crime starting with extortion & moving into drug trafficking, arms smuggling & most atrociously of all, pirating videos of Jennifer Aniston romcoms. 

In 1986 Edward Said reviewed Netanyahu's book titled 'Terrorism- How the West can Win' for the Arab Studies Quarterly. At the time Netanyahu was Israel's Ambassador to the UN

As a word and concept, "terrorism" has acquired an extraordinary status

in American public discourse.

It had even higher status for the Palestinians & their Arab allies. The PLO assassinated a senior Palestinian official in Cairo. The gunman stopped to lick the blood of the slain man. Clearly, there was some atavistic belief in the magical powers of doing evil shit.  

It has displaced Communism as public enemy number one,

Not yet. Art Malik was the Afghan ally of James Bond in 1987. He was the villainous terrorist in Tru e Lies in 1994. 

although there are frequent efforts to tie the two together. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and argument that are frightening

terrorism is frightening because it kills people. Said shits himself because of 'rhetoric'.  

in their capacity for mobilizing opinion, gaining legitimacy and provoking various sorts of murderous action.

Like killing killers.  

And it has imported and canonized an ideology with origins in a distant conflict,

the Crusades?  

which serves the purpose here of institutionalizing the denial and avoidance of history.

Universities have Departments of History. But the Government has an Institute for telling History to fuck the fuck off.  

In short, the elevation of terrorism to the status of a national security threat

e.g. 9/11. Sadly, no Palestinians were involved. They had gone soft.  

(though more Americans drown in their bathtubs, are struck by lightning or die in traffic accidents)

Death should be abolished.  

has deflected careful scrutiny of the government's domestic and foreign policies.

Smart people were paid to do that. Professors of worthless shite weren't.  

Whether the deflection will be longstanding or temporary remains to be seen,

Longstanding. Muslims be kray-kray.  

but given the almost unconditional assent of the media, intellectuals and policy-makers to the terrorist vogue, the prospects for a return to a semblance of sanity are not encouraging.

Coz Muslims be kray-kray.  

I hasten to add two things, however, that are. The noisy consensus on our

Libyan adventures is, or seems to be, paper thin.

Bombing Qadaffi brought the fellow to his senses. Sadly, bringing him down created a worse situation. 

The few dissenting voices are a good deal more effective in stimulating discussion and reflection (which on their own, alas, cannot prevent the destruction we are capable of unleashing) than one might have thought. A small instance of what I mean occurred recently during a Phil Donahue show whose subject was the April 14 raid on Libya.

Donahue began the show by asking the audience for their opinion; he received

an almost total, even enthusiastic, endorsement of "our" righteous strike. Two

of his guests were Sanford Ungar and Christopher Hitchens, who, once they

got going, managed quite rapidly to extend the discussion beyond the audience's

unexamined assumptions and patriotic bombast. By the end of the hour, the

kicking of Libyan ass in revenge for terrorism seemed to be a less agreeable,

more troubling exercise than when the program began.

Said gets terrorized by rhetoric. Watching Donahue isn't supposed to cause you to shit your pants. As Said says, this is a disagreeable and troubling outcome.  

The second source of encouragement is related to the first. The obvious case

to be made against the ugly violence and disruptions caused by desperate and

often misguided people has little sustainable power once it is extended to in-

clude gigantic terror networks, conspiracies of terrorist states or terrorism as

a metaphysical evil.

It is a nuisance. It can be curbed. Torture & kill the families of terrorists. Be like China- 're-educate' entire populations in Concentration Camps. Genocide works too.  

For not only will common sense rise up at the paucity

of evidence for these preposterous theories,

Said lacked common sense. That's why he was teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

but at some point (which is not

yet near enough) the machinery for pushing the terrorist scare will stand ex-

posed for the political and intellectual scandal that it is.

Terrorism is self-defeating. That is why the Israelis gave it up. Those who didn't became plagued by their own Frankenstein's monster.  

The fact is that most, if not all, states use dirty tricks, from assassinations and bombs to blackmail.

But the US & Israel have nukes. Sponsoring terrorism might get you, not just invaded, but nuked to arma-fucking-geddon.  

(Remember the CIA-sponsored car bomb that killed eighty people in the civilian

quarter of West Beirut in early 1984?)

No, because it happened in March 1985. The Saudis paid off Fadlallah after failing to kill him.  

The same applies to radical nationalists, although we conveniently overlook the malfeasance of the bands we support.

We want to kill our enemies & are happy if our friends do it for us. Also we wipe our own bums, not the bums of strangers. How very strange! 

For the present, however, the wall-to-wall nonsense about terrorism can in-

flict grave damage.

It can cause Said to shit himself while watching Donahue.  

The difference between today's pseudoscholarship

like that of Said 

and expert jargon about terrorism and the literature about Third World national liberation guerrillas two decades ago is interesting.

No it isn't.  

Most of the earlier material was subject to the slower and therefore more careful procedures of print;

Journalists dashed off such books quickly enough. So did 'academics'. Soldiers were a different kettle of fish. Some of their work looks quite good at first glance. But that is just spit & polish

to produce a piece of scholarship on, say, the Vietcong you had to go through the motions of exploring Vietnamese history, citing books, using footnotes

i.e. spend a couple of hours in the library

- actually attempting to prove a point by developing an argument. This scholarship was no less partisan because of those procedures, no less engaged in the war against the

enemies of "freedom," no less racist in its assumptions; but it was, or at least

had the pretensions of, a sort of knowledge.

If it made testable predictions, it was knowledge till proven otherwise. If it was mere paranoid ranting- like Said's- it wasn't.  

Today's discourse on terrorism is an altogether more streamlined thing.

The same people were doing it under Reagan as had done it under Nixon.  

Its scholarship is yesterday's newspaper or today's CNN bulletin. Its gurus - Claire Sterling, Michael Ledeen, Arnaud de Borchgrave - are journalists with obscure, even ambiguous, backgrounds.

Said had obscured his own background. He was from Cairo not Jerusalem- though he was born there because his parents believed Egyptian hospitals were shit. In Jerusalem, there were good Jewish midwives & doctors.  

Most writing about terrorism is brief, pithy, totally devoid of the scholarly armature of evidence, proof, argument.

i.e. it was like Said's own dreck.  

Its paradigm is the television interview, the spot news announcement, the instant gratification one associates with the Reagan White House's "reality time," the evening news.

There were plenty of such TV interviews in the Sixties.  

This brings us to the book at hand, Terrorism: How the West Can Win , edited

and with commentary, weedlike in its proliferation, by Benjamin Netanyahu,

the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Netanyahu is now occupying a goodly swathe of Lebanon while bombing the shit out of Iran.  

A compilation of essays by forty or so of the usual suspects - George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lord Chalfont, Claire Sterling, Arthur Goldberg, Midge Decter, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese 3d, Jean- François Revel, Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt, Leszek Kolakowski,

etc. -

some of whom had genuine influence. They didn't teach Literature to cretins.  

Terrorism is the record of a conference held two years ago at the Jonathan

Institute in Washington, Jonathan Netanyahu being Benjamin's brother, the

only Israeli casualty of the famous raid on Entebbe in 1976. (It is worth noting

that victims of "terrorism" like Netanyahu and Leon Klinghoffer get institutes

and foundations named for them to say nothing of enormous press attention,

whereas Arabs, Moslems and other nonwhites who die "collaterally" just die,

uncounted, unmourned, unacknowledged by "us.")

It is also noteworthy that few American Presidents have praised Hitler or Tojo. How very strange!  

The sections into which the book is divided roll forth with a reassuringly

steady acceleration:

In other words, the book serves its purpose quite well.  

"The Challenge to the Democracies" and "Terrorism and

Totalitarianism" are succeeded by (of course) "Terrorism and the Islamic

World," which in turn brings forth "The International Network" and "Terrorism

and the Media." These are followed by "The Legal Foundations for the War

Against Terrorism" and "The Domestic Battle," yielding in place to the final,

the biggest, the choicest subject of all, "The Global Battle." Compared with

earlier works on the subject (for instance, Walter Laqueur's Terrorism)

Lacquer was a smart Israeli. His 'Last days of Europe', published in 2007, warned of creeping Islamization.  

this one has shed all the introductory attempts at historical perspective and cultured con-

text.

Because it was obvious that A-rabs be kray kray. Their culture consisted of chopping off heads & licking the blood.  

Terrorism is now a fully formed object of more or less revealed wisdom.

There are some low-level oddities about this book that should be noted quick-

ly. Very few efforts are made to convince readers of what is being said: sources

and figures are never cited; abstractions and generalizations pop up everywhere;

and, except for three essays on Islam, historical argument is limited to the single

proposition that terrorism has never before presented such a threat to "the

democracies." I was also struck that the verb in the book's subtitle, How the

West Can Win , doesn't seem to have an object: Win what? one wonders.

The War on Terror. There's a reason Netanyahu is the longest serving Israeli PM. Now Vance is saying he tricked Trump into the Iranian quagmire. You've got to be pretty smart to manipulate POTUS. 

So great is the number of contributors, so hortatory the tone, so confident and

many the assertions, that in the end you retain little of what has been said,

except that you had better get on with the fight against terrorism, whatever

Netanyahu says it is.

Bibi is a friggin genius!  

No wonder, then, that Mario Cuomo, who consults on foreign policy with

Netanyahu, an official of a foreign government, has endorsed the book in a

jacket blurb, urging "presidents, premiers, governors, mayors," to read it for

its startlingly "valuable lessons": that "state-sanctioned international terrorism

is purposeful and often conspiratorial, and that the world's democracies are

targets of terorism."

Bibi had ingratiated himself with both parties. He was only 37 years old.  

If Cuomo's presence in this august company is designed

to make him appear serious and presidentabile by association, he really ought

to reconsider for a moment.

He should take advise from a shithead. 

Because the whole book is unfortunately staked

on the premise that the Western democracies and their leaders are gullible,

soft and stupid,

which is what Vance is now saying. Bibi bamboozled my boss!  

a condition whose only remedy is that they abandon their

"Western" essence and turn violent, hard and ruthless.

Like cowboys? John Wayne was Chinese- right?  

And if,in addition, they could be led by the Netanyahu family, Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Arens (all of them contributors to How the West Can Win), their successful transfigu-

ration would be assured. At that point, however, would a liberal Mario Cuomo

stand any chance at all?

He was right not to stand. The Dems needed 'Workfare' Clinton not an East Coast tax & spend liberal. 

In fact, Terrorism: How the West Can Win is a book about contemporary

American policy on only one level. It is equally a book about contemporary

Israel, as represented by its most unyielding and unattractive voices.

Those are the voices which prevailed- thanks to terrorism.  

An attentive reader will surely be alerted to the book's agenda from the outset,

The good thing about the book is that the title says it all. You don't have to read it.  

when Netanyahu, an obsessive if there ever was one,

So obsessive that he has run Israel for 18 years 

asserts that modern terrorism emanates from "two movements that have assumed international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, communist totalitarianism and Islamic (and Arab) radicalism." Later this is interpreted to mean, essentially, the KGB and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the former much less than

the latter, which Netanyahu connects with all nonwhite, non-European anti-

colonial movements, whose barbarism is in stark contrast to the nobility and

purity of the Judeo-Christian freedom fighters he supports.

Netanyahu's party- Likud- was in alliance with the Labour party. In 1985, Reagan made financial aid conditional on economic reform (the Stabilization plan) & Israel signed a free trade agreement with the US. This fundamentally changed how Israel was perceived by its neighbours. As it turned into an affluent knowledge economy, Arab countries felt that it would not seek to grab territory so as to achieve fiscal viability.  

Unlike the wimps who have merely condemned terrorism without defining

it, Netanyahu bravely ventures a definition: "terrorism" he says, "is the deliberate

and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear

for political purposes." But this powerful philosophic formulation is as flawed

as all the other definitions, not only because it is vague about exceptions and

limits but because its application and interpretation in Netanyahu's book de-

pend a priori on a single axiom: "we" are never terrorist; it's the Moslems, Arabs

and Communists who are.

Said is putting words into Netanyahu's mouth. The fact is, Bibi wanted to keep a distance between himself & Begin & the terrorists of the Stern gang. Still, the Israelis gave up killing each other so as to focus on bread & butter issues. The Arabs didn't.  

The view is as simple as that, and it goes back in time to the fundamental

and inaugurating denial in Israeli history: the buried fact that Israel came to

exist as a state in 1948 as a result of the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Israel had no choice but to side with the Allies. Sadly, the Grand Mufti sided with Hitler. To the victors go the spoils. The British thought the Jews might create a fiscally viable state. The Palestinians were incapable of any such thing. This remains true to this day. 

Said is silent about the dispossession of the First Nations by Europeans.  

In the early 1970s there was, I believe, a subliminal recognition on the part of

Israel's leaders that no conventional military option existed against the Palestin-

ians, who number 650,000 inside Israel, 1.3 million in Gaza and the West Bank

cheap labour- nothing wrong in that.  

and 2 million in exile,

their hosts would soon turn against them 

and that therefore they would have to be done away with by other means.

Bore them to death by getting them to read Said's shite. 

That recognition was certainly the result of the emergence

of post- 1967 Palestinian nationalism as a force resisting Israel's occupation of

historical Palestine in its entirety.

It failed in its entirety.  

The principle of "armed struggle" derives from the right of resistance ac-

corded universally to all peoples suffering national oppression.

Like the right of resistance of the American First Nations.  

Yet like all peoples (including, of course, the Jews) the Palestinians resorted on occasion

to spectacular outrages, in order to dramatize their struggle and to inflict pain

on an unremitting enemy.

They failed. Pay for slay backfires if Israel trades blood for land.  

This, I have always believed, was a political mistake with important moral consequences.

It was a necessity. If Palestinians become peaceful they might prefer to live under Israeli rule. Their own politicians are utterly shit.  

Certainly Israeli violence against Palestinians has always been incomparably greater in scale and damage. But the tragically fixated attitude toward "armed struggle" conducted from exile and the relative neglect of mass political action and organization inside Palestine

such action & organisation would focus on bread & butter issues. It would end with integration into Israeli society.  

exposed the Palestinian movement, by the early 1970s, to a far superior Israeli military

and propaganda system, which magnified Palestinian violence out of proportion to the reality.

The reality was worse in Jordan & then Lebanon & so forth. Nobody wants Palestinians.  

By the end of the decade, Israel had co-opted U.S. policy, cynically exploited Jewish fears of another Holocaust and stirred up latent Judeo-Christian sentiments against Islam.

Not really. The Americans wanted the Rodgers Plan & a path back to pre-'67 borders though maybe the Golan heights would have to be annexed for military reasons.  

An interesting article by the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk in the

February 1986 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique suggests that it became a con-

scious aim of Israeli policy in the mid-1970s to delegitimize Palestinian national-

ism in toto by defining its main expression - the PLO - as terrorist, the better

to be able to ignore its undeniable claims on Israel.

Not to mention its claim on Jordan, Lebanon etc. Assad, of Syria, had turned against the PLO by 1976.  

The major consequence of this policy was, of course, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, allegedly carried out to defeat terrorism but in reality designed to settle the fate of the

West Bank and Gaza, particularly given the fact that the PLO had scrupulously

observed a cease-fire between July 1981 and June 1982.

It is believed that the Abu Nidal group carried out the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat which was the cause of the war.  The war was a failure because Maronites are crazy mofos. The Lebanese Shia turned out to be a far more formidable opponent than the PLO.  

Yet one of the complexities of the 1982 invasion was that it showed the West

a side of Israel hitherto well hidden.

That was the side people liked. 

All the more reason, therefore, to efface the picture of Sabra and Shatila

where Lebanese Christians took revenge for some previous massacre 

by waging a full-scale ideological and cultural battle against terrorism - a battle whose main thrust has been, first, its selectivity ("we" are never terrorists no matter what we may have done; "they" always are and always will be), and second, its wholesale attempt to obliterate history, and indeed temporality itself.

This so terrifies Said that he shits his pants again.  

For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from

time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as

ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake.

Very true. That was Eisenhower's strategy. Churchill couldn't understand it because he thought 'ontology' was about the study of ontes- which is what camels are called in Bangalore, where Churchill was a subaltern.  

Thus if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally

speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their ter-

rorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on

to attack them and their "terrorist" states generally, and avoid all questions

about your own behavior or about your share in their present fate.

You can avoid all questions from shitheads by telling them to fuck the fuck off.  

In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu:

The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward un-

bridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which asserts that certain

ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral

inhibitions. In this context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is

terrorists is more than a tautology.

It is a policy prescription. Kill terrorists. Kill their families. Kill people who might become terrorists. Suddenly, you run out of terrorists though you may now face a proper army.  

To reduce the whole embroiled history that connects "us" with terrorists (or

Israelis with Palestinians) to Midge Decter's tiny, scornful phrase, "the theory

of grievances," is to continue the political war against history, ours as well as

theirs, and leave the problem of terrorism unsolved.

Netanyahu knows how to wage actual war. Said would get confused & think one should bomb the fuck out of the History Department/ 

Consider now the rigorous selectivity of this approach. Julie Flint, a reporter

for The Guardian of London, described an Israeli intervention in Lebanon in

early March of this year, just as Farrar, Straus was getting the Netanyahu com-

pilation ready for the bookstores. Looking for two missing Israeli soldiers, an

Israeli military unit accompanied by South Lebanese Army men (Israeli

mercenaries) entered the village of Shakra: "Throughout the week, every day

at daybreak, the Israelis herded all Shakra's men into the courtyard of the local

school for interrogation. 'We've spent the whole time sitting on the ground,'

Mr. Nassar [a young merchant in the town, just returned from several years'

absence] said. 'If we stood up they hit us.'" Flint's report continues in terrifying

detail;

Said just shat himself again.  

I shall cite it here at length because it is not likely to be found in any

American publication, so powerful are the restraints against printing material

that openly discredits the Israelis and compromises their antiterrorist stance.

The point about terrorism is that it licenses in advance any and every evil shit. Clint Eastwood played 'Dirty Harry' not 'Squeaky Clean Harry'.  

It should be set against the items regularly produced by the U.S. media that

purport to describe the U.S. -Israeli view of "terrorism," for example, the hand-

outs given to and dutifully reproduced by Thomas Friedman of the New York

Times.

As opposed to the hand-jobs Said dutifully supplied to Arafat.  

(A particularly egregious instance was an article on February 16, 1986,

in which we were treated to such solecisms as the Israeli intelligence notion

of the "terrorilla.")

Neologism not solecism. The Israelis were trying to convey the notion that an insurgent force may operate like both a rural guerrilla army as well as a cell-based urban terrorist network. Why? My guess is that some in the Israeli defence establishment want to annex southern Lebanon and displace its indigenous population. One can either exchange land for peace or exchange war for land. Forty years after Said's article, we are still guessing

The evidence from Shakra undermines, to say the least, Netanyahu's definition of terrorism as applied exclusively to the PLO and the KGB:

he defined terrorism as the deliberate targeting of innocents as opposed to collateral civilian casualties or action taken against hostile populations in occupied territory. There is a legal angle to this. Bibi isn't a lawyer but has Masters in Management. There are ways to break the law while minimising 'command responsibility'.  

The Irish [UN] troops tried to send in water, milk and oranges, but the Israelis

and the SLA men threw it all on the ground. Then on Friday, the routine changed:

men, women and children - the youngest a day-old baby - were all locked in the

courtyard and interrogated in two schoolrooms. Villagers say the first interro-

gation was with Israeli soldiers and the second with SLA thugs - in a room where

bloodstains were still to be seen last week on the floor and on two school desks.

Scattered all over the small room were objects villagers said were used in the

interrogation - chair legs, wooden sticks, cigarette butts in ash trays still sitting

on electric stoves, electric coils, and nails with which the interrogators reportedly

pierced ears. Throughout the day, the Irish were refused access to the detainees,

although screams could be heard and several people could be seen badly hurt

in the schoolyard. In the late afternoon, five men were thrown into the street

outside the school, still crying and some unable to stand upright.

They had been brutally sodomized. The Irish- having been buggered senseless by evil English toffs for centuries- were greatly traumatized. It was with great difficulty that they were persuaded to swallow a spud or two. 

They were taken to the hospital. Although UNIFIL declines to discuss "full documentary evidence"

i.e. did not give an inventory of all the objects retrieved from the rectums of these simple Semites 

in its medical report, reporters who visited the five saw they had been brutally

beaten and burnt on the back with cigarette ends.

You can't tell me things didn't stop there 

Radwan Ashur, a student, had badly damaged hands; friends said his interrogators walked over them in army boots. Another man had his penis burnt with a cigarette lighter. A short

way from his school, young men including Mr. Nassar, were assembled at night

by the village pond. They said they were thrown into it and then, dripping wet

and their hands tied behind their backs, were made to lie until dawn on the floor

of an unfinished shop. "You have to tell us everything about this town," Mr. Nassar

was told. He replied: "I don't know anything. I've just come from Liberia." After

the Israelis finally departed late on Saturday having failed to find their men, the

security report for Shakra showed that fifty-five men and six women, one of them

pregnant, had been taken away, three houses had been dynamited and many

others looted and wrecked, their doors blasted off with grenades. Several dozen

cars were stolen.

The Shias would soon gain hegemony. Karma is a bitch. The odd thing is that Hezbollah was actually less nasty than the Maronite militias. 

The point about this little episode (which features the innocent civilians whom

the United States loves to defend) is not that it occurs daily, or that such behavior

has been characteristic of the Israeli state from the very beginning (as revealed

by revisionist Israeli historians Tom Segev and Benny Morris, among others),

or that it is increasing in viciousness as the spurious excuse of "fighting terror-

ism" serves to legitimize every case of torture, illegal detention, demolition of

houses, expropriation of land, murder, collective punishment, deportation, cen-

sorship, closure of schools and universities. The point is that such episodes

are almost completely swept off the record by the righteous enthusiasm for

deploring Arab, Moslem amd nonwhite "terrorism."

No. The point is nobody gives a shit. Said, because he taught worthless shite, thought that pearl-clutching was important. It wasn't. The dowager who clutches her pearls started off as a can can dancer. Anyway nobody is really shocked that soldiers kill and torture people- more particularly if they are looking for members of their own squad. 

In this enthusiasm a supporting role is played by the accredited experts on

the Islamic world.

Like Said? His supporting role was as that of the pearl-clutching dowager who doesn't understand that soldiers kill people. That's their job.  

Note here how, unlike those scholars of Latin America, Africa

and Asia whose naïveté leads them to express solidarity with the peoples they

study, the guild of the Middle East Orientalists seems to have produced only

the likes of Bernard Lewis, Elie Kedourie and the utterly ninth-rate P .J. Vati-

kiotis, each of whom contributes a slice of mendacity to Netanyahu's

smorgasbord.

Israel is in the region these guys study. They are welcome to express solidarity with it. However their failure to chop off their own dicks in solidarity with Bihari Hijras is truly shocking.  

Far from offering insights about their area of specialization (which

provides them with a living) that might promote understanding, sympathy or

compassion, these guns-for-hire assure us that Islam is indeed a terrorist

religion.

No. They say some Islamist movements say that terrorism is jihad.  

So untoward and humanly unacceptable is this position that the New

York Times's John Gross refused to recognize it in his review of this book.

He also refused to cut off his own dick. How very sad! 

He therefore especially commended Lewis's view - Gross paraphrases freely- "that

there is nothing in Islam as a religion that is especially conducive to terrorism."

But had he read past the second paragraph of Lewis's essay, he would have

found the great man saying that "it is appropriate to use Islam as a term of

definition and classification in discussing present-day terrorism."

Because some terrorist groups are Islamic.  

Gross and Lewis are symptomatic of the whole deformation of mind and

language

which only exist in Said's mind. Does it cause him to scream his tits off & soil his pants? Yes. This is because of the ontological chrematistics of the oesophagus or the peristalsis of something Walter Benjamin mentioned to Berthold Brecht.  

induced by "terrorism." Gross is so ideologically infected with the

antinomian view that, on the one hand, no respectable scholar can say racist

things and, on the other, one can say anything about Islam and the Arabs if

one is a respectable scholar,

This isn't an antinomian view. Christians may be under no obligation to follow the moral law because salvation is by Grace but that has nothing to do with respectable scholarship. Respectable people can say anything about anything. If they say 'suck my dick, niggah scum!', they aren't respectable.  

that he just gives up on reading critically.

i.e. inserting stupid lies he has himself cooked up into the text 

Lewis, who is by now reckless

coz he was a British soldier during the Second World war & had spent a lot of time at SOAS meeting with the elite of the Arab world 

with the confidence inspired by having the New York Times , the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and Commentary more or less at his disposal,

jealous much? Lewis was Jewish. He was an ex-soldier & British diplomat. He had gravitas. Said was a Nancy boy clutching his pearls & screaming his tits off.  

serves up one falsehood or half-truth after another in his essay. `Islam, he tells us, is a political religion, a unique thing. Whereas, he intones, Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross and Moses died before he entered the Promised Land, Mohammed (clever fellow) founded a state and governed it.'

What's wrong with that?  

Those three millennial facts alone are supposed to have determined the whole of Christian, Jewish and Islamic history and culture ever since.

It is a fact that England has three sources of law- Canon Law, King's Equity & the Common Law- because there were three Estates with separate origins, languages, & trajectories. In Islam, every Muslim became a member of all three Estates simultaneously along with the Prophet & his Companions. Islam can have a political horizon in a sense in which Calvinist Geneva or Holland could not.  

Never mind that Jewish and Christian leaders have - to this day - founded and governed

states,

where the sacred was separated from the secular. I suppose, you might say the Papal States were an exception but they weren't really. Civil Law was separate and Roman in origin.  

or that Jews and Christians (quite ignoring the charity of Christ or the

misfortunes of Moses) fought battles in the name of Christianity and Judaism

that were as bloody as anyone else's.

Jews haven't slaughtered each other with might and main in the manner of Christians or Muslims. How many Ashkenazis were killed by Sephardics- none at all. How many Protestants were killed by Catholics- too many to count. The same is true of the various sectarian wars in Islam.  

What matters, says Lewis, is that at the present time there is "the reassertion of this association of politics and Islam" as if it isn't clear that Israel is perhaps the most perfect coincidence of religion and politics in the contemporary world,

It isn't clear at all. Hitler targeted Jews who had converted. Thus, race- not religion- was the binding factor. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a pure example of religion & politics coinciding.  

or that Jerry Faiwell and Ronald Reagan time and again connect religion and politics.

Which proves they are actually Ayatollahs- right? 

No, not at all; it is only Moslems, unregenerate combiners, like their founder, of politics and religion, who are guilty of this atavism. It can make you quite angry to read such

nonsense.

It makes this Protestant Christian angry even though his parents had sent him off to WASP America. They themselves had to leave Egypt.  

Terrorism: How the West Can Win is thus an incitement to anti-Arab and anti-

Moslem violence.

People would read the book & then punch Said in the face.  

It further inflames an atmosphere in which it is considered

natural that when Leon Klinghoffer is senselessly and brutally murdered, the

New York Times devotes 1,043 column inches to his death, but when Alex Odeh,

no less an American, is just as senselessly and brutally murdered at the very

same time in California, he gets only 14 column inches.

Why encourage kids to target the local Arab Mom & Pop restaurant? I think Israeli policy is to allow extradition of terrorists if they killed non-Arabs. This is understandable.  

Have we become so assured of the inconsequence of millions of Arab and Moslem lives that we assume it is a routine or unimportant matter when they die either at our hands

or at those of our favored Judeo-Christian allies?

Arab & Muslim lives matter for economic reasons. We want to buy stuff from them and sell stuff to them. Hopefully, Israel won't nuke its enemies before we found some cheap substitute for the region's oil & gas. 

Do we really believe that Arabs and Moslems have terrorism in their genes?

Sure. We all do. If terrorism is a rewarding profession, it will attract high quality recruits. 

The worst aspect of the terrorism scam, intellectually speaking, is that there

seems to be so little resistance to its massively inflated claims, undocumented

allegations and ridiculous tautologies.

Sadly, Lewis & Co. were right. Said was wrong. 9/11 is the most significant even of the twenty first century.  

What will happen next? I think the US, as a net oil exporter, will retreat from the area. Israel will be off the leash. It will do ethnic cleansing to get defensible borders & do cheaper, more indiscriminate, 'mowing the lawn'. There will be less money for 'pay for slay' as everybody focuses on gaining strategic deterrence. In Europe & America, I think there will be some amateurish tit-for-tat Muslim v Jewish (or Hindu) terrorism possibly involving criminal gangs. But the real interest will be in asymmetric warfare against trade routes- e.g. using drones to lay the straits of Hormuz. The technology may have evolved to a point where a non-State Actor could make a profit on operations of this sort. The truth is being killed by a nutjob is a manageable risk. It is losing your fucking pension pot which is truly terrifying.