Hugh
Thank you for sending this, though I had already read it myself. I hope that
by presenting the list with this particular understanding of the awful
situation we now all face, you do not fall foul of some of the mails I, and
other members, have had to face when refusing to take military 'sides', or
condone the need for simple and efficient responses!
If there is any glimmer of hope, it is that the nations of the world (and I
am not referring here to the mythos currently being perpetrated about a
civilised/uncivilised schism) will work together to address the global
conditions that breed such hatred and animosity... something will have to
face, including the American state, if a tragedy like this is not to be
repeated.
Best wishes
Philip
-----Original Message-----
From: Hugh WILLMOTT
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 9/14/01 9:18 AM
Subject: debate platform
This discussion has become understandably heated.
Even with some knowledge of the background to all this, which is now at
last becoming more widely recognised, the events were stunning and
shocking.
No words can convey the sheer horror and suffering involved - for
relatives and survivors as well as those who perished.
We are, I think, to a greater or lesser extent traumatised by the
witnessing of these events.
What we must be wary of - critical, if you like - are solutions/fixes
that are self-defeating or make counter-productive. That is always
difficult to call. But it seems that denying the sense of injustice and
hypocrisy that has contributed to provoking terrorist attacks is not
likely to stop them. Just the opposite.
The idea that terrorism can be eradicated, except perhaps in the
bleakest totalitarian regime, is pure fantasy. `Eliminating' specific
terrorists can be done, given sufficient force. But the risk is one of
making martyrs of those who are eradicated and of losing what moral high
ground may be ascribed to our self-referential Civilised World.
The glimmer of hope is that the US has not retaliated in a knee-jerk way
-perhaps mainly because of the confusion it has been thrown into by the
unexpected scale of the penetration, if from no higher motive or
political calculation.
I wish I had more confidence in the nouse and judgement of our political
leaders. Where is the statesmanship? Where is the understanding that
the promise of eradication is futile and that democracy is as much (and
perhaps more) threatened from within as it is from without?
I have been reading the press in the hope of finding something
critically insightful. I copy below an article that appeared this
morning that I found helpful. You may too. There are obvious parallels
to be drawn with everyday conflcts and decisions - in organizations and
elsewhere -but it seems distastefully trivialising to make them.
Hugh Willmott
Here's the article :
They can't see why they are hated
Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad
Special report: Terrorism in the
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usterrorism> US
Seumas Milne
Guardian
Thursday September 13, 2001
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers
in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most
Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the
streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable
assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with
overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible
account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of
recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such
atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the
United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim
countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely
absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle
to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might
make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what
their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be
repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US
political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing
popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus
of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US
foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel
anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation",
with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of
post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening
perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western
civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father
inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its
British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any
superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has
rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest;
ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to
every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and
Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of
murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown
its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage
was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of
the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to
be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that
drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom
there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth
and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama
bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again
reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be
overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war
against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go
to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and
trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland
and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post
with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while
US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban
now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US
subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m
to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while
Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching
the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US
soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank
yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since
the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political
thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?"
one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international
coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such
counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the
social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror
network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices
and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
Hugh Willmott
Home Page : http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/hcwhome
<http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/hcwhome>
Web site for Critical Management Studies Conference 2001:
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cms2001
<http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cms2001>
Web site for ESRC Critical Management Studies Seminar Series 2000-2002 :
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cmsseminars
<http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/cmsseminars>
Web site for Learning and Critique Network :
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/lcnsite
<http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/lcnsite>
Web site for Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs:
http://visar.csustan.edu/aaba/aaba.htm
<http://visar.csustan.edu/aaba/aaba.htm>
Hugh Willmott
Diageo Professor of Management Studies
The Judge Institute of Management Studies
University of Cambridge
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1AG
www.jims.cam.ac.uk <http://www.jims.cam.ac.uk>
Visiting Professor
Department of Business Administration
Lund University
PO Box 7080
S-220 07 LUND, Sweden
Visiting Professor
Strategic Management Division
Cranfield School of Management
Cranfield University
Bedford MK43 OAL
England
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