Careless Killings, Careless Language

There seems to be a pall of confusion settling over the nature of Genocide, an often rather perverse muddle. 

This is what it looked like in early 80s Guatemala. Some regions saw sharp population declines of over 15%, the majority of the deaths occurring in very specific, geographically constrained, ethno-cultural communities. 

This was almost entirely deliberate state action targeting civilian populations, not collateral damage from careless conflict between armed groups. Mass executions, mass graves. Infants burned, bayoneted etc. Orders from above, not rogue units, or random callousness. 

Now Gaza. Up until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 the territory was occupied by Egypt, not Israel. Their defeat led to a bit of an exodus, such that the population declined by around 1% per year up to 1970. EVERY year since, including 2005 when all the Jews left, and this past twelve months which has seen heavy casualties to both militants and civilians, the population has expanded overall, by around 2% in fact October 2023 to October 2024. 

Thus, however you feel about this war and about the way it is being conducted, no genocide has occurred and no genocide is in the process of occurring. 

Mis-use of this term not only does a significant disservice to the people of Gaza (by shrouding their plight in the idioms of partisan propaganda) it does an even greater disservice to the populations that have experienced verifiable genocide in the past — such as the Ixil Maya, who fought long and hard for formal legal recognition of the crime committed against them — and one specific population who suffered the worst genocide in human history, whose global numbers have yet to fully recover from it over eighty years later. 

When that disservice is done deliberately, especially when the intent is shrouded by the semiology of political or religious righteousness, something truly repugnant is occurring.

Orwell’s concern was for the use of euphemisms — imprecision where precision would have been more lucid. But here we have the contemporary alternative: bogus precision, to the point of inversion. The relationship between fact and linguistic camouflage remains broadly the same. 

El Fiambre is Kosher!

Last week I came across an article online which described Guatemala's traditional Day of the Dead dish, el fiambre, as "Arabe", at least in part.

Note: if they had said Spanish, this would undoubtedly make it a 'colonial' delicacy, but because it was pegged as Arab, it should of course be considered 'de-colonial', or even 'reclaimed' (...from those pesky Mayan indigenes.)

 

There are essentially two main ways that culinary techniques that one might describe as Arab, either correctly or misleadingly, could have arrived in Guatemala.

 

1) Between the Visigoths and the Reconquista there was an extended Islamic interlude on the Iberian peninsula, at first a Caliphate and then a patchwork of successor states. 

 

While some Arabic was spoken, the people running this show were Moors, e.g. native North Africans (such as Berbers) who had never been anywhere near the Middle East, and many of the people making up the show thus being run were forced converts from various ethnic groups who had been around since before Roman times. 

 

And so indeed, we find a Moorish precursor to el fiambre called Cachir, which involved copious quantities of cow meat and choice embutidos such as mortadella, a version of which is still prepared in Algeria. 

 

Bright sparks may already have twigged that Cachir is a 're-claimed' version of an earlier Hebrew word, Kosher, which means 'apt for consumption'. (You may recall that de-colonisation in the Levant involves taking the Hebrew names of places, converting them into Arabic and then claiming — or re-claiming — that these are now officially the originals.)

 

2) Sometimes one comes across a very distinct syncretic cuisine in Central America and the Caribbean, of a kind which most of us gringos would describe as Lebanese, but which the locals sometimes refer to as 'Arabe'.(Such as the pita/pan arabe in Guatemalan supermarkets.) 

 

This would be a much later arrival than the partly-remembered Moorish traditions that tagged along with the Castilians. And although these recipes would have long been passed down via the medium of the Arabic language, the the Lebanese diaspora on this side of the pond has been made up largely of Orthodox Christians who later converted to Catholicism (like Shakira's lot), and their reason for being here was related to running away from Islam, or at least its pricklier aspects — from the mid-nineteenth century onward. 

 

Resistance is Futile

The instant the people under the care of UNRWA wholeheartedly embrace peaceful coexistence and a broadly secular form of nationhood, a version of this state will almost immediately appear, as if by miracle.

Ceasefires are not peace, they are an obstacle towards that end, for all they do is force a reset of the terms of on-going resistance to any mutually-viable settlement. 

Those who choose to ignore or even deny this are either being very naïve or extremely disingenuous.

Other than a decisive, irreversible victory for either one of the 'sides', with all the horrors that would entail, the only way this conflict ever concludes is with a peace deal. Resistance is little more than perpetuation without any kind of reasoned objective in the medium or long terms.

And whenever I hear ‘resistance’ to describe the often un-tempered hostility of one set of combatants, I point out the bigger picture historically, which is this. The people of the Levant have spent the past millennium and a half resisting enforced Islamicisation from various external ethnic representatives of that faith. First Arabs, then Turks and now it seems, Persians as well, though up to now largely via surrogates.

This pressure was only briefly interrupted by a counter surge from the West, involving Germans and French-speaking Scandinavians in the main, and their rather stop-start attempts to forcibly re-Christianise the same region.

1500 years of war and oppression, sandwiched between these two self-regarding and enveloping civilisations. THAT is a story of resistance which has the scale which makes it worthy of primary consideration today, and not the one which is little more than a lasting expression of UN guilt for its ham-fisted attempts to break the cycle in the last century. 

 

 

Failures of Imagination

Nations are ‘imagined communities’, some imagined rather better than others, and as we have seen during this US election cycle, there are both superior and inferior imaginations in the mix. 

So, the nation state is not any kind of absolute good. Why should it be? But together they make up our current international order which, if not optimal, is itself superior to many of the alternatives. 

History has an interesting and somewhat overlooked lesson for us here. Incipient nations which consciously reject a clear opportunity to add the suffix “-hood” when the opportunity first arises, pay a very heavy price. To wit, Cuba and Palestine. 

There is an element of near mythological original sin in each of these refusals. And both have since tried to over-compensate by donning the hair shirt of Marxist victimhood in a not particularly convincing manner. 

Cuba might have gained independence at the same time as the other Spanish possessions in the Americas, such as Guatemala. But it was one of the most terrible of enslavement-based economies and the criollos, Cubans of Spanish descent, feared what would happen if they were left without a rescuer of last resort. 

So they chose to pass on self-determination. Later, when the matter seemed more feasible and urgent, they were easy prey for that anti-colonial coloniser just a short raft-trip away. 

And so they paid the price. Freedom came at a far bigger cost and most of their efforts to re-define it on their own terms have had the appearance of ideological self-harm. 

Palestine also had the chance to embrace nationhood. Not just in 1948 in fact, for the carrot has been dangled repeatedly, but the temptation has never been able to outweigh the urge to continue the 1500-year-old project of forcibly Islamicising the entire Levant, by which I mean not only what the UN considers to be Israel, but also Lebanon. 

It’s as if they ‘imagine’ themselves incapable of enjoying this formalised upgrade in status should any of the other ‘dhimmis’ of the medieval caliphate also be to enjoy it. 

Like those Cuban criollos with their African slaves. The hold on to the delusion that the new order would have to encompass the old one.

Mythological Goggles

 

Had a small chuckle today when I encountered an article in an American journal which referred to the ancient Arabs who had established a settlement in Italy as ‘immigrants’. It didn’t say if they arrived in small boats.

The important thing is that in American academic discourse, they can never be referred to as invaders or colonisers. (Made me wonder if Antigua might be usefully rebranded from ‘La Ciudad Colonial’ to ‘La Ciudad Inmigrante’?!)

Anyway, on a mildly separate note, I recently came across this highlighted passage in my copy of God’s War by Christopher Tyerman.

“Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history.”

 

What is perhaps so remarkable about this observation is how true it is of all the combatants in the perpetual holy wars waged in and around the Levant, both then and now. (And the blathering academics and intellectuals in their baggage train.)

 

And there is a monstrous lack of collective self-awareness. Each imagines that it is the other who is beholden to a toxic delusion.

For 1500 years the Levant has been plagued by ideologies which are essentially non-native yet which insist that their ground zero is a certain spot in the city of Jerusalem. This sense of ownership in largely grounded in fabrications, fairy-tales.

 

This has been true of Norman crusaders —  ultimately Scandinavian, and so non-local in the extreme —  or Arabian Muslims or Turks in the past and now Persians. Each brings an obsession which underpins meddling in a region that they have no real business to meddle in. 

It is also true of a certain group of extreme Zionists, originating in the US but also prevalent here in Guatemala, who are not even Jewish, but instead evangelical Christians.

The absolutist perspectives, which for the crusaders were grounded in the spiritual/apocalyptic —  and in fact geographically transferable —  notion of the Holy City on the hill, still prevent anyone who has signed up to these 'visions' from seeing reason today, because these groups have in effect  constructed their communal identities and the sense of how to live their everyday lives around these stark obsessions.

One of the greater absurdities in the western side of this discourse is that the Radical Left appears to have concluded that Zionism is the only form of formalised false consciousness impacting on the conflicts in the Levant during modern times.

This POV represents almost the most outrageous pair of mythological goggles worn by anyone, arguably comparable with those worn by the Islamic fundamentalists: a prescription which pares down reality to a rigidly thematicised, 'anti-colonial' conceptualisation of history.

And as I wrote here the other day, UN institutions like UNRWA have started to operate like the Society of Jesus in the early modern period, a self-serving order which maintains a bizarre, hypocritical, extra-legal operation in the region, which ultimately works against integration and the establishment of stable, peaceful, collaborative societies which operate within the international order as it now stands.