Daily Times

Raising anti-American violent slogans and disgracing the US flag in protest rallies shows as if the US state and society are our enemies and they are intentionally involved in insulting our faith. Behind intentions, there is always a purpose. What do the Americans want to achieve by inflicting emotional injuries on us? Is it about something that President Barack Obama’s speech in the UN explained? Or is it about something that the speech skipped? It is a mixture of both. Mr Obama said that the US would not ban the absurd film — that raised our emotions above boiling point — because doing so would mean curbing freedom of expression. Though Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign was a big contradiction in the US’s pro-freedom of expression narrative, and so are the US’s official policies regarding Iran, North Korea, Cuba and the Holocaust, the fact remains that freedom of expression is a structural/integral part of the US’s political architecture — made of democracy and capitalism.

In the Muslim majority countries, Islam is very much a part of social life, whereas in the US Christianity or any other religion is irrelevant to the state and to a vast majority of people. What is relevant over there is a combination of democracy and capitalism, which has tremendous ability to enhance intellectual and economic growth. However, capitalism’s intrinsic weaknesses, of which greed becoming uncontrollable is the foremost, demand a continuous and impartial review, which if not done can cause capitalism to face a kind of collapse that can lead to anarchy or fascism. Hence, freedom of expression is taken as an ideology in the US and also in all those countries that follow democracy and capitalism earnestly.

Freedom of expression is needed because new knowledge is needed to modify capitalistic tools. And new knowledge cannot be achieved unless the knowledge-seeking system is either an anti-belief system or it is in a state of equilibrium, which means it may not discard belief systems altogether, particularly on an individual level, but would accept the superiority of the new knowledge over the one given by the belief system. This is how the monk Mendel discovered genetic sciences while working on pea plants, some of which might have grown in the backyard of his church. Even Einstein, the greatest of scientists, was not a non-believer. However, he defined God scientifically. He said, “God is a great mathematician.”

The US’s successes, which are mind boggling and which have benefited the entire mankind, are because of a somewhat refined capitalism. The US’s failures, which have kept not only the American people but also the entire mankind in a web of constant uncertainty, are because of capitalism’s insufficient refinement of its basic tool — the exploitation of labour. Unfortunately, the US’s knowledge-seeking system has not succeeded yet in evolving the means that would have helped minimise this exploitation. In times of capitalism’s successes, an abundance of opportunities keeps most among the common people busy and the effects of exploitation do not appear on the surface. In times of crisis, what one finds is that despite modifications made to capitalism, the people living under it face similar agonies as their ancestors had faced during the era of early capitalism.

It happened not because freedom of expression failed to show how capitalism should refine its tools. It happened because technological means had not been developed to an extent where they could help generate surplus prosperity. It also happened because the capitalist states did not succeed in evolving equilibrium between the liberty of the rich and the responsibility of the state. It is a political or possibly an intentional failure. Anyway, experiments to modify capitalism are continuing. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they fail terribly. The present terrible crisis of capitalism has its reasons in the free market economy and WTO regime — the experiments that were made by capitalist activists on the basis of the thinking that after the demise of Soviet communism, capitalism would not face any major threat of either a big collapse or a replacement by any other economic system.

The extreme liberalisation of the economy demanded extreme relaxation of state control. It also demanded turning to old methods of exploiting international cheap labour. It did not work. Inside the two fundamental economic categories, agriculture and industry suffered and that led to the emergence of a big non-productive class and brought depression to most of the western countries and to the US. The irony is that instead of looking into the reasons for the failure of the experiments, the capitalists turned again to using old methods. They multiplied international conflicts. In this regard, the Iran-US tussle, the Gulf and Afghan wars are old and continuing stories. The new one is the advent of the Arab Spring.

The situation in Pakistan, which would likely lead to a Pakistani Spring if it continues to ignore internal development, is mostly indigenous. The US cannot be blamed for it entirely, because the US left Pakistan twice on its own, the first time when the US found in China a bigger and better partner against the Soviet Union. This happened during the mid-1960s. The second time when after the USSR’s unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan, the US assumed that Pakistan and Afghanistan had served their purpose and it was of little worth to keep them as allies. At both times Pakistan could have reshaped its future by turning to internal development, which it did not. Rather, it emulated the US. It became aggressively engaged in its external businesses. It embraced China as a friend on the basis of a shallow concept that the enemy of an enemy is a friend; not only that, it also started a war in 1965 against the ‘enemy’. None from friends or brothers came to Pakistan’s help when the enemy extended the war to international boundaries. Imagine who saved Pakistan from the terrible aftereffects of the war. It was the Soviet Union, Pakistan’s and Islam’s number one ‘enemy’.

On the second occasion of separation from the US bonds, Pakistan, besides turning to internal development, should have helped Dr Najibullah in his endeavours to form a national government in Afghanistan. What Pakistan did was that it not only ignored internal development but also created the Taliban and helped them capture Afghanistan by engaging al Qaeda mercenaries. This is how Pakistan brought about the first Afghan ‘Spring’ with the help of Saudi Arabia, is preparing for its own Spring and another Afghan Spring by continuously facilitating the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

The US-sponsored Arab Spring is a part of the US’ political architecture. Even if the Arab Spring fails or turns anti-US, the US can turn to another experiment, to another arena. What Pakistan is doing is based on abstraction as well as on how to protect the interests of Pakistan’s military and mafias. It is pertinent to mention here that Pakistan has no capitalist class; it has a corrupt bureaucracy and the rich groups and individuals who know no laws and no discipline, and we can correctly call them mafias. The mafias’ lifeline lies in constant chaos. They will not allow any experiment to be conducted to change the situation. The tussle between Pakistan’s political institutions and unelected institutions should be seen mostly through this perspective.

The US state need not, and will not waste its energies in purposeless acts such as doing nasty things to hurt our faith and feelings. However, both the US state and American individuals use freedom of expression sometimes nicely and sometimes crudely. What is needed from our side is that we too should turn to freedom of expression and use it nicely. And that is the only way we can succeed in making the American people feel how our feelings speak. Violent slogans and actions are of destructive worth only.

The writer is a freelance columnist