The Middle East - What We Should Have Learned from Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence's plans for the Middle East included separate areas for the predominately Kurdish and Arab areas in present-day Iraq.

As the violence and sectarian hatred in the Middle East continues, some are recognizing that much of today's problems trace back to disastrous decisions made in the wake of World War I when the victorious allies carved up the former Ottoman Empire based on their own needs and rivalries with little regard for the religious and ethic divisions that spread across the region.  It's not that they were not warned about the dangers of what they were doing.  Rather, hubris and colonial ambitions overrode what should have been common sense if one wanted long term stability in the absence of overwhelming outside forces such as the Ottoman Empire had provided or local dictators who could at least temporarily keep the lid on the sectarian and ethnic rivalries.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at the advice of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia, that should have been followed.  Here are excerpts:

In America, if we reflect on World War I at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war — against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

At war’s end, Lawrence’s vision of Arab independence was shattered when the Versailles peace conference confirmed the carving of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine into British and French spheres of influence; arbitrary boundaries drawn in the sand to satisfy the appetites of empire – Britain’s Foreign Office even called the former Ottoman lands “The Great Loot.”

The hopeful Lawrence drew his own “peace map” of the region, one that paid closer heed to tribal allegiances and rivalries. The map could have saved the world a lot of time, trouble and treasure, one historian said, providing the region “with a far better starting point than the crude imperial carve up.” Lawrence wrote to a British major in Cairo: “I’m afraid you will be delayed a long time, cleaning up all the messes and oddments we have left behind us.”

[T]hen and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

Homophobia, Africa and the Perils of Not Knowing Accurate History

Perhaps it is the history major in me, but one of the things that drives me to distraction is seeing people who do not know and understand accurate history being played for fools and often duped into acting against their own interest.  The phenomenon ranges from working class American whites who are duped into doing the bidding of the Koch brothers who view such people as little better than useful vermin to black pastors tricked into acting as water carriers by thinly veiled anti-black organizations such as The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  Don't these pastors understand that they are being used as tools by the descendants of the very same people who supported slavery and segregation?  But perhaps nowhere is such ignorance of history more dangerous than in Africa where corrupt politicians and American Christofascists are using ignorance to fan the flames of homophobia.  A piece in Think Africa Press looks at accurate African history and how the populace in many countries in Africa are being played for fools.  Here are excerpts:

At a time when more countries are moving towards inclusive human rights, Africa is taking steps backwards. Backwards, that is, specifically on the issue of gay rights, though sadly not to before colonialism, the era in which anti-gay legislation has its roots.

Most Africans don’t recognise homophobia as a colonial legacy even though before colonialism, many traditional cultures were tolerant of different sexualities and gender relations. For instance, in my tribe, the Ganda or Baganda, (Uganda’s largest ethnic group) women from the royal clan are addressed with male titles and may or may not be required to perform duties expected of women. More broadly, from the Azande of the Congo to the Beti of Cameroon, and from the Pangwe of Gabon to the Nama of Namibia, there is ethnographic evidence of same-sex relationships in pre-colonial Africa.

By preying on African values of inclusive difference, however, Africa’s colonisers rewrote its history, the effects of which haunt Africa to this day. Tribal chiefs and village courts of law which were traditionally the hallmark of conflict resolution were traded for a European Penal Code system which included the criminalisation of homosexuality. It is also important to stress that so-called sodomy laws would not have impacted African sexual politics without the influence of Christianity. Christianity was used to whitewash African culture as primitive and to demonise traditional interpretations of African intimacies. The bible became the credo of African morality, disordering African sexuality to missionary positions of heteronormativity (i.e. the idea that heterosexuality is the only 'natural' sexual orientation).

But sexuality is not all that the colonisers rewrote about Africa. European colonies were established through military conquest, perpetuated through the politics of divide and rule, and religion. The colonisers understood that to conquer Africa they had to turn Africans against Africans such that Africans would blame themselves for their divisions, most of which culminated in ethnic hostility. Amongst other things, colonial policies of divide and rule spurred ethnic tensions.
In today's postcolonial world, the influence of US conservative evangelicals on Africa’s sexual politics cannot be understated. They have picked up where their colonial predecessors left of and are providing the propaganda, by way of religious brainwashing, for Africa’s antigay campaigners to make the case for harsher laws against LGBT communities. This is why holding American missionaries like Scott Lively and Lou Engle to account is crucial to the protection of LGBT people in countries where they evangelise.

What needs to happen in Africa is an honest discussion on human sexuality in the African context before, during and after the colonial period. This is a conversation local activists, civil society, academics, and the media should begin to shape.Africans will have to reclaim their forgotten pasts as peoples who traditionally refused to hate but stood side-by-side and embraced their differences.

If Africans were truly interested in honoring their own history, the first thing that they would do is kick the Scott Lively's and Lou Engle's of the world out on their lying asses.  Sadly, it isn't likely to happen.  To flourish conservative Christianity needs an ignorant and uneducated - something that is all too abundant in most of Africa.

Why Africa’s Turning Anti-Gay

Sadly, news out of much of Africa is increasingly depressing as ignorant and corrupt rulers are using gays as a scapegoat for colonialism - even though it is colonialism that brought anti-gay laws to the continent in the first place - and a way to distract a gullible public from the massive misrule by their leaders.  Making the situation even worse are the efforts of American Christofascists to export homophobia to Africa even as they are losing the so-called culture wars in the west and America in particular.  For their brand of religion to thrive, one needs an ignorant populace and they have that in much of Africa. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the unfortunate situation.  Here are highlights:

[A]fter a story about George Freeman, director of the Sierra Leone LGBT organization Pride Equality, was published in a local newspaper last year—with photos accompanying it—he was dragged from his car and beaten by two men on motorcycles.

Freeman never consented to the story; the newspaper culled its content from an MTV interview. His assailants were never caught.

There are many stories like Freeman’s, of course, and the situation is steadily getting worse, even as LGBTs have made remarkable progress here—or perhaps because of it.  In fact, the rising tide of anti-gay sentiment in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, is an ironic brew of anti-Westernism and Western influence.  And well-meaning American activists may be making it worse.

Homosexual acts are illegal in 78 countries. Of these, 21 are small island nations, 20 are in the Islamic world, and 33 are in sub-Saharan Africa. In all three categories, almost all anti-gay laws are a vestige of European colonialism, and date back approximately 150 years.

Ironically, anti-gay leaders—politicians, clergy, journalists—in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone have all, within the last month, called gay rights, and homosexuality itself, a “Western” innovation that must be resisted in order to preserve “traditional African values.”

In fact, pre-colonial African traditions varied widely. Over 20 cultural varieties of indigenous African same-sex intimacy have been recorded by anthropologists. There are Bushmen paintings of men having sex with one another. There are countless examples of cross-dressing and cross-gender behavior. There are instances of female warriors marrying other female warriors, such as in the kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin—unsurprisingly, the Europeans called them ‘Amazons.’  There are even cases of male homosexuality being seen as possessing magical properties, such as the transmission of wealth from one person to another.

The irony would be funny if it weren’t tragic: cultures with rich traditions of sexual diversity now asserting that sexual diversity is Western, and that Western anti-gay bias is a traditional cultural value.

“African” ideas about homosexuality are often those spread by American Evangelicals, out to colonize Africa spiritually rather than politically.  Lou Engle, Scott Lively, Human Life International—these are not household names in the United States, and that’s precisely the point. Like has-been basketball players dunking baskets in Europe, the leftovers of the American Evangelical scene have found new life in Africa.

These Westerners bring (relative) wads of cash and influence, and are gladly met by opportunistic African leaders. Each group is using the other: Evangelicals shift policy and are able to raise money back home, and their African collaborators can posture against Western imperialism and get rich.

The notion that developing world countries should leapfrog 40 years of social history, and the corresponding one that Western sanctions should whip them if they don’t, only feeds the flames of anti-Western sentiment and bolsters the political position of anti-Western posturing.

There are alternatives. Donor nations could support those countries who have passed anti-discrimination laws (Botswana and Mozambique, for example), replacing the Western stick with a carrot. . . . Most importantly, European and American funders can support a fight for equality in Africa led by Africans themselves.