Empire, Terrorism and The Other Kingdom: Dan Hughes 02/03

We have spent too much time in thinking,
supposing that if we weigh in advance the
possibilities of any action, it will happen
automatically. We have learnt, rather too
late, that action comes, not from thought,
but from a readiness for responsibility. For
you thought and action will enter on a new
relationship; your thinking will be confined
to your responsibilities in action.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Thoughts on the Baptism of D.W.R, May 1944"
from: Letters and Papers from Prison

The men walked to the door in track suits. Carrying a gym bag they looked like they were ready to shoot some hoops inside the centuries old British Raj Church. The stately, yet unassuming, structure hidden in the dense mountain forest of this place was now the high school facility for a small private boarding school--a school not unlike the other international schools in the region; akin to a miniature United Nations. Students, staff, administration and faculty converged from dozens of countries to live, work and study in the picturesque hideaway nestled amongst the foothills of the Himalayas.

On their meandering walk to the school the men with the gym bag passed the small tea shop that once served up chai and parattas to my friends and I happily tardy for class. They walked up the path we covered on foot thousands of times in the snow of an early winter or the enchanting darkness of the long walks that were our primary opportunity for romance. When Kalashnikovs emerged from the bag that "should have" concealed the equipment of sport all appearances of the routine were unmasked in a defining aberration.

The heroic deaths that ensued as these men dressed for sport began making their way through the gate and onto the school grounds--directing round after round through doors, windows and those who would venture to stop them--joined those who fell not so many months earlier in New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. They joined the hundreds of fallen in Kenya and Tanzania, overshadowed by 9/11 and their station in the unspoken stratification of ethnic value. They joined the innumerable innocents to be lost amidst the plush accommodations of Mombasa turned killing field in the blink of an eye.

The normalcy, the spaces inhabited in our beautifully mundane comings and goings, all at once became backdrop to the shockingly-real that invests common space with a life-sharpening veracity that is always there, but seldom seen with such precision. The surreal moment penetrating the porous environment it engulfs denying any attempt at a feigned un-experiencing. The event fused the space and those who inhabited it; memories were forever invaded and recalibrated. As the death sport played out the friends who walked the paths with us, who shared our chai, were taken in the name of what?

Abdul Haq was the image of Afghan rugged freedom. He fought the invading Soviet's as a Mujahideen in the 1980's. He fought the violent ignorance of the Taliban in the 1990's. And when the United States began their war on terrorism he sacrificed himself to seek a Pashtun alliance against the Taliban in the early 2000's.

Screenwriters would scoff if asked to write the seeming cliché that was the stuff of reality for this man. He was often maligned and his motives questioned, but he is one of Afghanistan's heroes as Quixotic as he seemed to many. His last service to his country was on horseback deep in the untamed mountain regions outside of Jalalabad were he was surrounded by Taliban forces. Though he used his satellite phone to call in a desperate plea for U.S. Special Forces or air support he was captured and executed by his countrymen; his enemies.

This family friend, this paragon of Pathan pride and hospitality, died amidst the barren landscape of a country that has been at war with invaders or itself for more than a generation. In the iconic selflessness of an outgunned hero on horseback Abdul Haq died. But in the name of what?

Al-Qaeda is not an answer. These events were not played out in the name of al-Qaeda--though al-Qaeda enacted each of them. These barbarisms slipped into being in the name of something else.

Al-Qaeda does not stand as a legitimate revolutionary movement in the mind of the West because of our distaste for, what we deem to be, crass disrespect for life at the center of this network. Of course, as is the case with everything, our distaste is selective. We overlook the children killed by our sanctions, the collateral damage caused by "pin-prick" precision weapons sent into sovereign nations and the countless corpses left behind in the killing fields of our just wars. Nevertheless, there is a very real repugnance that accompanies the methods of al-Qaeda. There is something palpably different, though this is no value judgment, between the shocking clinical horror of wartime-sanctions-perpetrated mass death and the peacetime reappropriation of systems of civilian transport unleashing random death in the attempt at the symbolic.

Had Osama bin Laden done the hard work of target selection, casualty avoidance and message articulation he could have been a bearded Tyler Durden. Had he taken on the even more arduous task of offering a viable alternative to the dominant global consumer cultures he could have been an Islamic Benjamin Franklin. Instead he is that haunting historical figure doubled and indivisible; both demon and hero. A vampire illegitimately leaching off the lifeblood of a tradition that he claims to uphold and a revolutionary striking at the heart of a system he feels dominated by.

Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Al-Gama`a al-Islamiyyah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the hundreds of other groups in this ilk could have found sympathy and camaraderie among the various networks of underground and mainstream voices calling for understanding and justice in the post-cold war world. Instead they dealt with tyranny as tyranny dealt with them, and that, though having an appearance of justice or, at the least reciprocation, is the delegitimizeing factor in any periphery resistance to Empire.

The periphery leads in action that shames a fat imperialism. The periphery can never kill imperialism without itself succumbing to the very spectre it seeks to exorcize. The imperial dies under the weight of its own sloth. The totalizing physical violence of the various revolutionary messianisms at play in these groups has direct link to the totalizing ideological violence in their socio-religious positions.

In the short term, terrorist acts of pent up rage at, what is seen as, an immoral, aloof and hegemonic Western oppression foisted on the Islamic world through the tentacles of the bought oil cartels, installed or supported dictators, media entertainment and ad hoc issuance and adherence to UN mandates demand recognition. This pining for identity and voice makes bin Laden a hero in the hearts of hundreds of millions, yet, the interpretive stance that underlies the violent activism does more damage than the benefits derived from the symbolic violence.

This sodomy of Islam by bin Laden that gives a disenfranchised, conflicted generation a poster boy for their angst will not be the ideology or orthopraxy that brings the end that bin Laden, his cohorts and those marginally happy with the visibility he has attained desire. The violence of terror is the whoring out of the cause that has gestated it. Such violence is the point at which there is no longer a cause. Terrorism leaves the ideological a snuff film victim sating the haggard whim of a perverted dilettante. An attempt to destroy the imperial through terror emboldens the imperial. This is the case today in the, "War on Terror," as it was the case in the first century of the Common Era.

The protracted Roman-Jewish wars (66-70CE, 115-17CE, and 132-35CE) were fomented by a laudable cause: liberty for a subjugated people. The violence against Rome in an effort to gain this liberty did definitive damage to the cause of Jewish independence. Jerusalem was literally leveled, nearly everyone exiled or killed and the gloriously crazed religious panoply of the time smashed under the weight of Empire. Soon after, two, rather mangled, forms of spiritual community sought to deal with this inconceivably catastrophic turn of events by taking strongly accommodating postures that began the reconstitutive evolution of what we call Rabbinic Judaism and Orthodox/Catholic Christianity.

What was lost in the decimation of the Temple in 70CE and of Jerusalem in 135CE cannot be measured. In the irony that only retrospect allows, Rome eventually subverted itself and was conquered from within by a persecuted gentile Christian minority who spiritualized both a Jewish faith and a Caesar's Empire declaring the hybrid the Kingdom of Christ. She too fell, not many centuries later, to the invading hordes of Huns, Goths and Visigoths who swooped in and turned the Kingdom of Caesar-Christ on its head and created a crisis of identity for the imperial gentile Church not unlike that caused among the Jewish peoples by the demise of Jerusalem.

The movement from periphery voice of dissent to empowered institutionalized revolution (aka establishment) is the inevitable tangible impact of any successful revolutionary critique. We have seen the oppressed revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, France and the United States eventually turn oppressor as various incarnations of empowerment took place. We have seen the oppressed movements of Gentile Christianity, Chinese Buddhism and Indian Hinduism, among others, do the same. The attempt at an actualization of an ideal future through violence against those who seem to be in the way of this ideal is the definition of embodied, undeferred, dominating messianism as seen in all of these movements.

In the consideration of activism and revolution that is self-consciously spiritual in nature the revolutionary/empowered cycle remains. This metamorphosis is no mere state/political reality--as if spiritual matters were somehow categorically different or apolitical. The historically verifiable reality of the movement from oppressed-to-oppressor is the inevitable outcome of any revolution that seeks to not only disrupt, but to disempower an entrenched power system. The institutional outcomes of this cycle often catch the, would be, spiritual revolutionary by surprise (consider Joan of Arc) and, in one form or another, is the source for innumerable transitions from idealistic revolution to disillusioned political despondency.

The idealization of revolution, as if it were an utopian end in and of itself, is to miss how the radical is defined by the establishment that it becomes if and when it overcomes the particular establishment it is defined against. The point at which revolution reaches its goal is the point at which it begins to slowly calcify into an establishment. There is an endless cycle, at various macro and micro levels, of an establishment posture of stabilization and a revolutionary posture of critique. Postures of stabilization are what enable jobs, judicial constancy and secure social environments. Postures of critique are what engender sympathy for the marginalized, system checks and balances and chaos enabling social evolution.

There is no escaping this play. There is no way to engage communal human living outside of the cycles of stability and revolution. This is the outworking of social system logic; of internetworked evolution; of a communal organism's living. There is no other way.

I believe that this spiraling reality has part in explaining why Jesus is not a political utopian. The Kingdom of which he speaks and enacts is forever peripheral to the political cycle. Even the most oppressive regime was granted whatever it claimed to own in the teaching of Jesus ("give to Caesar what is Caesars"). It was only what was God's ("and to God what is God's") that was outside of the establishment's ultimate control--even if at times it seemed so otherwise.

This other Kingdom--always on the periphery, always already in the bowels of political cycle, never fully brought into language yet enacted in the midst of whatever stabilization or revolution one speaks from--is the critique that will not sacrifice the present for the future; the way that will not distinguish between a means and an end; the posture that will not demand ascent by laying hold of one's enemies.

This other Kingdom sees the way of peace as the inhabiting work of relational justice in the building of trust between individuals and communities in need of agreements that make for a step toward that ever elusive "good" society that we all desire. Seeking after justice and mercy at a societal level is carried out by aligning oneself with others in positions, parties, governments and the like to create just structures of existence and good laws of governance--however these are defined.

Co-creation has taken place in every generation. The surf and the feudal lord co-create as much as the citizen and the senator co-create. They each have part in a system that only works when a preponderance of people agrees to make it work. The form of the agreement is not relevant to the co-creation of the system. Any act other than system subversion through a redefinition of some sort is a co-creative stance. Revolution takes place when enough people can envision and begin living another reality--another set of agreements.

There is no algorithmic set of logic that draws upon some objective data set to determine how one goes about engaging the wider political situation. Such work requires the messy involvement of real people in real, conflicting situations. The work of co-creation is fuzzy to the point of nonsensical at times and demands the unique embodiment that our species cannot replicate in strictly principal based reasoning systems--the disembodied chains of command or case logic that act as artificial intelligence in whatever technological garb we dress it up in.

A generation unafraid to die, unafraid to speak, but more, unafraid to live must rise and show an alternative to the cold domination of centralized, strong identity networks of oppressive governance. Globalization need not be synonymous with oppression. A middle way, hard won in the living and dieing of families who privilege peace, hospitality and fidelity must rise to this occasion to show a path between the extremities of a raping and pillaging global elite and a dangerously overactive and under-deliberating mobocracy. For these extremities form one system, each side of the spectrum feeding into and using the other in cycles of socio-economic class dominance and the related distractions of narco-consumption on the one hand and terror on the other.

New agreements must be formed in action. As Bonhoeffer said in a baptismal address while in a Nazi prison camp:

"We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For you thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action."

A new generation must think well, but not stop at the academy. If new agreements are to actually be formed and not just discussed a new generation must be ready to embrace a radical responsibility of thought in action. This decision to embody the end of tyranny is the message of the Kingdom with regard to violence. The end of tyranny is not won by the sword; the deferral of tyranny, perhaps, but never its end. Tyranny is ended only in the hearts of humanity; for this is where it begins.

This tyranny of domination in the hearts of humanity is that which Jesus, and the cells of those sympathetic to his message, acted out against amidst the Roman-occupied Galilee of the late second Temple period. Jesus had opportunity and precedent to advocate and activate violent resistance to the Roman and Rome-kow-towing Sadducean domination of the time. Jesus had sicarii, the al-Qaeda of his day, among those who learned from him--even among his disciples. The betrayer of the son of Mary was one such man. Jesus would not have it, yet, nor would he send the terrorists in his midst away.

The time in which Jesus lived was filled with injustice that we, in the privileged world, have difficulty fathoming. Not just acts of injustice, but truly structural injustice. In the face of this Jesus was not silent. In the face of this Jesus enacted a way of peace, spoke for an alternate Kingdom and then died an unjust death as a political insurrectionist.

In the midst of this life and death as protagonist for the Kingdom of God, Jesus was activist against only one thing: the tyranny of the brokers of God. These, "the sons of hell," as he had opportunity to call them, were the purveyors of the fundamental domination of the human spirit that Jesus deemed more costly, more heinous than even the political and military domination of Rome. Jesus struck at political domination and the nationalist response of violent terrorism with a self-sacrificing activism of love articulated in the blood and sweat of a normal life.

Jesus would have none of the political anti-Rome banter that came from the most conservative elements of his people. These were the people who called for the immediate, violent toppling of Roman rule. From what we can discern of Jesus from the sacred tradition it would be difficult to argue that Jesus was firmly for or against independence or freedom. Undoubtedly, without direct evidence, but through inference we can surmise that he saw political freedom for his people as something better than their oppression. Nevertheless, he would have no part in carving a utopia with the sword. Why?

Because tyranny is not defeated it is traded. From the extant texts Jesus seems more concerned about the ideological and volitional sources of both empowered domination and disempowered violent revolution than with picking any particular tyranny to side with. The way of Jesus seems to point to the belief that unless tyranny ended in the hearts of the women and men of his community and those communities around his any political freedom would be squandered as quickly as Esau sold Jacob his birthright for a smackeral of potage.

So what did Jesus do? He lived a life of counter-valuation. He traded freedom from tyranny for simple freedom and invited those who followed him as Master, those who learned from him as teacher and those who encountered him as stranger to do likewise. The counter-valuations of Jesus are stunning in their loving subversion. Love your enemies. Pray for those who mistreat and malign you. Help the foreign, occupying military personnel carry their equipment! Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Don't resist an evil person. If a thief demands your coat give them your shirt as well. And on it goes.

Living a counter-valuation was not the end of Jesus' response to the tyranny of his time. In the place of Empire and those wanna-be Empire revolutionaries, who would not change the system so much as they would its protagonists, Jesus proclaims another Kingdom; an other Kingdom; the Kingdom of an other. This counter-Empire, declared and enacted by Jesus and those he sent out, was an unbrokerable, inner subversion of the status quo. This counter-Empire was not a dominion established or ruled or imposed, but one declared and enacted standing opposed. This was a gospel of liberation in the midst of domination without need for violent subjugation.

Just as Jesus would not dabble in the revolutionary violence of the al-Qaeda-like leanings within his own people he would have no part in a theological kingdom owned, packaged or sold by an elite--even if that elite was an "us." The moments, that we catch only glimpses of, in which Jesus carries out a certain verbal or physically non-lethal violence are those in which he is interacting with the established religious leadership of his time: the children of hell rebuke; the silence after a cunning demand for an answer; the Temple whippings and property destruction. Unlike the terrorist-leanings of his sicarii compatriots the lived counter-valuation of the declared counter-Empire was activated not by striking out against a dominating other, but by, in yet another reversal, the privileging of that other and the striking out against violently revolutionary or religiously dominating us.

The events that have unfolded in our day under the auspices of al-Qaeda have been carried out in the name of God--Bismillah--in the belief that they are a divinely sanctioned attack on oppression. Despite being enacted in the name of God, these actions undermine the actor's intention for they misconstrue the name of the one they seek to represent--Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim. All of al-Qaeda knows this name, but this name cannot be conscripted into the service of blind power--imperial or revolutionary. For if one is to live, In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, one must find their path in the way the name enacts.

In every generation humankind is faced with transition. The message of the Kingdom is that this need not be a blood bath.

Dan Hughes does not like to be identified by how he makes money. That doesn't seem to make much sense to him. He would prefer to be identified by what he loves--his children, his comrades, the gift and that which where cannot contain. He would love to find a way to have a poverty-level income by writing, speaking and serving. Until that time he will continue to whore himself out. Suggestions and well structured flames can be sent to TheyBlinked (at) hotmail.com.