we are not sociopaths, we need unity and ideology

A lot has been said about our propensity for violence, and our criminal degeneration as a society after the Sialkot murders.  Fasi Zaka calls us sociopathic.  He writes:

“We are diseased, rotten to every brain stem, world please make an impenetrable fence around us, keep us all in so we don’t spread it to other people, other countries.”

George Fulton, asserted in a surprisingly supercilious manner (given that the racism should be obvious to him, and given that he is clearly NOT a true Pakistani) that:  

“We are, and have always been, a barbaric, degenerate nation revelling in bloodlust.”  

Fasi and George also agree that Pakistani crowds get some kind of pornographic pleasure from violence

(Fasi) Do not be shocked. This wasn’t isolated, it’s just that the crowd wanted to make sure their orgasmic moment could be captured for later viewing, at one’s pleasure.

(George) One just has to read eyewitness accounts of the riots, the train butchery, the brutal rapes and slaughter of that period to get a feel of the heady, almost orgasmic, delight that the perpetrators of these crimes revelled in as the nation was born.

Somehow, George's inane racism doesn't bother me.  It doesn't have the institutional backing of, say, the New York Times, or Mayor Guiliani, the American military-industrial-prison complex, or the immigration reforms.  He is too small a fish to fry, and his position is somewhat anomalous.  A white man and his silly racism, and married to a Pakistani talk show host, Kiran.  More insidious is the subtle contempt of Robert Fisk, or more relevant to our context the compassionate classism of Daniyal Mueenuddin.   If American society is deeply, deeply racial, ours is steeped in a virtual class apartheid. 

Fasi's angst doesn't bother me either.  I think a lot of people without coherent politics think and feel in the same redundancies, with equal passion and self- righteousness.  He, in fact, represents the problem that he is highlighting: the breakdown of our institutions, the breakdown of  coherent thinking.  


There are too many people espousing opinions without any real political or ideological basis , without any idea of how to achieve an equitable society.  They know how to vent, and they vapidly oscillate between wanting the army back, hating that America  and Israel are blamed for everything, feeling that Imran, Altaf, Ataturk, or some other honest, if swiftly brutal, person is the answer, and pointing to illiteracy and over population of our people as the root of all problems, wanting catharsis and saviors.   They also make vague claims against feudalism and corruption, and our venal politicians.  (But they wouldn't so much as attempt to hurl a shoe at any one of them.  They have not been trained in any school of political thought;  if they have read, they have done so haphazardly.)

See for example Moshin Hamid's recent plea that military and NGOs work together.

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/op-ed-contributor/Pakistans-challenge-780

Perhaps because of institutional breakdowns, they do not know how to understand systems of oppression.  If they understood that the military is part of an oppressive structure, they wouldn't, in their right mind, suggest a partnership of this kind, and they certainly wouldn't (as some kids on Zamzama are doing) raise funds for flood relief for a major.

The army, the police, and the people emboldened by police inaction all perpetuate a system of unabated and unchecked state violence - whether it is in disappearing activists in Baluchistan, beating old men suspected to be taliban, raping Baluchi women in secret prisons, shooting people in illegal encounters, or presiding over public murders.  We are further crippled by military expenditures, debt servicing, wars in lieu of development, direct repression of social movements, privatisation and profit maximization without labor rights  -- further broken down institutionally.  

In order to understand why and how Pakistani institutions (besides the military) have gradually been eroded, listen to the experts --people of a generation who have tried building from the ground:  Urban Planner Arif Hasan on how NGOs once (actually) impacted policy; Tasneem Siddiqui of Khuda ki Basti on how the poor subsidize the lifestyles of the rich; Mohammad Ali Shah of the fishing community and how they have been driven out of traditional fishing grounds, how deep sea trawlers have depleted the oceans; Sheema Kirmani on how theater workshops in slums in Orangi changed people in ways they didn't even anticipate;  Kaiser Bengali on how the last major industrial development was the set up of the Steel Mills in the late 70s.  Labor activists and the women’s’ movement without whom – unfair IROs and Hudood Ordinances would be firm law without anyone even knowing about their discriminatory provisions.  


The work of this generation of activists has not quite spread to newer people, has not quite led to a movement.  The womens' movement does not have a chapter in the universities; besides a few writers here and there, hordes of people are not campaigning for housing and transport reforms.  Most will cheer the new flyovers of Karachi, but as writer Rafay Alam points out, these are all short term solutions as Karachi swells with cars and people, and workers needing better commuting choices.  
   

I wouldn't use the word sociopath.  Mob violence is but a symptom of a society with too many dysfunctional institutions.  It is our inability to identify systems of oppression, and organize against these that is a pervasive, perhaps "sociopathic," problem  Rather, I feel people are groping wildly in the dark, lamenting in futility the soul of our nation, and wasting time on mindless, fatalistic equations about society -- illustrating with anecdotes, and so sure the truth of personal experience signifies a larger truth.  (At least I am grounding mine in years of activism and some politics.)

A labor party ally once commented:  “Shit's coming out of the pores of this society.”  While we do not have a particular propensity for violence (and no ethnic group is lazy, fierce, or musical), ordinary Pakistanis now experience violence every single day because of these institutional breakdowns.  And when we do not have the language or politics to understand and speak out against this violence, or avenues to organize effectively, this manifests itself in absurd expression -- like that of Mohsin Hamid and Fasi Zaka.   Even I can’t resist the temptation on most days as I fret through various obstacles in my still very good life – traffic, hostility of men, continually disparaging attitudes, blocks blocked by Bilawal's house  -- I too want to be fatalistic and reductionist.

Every night when I talk to S who is in Sukkur doing flood relief, we worry about how much change is needed.  People lack capacity, and there is zero data, zero record keeping, no training, no skills and the chiding of white bosses is often irrefutable.  Instead of throwing hardcore data at their faces, we bow our heads in shame (or lack of aptitude.)  


Students I encounter are more enthusiastic about consumerism and acquiring corporate jobs, than justice; more interested in defaming teachers than reading and engaging in debate, going for Moot in America than forming poverty law clinics at home.  

People I have hired have lied to and stolen from me, and neglected my children.  You have to remind yourself (grudgingly) that it stems from an exploitative system of wages, rather than a personal shortcoming in you or them.  An uglier form of this lying and stealing are the one hundred blue uniformed security guards I see congregating at Tauheed 7:30 in the morning to protect people like me and their wealth.

My sister, who works two jobs, was mugged violently twice in the last few months.  My brother desperately covered his children with bed sheets as burglars rummaged through every drawer in my mother's house.    It is hard to be rational when your family member has a gun to his/her head.  It is easy to resort to  -- this society is sick -- standard of analysis “and shit's coming out of its pores.”

I remember a 14th August many years ago when I was about 10 or 11.  I went to Jinnah's mazaar and managed to lose my father’s hand in the crowd.  Someone in the crowd reached out and slapped me hard across my face.  I was in shock and humiliated as I stumbled out, without one shoe, to find my father and a gymkhana uncle waiting outside on the steps.  I insisted I didn't need my shoe, but the uncle, somehow guessing from my shaken state thought it was the least he could do and got it out.  I was wearing a long purple polka dot dress with full sleeves.  I wondered then if I should I have worn a shalvar. The incident stayed with me for days. 

If I did not have politics today to understand oppression and exploitation, I could use these examples of personal violence to justify a stark, emotional, and black vision of our society. Or perhaps, I would go the other way and cheerily point out the goodness of people who rescued hundreds in floods even placing themselves at peril.

But focusing on the positives or obsessing about the negatives is not the point; in almost any society there are good and bad people – and sometimes even bad people are good – like the police officers who rushed in to save people from a burning tower.  There are many, many positive examples in society of students wanting to organize, ready to take on injustice.  But then they need unity and ideology too.


If there is a pathological problem in our society, it is that our institutions, for the numerous historical and political reasons, have broken down, compromised our theoretical understanding of oppression and thus hampered our ability to resist the state in any organized and sustained fashion.  May all corpses find coffins; may the rest find causes.